Cedar Ridge To Enhance Communication

News of my son choosing to leave Cedar Ridge and seek employment elsewhere has raised some concerns about what changes might occur as I take over his responsibilities. This is understandable. I think the best way to for me to proceed is to communicate through a series of short e-mails that, hopefully, will facilitate an orientation of what I feel is an important course to sail this program along. Short e-mails because in our busy world, none of these communications will become too arduous for you to read or for me to compose. I am sure that with each offering, questions or ideas will be generated that I welcome you to ask me and I will do my best to answer.

For the past 16+ years I have kept myself quite busy as a therapist and have had the good fortune to have people around me take over responsibilities of executing the duties of keeping shop. I am currently still maintaining a fairly heavy caseload that will start dwindling down over the summer and fall as I methodically work towards more involvement with the business side of the program. I have a lot of good staff in place that know their jobs well so this seems reasonable.

I believe that the better Cedar Ridge can define the population of students that we work best with and get that message out to the consultants, the better things will go for us. This means that in the coming months, more scrutiny about who seems appropriate for Cedar Ridge will occur. For the most part, the students that are coming are a good fit. Currently, a review and re-clarification of the mission statement is underway as a means of setting the compass in a more precise direction.

One of the foundations of Cedar Ridge has been the "Fears Chart" which might be more aptly named as the "Courage" chart and we use the term "little acts of courage" quite regularly now. This is an "exposure/desensitization" model that is apparently becoming more popular as a means of therapy. For this to work well, a student needs to stay involved with "approaching" stimuli, "fears" that "trigger" the instinctive habits of "avoiding" to gain relief from sensitized content. (Assuming good intention to do well, most problematic behavior will occur in a student returning home after something triggers an already established conditioned response.) I have often used the example of a pressure cooker on low heat. Not too much heat, not too little but consistent heat as a means of describing the process of approaching fears. I talk about the need to choose to get out of your comfort zone. I have often stated that if the students are just out here having fun, we aren't doing our job. The better word for the process is "immersion". Steady over time.

This process works hand in glove with mindfulness. DBT principles which have underpinnings of Zen teachings (as does Karate) start to pull the process of development at Cedar Ridge more towards how a Zen retreat functions. In this case, teaching students to engage in a state of calmness, having fun when planned as contrasted to goofing off.

Living in an encouraging atmosphere that continues to guide the students towards their strengths as opposed to focusing too much on the problems are all what I like to see here at Cedar Ridge. While much of this has been going on for quite some time, my understanding and appreciation for this process has deepened and I have started to train staff more thoroughly along these lines.

I welcome and appreciate any comments or questions from any of you so feel free to e-mail me any time.

Sincerely
Robert Nielson