Tag Archives: whole person

Managing Hope to Build Resilience and Overcome Stress

What is Hope Management Theory?

While most therapists work to help people manage stress and its ancillary emotions (i.e., anger, anxiety, sadness), Hope Management Theory suggests that hope is a natural way to build hope-based resilience and overcome the effects of stress. The following are some of the central beliefs of a Hope Management Theory approach:

Hope is the most potent, positive, universal human emotion, characterized by intense feelings of motivation, optimism, and elevated mood about the future. Therefore, people need to manage the positive components of hope like they similarly manage the negative aspects of stress.
Feelings are more robust than thoughts and behaviors, thus they create thought patterns and direct behavioral routines.
Hope functions as a self-motivator, influencer, and inner driver to help people experience positive stress and flourish.
Hope is the best way to build natural hope-based resilience coping skills.
Hope not only builds resilience, but it also operates as a natural antidote to stress (and its subsequent problems, including trauma, anxiety, and sadness).
As hope increases, resilience and positive stress increase, and negative stress decreases.

All people have stressful collisions with the future. The intensity of these collisions determines how much stress people experience. This negative stress harms emotional, psychological, and physical health and wellness. Rather than manage stress and its ancillary issues (anger, anxiety, sadness, etc.), people can take a positive approach by managing and enhancing their levels of hope to generate enough positive stress (eustress) to overcome the effects of negative stress (distress). Positive stress, or eustress, is beneficial stress that motivates people by providing a meaningful, positive challenge.

Discover and Create Meaning in Your Life workbook cover — Discover and Create Meaning in Your Life from Positive Psychology – The Hope Series

Application of The Hope Management Theory:

People can cultivate “hope on steroids” to generate positive stress, build a shield of resilience, and eventually eliminate negative stress:

Activate Hope (Trigger the emotion of hope by understanding change and transitions, remaining optimistic, visualizing the future you, and being flexible and opening your mind to possibilities.)
Make Hope a Habit (Engage in hopeful actions and build “Hope Habits” by creating a map of your vision, developing meaning and purpose for goals, and utilizing flow to maintain hope.)
Maintain Hope (Make hope a lifestyle by maintaining positive stress over a lifetime, generating resilience in the face of obstacles, finding ways to integrate hope into your lifestyle, and sustaining self-care.)

Therapists can use the workbooks from Positive Psychology – The Hope Series written by Dr. Michelle Scallon and Dr. John Liptak, currently being published by Whole Person Associates, to ensure hope becomes a habit. The five workbooks are:

Discover and Create Meaning in Your Life

Generate a Sense of Accomplishment in Your Life

Maintain Positive, Healthy Relationships in Your Life

Regain Control in Your Life

Cultivate Hope and Engagement in your Life

In conclusion, hope is the most intense emotion people generate, and the feelings associated with hope must be triggered, managed, enhanced, and maintained. When people are able to develop it in all aspects of their lives, hope becomes an antidote to stress and a way to build a protective shield of resilience.

Written by John J. Liptak, Ed.D.

*APA (2023). Stress in America 2023: A nation grappling with psychological impacts of collective trauma. https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2023/11/psychological-impacts-collective-trauma

Wellness or Well-Being?

Should Wellness be replaced by Well-Being?

By Michael Arloski

The term “Well-being” may have come along at just the right time. Public speakers and marketers are re-branding “wellness” as “well-being” by saying that well-being is more complete, more holistic. Well-being, they say, incorporates the whole person, their environment, their financial picture, their career, etc. On the one hand it’s too bad that we have to invent a new term to refresh our memory of what wellness really is. On the other, with the way that corporations and organizations have allowed their wellness programs and products to deteriorate into overly simplistic efforts, based on single-measurable-variable pieces of research, well-being may be the kick in the pants that reminds us about “Whole-Person Wellness”.

Twenty to forty-year veterans of the wellness and health promotion field hear speakers appear to create false distinctions between the terms well-being and wellness. And yet, are they indeed false distinctions?

Has the term wellness been worn out? It has certainly been misused and abused. Here in Northern Colorado a wellness center is probably a medical marijuana dispensary. Google the word and the number one listing on that search engine is always the Wellness brand of dog and cat food.

What may be more disturbing though, is how we have come to look at wellness in ways that jettison its original holistic meaning. In an effort to be more scientific and evidence-based, we have embraced research efforts to show the effectiveness of our approaches to wellness and health promotion. While this research is important and has yielded much of great value, too much of it has been focused on what could be called the measurement of a single variable. As we’ve tried to apply the scientific method to this cause we’ve oversimplified our approach far too often. When we want to study the health behavior of human populations the challenge is daunting.

It’s easy to control extraneous variables in a “Skinner Box”*. Any social scientist will tell you
skinner-box that people are a lot more complicated. The result has been too many health behavior studies measuring one aspect of activity, one blood lipid level, one blood sugar level. While those little building blocks all help to assemble the scientific foundation we need, too much is concluded from them. In our online digital world a simple study with twenty subjects, run one time, has its results proclaimed as headline news.

Following the medical world, where the threat of litigation for malpractice hovers over every practice like a vulture, we have sought to provide only programming that is evidence-based. That means, as Dee Edington stated at the 2013 American College of Lifestyle Medicine Conference, “if you only do evidence-based [programs] you’ll never innovate!” The temptation is to dumb-down our concept of wellness to just physical fitness and nutrition. The temptation is to be happy that we got someone to walk three times a week and call it good.

There Is Nothing New Under the Sun

Dusting off the yellowed pages of my edition of Donald Ardell’s High Level Wellness: An Alternative To Doctors, Drugs and Disease (1977) I found my long-time friend Don referred to his colleague and fellow wellness pioneer, Jack Travis, as Jack and he defined wellness: “Travis believes that wellness begins when an individual sees himself or herself as a growing, changing person. High level wellness means giving care to the physical self, using the mind constructively, channeling stress energies positively, expressing emotions effectively, becoming creatively involved with other, and staying in touch with the environment.” Ardell posed five dimensions of wellness,
Bill Hetler six http://www.nationalwellness.org/?page=Six_Dimensions), and Travis, including a number of psychological dimensions, built a model with twelve dimensions. (http://www.wellpeople.com/Wellness_Dimensions.aspx)

Travis wellness wheel
Clearly Wellness has always been meant to be a holistic concept as I stated in 1994 in my article “The Ten Tenets of Wellness” (published in Wellness Management, the newsletter of The National Wellness Association, which also can be found in Chapter Two in Wellness Coaching for Lasting Lifestyle Change, 2nd ed.

Indeed we’ve seen it all before. The term “Mindfulness” has been skillfully re-packaged by Jon Kabat-Zinn and others. Studying today’s version of mindfulness someone like me is transported back to about 1968 when I was in college and reading books like Bernard Gunther’s Sense Relaxation Below Your Mind. Of course everything we’re talking about here is based on practices that go back thousands of years in the traditions of meditation, Yoga, Tai Chi, and more.

Yoga Pose

While in my doctoral program in the 1970’s, I was blessed with the opportunity to learn deeply about biofeedback and how to apply it in working with stress-related disorders. I specialized in that for many years as a psychologist and served as the President of The Ohio Society for Biofeedback and Behavioral Health. The beauty of the research done by biofeedback pioneers Elmer and Alice Greene (http://www.amazon.com/Beyond-Biofeedback-Elmer-Freen/dp/0940267144 and http://www.consciousnessandbiofeedback.org) was to use recently developed technology to study the consciousness practices of Indian Yogis, monks, and others. By examining their subject’s brain waves and various physiological indicators they ended up validating the legitimacy of such practices. Thus we see that today’s mindfulness has its roots in research completed under other names as well.

Today’s dynamic “Positive Psychology” movement has invigorated the field of psychology and is providing the sound research evidence that is validating what the Humanistic Psychology folks have been saying since the 1950’s and 1960’s. The “Human Potential Movement” of the late 1960’s and the work of Abraham Maslow, Virginia Satir, Carl Rogers, Rolo May and many others, emphasized looking at human behavior from a positive growth perspective instead of the usual clinical/pathological perspective. Saying that Martin Seligman founded the Positive Psychology Movement may be accurate in recent history, but he did so standing on the shoulders of these earlier giants. Our field of coaching also built its self on these same shoulders and from its inception always took on a positive psychology, strengths-based approach to working with people.

A Return To Whole-Person Wellness. Looking at wellness programs merely as cost-containment strategies has caused us to develop a tunnel vision ROI-only view. Some companies today are spending more money on their incentives to get people to take a health-risk assessment, etc. than they are spending on their wellness programs! When we view employees only as statistical units that drive up healthcare costs, we down-size or dumb-size our thinking.

The well-being approach would have us view employees as whole people who can contribute to the mission and purpose of our company and do so through creative, higher performance that happens when they are well in this holistic sense. The term to shift to is VOI (Value On Investment).

More Than Just Corporate Health Promotion. When we step outside of the corporate world we see wellness, and now well-being, at work in our healthcare settings, communities, schools, places of worship, and among groups and individuals who want to live their best life possible. We are realizing the powerful effect that connection and community provides for our
Kids eating greens health and well-being. We are seeing how having safe green spaces to walk, play and exercise increase the health of communities. Part of our approach to wellness/well-being is to step outside of a myopic corporate perspective and remember that not everyone works for a company with the benefits of a wellness program. Being inclusive of under-served populations in both rural and urban areas, Native American/First Nations Reservations, and others means maintaining this big-picture view of what wellness/well-being means.

If Well-Being helps us remember to work with the whole person and view them from a holistic perspective – great! If the term refreshes programs and generates engagement – wonderful! Bring on Well-Being while we remember what it really is – Whole Person Wellness.

* A Skinner Box is an apparatus for studying instrumental conditioning in animals (typically rats or pigeons) in which the animal is isolated and provided with a lever or switch that it learns to use to obtain a reward, such as a food pellet, or to avoid a punishment, such as an electric shock.

Dr. Arloski is the author of the seminal work Wellness Coaching for Lasting Lifestyle Change, 2^nd Edition, and Your Journey to a Healthier Life.

Just for Laffs: I Won’t Ballroom Dance, Don’t Ask Me

Mindfulness

Personal Management: Stress Less!

Everyone has moments where we feel as though life is throwing too much at us. We can’t control what happens to you, but we can control how we each respond to it. By understanding how to spend your time and energy, you can help yourself when you feel overloaded. Understanding how to prioritize yourself is a great stress-reducing tool. These are called Personal Management Skills. They are useful when you:

feel as though you spend too much time on things that aren’t important,
feel out-of-step with yourself,
feel you have too much to do and no time to get it done, and
you don‘t really understand what you want from the future.

There are five facets to Personal Management Skills. The first are Valuing Skills, which help determine what’s important. Second are Planning Skills, which turns your values into a road map. Commitment Skills help put those plans into actions. Fourth are Time-Use Skills, which help you trim out your time wasters, and last are Pacing Skills, which help you to keep on course and not fizzle out halfway through.

Do you feel as though you need management skills, or do you feel like you’re already organized?
Does it seem as though you need help on one facet in particular?

Eat healthy, stay active and stop making excuses

Feeling refreshed after a wonderful two-week Colorado vacation with friends and family it’s time to get my body’s insides feeling as energized as my mind and spirit.

Here’s why my body needs help.

We spent a week with close family – three couples and four kids – in Durango, CO. Wonderful cooks in each family showcased their skills creating mouthwatering breakfasts, lunches and dinners. This continued with our Boulder friends, too. I ate heartily at every single meal (boof!) and consumed generous amounts of alcohol over evening card games, laughter sessions and football games.

Now that we’ve returned, we’ll do our annual post-holiday, two-day cleansing apple diet to rid ourselves of our excesses.

I have two additional healthy intentions:
· To switch to one or two meals weekly of beans and legumes, with little or no meat: since my husband is the cook, I must convince him this is a good idea. So, while in Boulder I purchased a bean cookbook. To make this happen I may have to cook these meals – I haven’t cooked for over 27 years.
· To return to my exercise regimen: weekly bicycling, kayaking and Nordic Track plus yoga multiple times a week. I slacked off last quarter due to a variety of reasons, one of which was the cold weather.

If I fail to accomplish these goals, I’ll stay attuned to my reasons – aka excuses, like it’s too cold to kayak today.

Best-selling author Bob Greene, Oprah’s former personal trainer said, “I’ve heard every excuse on the planet – except a good one. Having an excuse is an obstacle that you choose to place in front of yourself. … in general, we do it to justify not changing. When you are out of excuses is when you are ready to change.”

Which excuses justify you not changing? Do your knees hurt? Maybe your job exhausts you so much that you can do nothing when you get home but veg out. Whatever your excuses, bring them to your conscious mind and admit that you just don’t want to do whatever it is you’re considering. Keeping excuses conscious versus automatic (unconscious) gives you more power to change someday.

Also, strengthen your motivation for healthy change by using intrinsic reasons that benefit you rather than someone else. The day of each week I target for my Nordic Track session isn’t a day I say, “Yippee! I get to do the Nordic Track today.” I just do it because I’m committed to strength, energy, health, flexibility, etc., all intrinsic reasons to work out.

Greene encourages you to look for some form of activity that fits you. Distract yourself while doing it if that would help, like watch TV as you march in place. Make a t-shirt for yourself with “No excuses” printed on it. Eat modestly and healthfully five days a week leaving two days to eat whatever you like. Do whatever works for you.

As one reformed couch potato said, “There is no excuse good enough for poor health.”

Jacquelyn Ferguson, M. S., is an international speaker and a Stress and Wellness Coach. Check out her book, Let Your Body Win: Stress Management Plain & Simple.

Coping 101

Coping skills for distress are different for all of us. They seem to come naturally, but at one point and time, each coping skill was new and different. You found it effective, so you kept doing it until it became second nature to you. Stress reducers are healthy, but some of our coping skills come at a price that makes them unhealthy. The economics of coping are simple. Some skills work, but come at a price, such as drinking. It may help you forget your troubles, but can cost headaches, embarrassment, loss of productivity, irritation, or even organ damage. Screaming, taking a bath, or yelling are also solutions people use, but these are instant-gratification fixes; they work fast but don’t last long. Low-cost, high-yielding coping skills are things such as talking with a friend or exercising.

You may find not all coping skills work for you, or that they don’t work after time. If you’re reading this, sucking your thumb won’t make you feel better anymore. Also, not all coping habits are helpful in all situations. If you cope by sleeping, then it won’t help when you shut down in the middle of a crisis. It’s hard to let go of old, comforting skills; but you can change them if you want to. First, decide to do it! Then take it one step at a time and make your new skills as natural as cuddling a blankie was when you were a child.

What kind of skills would you like to try?
Do you have unhealthy coping skills?
What skills would you like to phase out?

Children can overcome abuse, deal with trauma

Victims of sexual assault struggle

In recent articles (http://stressforsuccess.blogspot.com) I’ve covered how vulnerable children are lured into sex-trafficking due to their desperation. S/he’s:
· Likely running away from an abusive home, therefore homeless;
· Alone and frightened;
· Just a kid.
A seemingly protective man, and sometimes a woman, offers to protect them. What would you do?

Beyond predatory traffickers/pimps who are preying on vulnerable kids, there’s a sad reality that makes them more vulnerable to this nightmare: early and repetitive childhood sexual trauma.

Sexual abuse harms victims’ mental, emotional, spiritual and physical development. The following description is adapted from “Childhood and Adult Sexual Victimization” by Parson, Brett and Brett.

A victim of repetitive childhood sexual abuse undergoes damage to her still-developing personality. The abuse shatters her very spirit, which is much more difficult to heal than mental and physical damage.

“Mind, body, and spirit” implies that spirit is part of the total self. Rather, spirit permeates all. It represents her essence. It holds the fabric of the self together. Spirit:
· Provides her with a healthy self-centeredness: a sense of her unique self;
· Is the natural belief that her self is her priceless, personal possession, worthy of protection and respect;

Sexual assaults devastate his spirit and self-respect. His natural social tendencies are haunted by constant vulnerability, resulting in blameless availability for adult abuse. The child goes from being spirit-filled and alive to essence-defused and empty. The degraded self may be drained of most traces of feeling human.

Contributing immeasurably to the child’s helplessness is the blaming the child for the incest while the adult denies responsibility. The abuse is committed on someone who is least able to protect himself from immoral adult power.

After repetitive abuse the child’s changed view of self is the essence of his stress. He’s robbed of his free will, spontaneity, and autonomy. His patterns of perceiving, trusting, and acting are drastically altered based on many secrets too terrible to face. He’s forced into secrecy with threats of exposure, abandonment, fear of repeated sexual injuries, and further humiliation. He’s constantly wary around adults.

He’s forced to grow up fast, learning how to survive. To survive he navigates his dangerous terrain through hyper-vigilance to adult mood and behavioral cues of impending abuse. He maneuvers around them. He de-activates the mines before they explode through good behavior and an appeasing manner to avert adult depravity. Running away becomes a viable option.

His spirit dims; her laughter is extinguished. Their environment is a place where no joy, hope, and love are allowed to flourish. There’s only emotional and spiritual darkness, helplessness, and buried rage to be resurrected at a later time, and unleashed suddenly on unsuspecting targets, including the self.

They live in a persistent state of stress-induced burnout due to near-constant paranoid expectations of attacks. Being chronically revved-up is akin to living in an internal police state.

What’s profoundly remarkable is that these children find a way to survive. Their strength and ingenuity are integral parts of trauma therapy, which can help. To find trauma therapists in our area go to http://www.mhaswfl.org/.

Jacquelyn Ferguson, M. S., is an international speaker and a Stress and Wellness Coach. Order her book, Let Your Body Win: Stress Management Plain & Simple, at https://wholeperson.com/x-selfhelp/selfhelp.html#Anchor-Let-11481.

Stress and Rhythm

We all have rhythms in our lives; yearly, monthly, weekly, daily, even hourly patterns we all experience on a regular basis. Have you noticed you wake up around the same time even when you don’t have to? This is your body’s natural rhythm at work. Things such as scheduled lunch breaks, alarm clocks, and weekly planners hamper your body’s natural rhythm, but we need these things in our society. Even so, you can stay in tune with your body’s rhythm. Some of us feel as though we’re lagging behind our lives and others feel as though they’re getting ahead of themselves. Think of a frantic CEO, who needs to be in ten places at once, or the procrastinating student who can’t seem to catch up before the exam. There are also instances where due to other circumstances, your rhythm is thrown completely away, like the new parents who suddenly find themselves low on sleep. Speeding up, slowing down or tossing out our natural rhythms can cause tension, so we sometimes need to slow ourselves down, or kick it up a bit to match where our bodies want to be. In a situation like the new parents, we just have to learn to live with a strange rhythm for awhile.

Kairos is a Greek word that means “the right moment” – that special time when you are in harmony with your natural rhythm, in tune with the universe. Listen when your body is telling you now is kairos. It’s up to you to decide what for.

Is it time to slow down? Speed up?
Do you keep in step with your body?

Simplify your life by throwing out the clutter

Spend more time doing things you like

Simplicity is gaining in popularity as a response to our economic times. Even though it goes against our contemporary American brain to be satisfied with greater simplicity and less stuff it came very naturally to our grandparents. Maybe it’s time to return to our practical past by challenging stereotypical American assumptions like:
* Baby boomers’ belief that human worth is tied to how much we work;
* Some parents equating being a good parent with giving your children everything they want;
In other words, simplifying will be different for everyone. What would make your life easier?

Leo Babauta writing for Zenhabits suggests that simplifying means getting rid of much of what you do to spend more time with those you love, doing the things you enjoy. It means “getting rid of the clutter so you are left with only that which gives you value.”

Babauta suggests many ideas. The following is adapted from http://zenhabits.net/simple-living-manifesto-72-ideas-to-simplify-your-life:
* First, write out a clear description of what your simpler life looks like.
* Identify your well-considered priorities or simplifying won’t work for you. Make a list of the four to five most important things to you, what you most value, and what you most want to do in your life.
* Identify which commitments – from family, hobbies, work and volunteering – truly give you value and you deeply enjoy. Which are in the top four to five most important things you listed? Drop those that aren’t.
* Log your time investments from upon awakening until you go to bed. Do they support your top priorities? Eliminate those that don’t. Then redesign how you spend your waking hours.
* Simplify your work and home tasks. Instead of hacking your way through your to-do lists, identify what’s most important and do those first. Eliminate the rest, delegate them or pay someone to do them.
* Set appropriate limits! If you don’t know how, take an assertiveness class. If you set no limits you teach others that you’ll always say “yes” to their requests. And guess what. They’ll keep asking!
* Take control over your emails, cell phone, IM, Twitter, etc. They’ll take over your life if you’re not careful. Set limits like checking emails once in the morning and once in the afternoon. Or admit that these electronic connections are a top priority and more important than whatever else you’re falling behind on.
* Get rid of stuff. It feels good. Use the idea of a workshop participant: once a year she hangs all of her clothes backwards. When she wears something she hangs it back up frontwards. At the end of the year anything that remains hanging backwards gets donated. I love this simple idea!

Happiness and satisfaction are never from what you own. They come from your relationships, being satisfied with what you have, being what you want to be and living your values. Recommit to your simplicity annually to avoid slipping back onto the American hyper-treadmill once the economy recovers.

Jacquelyn Ferguson, M. S., is an international speaker and a Stress and Wellness Coach. Order her book, Let Your Body Win: Stress Management Plain & Simple.

Teen Aggression & Bullying Workbook: Book Release

Book Release

Whole Person Associates
PHONE 218.727.0500
FAX 218.727.0505
WEB http://www.wholeperson.com
E.MAIL books@wholeperson.com
CONTACT: Carlene Sippola

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

The Teen Aggression & Bullying Workbook:

Facilitator Reproducible Self-Assessments, Exercises & Educational Handouts

By John J Liptak, EdD and Ester Leutenberg

Whole Person Associates announces publication of The Teen Aggression & Bullying Workbook: Facilitator Reproducible Self-Assessments, Exercises & Educational Handouts by John J Liptak, EdD, and Ester Leutenberg. Today’s newspapers, websites, and social sites are full of discussions about how to prevent the aggression and bullying that occurs with greater and greater frequency everywhere from playgrounds to cyberspace. It can disrupt families, workplaces, and communities. As this problem continues to grow, mental health professionals are searching for proven ways to reach troubled teens. The Teen Aggression & Bullying Workbook provides just that.

The Teen Aggression & Bullying Workbook is divided into six sections, each of which includes:

assessment instruments
activity handouts
quotations to provide insight and promote reflection
reflective questions for journaling
educational handouts to enhance instruction

Mental health professionals, counselors, teachers, and parents will use these tools to help teens explore violence motivation, environmental aggression, are you (the teen) being bullied, are you a bully, and how you would likely respond if you see bullying behavior. The final section addresses depression and suicide. It includes a detailed questionnaire, idea-prompting lists, and relevant journal questions designed to lead to productive in-depth discussions about how problems arise and how they can be solved.

The Teen Aggression & Bullying Workbook: Facilitator Reproducible Self-Assessments, Exercises & Educational Handouts is one of a series of 12 books covering mental health and lifestyle issues familiar to all professionals working with teens. Being released concurrently are: The Teen Friendship Workbook and The Teen Anger Workbook.

Teen Aggression & Bullying Workbook

Facilitator Reproducible Self-Assessments, Exercises & Educational Handouts

Written by: John J Liptak, EdD and Ester Leutenberg
No. of pages: 132
Softcover: Price $49.95
ISBN: 978-1-57025-252-5
Publication date: 2011

About the Authors

John J. Liptak, EdD, frequently conducts workshops on assessment-related topics. He has written three books on career-related topics which have been featured in numerous newspapers including The Washington Post, The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and the Associated Press. His work has also been featured on MSNBC, CNN Radio, and on the PAX/ION television series, “Success without a College Degree.” John has many years of experience in providing counseling services to individuals and groups in a variety of settings including job training programs, correctional institutions, and colleges and universities. In addition, John has ten years of teaching experience as

an assistant professor. With Kathy Khalsa and Ester Leutenberg, he has written three other comprehensive books for teachers and counselors to use with their students and clients: The Self-Esteem Program, The Social Skills Program, and The Stress Management Program: Inventories, Activities & Educational Handouts. John and Ester Leutenberg continue to co-write books to add to their Mental Health & Life Skills Workbook series, published by Whole Person Associates as well as a series of 12 books addressing teen mental health issues.

Ester A. Leutenberg has worked in the mental health field for many years as a publisher, author, and advocate for those suffering from loss. She personally experienced a devastating loss when her son Mitchell, after struggling with a mental illness for eight years, died by suicide in 1986. Soon after, as a way of both healing and helping others, Ester co-founded Wellness Reproductions & Publishing with her daughter Kathy Khalsa and began developing therapeutic products that help facilitators help their clients. Ester is the co-author of the SEALS series for teen-agers, Life Management Skills series for adults and Meaningful Life Skills for older adults, as well as a variety of therapeutic card games, board games, and posters. Ester has co-written GriefWork —Healing from Loss, The GriefWork Companion, and Creating a Healthy Balanced Life.

Ester and John have co-written the Mental Health & Life Skills Workbook Series, the Teen Mental Health & Life Skills Workbook Series and are currently working on a Coping Workbook Series, all published by Whole Person Associates.

About the Illustrator

Amy L. Brodsky, LISW-S, has worked assisting children and adults in psychiatric crisis. She is well known for her creative illustrations of the Emotions product line, over 35 therapeutic books, including the Life Management Skills and SEALS series, the een Relationship Workbook, Crossing the Bridge, GriefWork—Healing from Loss, The GriefWork Companion, Creating a Healthy Balanced Life, and the Liptak/Leutenberg Workbook series.

Teen Friendship Workbook: Book Release

Book Release

Whole Person Associates
PHONE 218.727.0500
FAX 218.727.0505
WEB http://www.wholeperson.com
E.MAIL books@wholeperson.com
CONTACT: Carlene Sippola

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

The Teen Friendship Workbook

Facilitator Reproducible Self-Assessments, Exercises & Educational Handouts

By John J Liptak, EdD and Ester Leutenberg

Whole Person Associates announces publication of The Teen Friendship Wokbook: Facilitator Reproducible Self-Assessments, Exercises & Educational Handouts by John J Liptak, EdD, and Ester Leutenberg. Choosing healthy friendships is of monumental importance to teenagers. As they move into middle school and high school they will experience changes in friends, personal style, social life, emotions…in fact in all aspects of their lives. The Teen Friendship Workbook will help counselors, teachers, therapists, and parents guide teens to choose wisely, avoiding potentially risky situations. Using worksheets, assessments, and games teens will learn how to say “no” and to avoid being negatively influenced by their peers. Adults working with teens will appreciate the quality of the materials as well as the time they save having a versatile collection of tools right at hand on their bookshelf.

The Teen Friendship Workbook contains five separate sections to help teens learn more about themselves and the skills that are fundamental to developing and maintaining healthy friendships:

Characteristics of Friends Scale – helps teens explore the types of positive and negative qualities their friendships possess.
Friendships Skills Scale – helps identify the strengths and weakness teens possess in interacting with their friends.
Friend Communication Skills Scale – helps identify and explore how well teens are communicating with their friends and develop better friendship communication skills
Friendship Personality Scale – helps teens understand their own personality and the personality of their friends to better accept one another for the ways they are different.
Peer Pressure Scale – helps identify the ways in which teens feel pressured or influenced by their friends to do things they may or may not want to do.

The Teen Friendship Workbook: Facilitator Reproducible Self-Assessments, Exercises & Educational Handouts is one of a series of 12 books covering mental health and lifestyle issues familiar to all professionals working with teens. Being released concurrently are: The Teen Aggression and Bullying Workbook and The Teen Anger Workbook.

Teen Friendship Workbook

Facilitator Reproducible Self-Assessments, Exercises & Educational Handouts

Written by: John J Liptak, EdD and Ester Leutenberg
No. of pages: 122
Softcover: Price $49.95
ISBN: 978-1-57025-249-5
Publication date: 2011

About the Authors

John J. Liptak, EdD, frequently conducts workshops on assessment-related topics. He has written three books on career-related topics which have been featured in numerous newspapers including The Washington Post, The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and the Associated Press. His work has also been featured on MSNBC, CNN Radio and on the PAX / ION television series, “Success without a College Degree.” John has many years of experience in providing counseling services to individuals and groups in a variety of settings including job training programs, correctional institutions, and colleges and universities. In addition, John has about ten years of teaching experience as

an assistant professor. With Kathy Khalsa and Ester Leutenberg, he has written three other comprehensive books for teachers and counselors to use with their students and clients: The Self-Esteem Program, The Social Skills Program, and The Stress Management Program: Inventories, Activities & Educational Handouts. With Whole Person Associates, he and Ester Leutenberg continue to co-write books to add to their Mental Health & Life Skills Workbook series.

Ester A. Leutenberg has worked in the mental health field for many years as a publisher, author, and advocate for those suffering from loss. She personally experienced a devastating loss when her son Mitchell, after struggling with a mental illness for eight years, died by suicide in 1986. Soon after, as a way of both healing and helping others, Ester co-founded Wellness Reproductions & Publishing with her daughter Kathy Khalsa and began developing therapeutic products that help facilitators help their clients. Ester is the co-author of the SEALS series for teen-agers, Life Management Skills series for adults and Meaningful Life Skills for older adults, as well as a variety of therapeutic card games, board games and posters. Ester has co-written GriefWork ~ Healing from Loss, The GriefWork Companion and Creating a Healthy Balanced Life.

About the Illustrator

Amy L. Brodsky, LISW-S, has worked assisting children and adults in psychiatric crisis. She is well known for her creative illustrations of the Emotions product line, over 35 therapeutic books, including the Life Management Skills and SEALS series, the Teen Relationship Workbook, Crossing the Bridge, GriefWork ~ Healing from Loss, The GriefWork Companion, Creating a Healthy Balanced Life, and the Liptak / Leutenberg Workbook series.

Want to simplify your life? Listen to inner wisdom

If it’s true that our new economic reality is here for a while, what can we do to cope?

How about simplifying and living within your means to reduce financial stress now and to enable living more wisely in the future?

It’s fortunate that the best things in life are very simple – and free: love, motivating work, enjoying nature. Yet most of us are chained to making a certain income to support a cluttered lifestyle, the opposite of simplicity. At the other extreme are some younger people who are promoting a lifestyle where you only possess 100 things. If you have three pair of jeans that counts for three! That’s too stark for me but the sentiment is appreciated.

A good place to start figuring out where you could simplify is to listen to your inner wisdom. But do you listen and act on its authentic advice? To hear it you must slow down. You could:
* Begin your morning routine more slowly. Get up a few minutes earlier, brush your teeth more slowly, eat slowly, and drive more slowly.
* Daily connect with nature with a conscious walk; not just a mechanical one, but one where you focus on the birds, the squirrels and the emerging morning light. At minimum before getting into your car deep breathe the fresh air and appreciate our gorgeous, emerging fall weather.
* Surround yourself with beauty. I don’t mean buy stuff that becomes clutter but rather make your surroundings more attractive with flowers, photos, meaningful mementos, candles and fresh air.
* Seek and enjoy silence daily, the opposite of the cacophony of daily noises: the alarming alarm that shocks you awake, the offensive hair dryer, the endless drone of depressing TV news, the ubiquitous office clamor. All day we’re surrounded by so much noise that it becomes part of the backdrop of life — until it totally stops — leaving the sweet sound of silence.

Don’t underestimate the stress of this incessant noise. To hear your inner voice above it you must regularly stop the noise and create silence for yourself through deep relaxation, sitting in silence with no TV or music, sitting comfortably in nature listening to its peaceful and natural sounds.

With practice, you’ll slow down allowing your intuition to surface. Keep a journal nearby to record your thoughts. You don’t need to act on any ideas but at least get them onto paper and into your conscious mind.

To attract your intuition to surface ask and answer questions:
§ What energizes/drains me the most? Why?
§ What part of my life is/isn’t working? Why?
§ What could I do to make life easier?

Be patient. It may take awhile for your answers to surface.

Americans have bought tons of stuff and discovered it doesn’t make us happier. In fact, the more stuff you have the more you want. Simplifying your life clears out the clutter so the clarity of what you really need shines through.

-Jacquelyn Ferguson, M. S., is an international speaker and a Stress and Wellness Coach. Order her book, Let Your Body Win: Stress Management Plain & Simple.

Stages of Grief

You grieve mentally, physically and spiritually. Many of us experience a similar cycle when grieving — they are common steps we use to help heal. Some people skip steps.

1. Denial	When the pain is too great, we temporarily shut down. You feel so numb you act as though nothing happened.
2. Eruption	Your emotions suddenly break out —it seems to hit at once.
3. Anger	You’ll get angry angry: it’s unfair, someone should have changed things, you don’t understand why. You may even be angry at who you’ve lost for deserting you.
4. Illness	Illness and stress go hand in hand. Don’t be surprised if you’re sick.
5. Panic	You worry you’ll never get over the loss, that you’ve lost yourself. You wonder if what you’re going through is normal.
6. Guilt	We try to find something to blame. If there is no one to blame, we blame ourselves. Feeling as though it’s your fault seems more bearable than there being no reason at all.
7. Loneliness	You find yourself avoiding others, feeling as though they can’t understand. You withdraw from friends and family.
8. Re-Entry	You want to move on, but can’t yet. You feel loyalty to the memory of who you lost, and worry moving on would be abandoning them.
9. Hope	You don’t know when, but one day, you notice you’re doing better. You feel like a fog has lifted. You begin to think you’ll be ok again someday.
10. Reality	You reconstruct your life, using the new strengths you’ve gained from grieving.

Teen Anger Workbook – Book Release

Book Release

Whole Person Associates
PHONE 218.727.0500
FAX 218.727.0505
WEB http://www.wholeperson.com
E.MAIL books@wholeperson.com
CONTACT: Carlene Sippola

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

The Teen Anger Workbook

Facilitator Reproducible Self-Assessments, Exercises & Educational Handouts

By John J Liptak, EdD and Ester Leutenberg

Whole Person Associates announces publication of The Teen Anger Workbook: Facilitator Reproducible Self-Assessments, Exercises & Educational Handouts by John J Liptak, EdD, and Ester Leutenberg. Teaching teens to handle their anger is one of the most challenging tasks of counselors, therapists, teachers, and parents. The Teen Anger Workbook provides tools to help young people engage in self-reflection, examine their thoughts and feelings that lead to anger, and learn effective tools and techniques to effectively manage the inevitable feelings of anger they will experience throughout their lives.

Divided into five separate sections, The Teen Anger Workbook provides a myriad of tools to guide teens through the exploration of a difficult topic and to learn more about themselves and now anger impacts their lives.

Teen Anger Triggers Scale helps individuals explore what triggers feelings of anger within them.
Teen Anger Intensity Scale helps individuals identify how prone they are to anger and how strong their feelings are of anger.
Teen Anger Expression Scale helps individuals identify their particular ways of expressing their anger to other people.
Teen Anger Consequences Scale helps individuals explore the adverse effects of uncontrolled anger on their relationships and life.
Teen Anger Management Scale helps individuals better understand their skills in managing the anger in their life.

The Teen Anger Workbook: Facilitator Reproducible Self-Assessments, Exercises & Educational Handouts is one of a series of 12 books covering mental health and lifestyle issues familiar to all professionals working with teens. Being released concurrently are: The Teen Friendship Workbook and The Teen Aggression and Bullying Workbook.

The Teen Anger Workbook

Facilitator Reproducible Self-Assessments, Exercises & Educational Handouts
Written by: John J Liptak, EdD and Ester Leutenberg
No. of pages: 122
Softcover: Price $49.95
ISBN: 978-1-57025-250-1
Publication date: 2011

About the Authors

John J. Liptak, EdD, frequently conducts workshops on assessment-related topics. He has written three books on career-related topics which have been featured in numerous newspapers including The Washington Post, The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and the Associated Press. His work has also been featured on MSNBC, CNN Radio, and on the PAX / ION television series, “Success without a College Degree.” John has many years of experience in providing counseling services to individuals and groups in a variety of settings including job training programs, correctional institutions, and colleges and universities. In addition, John has ten years of teaching experience as

About the Illustrator

Amy L. Brodsky, LISW-S, has worked assisting children and adults in psychiatric crisis. She is well known for her creative illustrations of the Emotions product line, over 35 therapeutic books, including the Life Management Skills and SEALS series, the Teen Relationship Workbook, Crossing the Bridge, GriefWork—Healing from Loss, The GriefWork Companion, Creating a Healthy Balanced Life, and the Liptak/Leutenberg Workbook series.

Grief: A Natural Stress

The greatest distress most of us ever have to survive is the death of a loved one. Grief is the process we go through when we are recovering from a loss. It can be a major or minor, and the amount of grief experienced by each person will vary. Some losses are simply more painful than others.

If you are going through the grieving process, allow it to happen. You need time to recover from the injury. If you were suffering from an illness, you would give yourself some time off. Death isn’t any different. Take your time; find other things in life to focus on, to spend your love and energy on. This is not to say you will ever, ever replace the person you lost. You will learn to accept your new normal. There is no replacing a loved one — people aren’t things. You need an outlet for your stress energy. Let yourself lean on friends and family; join a support group if you need to. Don’t be afraid to reach out during this difficult time.

You will never get over your loss. You will always love and miss the person who is gone, but you can and must accept their passing and move on. You are forever changed, but you continue on with a new strength and purpose, becoming a stronger person who experiences life on a deeper level.

*Click here for Grief Resources from Whole Person.

One Stage at a Time

There are many ways to handle the stresses caused by life stages. An important one is not to take yourself too seriously. Laugh at the little things in life, and remember that all stages in life – the terror of being out on your own for the first time in your twenties, the confusion of processing death at 70 – will pass with time. Be patient; it’s all just a stage! Keep in mind as you age that coping skills won’t always work the same way.

Aging helps you develop a fuller, deeper perception if you let it. Keep in touch with friends both older and younger than you. It’s amazing to see someone go through the same stages you did, and it’s helpful to see someone go through those that are approaching. Watching others helps you see first hand the benefits of accepting aging as a part of life. Continue forward instead of looking back. Some people live in the past and others can’t seem to stop worrying about the future. What we should all try to do is cultivate today’s joys, because they become the future. Today’s joys also become tomorrow’s cherished memories. Be patient, have a sense of humor, and accept life in all of its stages. Things will be a lot less stressful.

Stages of Life and Stress

Here are some of the stresses and joys of each life stage.

Breaking Loose	Leaving home, focusing on/conforming to peers, testing our wings, loneliness, attachment to causes, changing lifestyle, throwing out family morals.
Building the nest	Searching for identity, intimate friendships, marriage, intoxication with ones own power, great dreams, making commitments, taking on responsibilities, launching a career, working towards goals, doing shoulds, finding a mentor, thinking about having children.
Looking around	Raising questions, recognizing painful limitations, gathering possessions, moving up a career ladder, questioning marriage, settling down, having children, desiring freedom, what do I want to do with my life?
Mid-Life rebirth	Awareness of mortality, diminishing physical energy, emotional turmoil, parenting teenagers, finding new friends and developing deeper relationships with current ones, asking deep questions, changing careers, second adolescence, divorce, remarriage, conflicting pressures, learning to play again.
Investing in life	Life reordered, settling down again, embracing new values, focusing on relationships rather than on possessions or power, nurturing a few good friendships, grandparenting, having more freedom, enjoying life, adjusting to an empty nest, facing lost dreams.
Deepening wisdom	Softening and mellowing, steady commitments, deepening richness, simplifying life, adjusting to limitations, loss of energy, retirement, quiet joys, self-knowledge, and facing death.
Twilight years	Loneliness, freedom from shoulds, dependence, mind sharp/body failing and/or body fine/mind failing, death of mate and friends, preparing for death, achieving a sense of peace and perspective.

Where are you now?
How are you experiencing changes physically?
Are you holding on to some things that may be best left behind?
Are you stretching yourself too far forward?

*Find out more about our Stress Management and Wellness Promotion Resources and Self-Care Products.

Growing Older is Stressful!

How many times have you heard a child say they can’t wait to grow up? Did you chuckle to yourself? Why is it that as a kid, you want to grow up and as an adult, you want to go back? It is because growing older can be stressful. The stresses of going through the aging process are numerous. Some people turn a blind eye to getting older, but they’re only fooling themselves. Aging happens whether you’re paying attention to it or not. However, if you are aware of the ways that you’re aging, you can prevent a lot of distress. If you accept that the years are passing, you can view that first grey hair with a laugh, and think of it as a physical sign of your growing wisdom. If you don’t accept that you’re aging, you’ll probably panic and just pull it out. (Be warned, however, that it’ll just grow back!)

Do you feel as though you’ve acknowledged that you will age?
Are you putting off coming to grips with reality, or are you accepting the passing years gracefully?

What is Hope Management Theory?

Application of The Hope Management Theory:

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Should Wellness be replaced by Well-Being?

By Michael Arloski

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Book Release

The Teen Aggression & Bullying Workbook:

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Book Release

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