S.E.L.F.: A Nonlinear Organizing Framework
The road to recovery from trauma and adversity can be a long one for both individuals and organizations. When you are lost, it’s useful to have a compass and that’s what S.E.L.F. is – a compass on the road to healing. S.E.L.F. is an acronym that represents the four interactive key aspects of recovery from bad experiences. S.E.L.F. provides a nonlinear, cognitive behavioral therapeutic approach for facilitating movement – regardless of whether we are talking about individual clients, families, staff problems, or whole organizational dilemmas.
The four key domains of healing: Safety (attaining safety in self, relationships, and environment); Emotional management (identifying levels of various emotions and modulating emotion in response to memories, persons, events); Loss (feeling grief and dealing with personal losses and recognizing that all change involves loss), and Future (trying out new roles, ways of relating and behaving as a “survivor” to ensure personal safety and help others). Using S.E.L.F., the clients, their families, and staff are able to embrace a shared, non-technical and non-pejorative language that allows them all to see the larger recovery process in perspective. The accessible language demystifies what sometimes is seen as confusing and even insulting clinical or psychological terminology that can confound clients and line-staff, while still focusing on the aspects of pathological adjustment that pose the greatest problems for any treatment environment.
S.E.L.F. is useful because it can simultaneously be employed in a parallel process manner to deal with problems that arise within the treatment setting between staff and clients, among members of staff, and between staff and administration. Applied to such issues of staff splitting, poor morale, rule infraction, administrative withdrawal and helplessness, and misguided leadership, S.E.L.F. can also assist a stressed organization to conceptualize its own present dilemma and move into a better future through a course of complex decision making and conflict resolution.
Outline of S.E.L.F. Psychoeducational Group Curriculum
Purchase page for the S.E.L.F. Psychoeducational Group Curriculum
S.E.L.F. Introductory Material, free download
Foderaro and Ryan S.E.L.F. Mapping the Road to Recovery
Bills, Using Trauma Theory and SAGE
Bloom, Beyond the Beveled Mirror
Vargas and Bloom, Loss, Hope and Hurt
Bloom, By the Crowd They Have Been Broken
Bloom, Grief That Dares Not Part I, II and III
Bloom, Loss in Human Service Organizations
Bloom essay, Moral Safety and Responsibility in the Evolution of a Sane Society, 1998
