So back to the idea of relapse prevention… What, you say, you have never talked about relapse prevention! Well, I was and am talking about it in the non-drug sense. My time working in addictions counselling taught me a lot about relapse prevention, and I of course related it to maintaining other positive behaviours.
This is part of my thesis. And if you talk to someone like Insoo Kim Berg (rather hard to talk to her directly now, but wow, she was a hoot), she would look at it more as solution maintenance. So:
- relapse prevention – stopping something negative from happening – focus on the negative
- solution maintenance – keeping something positive happening – focus on what works (has worked – therefore doable again)
You could say it is semantics (and I do LOVE semantics) and so what. Language (aka languaging – not sure I can get behind that usage), is very important and overlooked.
Somewhere I have a reference that it is way easier to make something happen than prevent something from happening. or maybe I am thinking about how many more muscles it takes to frown versus smile…
Anyway…
So since I need absolutely NO solution maintenance around the art world right now, and I have decided to focus on getting my thesis done, I am trying to remember WHY I give a crap about actually finishing the thing.
I was going through papers earlier, and then a new very cool blog, and remembered several things that excite me about counselling/psychology/human behaviour. Because I do love it. I do enjoy clients. I hate office politics and people with absolutely no ethics. And power hungry gits.
Good things list:
- Careful use of language makes a positive difference
- being in a room with 2 clients, usually a couple, is fun!
- Co-counselling is even better
- Seeing people excited about their lives rocks
- Appreciative Inquiry is the way to go in organizations
- Change is possible, inevitable and can be directed, assuming insight and intention is present
- both/and versus polarity
So what do you need to do to give yourself some solution maintenance?
