Phase 2: Introduction to the Exploration Phase
On Exploration Phase of healing the student is still externally motivated while she and her family begin to explore and rediscover their values. They learn and establishes an attitude of openness to new information about themselves, specifically self-defeating behaviors. The student still manifests the necessity of continual staff direction. She is mostly teachable, open to learn in therapy and school, and is compliant with expectations. The family is able to give feedback in respectful ways and receive it non-defensively, as well as identify and acknowledge treatment issues.
STUDENT ASSIGNMENTS
1. Earn the Love value bead (2.1), one assigned from your Therapist, and one of your choice for a total of 3 beads.
2. Using New Haven's list of values (2.2), make your own personal list of at least 10 values, and define what each value means to you. You can use the Personal Prioritized Values List to help you (2.2) Discuss your list with your Therapist.
3. Write a page on why your values are important to you. Include whether or not your actions match your values. Discuss with your Therapist.
4. Find a quote that is meaningful to you in relation to Exploration. Share what it means to you with your Values Coach, and in either a Community Meeting or General Group.
5. Participate willingly in Recreational Therapy activities.
6. Demonstrate through Peer Feedback Pages (2.3) that the majority of your peers feel you are striving to be a positive member of the community.
7. Show that you are compliant with community rules, that you are open to new information about yourself, and that you are learning to give and receive feedback in respectful and non-defensive ways.
8. Complete an autobiography using the outline (2.4) provided.
9. Complete School Requirements.
PARENT ASSIGNMENTS
10. Using New Haven's list of values, make your own personal list of at least 10 values, and define what each value means to you. You can use the Personal Prioritized Values List 2.2) to help you. Discuss your list with your Therapist.
11. Write a page on why your values are important to you. Include whether or not your actions match your values. Discuss with your Therapist.
12. Parents demonstrate an understanding and application of emotional safety principles, by completing the Emotional Safety Module (2.5) found in this section.
13. Parents demonstrate ownership of their role/part in the system.
14. Parents practice using responsible language in therapy and family phone calls.
15. Parents complete an autobiography, including exploring their parenting philosophy, using the outline (2.6) provided.
FAMILY ASSIGNMENTS
16. All family members are actively exploring themselves and their family relationships in Family Therapy sessions. 11. Write a page on why your values are important to you. Include whether or not your actions match your values. Discuss with your Therapist.
17. In family therapy, discuss each family member's autobiography. 13. Parents demonstrate ownership of their role/part in the system.
18. Review the Emotional Safety Module (2.5). Define safety in relationships and discuss ways to create safety in your family. Discuss your commitment to Therapy.15. Parents complete an autobiography, including exploring their parenting philosophy, using the outline (2.6) provided.
19. Read the information on Ego Defense Mechanisms and Thinking Errors (2.7). Each family member list ego-defense mechanisms or thinking errors they use. Discuss how these 19. Read the information on Ego Defense Mechanisms and Thinking Errors (2.7). Each family member list ego-defense mechanisms or thinking errors they use. Discuss how these hurt or help your relationships and your self-esteem.
TRANSITION ASSIGNMENTS
20. As a family, create a list of values and a list of strengths using the worksheets found in this section (2.8) The family will use this list at New Haven, as well as when setting up structure in their home.
21. Using the Love Currency Worksheet (2.9), the family will discuss each member's love language, and effective ways to show love to each other.
2.1 | Love
- Make a list in your Values Binder of those people and things that you love. How do you feel when you think about these people and things? Discuss with your Values Coach.
- List the people who love you. How do you know these people love you? Discuss with your Values Coach.
- Every day for two weeks, tell someone something you love about them. In addition, every day list one thing you love about yourself in your journal.
- Write in your own words what love means to you. Compare your definition to the dictionary's. Discuss with your Values Coach.
- Discuss the difference between physical intimacy and emotional intimacy with your Therapist.
- Care for an animal for one week. Keep a log of how much time you spend with it. This includes feeding, watering and grooming.
- Make a list of the characteristics of the perfect relationship. Discuss it with your Values Coach.
- Discuss with your Therapist the concept of freedom and control in relationships.
- Attend or do a Devotional on Love.
- Talk to your Values Coach about how love and sacrifice are connected. Decide on a sacrifice that you can make for a peer this week and follow through with it.
2.2 | Value Definitions
Adventure*
I believe in trying new things.
Agency
I value my right to think, act, and speak as I wish, and I do so responsibly.
Attitude
I know that any success I achieve in life depends more on my attitude more than anything else.
Anti-Bone Head
I believe in thinking before I act.
Authenticity
I believe that when I act according to my true self, I am benefiting myself and others.
2.2 | Personal Values List
Download the following worksheet and identify your top ten values. Write your definition for each value.
2.3 | Peer Feedback
EXPLORATION
On Exploration Phase of healing the student is still externally motivated while she and her family begin to explore and rediscover their values. They learn and establish an attitude of openness to new information about themselves, specifically self-defeating behaviors. The student still manifests the necessity of continual staff direction. She is mostly teachable, open to learning in therapy and school, and is compliant with expectations. The family is able to give feedback in respectful ways and receive it non-defensively, as well as identify and acknowledge treatment issues
On Exploration Phase the student is willing:
- to follow the rules when staff asks her to be compliant
- to do chores
- to take meds without complaint
- to be open in therapy
- to attend and learn in school and groups
- to admit she needs to be at New Haven
- to be safe
- to identify her treatment issues
- to begin looking at her responsibility in her treatment issues
- to give feedback respectfully and accept it non-defensively
- to be honest and start to step out of her comfort zone
What Phase of Healing do you feel this person best represents?
- Safety
- Expectation
- Exploration
- Insight
- Integrity
- Interdependence
Download the following worksheet to complete the peer feedback.
2.4 | Autobiography
Your autobiography should include the following details:
- When and where were you born?
- What is your earliest childhood memory that you can remember?
- What was it like for you when you were a child?
- Describe each member of your family and write about how you feel about each one.
- Describe each of your friends and write about how you feel about each one.
- Describe what values you have and if you feel like you are living true to those values or not.
- Describe the time when you feel like your life first started to "go wrong".
- Describe the events that brought you to New Haven.
- What was the journey like for you personally?
- How did it affect those around you? (Family and friends)
- How do you feel about what happened?
- Write about:
- Emotional struggles - Do you ever feel like your mood is "out of control"? Do you feel like it is acceptable to express emotion at home or is your home too emotional about issues? Talk about how these have affected you.
- Family Issues - Talk about how you get along with your family. Are your parents divorced, married, separated, single-parent family? How has this affected you?
- Drugs/alcohol and/or Self-Harm - Have you ever used drugs or alcohol? Do you intentionally injure yourself? Talk about how you learned about these behaviors, and what experience you have with both. How has this affected you?
- Legal - Have you ever been in trouble with the police or broken the law and not been caught? What was that experience like for you?
- Physical problems - Do you have asthma, long-term pain, diabetes, any long-term physical conditions that you struggle with? Write about how they have affected your life.
- Eating disorder behaviors - Talk about if you struggle with liking your body, binge eating, etc.
- Honesty issues - Do you find it hard to be honest? Is it easy for you to lie? Talk about how this has affected you, your friends, and family.
- Write about your strengths:
- What do you do really well?
- What do you love to do?
- List the two most important people in your life.
- Describe what your hopes are for your future.
After you have finished, read your autobiography with your Values Coach and he/she will help you make revisions if you need to. When you are done, take the final copy to your therapist.
2.5 | Emotional Safety
What is Emotional Safety?
Emotional Safety is a relational atmosphere. When emotional safety is present in a relationship, ideas and feelings can be expressed with confidence. Those in the relationship feel physically safe, emotionally supported, and secure. When correction or challenging is needed, it is done with honesty and respect. Emotional safety means having a level of predictability and consistency in emotions and behaviors, including clear boundaries and expectations. Continued emotional safety requires that repairing occurs when the relationship is damaged. Indicators of emotional safety include: vulnerability, disclosure, honest feedback, absence or reduced defense mechanisms, and a feeling of connection.
What does Emotional Safety have to do with New Haven's Relational Approach to Healing?
Creating emotional safety in relationships requires us to model for others the very thing we are hoping to receive from them, treating what they share as important and valuable, and providing them experience with us consistently doing what we can to support them. Our ability and willingness to look at ourselves in our relationships with others is a starting point in facilitating needed emotional safety in order to address behaviors, understand beliefs, and help facilitate healing.
How does Emotional Safety effect lasting change?
- Love
- Foundation of change - Love promotes long-lasting change; fear promotes short-lived behavioral changes - Must create emotional safety to allow for love to be felt.
- Spirituality
- Healing often occurs through connections with things larger than ourselves and with whom we can be accountable to - Lack of emotional safety creates hesitancy to have faith in and connect with things bigger than self.
- Family
- The most meaningful and influential relationships in facilitating healing - Emotional safety is a prerequisite for love, trust, vulnerability, authenticity and connection in the family.
- Positive Values
- Need to explore and reconnect to positive values to rise beyond problem behaviors - Consistently following positive values promotes emotional safety.
- Internal Locus of Control
- Consistently regulating one's own self-contributes to the emotional safety others experience with me.
- Self Esteem
- The byproduct of successfully living by internal control and positive values, leading to greater levels of self-respect, emotional stability, and relational confidence.
Each of these is seen as a progression in the process of change. Without emotional safety to pave the way, permanent positive change would not be able to occur.
ASSIGNMENTS
Do the following sometime during a family therapy session or family phone call:
- Have each family member complete the Emotional Safety Rating Scale. Rate yourself on each question. As a family, discuss each individual's contribution to emotional safety and develop individual and family goals for improving emotional safety.
- Catch yourself using voice tone, displaying attitude or using language that is judgmental, inappropriately critical, or otherwise emotionally unsafe. Acknowledge this and communicate your message again in a different way.
- Practice empathetic listening. Make responses that demonstrate understanding. Resist impulses to give advice and provide "solutions". Express confidence in family members' abilities to solve problems and make good choices. Talk to the therapist about this experience.
- Together as a family identify and describe at least one family pattern that results in one or more family members experiencing a lack of emotional safety. Discuss this with your therapist.
- As a family identify a list of behaviors that are warning signs of an emotionally unsafe situation. Discuss action plans for how to do things differently.
- Listen to and acknowledge feedback from other family members without defensiveness, anger or arguments.
- Parents Only: Discuss with your spouse, or another adult that you are close to, the issue of control in relationships. Discuss appropriate vs. inappropriate control with children. Where are the proper boundaries between a parent's right to control and a child's right to self-control? When is control emotionally unsafe and developmentally detrimental?
2.5 | Emotional Safety Rating Scale
How effective are you at creating an atmosphere of emotional safety? Consider how you "show-up" in your relationships in the following areas: your Communication, your expression of Emotion, your Tolerance, your Closeness, and your use of Power & Control.
Read the statements below and then rate yourself according to the following scale:
1. Never Me 2. Rarely Me 3. Sometimes Me 4. Often Me 5. Always Me
COMMUNICATION
I speak with kindness, consideration, and sensitivity.
I listen attentively and sincerely, allowing others to speak without rejecting or interrupting.
I give feedback and advice and ask questions in the spirit of love and caring without judging and condemning the individual.
Honesty and truthfulness prevail in my relationships.
EMOTIONS
I am responsible and accountable for my own feelings and actions.
I recognize and validate the feelings of others without judgment.
I do not use feelings to punish, harass, coerce, manipulate, intimidate, or control others.
I am able and willing to be vulnerable in relationships when appropriate.
TOLERANCE
I am able to recognize differences and conflicts in my relationships and seek understanding, accommodation, and cooperation.
I acknowledge and respect the uniqueness of other individuals.
I do not attempt to dominate others as a means of handling differences.
I realize that my knowledge, experience, and abilities are limited, and pursue learning and growth in my interaction with others.
CLOSENESS
I freely and easily communicate closeness and connection in meaningful relationships.
I am aware of the importance of healthy boundaries and implement them in my relationships.
I allow others to support me when appropriate.
I am supportive of others and do not use antagonistic coalitions or scapegoating.
POWER & CONTROL
I am responsible for myself to the degree that is appropriate.
I allow influence from others to the degree that is appropriate.
I do not use my power for manipulative purposes, or to dominate others in a demeaning way.
I allow others to make their own decisions to the extent that is appropriate and that fits the circumstances.
What is your total score?
Safety Score: 0-29 Hostile / 30-49 Poor / 50-69 Moderate / 70-81 Good / 82-100 Excellent
2.6 | Parent Autobiography
Your autobiography should include the following details:
- When and where were you born?
- Describe the family you grew up in (family of origin).
- What was it like for you when you were a child?
- Describe each member of your immediate family and write about how you feel about each one.
- Write about any family traditions or rituals you have.
- Write about at least two of the suggestions below:
- Share a personal story from your life where you felt a lot of fear and how you got through it.
- Share an experience from your life where you made a mistake and had to work to make things right again.
- Share an experience from your life where you had to do something really hard and didn't think you were capable. How were you able to get through the situation?
- Write a list of 5 things that you wish you had known when you were a teenager.
- What are the most important lessons you learned from your own parents while growing up?
- What are some of the most important lessons you have learned in yourlife.
- Share a personal story from your life where you felt a lot of fear and how you got through it.
- Describe your close friends and write about how you feel about each one.
- Describe what values you have and if you feel like you are living true to those values or not.
- Describe the time when you feel like your daughter's world first start to go awry.
- Describe the events that brought your family to New Haven. Please talk about your feelings regarding these events.
- Write about your strengths:
- What do you do really well?
- What do you love to do?
- What do you do really well?
- Describe your hopes for your future.
- Describe the hopes you have for your daughter's future.
After you have finished, send your autobiography to your family therapist and he/she will help you make revisions, if needed. When you are done, send the final copy to your family therapist, so that you can share this with your family in a family therapy session.
2.7 | Ego Defense Mechanisms & Thinking Errors
EGO DEFENSE MECHANISMS
Defense mechanisms are patterns of thinking that we engage in to provide ourselves psychological protection. Healthy defense mechanisms help us cope with trauma, stress, and adversity. However, if we use defense mechanisms to avoid feelings that must be fully experienced, to avoid unpleasant truth and reality, or to avoid difficult work, responsibility or accountability, then this process is unhealthy. We will be more successful in our lives as we understand how we use these unhealthy defenses and learn to recognize them in ourselves.
We protect ourselves from some unpleasant reality by simply refusing to face or accept it.
Example: It is obvious that an alcohol addiction is creating serious problems in my life, but I deny it because I don't want to give up the perceived benefits that I get from drinking.
THINKING ERRORS
Thinking errors are patterns of thinking which are twisted, distorted and erroneous. They are a lot like ego defenses in that they often have as their root an attempt to avoid or escape unwanted or unpleasant feelings, effort, responsibility or accountability for past behaviors. Sometimes thinking errors are simply the result of inexperience, disturbed development, or lack of wisdom and maturity. As with unhealthy ego defense mechanisms, it is important to recognize and eliminate thinking errors in order to have good relationships and good personal functioning.
A rationalization in which something or someone else is made to appear responsible for your behavior or problem. Also called "externalization".
Example: I deny responsibility for my anger problem and avoid responsibility for getting it under control by saying to myself, "It's not my fault. Everyone in my family is rude and inconsiderate to me. How else can I act?"
2.8 | Family Values List and Definitions
Download the following worksheet and identify your top ten values. Write your definition for each value.
2.8 | Family Strengths List and Definitions
Download the following worksheet and identify your top ten strengths. Explain each strength.
2.9 | Love Currency: Learning How to Exchange Love
Individuals like to give and receive love, however usually they do this in their own unique way. When two people have a relationship they express love in these unique ways, and sometimes these emotional expressions get misread. Learning to express love in a way that other family members can understand is an important part of the emotional health of your family.
Each individual has an emotional bank account. We make emotional deposits in others accounts by expressing love in the way that makes sense to those we care about. We occasionally have to make withdrawals by giving constructive feedback or following through with consequences.
Gary Chapman, Ph.D. identified five primary love languages. Giving love in a variety of ways is helpful, however, when we speak each other's primary love language, it will touch more deeply and will more rapidly fill the emotional bank account. If we ignore each other's primary love language, using the other four forms of currency is not likely to fill the emotional bank account.
According to Gary Chapman Ph.D., There are five primary love languages:
- Words of Affirmation
- This means giving sincere and specific words of praise. If you are not able to praise results you should praise efforts. This also means expressing words of affection (saying I love you or I enjoy being with you). It is good to speak affirming words in front of family members although with teenagers, it may not be a good idea to speak to them in front of peers.
- Physical Touch
- This means hugging, cuddling, kissing, back rubs, pats on the back, arm wrestling, etc. There are many different kinds of touch. With teenagers it is important to find the appropriate time to touch. Inappropriate physical touch includes anything that is physically or sexually abusive.
- Quality Time
- This does not refer to proximity, but rather to togetherness. This means really listening and validating each other like, teaching instead of preaching and participating in quality activities. The most important thing is to focus on the person that you are spending quality time with and not try to do other things at the same time (i.e., don't try to fold laundry and have a heart- to- heart conversation with your teen at the same time).
- Acts of Service
- As parents you probably feel that you give constant service to your children and you are probably right, but to show love through service you have to check your attitude. Making the child feel guilty for all that you do around the house is not going to help them feel loved. Manipulation is not showing love. "I will drive you to the mall if you clean your room," is not giving an act of service. Some acts of service may include teaching someone how to do something they don't know how to do. Teaching your daughter to do laundry before she goes to college is a definite act of service.
- Gifts
- Gifts are visible, tangible evidence of emotional love. Again, a true gift is not used to manipulate someone into doing something you would like him or her to do. Giving gifts should be done with some sort of ceremony. Remember the purpose of the gift is to express emotional love. Gifts may also include things of little monetary value but things that are treasured for what they mean to the family. Gifts should never be given to take the place of true love. (This kind of gift giving is done by busy or absentee parents who are trying to make up for their deficits as parents by giving gifts.
Download the following worksheet and list the 5 love languages in order from how you most like to receive love to how you least like to receive love (#1 being your primary love language). Also, list the ways you tend to express love to other members of your family.
For more information check out The Five Love Languages, and The Five Love Languages of Teenagers by Gary Chapman, Ph.D.
Family Phase Application
Instructions: In order to apply for your next phase, each family member, values coach, and therapist(s) must complete their part. Once each section is complete, the form can be turned in with the student's values binder.
Download the following document to complete the family phase application.
Working With New Haven Horses: Guidelines Contract
At New Haven, we encourage everyone to learn about and interact with horses. However, everyone must follow some basic guidelines. Before a student can do anything with a horse, they must read and sign this sheet.
- No one can take the horses out during the dark or dusk hours of the day.
- No one can jump horses from the ground or on horse back except when the Animal Manager is present.
- No one can ride or groom horses during bad weather. This includes heavy rain, thunder and lightening, hail, wind storms, and heavy snow.
- No one may ride the horses when the ground is frozen or when there are puddles in the arena.
- Any student who works with a horse, other than during a group activity, must sign the Horse Sign-Up Sheet inside the tack room.
- When a student is finished with the horse, she must put ALL of her equipment away.
- No one may bathe a horse unless the temperature is 70 degrees or higher for at least four hours during the day.
- The person who got the horse out is responsible to put the horse away. The only exception is during a group activity when everyone is responsible to help put the horses away.
- The person who gets equipment out is responsible for putting ALL the equipment away properly. The only exception is during a group activity when everyone is responsible to help put ALL the equipment away.
- No one may ride alone without a Horse Riding Contract completed and signed by the Animal Manager.
- In order to ride or work with a horse, the student must have at least one hour of free, staff approved, time.
- All students who ride must wear a helmet the ENTIRE time they are on a horse.
- All students who ride during free time must ride in the arena with a saddle and bridle.
- BE SAFE!
Download and sign the following document saying that you have read these guidelines and understand them and agree to abide by them.