Back in 1980, one of my supervisors at Woodside Hospital in Vancouver, WA, gave me a big compliment. At the time, I was a recreational therapist in a 22-bed psychiatric hospital. In a letter of recommendation, the supervisor described me as having a special knack for translating complex psychological phenomena into concrete activities from which patients could learn. To be honest, I really had no idea what I was doing.
But I think he was onto something about me and my personality. I like to integrate, summarize, and boil down information into digestible bits. Sometimes I have to get the facts to play Twister to get otherwise incompatible perspectives to fit together. This tendency is probably why I’ve written textbooks on clinical interviewing and counseling theories.
Today, I’m tackling anxiety, anxiety reduction, and self-regulation. This feels more personal than usual, mostly because I’ve been dysregulated, more or less, since November 9, 2016.
After reading and thinking about anxiety and anxiety reduction for 30+ years, I’m strongly leaning toward the position that there’s only one, single, universal method to achieve self-regulation. The method is Mary Cover Jones’s counterconditioning. You probably already know that I think Mary Cover Jones is fabulous.
As a means of exploring this unifying method, I recently did a podcast on it with Sara Polanchek. I’ll write more later, but for now, if you’re interested, check out the podcast. It’s the latest episode (7/19/18 release date). You can listen on iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/practically-perfect-parenting-podcast/id1170841304?mt=2
Or Libsyn: http://practicallyperfectparenting.libsyn.com/
If you do listen, please let me know what you think. That way I can continue with integration and synthesis by incorporating your thoughts into my thoughts. I’ll bet you can find many different ways to communicate with me.
If you don’t listen, no worries, I’ll just keep hanging out here in my personal echo chamber.
John Sommers-Flanagan 
Inquiring minds want to know… What happened on November 9, 2016?
There was that election the day before.
Nice stuff! I can imagine there might be some that utilize Virtual Reality mediums for self regulation purposes? I hear combat vets have benefitted from VR work. I like the practice of including our own success stories in many aspects of self regulation, as for so many years I’d recall how I managed anxiety, ( in some cases panic prevention) doing parachute work to forest fires!
The research on VR for treating fear and anxiety is pretty darn good. Of course, it involves using an exposure paradigm. What you and I need to do is to overcome our anxiety and do panic prevention to get us out on the links.
This iis great