Five areas of focus

1. Distress Management Skills – Distress is a normal part of life.   In this module you will learn what kind of steps to take to minimize or limit the impact of the distress you are experiencing on the overall quality of your life.  You will learn to increase your awareness of your own style of manifesting distress and become familiar with self-management strategies for intervening.   We will also spend time overcoming barriers to implementing your distress management skills.

2. Coping Self-Talk Skills – In this module we will raise your awareness of your own internal speech (what you say to yourself in your head) and the beliefs you carry along with that self-talk.  We will focus on creating and using more helpful self-talk.

3. Mindfulness Skills – You will be exposed to the idea of consciously directing and enhancing how you attend to yourself and your environment.  You will learn how to center or widen your attention willingly and how to become a detached observer of your own experience when you choose to do so.  A variety of sensory, stretching and breathing exercises are used.

4. Interpersonal Effectiveness – This module offers brief and selective assertion training.  Skills will include 1) identifying and labeling feelings, 2) use of “I” statements, 3) requesting behavior change, and 4) refusing requests.

5. Skills for Living Well – Increasing life satisfaction and promoting a healthy lifestyle will be the focus of this module.   Each member will identify and pursue a personal goal for healthier living.   Effective goal setting and developing an optimistic approach will be covered.

Who can attend?

This group is for adults of any age.  All members must be working actively with an individual therapist.  This is because we will only be focusing on developing coping skills and we will not be spending time working through upsetting or traumatic experiences.  Members will need to have an individual therapist or other type of therapy group that they can use to work through emotions and issues they may face during the time-frame of this group

Why these skills?
These sets of skills have been used to help hundreds of traumatized women and men for more than a decade.  Mary Jean Mariano, Ph.D., Denise Pritzel, M.S.W., and Kristen Ogren, O.T.R., L.M.H.C. along with other staff members at the Puget Sound VA Health Care System have developed and fine-tuned these modules in order to help their clients lead healthier and less distressed lives.