Tag Archives: Art

education, Happiness, Personal Reflections, Suicide Assessment and Intervention, Writing

The Secret Retreat

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Yesterday, Tammy Tolleson Knee (the new director of the Phyllis J. Washington Center for the Advancement of Positive Education) and I arrived in Kalispell, Montana for a 2+ day retreat with staff from the Nate Chute Foundation (NCF). Their mission: The Nate Chute Foundation supports, educates and empowers our community to promote mental wellness and reduce suicide. You can learn more about NCF’s fabulous work and staff right here: https://www.natechutefoundation.org/

Our retreat is top secret, but I’ll share it here anyway because I don’t like secrets.

Having grown weary with traditional, pathology-oriented approaches to “suicide prevention” we’re working together to create a new curriculum tentatively titled “Strengths-Based Suicide Education for Concerned Adults.” Our plan is to use this new curriculum to replace all the unhelpful and sometimes traumatizing approaches to suicide prevention.

Yes, we have big goals.

Today we’re breaking away from our retreat for a short presentation/consult with Immanuel Living of Kalispell.

In preparation for this short conversation, I pulled out an old slide about a thing called Stress Inoculation Training (thanks Don Meichenbaum!).

The point of SIT is to prepare for stressors or provocations in life that adversely affect us. For example, let’s say that you find ___________ stressful. (You can put anything in the blank. It could be exercise, talking with your boss, going to church, not going to church, speaking in public meetings, etc.). Then you create your own personalized stress inoculation plan.

Meichenbaum’s therapy approach is designed to prep or inoculate us from our usual and predictable stressors. He described three steps: (1) preparation for provocation, (2) coping with the provocative situation, and (3) reflection and self-reinforcement. Here’s a visual, with our stressors and responses organized into 7 dimensions:

If we all had rational brains and lived in a rational world, SIT would work perfectly for everyone. But like everything, it doesn’t always work. During today’s talk, I’m revealing the secrets of why our best laid plans often fail. Newsflash: it has to do with our quirky brains, which, although amazing, also automatically and regularly take us down into negative thinking rabbit holes.

TBH, IMHO, dipping into a negative thinking rabbit hole every once in a while can be fun, but if your intention was to avoid negative thinking rabbit holes, they’re considerably less fun.

Unfortunately, due to time limits and the need for mystery in marketing, this blog is ending without me sharing the five secrets of why our pesky brains often derail us from our positive intentions. Sorry about that. They’re in the pdf of the ppts linked below, and although you can find them there, it’s much more fun for us to talk about these in person . . . so I hope to see you at a presentation in the future.

5 2026 NCF Talk KalispellDownload

culture, diversity, Multicultural, Personal Reflections

A Brief and Clear Reflection on DEI

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This photo is of Lynnel Bullshoe gifting Rita beautiful Indigenous art at a two-day workshop in Browning on the Blackfeet Reservation.

With all the politicizing and media activity around DEI, I think it’s easy to get confused and polarized on DEI issues. Last October, when talking with a friend at a conference in Philly, my friend told a story that I found wonderfully clarifying about DEI. In my previous Theories Preface post, I didn’t include her anecdote–which is one of my favorites–because I didn’t have permission then. But I have permission now, so here’s the missing anecdote:

Recently, a friend of ours told us a story about being asked to deliver a keynote speech for a state school counselor association event. A board member recommended that she “go light on DEI.” Perhaps our friend interpreted that as “You’ve got the green light on DEI,” as the beginning of her speech went something like this:

I was asked to go light on DEI, so I’d like to start by saying, I recently heard someone say that the opposite of diversity is uniformity. The opposite of equity is inequity. The opposite of inclusion is exclusion. And the opposite of anti-racism is racism. I sincerely hope it’s safe to say that as school counselors, none of us want uniformity, inequities, or exclusionary and racist practices.

She went on to remind the audience that we cannot take DEI out of our work, that it is our professional and ethical duty to continuously examine our biases, assumptions, and beliefs, and engage in the ongoing work of self-reflection, learning, and unlearning (J. V. Taylor, personal communication, October 11, 2025). 

I love this clear, concise, and beautiful analysis of what is NOT DEI.

What are your thoughts?