We All Experience Distress
We all experience emotional distress sometimes, especially during conflicts. And when people experience emotional distress, everything can spin out of control. Even the most seasoned professionals may find themselves overwhelmed while trying to balance the clashes that occur when some distressed parties start shutting down and others begin blowing up. The professionals, themselves, may have their own distress – maybe the conflict reminds them of something in their own lives or perhaps they feel personally attacked or nervous that things are escalating beyond what they can handle.
There Are Resources That Can Help Us Do Distress Better
Amidst these traumatic breakdowns, many practitioners and clients are tempted to disengage, give up, and write some people off as impossible to have a “normal” connection with. This Distress Resource Group is all about shifting our normal so we can [1] understand ways distress manifests differently for different people, and [2] take a trauma-informed approach to working with those differences – all while setting appropriate, transparent boundaries for challenging behaviors (ones that are equitable to ensure people aren’t treated differently due to unconscious or systemic biases). And of course we also [3] practice self-care to reduce and manage our own distress.
The Distress Resource Group Provides Trainings, Updates, and Live Q&A Sessions
MH Mediate’s Distress Resource Group provides members with a platform of resources you can use to reduce your distress in conflicts including a full Ready for Anything course for planning for challenging behaviors, a Challenging Workplace Behavior Summit with dedicated programs and tools for the ten toughest behaviors at work, and more.
Every month, you will receive an anonymous survey form you can fill out with your questions about distress and we will release a Distress Digest message and two live Q&A programs that answer all of the questions from the group. If you miss the program, it will be recorded and any questions you anonymously submitted will still be answered. These live programs will generally be scheduled the first Monday of the month (6PM ET) and one being the third Wednesday of the month (12PM ET). The Q&A’s will also be shared in our Distress Digest messages along with the recordings.
You will also have access to reach out with any scenarios or questions directly to Dan Berstein, the group’s director. Dan is a mediator and mental health advocate whose practice focuses on helping people better manage distress so they can have empowering, bias-resistant interactions that prevent inadvertent discrimination. He led the Mediate.com Demystifying Distress program that was co-sponsored by ACR, APFM, NAFCM, and CPR. Dan’s book, Mental Health and Conflicts, was published by the American Bar Association in 2022.
We encourage you, even if you do not join our resource group, to please access over 4 hours of free training materials and tons of resources for distress at: https://mediate.com/demystifying-distress/
And if you’d like to make a tangible, regular commitment to continuing your learning and skills practice when it comes to distress, then please join us by signing up using this subscription page.