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1. Crisis Intervention
Promoting Resilience & Resolution
Presented by: Dr. Dawn-Elise Snipes
Executive Director, AllCEUs
AllCEUs.com Unlimited CEUs and Specialty Certifications $59
By Lennis G. Echterling et al.

2. Objectives
 Resilience and Transcendence
 Crisis Resolution: The Change Process
 Making Contact: The Power of Connecting
 Making Meaning: Transforming a Crisis
Narrative
 Managing Emotional Arousal
 Envisioning Possibilities: Creative Coping
 Crisis Intervention with families

3. Resilience and Transcendence
 Crisis is a point of threat and opportunity (-/+)
 Six facets of crisis experience (BASICS)
 Behavioral
 Affective (Emotional)
 Somatic
 Interpersonal
 Cognitive
 Spiritual
Crime victim | Death of a Loved One | Natural Disaster |
Secondary Trauma by Media in Children

4. Resilience and Transcendence
 Validation of the experience is crucial (LUVE)
 Listen
 Understand
 Validate
 Explore client strengths
Crime victim | Death of a Loved One | Natural Disaster |
Secondary Trauma by Media in Children

5. Crisis Resolution: The Change Process
 Chaos Theory
 Chaotic systems are predictable for a while and then
'appear' to become random.
 Each point in a chaotic system is close to other points
with significantly different future paths. An arbitrarily
small change of the current path may lead to
significantly different future behavior.

6. Crisis Resolution: The Change Process
 Complexity Theory
 Emphasizes interactions and the accompanying feedback
loops that constantly change systems.
 Systems are unpredictable, they are also constrained by
order-generating rules (Reward principle)
 Individual behaviors and choices are more important than
executive plans in an organization.
 Focus on self-organization instead of management control.
 Use small changes and interventions
 Encourage conflict and change
 This may seem to push the person to an unstable situation,
but the person actually can gain improvements from the
healthy edge of chaos (Comfort zone)

7. The Change Process: 3 Principles
Large changes result from small changes
 Change can begin suddenly and resolve
rapidly (Microsoft Updates)
 Change is a complete reordering. Something new
emerges and noting is ever the same

8. Solution vs. Resolution
 Solutions are largely outside yourself
 Stronger security
 Behavior alterations (Preparation/prevention)
 Resolutions are internal events
 Alteration in mood
 Shift in thinking
 Change of heart
Crime victim | Death of a Loved One | Natural Disaster

9. Making Contact: The Power of Connecting
 Reconnecting
 Social supports are a powerful buffer
 Connecting to others is a fundamental human need
 Humans are hardwired to help each other
 Humans develop empathy even before verbal skills

10. Making Contact: The Power of Connecting
 Receiving support
 Use reaching out questions
 Provide encouragement
Acknowledge the crisis experience
Make positive observations
Be tentative rather than authoritative, owning your
impressions
Highlight the survivor in crisis
Invite the person to talk (or not) about the experience

11. Making Meaning: Transforming a Crisis
 Crisis can shatter people’s assumptions about the
world
 Basic Assumptins
The world is benevolent
The world is meaningful and predictable
The self is worthy / Life is fair
 As humans, we need to create meaning
Crime victim | Death of a Loved One | Natural Disaster |
Secondary Trauma by Media in Children

12. Making Meaning: Transforming a Crisis
 Telling the Story
 Survivors often have slightly different accounts of the
crisis each time they tell it
 Changing recollections are the result of trying to find
meaning and resolve crisis
 Help clients rectify discrepancies by pointing out
positive change or evidence of strength
 Listen for the hero in the tragedy
Crime victim | Death of a Loved One | Natural Disaster |
Secondary Trauma by Media in Children

13. Narrative
 The narrative can be used to help people explore the
bigger picture
 The narrative can be continued into a positive resolution
 The narrative can be explored in terms of focus and
character development (what role did others play or could
they play)
 Ask making meaning questions
 What have you discovered about yourself?
 What sense do you make of this?
 What do you see as the purpose for this?
 What keeps you going through this difficult time?

14. Managing Emotional Arousal
 People in crisis experience
 Distressful emotions: Fear, anger, grief
 Positive emotions: Resolve, courage, compassion, hope
Highlight the positive
 Handling Distress
 Catharsis is not necessary
 Expression is…
 Arousing Resolve
 Performance quality is curvilinear proportion to
emotional arousal

15. Taking Action
 Envisioning Possibilities
 Explore goals
 Create goals that are positive
 Create a goal statement… “When you achieve this…”
 Use scaling…. Getting from 1 to 10 (1 is the crisis)
 Creative Coping
 Examine current behaviors in terms of creative coping
 Educate about common behavioral changes in response
to stress/crisis
 Using Resources

16. Tools
 Refer to the acute crisis in the past tense
 Describe resolution and coping in the present
 Special case: Flashbacks and nightmares
 Have been/were vs. are…. You have been having flashbacks
 Before you …what are you doing…
 Transform crisis metaphors
 I feel trapped…. “And when you begin to escape from the
trap, what is the first thing you will be doing?”
 I feel overwhelmed. “When you decide to start sharing some
of this load with someone else, to whom will you turn, and
what will you want them to do?”

17. Tools cont…
 Reframing
 Situational context (global vs specific)
 Temporal context (Stable/ongoing vs. changeable/time-
limited)
 Normalize negative cognitions
 Enhancing emotions of resolve
 Look for exceptions to the distress
 Daily inventories
 Narratives
 Ask presumptive questions of resolve…”When things
improve…”
 Reflect emotions of resolve

18. Tools cont…
 Moving On
 As you begin to resolve this painful time in your life,
how your life be different?
 When you leave here, what is the first thing you see
yourself doing?
 What do you see as your next step?

19. Finding the Pony
 Parents tried to teach their son that life wasn’t
fair by making him shovel a room full of manure
 Parent’s returned at the end of the day to pick up
the child.
 What happened???

20. Families and Couples in Crisis
 When one member of the system is in crisis, it
impacts the entire system
 Families and couples may face developmental
crises
 Family members need to learn LUVE skills
 Listen
 Understand
 Validate
 Enhance resolve

21. Summary
 Resilience and Transcendence
 Crisis Resolution: The Change Process
 Making Contact: The Power of Connecting
 Making Meaning: Transforming a Crisis Narrative
 Managing Emotional Arousal
 Envisioning Possibilities
 Creative Coping