English: Emily Chrisman and teacher Joseph Pascetta role play a situation during the Oct. 10, “Tying the Yellow Ribbon” event in Elgin, Ill. This is one of the many ways instructors with the Children’s Reintegration Program teach kids how to deal with difficult situations when their parent comes home from deployment. Pascetta is one of eight teachers from the Chicago School of Professional Psychology that help with the children’s program. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
You have a loss for words when sitting around at a party or some other function. Your memory is fishing for something nice to say to a peer and there is nothing but a blank. To fish anywhere in the world requires the body of water is stocked or naturally populated. Otherwise you are dipping the hook with no results. You might also have to learn how to fish.
In many of the psychotherapy sessions I facilitate, there is an all too common challenge for the client to communicate in a positive and productive way with others. I see whole families who come off with a tendency to talk down to each other and act confused when directed to pay a compliment. Along with this, we usually discover that the family members are sorely lacking of a personal vocabulary for positive-based phrases and words.
To help with building a new track in the memory banks for the positive verbage and productive use of it, I propose an active use of role-play and an immediate goal to meet. The development of skill and a change in memory takes repetition of a particular task, which in this case means saying the words out loud.
In my next post, I will talk about the art of motivation for this task and the different and fun ways to help get it started.
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