Grant Clowers, LCSW is a psychotherapy and clinical services supervisor at Carson Tahoe Hospital Behavioral Health Services. He works on both the inpatient psychiatric unit and in the outpatient psychotherapy clinic. He specializes in mindfulness-based cognitive behavioral therapy such as Dialectical Behavior Therapy and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy.
He has worked in the past in several different mental health areas including community mental health and in outpatient private practice. His last job before coming to Carson City 12 years ago to work for Carson Tahoe was in the Office of Mental Health Research and Training at the University of Kansas in Lawrence.
He has worked for the last several years on developing programs to help people deal with the fundamental nature of human suffering, which is the way our brain takes part of reality, especially negative and painful parts, and makes it the center of focus. This is known as a “negativity bias” and it often leads to an understandable but unhelpful sense of reality as being dominated by problems and pain.
The bad news of this therapeutic perspective is that our brains are wired for unhappiness. But the good news is that there are practices and skills that can help us to get a broader, more realistic, and more positive view of ourselves and our life.
In this series Grant will show that losing a job or career is more like losing life as we know it, and how the resulting stress gets people more and caught in a narrow and negative sense of reality. But, he will also show that with the right skills this negativity bias can be overcome and how people can take even catastrophe as an opportunity for growth and change.
Have you ever had a point in your life where you didn’t know how you were going to put food on the table?
If you were in that situation, in what way would you want people to help you?
What’s an unhelpful thing that you’ve seen people do when someone is struggling?
How can you as a librarian help people who are struggling to find work?
A study on the job market during COVID
Şahin Ayşegül Şahin Contributing Author Ayşegül Şahin is a contributing author. Murat Tasci, A., Tasci, M., & Yan, J. (2020, May 07). The Unemployment Cost of COVID-19: How High and How Long? Retrieved August 04, 2020, from https://www.clevelandfed.org/en/newsroom-and-events/publications/economic-commentary/2020-economic-commentaries/ec-202009-unemployment-costs-of-covid.aspx
Managing your mental health after losing your job
Brown, C. (2017, September 01). 7 ways to mentally bounce back after losing your job. Retrieved August 04, 2020, from https://www.headspace.com/blog/2017/09/04/bounce-back-after-losing-job/
Book List:
Ellen Langer’s Mindfulness, Goleman, D., Langer, E. J., David, S. A., & Congleton, C. (2017). Mindfulness. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press.
If someone comes in the library and is clearly upset or hurting, what might that raise or trigger in me?
If I was accessing public services and I was in a bad place --- how would I like to be treated?
If I’m upset what do I do to get grounded?
Life Space Interview (LSI) According to Cornell University, there are 7 steps to perform a LSI, this include the following acronym:
I Isolate the conversation
E Explore the student's point of view
S Summarize the feelings and content
C Connect feelings to behavior
A Alternative behaviors discussed
P Plan developed and new behavior practiced
E Enter the student back into the program
Activity: think of a crisis scenario and use the LSI observation to explain actions and thoughts through each step of the Life Space Interview.
Additional resources:
Vollrath, D. (2020, January 14). A De-escalation Exercise for Upset Students. In Edutopia. Retrieved from https://www.edutopia.org/article/de-escalation-exercise-upset-students
(n.d.). In Theraputic Crisis Intervention Strategies . Retrieved from https://knilt.arcc.albany.edu/Therapeutic_Crisis_Intervention_Strategies
How can you think about how grounding offers an instant way to discharge unwanted energies?
How does grounding promote an instant sense of calm?
How does grounding improves mental, emotional and empathic clarity?
Sinclair, S., Beamer, K., Hack, T. F., McClement, S., Raffin Bouchal, S., Chochinov, H. M., & Hagen, N. A. (2017). Sympathy, empathy, and compassion: A grounded theory study of palliative care patients' understandings, experiences, and preferences. Palliative medicine, 31(5), 437–447. https://doi.org/10.1177/0269216316663499
(n.d.). In Workforce Initiative. https://ca-hwi.org/public/uploads/pdfs/Empathy_Caring_Behaviors.pdf
MIller, C. C. (2020, March). How to Be More Empathetic . In nytimes.com. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/guides/year-of-living-better/how-to-be-more-empathetic
