Episode 88. AODA 7:  Special Strategies to Cope. Ulland and Jo review special strategies and skills that are necessary for working with substance use disorders.  They do not review the skills in depth although some skills may be reviewed during later episodes more specifically.

Episode 87. Interview with Raina 4. Raina shares how her treatment has translated into her life over the past two years. She discusses some lapses she had that were short lived, due to an understanding of dialectical abstinence. As she has done more work with trauma, she appreciates how important the work she has put into experiencing body sensations has been. She shares, “It would have been a fire” if she would not have been able to regulate her body sensations.  She shares how she continues to use skills from DBT now as a way to live and not just because they worked to prevent NSSIB in the past.

Episode 86. Raina 3.  Raina shares how treatment was like for her and her family.  She discusses how limits on the unit were difficult and helpful, since she was more able to see how rescuing behaviors could lead to reinforcement of suicidality.  She reviews how some patterns within relationships inadvertently worsened her suffering. She shares how it was for her to effectively resolve a conflict with an adult and what that meant for her recovery.

Episode 85. Interview with Raina 2. Caution: This episode briefly mentions sexual abuse and suicide. Raina discusses what things were like right before treatment with conversion disorder symptoms, and dissociative episodes. She reviews a history of sexual trauma that led to her first suicide attempt and hospitalization that likely made things worse. She shares that her wish for suicide was not necessarily to die, but to escape her suffering, “I didn’t know how to live [my life].”

Episode 84. Interview with Raina 1. While on a visit to see family, Raina stops by to visit about life and how things changed after residential DBT treatment. This first episode reviews a history of multiple inpatient hospitalizations and suicide attempts leading to her readiness to commit to change in an intense, highly adherent program. She discusses the complexity of her symptoms and diagnosis prior to arriving. This interview is broken into 4 parts, and this is the beginning.

Episode 83. AODA 6 : Special Attachment Strategies. In this episode Ulland and Jo review some of the special strategies for how to foster attachment with clients who are in Dialectical Behavior Therapy for alcohol or other drugs of abuse.  They review the unique challenges in attachment due to competition with powerful reinforcers for ongoing substance use in their daily lives which have often formed around substance use for an extended period of time.

Episode 82. AODA 5: Treatment Hierarchy.  Ulland and Jo break down the early stages of DBT for AODA as compared to standard DBT. They review pre commitment through Stage I targets such as life interfering, treatment interfering, and quality of life interfering behaviors.

Episode 81. Ulland and Jo come back.  They have been keeping busy, probably like everyone.  Life changes, manuals, Magic the Gathering, etc. And the You Tube announcement. Please catch the earlier podcasts with some visuals on the site. Same name, different place.

Episode 80: Is this what it’s coming to?  Ulland discusses some ideas and shares some emotion about his experience this past weekend with social media and the polarization of posting. Jo brings her insights to social dialects and poses some DBT skills solutions, including dialectical thinking. She informs Ulland of what Cancel Culture is, since, as typical, he has no idea what’s going on “in the real world.” [Why’d we hire this guy again?]

Episode 79. AODA 4: How AODA DBT differs from standard DBT.  Ulland and Jo review some key differences in how DBT is adapted to work for individuals with predominant substance use issues. A key difference is how dialectical abstinence is applied to decrease risk and severity of relapses should they occur. It is a middle path between absolute abstinence and harm reduction models.