In episode one of the mini-series on Self-Regulation Skillset training, Brad Chapin emphasizes the importance of balance and self-awareness in managing life’s challenges. Drawing from his extensive experience in mental health, Chapin discusses the adaptation of successful frameworks used with children to address adult stress and burnout, particularly exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. The training aims to equip participants with practical skills to reduce perceived stress and improve emotional regulation, moving beyond vague advice to actionable strategies. Participants from diverse backgrounds share insights, highlighting cultural paradigms and generational influences on emotional regulation. The session underscores the significance of distinguishing between controllable and uncontrollable challenges, encouraging a focus on effective responses. Chapin advocates for introspection and skill development, fostering a supportive environment for personal growth and community organization.
Introduction to The Gravity Well | Brad Chapin Self-Regulation Skillset Training Program
Jenny | Geophysicist:
Welcome. We have Brad Chapin who’s about to lead us off on our first week of self-regulation training. Take it away, Brad.
Brad Chapin | Public Mental Health Director:
Yeah, thank you so much, Jenny. And for everyone already doing your introductions here, there was one person I was going to write her name down who said she was terrible at this, but I don’t know if there’s anyone more terrible at this than when I first started with this. This has become my passion topic and I love that everyone introduced themselves. And then Jenny, you listed off all of our different professions and work and backgrounds and that and all I kept thinking throughout that was, “I’m so basic” and “this information is such a basic level” that I just kept thinking “we’re all human beings”. That’s where we’re going to be coming to this information, at least from my lens. I’ll be honest with you, this is the first time we’ve done a group like this. I’ve taught several classes like this that we hit on the skill, a skill a week, but never virtually like this with a group of adults from all kinds of different backgrounds.
I’m just as curious as you are as to how this is going to go. And I also see myself more along with Jenny here as facilitating this conversation. But I did want to thank Jenny, and I want to thank everybody for taking some time. I know time’s our most precious and valuable thing, thanks for getting the books out to everybody and coordinating all that. I do want to say first off that this book, this adult book, “my bad”. It should have probably come first, but I have several other books and curriculum guides out there for kids and tools for children. And I remember thinking when I first started out as a clinician working with adults, I always wanted to, I just kept working and working hours with these adults who are really dysregulated and struggling at the mental health center. And I was like, man, we need to get to these people earlier in life because they are pretty set in their ways and these patterns of behaviour are pretty instilled once you’ve been responding to challenges in a certain way for 30 or 35 years, it’s more difficult to change.
And I thought, well, I want to keep getting younger and younger and working with these kids. We put out these curriculum guides for middle school, high school, elementary, and then pre-K. I thought, wow, we got the problem solved. And then COVID came around. I’ve been in mental health for 25 years in the clinical side as a director of inpatient and outpatient services for a large healthcare system. And about two months into COVID, our administration said, Hey, we know your background. Can you do anything for our staff? We’ve got burnout, we’ve got people leaving, nurses leaving the profession, people who’ve been here for a long time and seen a lot of things, aren’t able to manage this level of challenge effectively. Can you do anything to help? And took this framework that we’d had a lot of success with proven success, research-based success with kids, and just upscaled it to adults.
Probably for the last three, four years, I’ve spent more time working with adults on how to integrate, learn, practice, this basic skillset and effectively reduce their perceived stress, which has been really cool to see happen. And then the more I’ve been talking with school districts around this idea, it’s like, yeah, if the grownups aren’t doing very well, how are we expecting them to get these skills to kids in a meaningful way and be able to co-regulate and help that development increase? Super happy that we have everybody from different backgrounds here and I can’t wait to hear some of the stories that go along with how these skills are manifesting. A couple of things I want to throw out right off the bat, this book, hopefully it didn’t take you very long to read. Sometimes I think it’s harder to make something brief and simple than it is to make it complicated.
One of the things we heard, and when I’m working with nurses or educators, first of all, I see a lot of parallels and people are carrying a lot of stress in both those professions and other professions too. But that if you go to a group of people, even if you’re coming from a place of helping, if they can’t even see the plate anymore, what they’ve got on it with their personal and professional lives and the challenges that they have, and you come and say, man, you’d be doing a lot better if you could do these 10 other things, just not going to happen. Part of this whole process was how do we bring something to people who are already in this really dysregulated, pretty awful state, that doesn’t seem like more for them to do or at a level that’s just overwhelming to even get started to feel better.
And I see that a lot in the, of course, when I come from a behavioural health background, how do you get someone at this? They’re just so far down, low, no energy, nothing seems to be going well to get to move forward from that stance. I hope that you found it easy to read, quick read. There’s a lot in there if you want to dig into the information in those words, in those chapters and in those sentences, there’s thousands of pages of research behind that if you want to dig deeper. But there was a really strong effort to make this simple to get through. I want to throw that out there. I also want to qualify this, that you can make this a lot more difficult than it needs to be. Sometimes I end up with pretty intelligent, pretty high level, highly educated, highly motivated achievement, striving folks in my training and in groups like this, I know we’ve got some of those in here, and you can really make this difficult.
I always tell people, don’t overthink this. There was a lot of effort in laying this out the way it’s laid out. Please try not to ruin it by getting caught up in overthinking it. Okay, I’ve put that out there and if I see that or hear that, I’ll probably say something about it. I’m pretty straightforward when it comes to that kind of stuff. And I’m also just here to try to help. The other thing is set your expectations appropriately in going into something like this. I don’t know of any of your professional basketball players or anything like that, but if we put this up against another skillset and you had one session on it, I’m not sure how good you would expect yourself to be in skill development with that. None of us will ever be perfect at self-regulation. That’s actually not the goal here.
What we’re trying to do is become more aware and make some improvements along the way. The journey to me here along this, you’re going to learn things, but you’re also going to be experiencing things. You’re going to become aware, more aware of things that you haven’t been aware of before. And that’s important. That’s important stuff. There’s spaces and places in here too, I hope this thing gets marked all up. By the time this is over, I mean write things in it, make notes in it. It’s yours. This is your plan for you. This isn’t real gold on the front either, don’t be afraid to mess it up. What stuck out to you as if you look at that first introduction piece, those first 27 pages where we’re looking at this idea of challenges being a human thing, lack of skills, formal training in this area, what stuck out to you? Anyone can chime in.
Group Feedback, Discussion, and Questions
Professor Gabrielle Weasel Head (07:11):
I mean, definitely “challenge” is a human experience. And one of the things that really resonated with me is this notion of balance and walking in balance because I’m Blackfoot. That is our whole paradigm, our cultural paradigm. That’s a way of life. And it always has been for thousands and thousands and thousands of years long before the bearing straight theory, which has since been disproven. Tens of thousands of years it has been, that’s our way, is “balance” and not just [within]. It really goes with the idea of balance within balance without, if you are not balanced with yourself and valuing yourself, you will not value the land that you’re on. You will not value, will not take care of that land as if it is completely part of you. It’s that balance that really resonated with me. And the challenge aspect, that challenge is a human experience because absolutely it is.
But so is sacrifice, and pain. Your book and the points you make is how do we naturalize this and normalize it in such a way that the emotional regulation piece that also is naturalized and normalized and emotions are naturalized and normalized even. And I’ll say it right off, even entering into the zoom space, into the virtual space, seeing that I’m the only indigenous person here and with the history of colonization, all of that. And one thing that dysregulates me is racism. That’s what completely, it’ll dysregulate me. And I need to be able to determine what is a threat and what isn’t a threat because it’s irrational to go into every space and think these people, oh, they’re going to see me, that I’m the only native here and they’re not going to value me because that’s really been my experience growing up. It’s incredibly complex and I think the way you have distilled it, you’ve distilled very complex neurophysiological processes that are in the happening in the brain, that are part of spirit that are connected to the environment, and you’ve been able to distil them into these skill sets, domains that are very accessible.
That was my impression in reading this. It’s that awareness, almost hyper self-awareness, knowing yourself, knowing yourself in order to know your environment because of our energy, and I think physics is finally now really there’s this evidence, empirical evidence that we’re all energy, everything is energy. But this is something that as a Blackfoot woman, this has been taught to me by our elders, and this is in our ceremonies. For thousands of years, our ceremonies have actually been a tool of emotional self-regulation, spiritual self-regulation, physical self-regulation, all of that. I’m coming at it, looking at it from this Blackfoot paradigm lens. It’s interesting to see that we’re all going to enter into this through our own holistic, embodied experience. Yeah, it’s just the first 27 pages accessible, easy to read. Good. Yeah, it was great.
Brad Chapin:
Everybody on this call and off this call has their challenge story, and has their whole backpack full of stuff. They’re carried around into every zoom meeting, into every meeting, into every interaction relationship. It’s full of challenges. And I have heard being a therapist, I mean, that’s my job listening to all kinds of challenges from all kinds of backgrounds. And what is interesting there is that as human beings, we do some very similar things about trying to manage those challenges. If you just look at that process of how does a human being manage challenge, and we understand, I’m glad you pointed out balance as a theme, what research tells us is that when an organism or a human is balanced, we have the best chance of managing that challenge in a successful way when we get out of balance. Then that question, and this is a really, those of you that know me and have talked to me, this is a completely logic driven system.
The question then becomes, if balance helps us be most effective, what are those things that throw us out of balance? What keeps us from being balanced? That’s a really, really important thing. And you probably noticed in that first chapter, we focus some on this other key term called reactivity. Reactivity really gets in the way of a human being, being balanced and responding in a balanced way. When you look at the self-regulation training model and the skills that we’re going to step through, it’s really good to keep those two principles in your mind. Balance is the goal, and reactivity is one of those things that’s going to be in my way. There is no self-regulation without self-awareness. There is always this piece of understanding and then there’s the skill training that comes along in the practice that goes with that.
I wondered if anybody picked up on this idea of not really being formally prepared versus the vague advice that we often get when we’re dealing with challenges. How are we equipped to deal with this massive, these social-emotional challenges are huge. Loss, grief, anger, threat, self-doubt, jealousy, all these things. How’s a 7-year-old or a 17-year-old or a 35-year-old formally equipped and prepared? Is there a class on that that I missed somewhere? I mean, I think that that’s a really interesting concept. When you look at a group of individuals and they say, I want to do better. I don’t want to be dysregulated, I don’t want to suffer like this. And yet when we’re in these really challenging situations, what is it that we dish out for each other? What’s offered, what do we fall back on? It’s a lot of words that I’ve come to.
The conclusion is we dish out a lot of words and we receive a lot of words when you’re really, really challenged and really, really suffering. And I put those in there, some of those examples, my favorite one is just hang in there, keep your chin up tomorrow, be a brighter day. These are all the things that we say. It’ll get better. Time heals all wounds, all these things. And I think that bar is set really low, but I think we can do better than that when someone is in a challenging state. That’s what gets me excited about this is that skill development can lead to improved outcomes way more than just a cliche or another meme up on the wall can do for you. That’s why I’m excited for you all for the next six or seven weeks here together. I know time’s running here and I want to hit on a couple of things.
I want to make sure I get a couple of things that I wanted you to pay particular attention to, but that vague advice piece is one. We’re going to improve on that. We’re going to do much better than vague advice. There’s an element of in your challenges, in your list of challenges, your personal list of challenges, there’s an element of controllables versus uncontrollable that I want you to, hopefully you picked up on that, that we went through that much of. We do an exercise, usually when we’re teaching this course in nursing school and to teachers is list your challenges out on the side here, some of the big ones, it’s finance, it’s relationships, it’s job, it’s other people, it’s traffic, it’s weather, all kinds of things that you have in your backpack. And then we ask ‘em to put a U or a C next to that.
It’s uncontrollable versus controllable out of that list. And almost every time, well, every time that we’ve done the course, the list of uncontrollable challenges is much greater than the list of controllables. And then you start thinking about, “Where am I putting my energy?” I’m putting a lot of energy in trying to control these uncontrollable challenging situations. If you think about this whole concept of me, a human being responding to challenges, you need energy to respond to challenges in your life. You only have so much capacity to manage challenges as a human being. If you’re spending over half of that time on uncontrollable challenges, how much time and energy does that leave you to spend on the things that you actually can do something about? And then the next logical question is of the controllable problems, what do I do with those? How do I know how to manage those challenges? And that’s where the skilled training comes in. I wanted to make sure that controllable versus uncontrollable is something that’s out there, and we’re going to focus mostly on what we can have some control and influence over where we can maximize our time and energy.
Jenny:
Gord offered a Blackfoot elder in Okotoks told him no one listens to the angry man in the room. That’s that. This is my, I will say one of my challenges is you want something to change. And like you said, it’s an uncontrollable potentially situation, but you’re still trying to influence that situation. It’s trying to make sure that you, because people will describe me going, oh, and then I ask a question, I shoot my hand up or worse when it comes to somebody close to my family where I stay controlled. And like you pointed out in these books or these conversations with you,
Brad Chapin:
Appreciate that because passion, we’re not going to make a whole bunch of robots here, make people not have emotions. And that’s not what we’re doing here. And you won’t ever hear me say, I like numbers and I like rating scales and those kinds of things. If you are involved in a topic or a challenge where you’re at a level eight on a scale of one to 10, you’re not going to hear me say you shouldn’t be at a level eight. The question I want you to ask yourself is, are you an effective person in that challenging situation at a level eight? Is that where you want to be? How effective is a level eight for this challenge? What’s your behaviour look like? What do you sound like? What’s your face look like? What’s your internal processes feel? Who’s suffering, at a level eight? I won’t tell you what number you should be, but the whole process is really geared around if you recognize that level eight’s not effective and you think a level three is more effective, how do you get there and how do you make that happen?
MC Breadner | Energi Media :
I just wanted to make one quick comment on how much for me, this was generationally taught. I was taught by my grandma, and then especially as a woman, I think there’s a gender part of this. You have to be happy. You have to be a people pleaser. And it’s like my grandma was like that. My mom was like that. I was taught to be like that and how hard I’m trying to fight right now to not raise a daughter, to be a people pleaser and not to raise a daughter to say, “It’s okay. You’ll figure it out. Anyways, I just wanted to add that about the generational complexity and how hard it is to break this pattern in my life.
Brad Chapin:
Is this mc that’s talking? Yeah. Wow. Really powerful. Thank you for bringing that up. And I really want to think broadly about the challenges, the challenge of being a people pleaser. And the other thing that came to mind when you said that is just because someone looks calm on the outside does not mean they’re well regulated. I mean, those two things are not equivalent. You can be an absolute wreck on the inside. And I know probably several of exactly what I’m talking about here, but we can cover it up pretty well. And that’s also not what this framework is about. You’ll notice that the whole emotion regulation piece is about identifying healthy expression, ownership of emotions, and it’s going to come in sequence. We’re going to get there. I’m super excited about that too. Does anybody else have anything quickly? Thank you for that. These are great comments. I appreciate it.
Jenny:
This is about a broader educational awareness over the years. We’re starting with ourselves and then we’re getting into organizing as a community and then getting into organizing on the landscape and then ending with treaty education from Gabrielle. There are many ways to enter and exit. Thank you to those who are here for this and for those that are participating in other courses throughout the year, and this is all meant to feed and stack on each other and make it lighten the load for all of us. Yeah.
Brad Chapin:
Yeah, one last thing I wanted to say. This work, you can get into some deep places. We are asking you to be introspective. You could get into touch with some challenging situations that bring up some stuff as we go through these skills. I just wanted to encourage this, it seemed like a really great group, supportive, safe environment, but just reach out if there’s things that come up with that.
