Practice Self-Regulation™ programs are designed to be facilitated in individual sessions with a facilitator specifically trained in the model. Due to the sensitive nature of trauma they should not be facilitated in group or family therapy. The model has nine core components promoting long-term health and well-being. While flexibility is built into the model, the following adaptation guidelines can help organizations and facilitators promote optimal effectiveness across a variety of settings.
Core component 1: Trauma-informed
Adaptation: PS-R can be facilitated in a wide variety of safe and supportive settings.
Rationale and guidance: The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration of the United States federal government has designated key elements and key principles of trauma-informed services (SAMHSA, 2014). When these elements and principles are adhered to, the intervention can be facilitated indoors or outdoors in any setting that provides private and confidential space for communication and facilitation of multi-sensory activities.
Core component 2: Positive youth development
Adaptation: Identifying, affirming, and promoting individual strengths.
Rationale and guidance: Motivational Interviewing and positive youth development have been shown to provide direct and effective approaches to change. When facilitators interact with participants in warm, nonjudgmental, empathic and genuine ways, youth are most likely to consider positive change in their lives (Duncan, Miller, Wampold, & Hubble, 2009).
Core component 3: Uniform session structure
Adaptation: Streamline session process and content.
Rationale and guidance: Predictability is a potentially calming and stress reducing experience that can lower stress hormones. When people can expect and experience familiar and generally positive interactions, the brain, mind, and body can focus better, more effectively retain information, and improve executive functioning. When facilitators follow the uniform structure of each session, interaction becomes predictable, and participants are more likely to feel calm, competent, and confident in addressing challenges that promote positive change. Two empirically predictive questions anchor the beginning and wrap up each session.
Core component 4: Self-efficacy (autonomy)
Adaptation: Allow and support youth in making their own decisions
Rationale and guidance: Neuroscience indicates that young people thrive in trauma-informed settings that respond to their needs with flexibility and allow for mistakes and poor judgment to be self-corrected with adult support and encouragement. Even when participants are not making optimal decisions, it is imperative that facilitators respectfully accept their choices. Directing, dictating, and expecting to youth to do whatever facilitators tell them to do goes against the entire foundation of the model.
Core component 5: Personal values
Adaptation: Facilitating the Motivational Interviewing Personal Values Card Sort.
Rationale and guidance: This simple and straightforward values card sort is provided free of charge to download and use in a wide range of settings. It is an efficient tool for organizing and thinking about personal values and exploring what is most important to participants. It is highly recommended as a foundation for exploring life experiences and creating a vision for becoming the person a participant wants to be.
Core component 6: Affect regulation
Adaptation: Introducing, teaching, and supporting the practice of self-regulation can be done in a wide variety of ways that reflect the neuroscience of trauma and decision-making.
Rationale and guidance: Affect regulation is the central unifying element of the model. Effective programs are sequenced, active, focused, stimulating, scaffolded (demanding, but not so much that they overwhelm capability) and sustained through practice (Saunders, Berliner & Hanson, 2004; Steinberg, 2014). Intervention should involve activities to improve executive functioning (working memory, analysis and synthesis, organizational skills, internal speech, emotional and behavioral regulation); require intense concentration; mindfulness practice; exercise; and strategies to boost self-control and the ability to delay gratification (Steinberg, 2014).
Core component 7: Practice Self-Regulation Workbook
Adaptation: Reading the workbook and processing it in session.
Rationale and guidance: The workbook, a clearly defined and structured framework for healing trauma, is meant to be read and processed in sequence as each chapter builds on previous information and establishes a purposeful flow. Skipping over sections or chapters is not recommended. Participants who are motivated to complete the workbook often read it and answer questions semi-autonomously on their own. Those who are ambivalent may focus on some parts and not on others, or may read the workbook and not answer some, or all of the questions in writing. Others may want to read the workbook in session with the facilitator’s support and assistance. Participants should be nonjudgmentally supported no matter how they go through it even if they are unwilling to read it at all.
Core component 8: Multi-sensory activities
Adaptation: Facilitating specifically focused activities.
Rationale and guidance: Multi-sensory activities reflect the neuroscience of cognitive and affective processing that enhance memory retention and behavioral change. They promote understanding of key concepts and help participants reduce impulsivity, learn to negotiate, and practice harm free and protected sex. PS-R activities were specifically chosen for each session in order to build on the affiliated chapter topics and sexual health information. Activities designated for the intervention are highly recommended.
Core component 9: Future orientation
Adaptation: Creating a vision for success.
Rationale and guidance: Future orientation is considered a protective factor for everyone, and especially for youth with adverse childhood experiences (ACEs). Envisioning a goal, identifying a plan and writing it down, and creating a vision for a positive future are all known to enhance potential for successful outcomes. While mindfulness activities help to ground participants in the here and now, future oriented activities can provide motivation for long-term change. Combining both maximizes neuroprocessing to enhance understanding, promote effective memory retention, reduce impulsivity, negotiate, and practice harm-free and protected sex.