Volume 23, No. 1, April 2025
Welcome to the April edition of Tips and Topics.
In SAVVY, starting year 23 of Tips and Topics. Five ways to make helpful science-based information available to people in ways beyond face-to-face counseling. Introducing Atlas, and online digital interventions.
In SKILLS, excerpts from “Unlocking Transformation: David Mee-Lee’s Wisdom on Behavior Change and Person-centered Care”, an interview from CASAT — The Center for the Application of Substance Abuse Technologies — a Center within the School of Public Health at the University of Nevada, Reno.
In SOUL, How would you describe your relationship with yourself today? This interview question sparked several awarenesses and existential questions like, “Can I live with myself by myself? Is there really self-love and the ability to be alone?”
This April edition begins the 23rd year of writing and publishing Tips and Topics. Volume 1, No. 1 was April 2003. It is still fun and stimulating to wonder what is crossing my mind each month that I want to pass onto you. So I will keep writing until it stops being fun. For many years I have written and formatted Tips and Topics in a Constant Contact template, managed the subcribers’ list and sent it out to you. Happily, The Change Companies has taken over all the logistics for which I am most grateful:
The Change Companies is pleased to partner with Dr. Mee-Lee in publishing the time-tested Tips and Topics blogs each month. For years, Dr. Mee-Lee's expertise has helped shape The Change Companies' standards for evidence-based content and high-quality treatment materials — materials which are now available digitally via the Atlas platform. We invite you to let others know that they can sign up to receive Tips and Topics and explore the wealth of content available in the Tips and Topics library. So much of the wisdom in these archives remains relevant and actionable today!
Valerie Bagley
Chief Program Officer
The Change Companies
www.changecompanies.net
vbagley@changecompanies.net
Tip 1
Five science-based Interventions for Self-Directed Change available to people in ways beyond face-to-face counseling.
We all know William R. Miller, PhD’s transformational work on Motivational Interviewing. Bill wrote an article in January 2025 that is currently available for download on the The Change Companies website: “Making Psychology More Available.”
Abstract
“The prevalence of behavioral health concerns such as depression, anxiety and substance use problems far exceeds the availability of professional practitioners. It is possible, however, to make helpful science-based information available to people in ways beyond face-to-face counseling. This article reviews research on five such extensions of psychological knowledge for helping people change.”
Here are the five tools for self-directed change that I have excerpted from Dr. Miller’s article:
Bibliotherapy involves written material such as self-help books that provide guidelines for people to improve their well-being.
Therapeutic Writing has people express their own thoughts and feelings in written form.
Motivational Interviewing is a communication method for strengthening people’s own motivation for change, that is now being practiced by a wide range of helpers and more recently is guiding self-help approaches.
Interactive Journaling combines aspects of all three of the above self-improvement modalities. As a clinical tool, Interactive Journaling (IJ) combines elements of bibliotherapy, motivational interviewing and therapeutic writing.
Digital Interventions further allow individuals to access or interact with these self-change approaches. Beyond written materials in print, it is also possible to provide digital interventions via computer and cell phone that are either static or interactive. Such interventions can be offered before, in lieu of or in addition to formal treatment.
Tip 2
An example of online digital interventions that combines Bibliotherapy, Therapeutic Writing, Motivational Interviewing, Stages of Change and Interactive Journaling.
For decades, The Change Companies (TCC) has offered Interactive Journaling (IJ) in a pen and paper format that has impacted and changed thousands of lives. This is not a paid advertising pitch, but I was impressed with what TCC has done to build on those decades of experience with IJ.
They recently introduced Atlas, “a platform that empowers justice and treatment agencies to effectively manage, deliver and scale person-centered, evidence-based programming.” I can see how Atlas does indeed deliver:
Individualized interventions
Measurable results
Digitally presented material
Programming delivered to fidelity
Comprehensive and user-friendly features for your agencies, staff and the individuals served.
The paper Journals that TCC has been known for can now be presented in a format elevated by technology. “Atlas is your partner for delivering HIPAA-compliant, evidence-based programming at scale.”
Digital delivery affords additional advantages beyond what has been possible with hard-copy documents.
First of all, wider and faster distribution is possible through not relying on the physical storage and shipping of printed materials.
Revising, updating and adapting can all be accomplished quickly without reprinting.
The interactive aspect of IJ becomes possible, providing immediate response to what clients write, allowing individualized content, pace and sequencing, and permitting users to select from menus what is most applicable and interesting.
Immediate feedback to clients also becomes possible with digital IJ.
An interview I recorded a few months ago, just went “live.” Season 6, Episode 1: Unlocking Transformation: David Mee-Lee’s Wisdom on Behavior Change and Person-centered Care
CASAT is The Center for the Application of Substance Abuse Technologies, a Center within the School of Public Health at the University of Nevada, Reno. In their sixth season of CASAT Conversations, “we sit down with professionals who have spent decades in their fields like mental health, addiction treatment, business, sociology and
more. In this special season, our guests share valuable wisdom from their careers, reflect on what has kept them grounded and inspired, and offer advice for future generations.”
Here are a few excerpts from that podcast. I bullet-pointed the narrative.
Tip 1
Don’t “help” people. Help them “help” themselves.
Question in the interview: What guidance would you offer to inspire the next generation of professionals?
When people get out of training they are in “I'm going to change the world” mode. "I've got the latest knowledge, I want to start applying all of this stuff."
It is easy to get into a situation where you are doing things to people and while well-intentioned, you are running at a problem as fast as you can.
Easy to get burned out as you discover that all of your efforts don’t change the world, patients and clients.
The advice I would give is to first recognize that you can help contribute to a person’s change process but the treatment and the part you play is really just a tiny piece. Your job is to engage the person, inspire and attract them into a self-change process where:
They are going to make the right choices in the dark of night when nobody's watching, not just when you have them in treatment or at your session.
They can then sustain any change from their own self-empowered position and life choices.
So your job is really not to help people, but to help people help themselves.
In any moment that you are interacting with a person, you're asking yourself, "How, in this moment, am I helping them to help themselves?" Not, "How am I helping them?"
If you help people to help themselves, you have really contributed to their life. It's the old fisherman thing: Do I give a fish or do I help them to learn how to fish?
You have an important role to play in treatment, but only in so much as you help people to help themselves and engage them in a self-change process, not in being the almighty one to fix people.
Tip 2
To help people change, start with yourself.
Question in the interview: How would you engage someone who is not willing to change and even owns it in their identity as a philosophy?
It's true not just with people who are proud of not changing their attitudes as an identity and philosophy, but it's true of all change behavior.
You have to start where the person is at.
Prochaska and DiClemente’s Stages of Change model is very useful to help you join with people where they're at. You might want them to be at Action for changing their language, behavior or attitudes.
But if they are at Precontemplation where it's not even on the radar screen or they don't even see any problem, you can't start by interacting with them as if they should be at Action for something they have no interest in changing.
They are not being resistant or in denial. Change is just not on their radar screen.
Your job is to accept them where they are at and then find ways to attract them into a change process.
How might I move them from not being interested at all to where they might be ambivalent and thinking maybe there is something to that?
For example, in the political realm or in the stigma realm, how can I move them from “Not interested at all” to “Well, maybe I should consider that.”
One of the ways in medical school addiction training is to have a person in long-term recovery talk to the medical students about their journey from active harmful addiction to recovery.
It gives students a glimpse, through that story of a real person’s pain of addiction, and their joy of recovery.
That inspiring story might not move a student all the way to want to work with people with addiction. But it might move them from Precontemplation (not interested at all) to Contemplation — maybe I need to change my attitudes about addiction from thinking “They're a bunch of losers who are weak-willed” to "Maybe it's an illness that I, as a helping person and a medical student could really be part of."
Attracting people into a change process, not mandating or shaming people into a change process.
None of this process will flow unless and until you have examined your own attitudes, beliefs and skills to be:
Curious about the individual, non-judgmental and to practice deep-listening, starting with compassion, acceptance and respect for that other human being.
The antidote to an attitude of “I'm going to change the world and make these people think and behave better” is a Rumi quote:
“Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.” ― Rumi
A question in the interview that tapped into the SOUL of me was: "How would you describe your relationship with yourself today?"
When my wife passed away very suddenly about five and a half years ago (at the time of the interview), it raised several awarenesses and existential questions:
Can I live with myself by myself?
When you are married for 46 years, and have a family and busy career, you're almost on automatic pilot of day-to-day living the family and career life.
Then when you are suddenly alone, it brings back all of the things that I taught but maybe didn't live: You are responsible for your own happiness. It is nobody else's job to make you happy. You don't have to be alone, you can form relationships.
Am I going to “walk the talk”? Or will I now try to find somebody else to fill the void or use my career to work harder to take care of the pain?
How do I actually live with the relationship I’ll have to the day I die ― the relationship with myself?
Is there really self-love and the ability to be alone?
I've seen other people who lost their loved one very suddenly. I think of a particular man who married again very quickly within a few months, only to have that marriage end in divorce within a year. He never really healed from his loss and was trying to cope by getting into another relationship. So it was a time of reflection that helped me feel much more grounded in:
I could live alone if I needed to. But I also enjoy a relationship where both people are committed to be responsible for their own happiness.
From a position of wholeness, I can now come together and have an even better partnership and joy because no one is relying on the other person to make them happy.
It is not their responsibility to respect me, so I respect myself.
It is not their responsibility to love me so that I can love myself.
It's from loving yourself that you can then come in wholeness to another relationship and have an even better, joyful experience together.
There will always be bumps and triggers that come up, but those bumps are opportunities for growth and expansion, not for blame or displeasure with your partner.
That's probably more information than you wanted, but that's where I'm at in my relationship with myself.
Interviewer Heather Haslem: "I find it fascinating and I'm sure listeners will find it fascinating and appreciate it. I think most of the people who listen are on this journey of human discovery, and growth. And so getting to hear about your journey is a true gift. Thank you for sharing it with us."
Thank you for joining us this month. See you in late May.
David