Author: Scarlett Baker, AA

Scarlett is The SASSI Institute's Project Director and Director of Training Services.

New Workshop: Community Reinforcement Approach for Substance Use in Adults

We hope some of you have been able to participate in at least one of our new Professional Development webinars. We are excited to be able to partner with fellow colleagues in the field of addiction to be able to provide continuing education on professional topics of interest.

We have recently partnered with Courtney Hupp, MSW, LCSW, CADC, an EBT Clinical Coordinator at Chestnut Health Systems in Illinois. She had an active role in the Assertive Continuing Care (ACC) study, funded by NIAAA, in which she administered the ACC and Community Reinforcement Approach (CRA) protocols to residential clients’ post-discharge, as well as supervised other therapists on the study. Courtney will be offering her workshop “Community Reinforcement Approach for Substance Use in Adults” live online through the SASSI Institute’s training platform on February 8th. The treatment model known as CRA recognizes that, at least initially, alcohol and drug use is about reinforcing consequences — that make us more likely to repeat actions. This is true whether we are hanging out with friends, playing a favorite game, eating a good meal, or using alcohol or other drugs. People who use alcohol and drugs get something out of it – or they wouldn’t keep doing it. 

The overall goal of CRA is to help individuals reconnect with or discover new sources of positive reinforcement within their community to compete with alcohol or drug use. How do CRA clinicians do this? By listening to and learning from their clients what is important to them. They then help them connect to pro-recovery activities that have meaning and value to their client. In addition, CRA clinicians help their clients identify goals and learn how to achieve them. CRA clients also learn a variety of new skills, such as problem-solving and positive communication (with partners, friends, and others), which help them attain a better quality of life. Practicing new skills is a critical component of the skills training used in CRA. Every session ends with a mutually-agreed upon homework assignment to practice skills learned during sessions. This intervention has been implemented in outpatient, intensive outpatient, and residential treatment settings. This research-tested intervention has been used in over 500 organizations across the United States and Canada. Courtney Hupp will provide an introduction to the CRA model, a summary of the research base, and details about how to use a variety of CRA skills during sessions. 

What You Will Learn:

  • An Introduction to the CRA model
  • History of CRA research and implementation
  • Goals of CRA treatment
  • An overview of the CRA session structure and treatment guidelines
  • How to use some of the CRA procedures during sessions like a Functional Analysis for substance use, Happiness Scale, Sobriety Sampling, and Increasing Prosocial Recreation
  • General clinical skills necessary to implement CRA

For registration information click here.

Live Assessment Webinar – Includes ASAM Placement Criteria

After screening, the assessment process is critical to effective addiction treatment. In fact, treatment can only be as effective as the thoroughness of the assessment process. The assessment process can and should result in clients’ reduced denial or “resistance” and easily transition into therapy.

On December 7th and 8th, Dr. Don Osborne will be presenting a live webinar on Comprehensive & Advanced Assessment of Addiction That Parallels the ASAM Patient Placement Criteria.

In this program you will learn:

  • Understanding a comprehensive approach to assessment.
  • Be able to describe a continuum model of addiction’s progressive nature with problems, tolerance and loss of control.
  • Be able to formulate specific relevant questions to ask during the interview process.
  • How to use Motivational Interviewing to engage clients and develop a rapport with them.
  • How to obtain collateral information about the client from family members and other sources.
  • How to use the DSM-5’s criteria for Substance Use Disorders to diagnose clients and decrease their resistance to treatment.
  • Gaining clients’ trust, reduce denial and resistance to treatment.
  • Gain clients’ agreement that they are addicted to some substance or behavior at a particular stage of the addiction process.
  • How to match the assessment with the patient placement criteria that determine the specific level of care advocated by ASAM (American Society of Addiction Medicine).
  • How to transition from screening to the assessment to the therapy stages of treatment.

Registration is now open, click here to sign up. Course completion earns 3 CEUs.

Please note that this workshop is not on the SASSI screening tool.

In-Person SASSI Training and other Professional Development Courses

Many of our SASSI trainers and other instructors have expressed a desire to get their boots back on the ground and start offering live in-person, hands on workshops again. While we have all been adapting to with what has become a new social norm of online training, webinars, and conference events, many have decided that they are ready to embrace in-person events again.

If you have a group that you would like to discuss arranging a live on-site SASSI Training for, please let us know. You can reach us at training@sassi.com and we can have the trainer/s in your area reach out to you for planning. You can also find a list of available trainers and their contact information at https://sassi.com/sassi-training-us/ and https://sassi.com/sassi-training-canada/. As always, training online for groups and individuals is available.

We also offer professional development webinars on various topics found at https://sassi.com/other-training-online/. On the top of that page there is a link to complete a form to request a quote for a private in-person or online training.

Stay safe and be well.

The Power of Narrative Therapy

Last month, Dr. Hugh Marr, a longtime trainer on the SASSI and clinical psychologist in the private practice of psychotherapy in the Washington, DC area gave an interview on the Shrink Rap Radio podcast. Dr. Marr has taught both substance abuse counseling and psychotherapy at area universities; and has worked in all phases of community mental health, culminating in running a partial hospital program for clients with the co-occurring disorders of substance use and major mental illness. He is the author of A Clinician’s Guide to Foundational Story Psychotherapy: Co-changing Narratives, Co-changing Lives (Routledge, 2020); and the coauthor of the books What Story Are You Living? (CAPT, 2009) and Introduction to Archetypes (CAPT, 2002). His forthcoming workbook for a general audience, also to be published by CAPT, will be titled Finding Your Story. You can view a clip from that interview here or a link to the interview in its entirety can be found here.

The SASSI Institute is excited that Dr. Marr has developed a workshop based on his five-star rated book: A Clinician’s Guide to Foundational Story Psychotherapy: Co-changing Narratives, Co-changing Lives. This workshop is being offered through The SASSI Institute’s Professional Development Platform. A link to a flyer with additional information on the workshop can be viewed here.

We hope you enjoy the interview and that you will join us for this informative webinar.

To register for the webinar and see our other titles, click here.

Healing the Family: Conjoint Family Therapy for Addicted and Dysfunctional Families

Please join us for this insightful live webinar presented by Dr. Donald Osborne. Following is a description of what will be discussed:

Addiction is a Family Disease
Families are systems of relationships with each member playing their part to maintain a homeostasis or equilibrium. This is true of addicted and dysfunctional families as well as healthy ones. Individual family members assume roles within the system. Families with an addicted member may point to the addict as the troubled one and fail to recognize the damage being done to everyone in the family. Families very often unintentionally contribute to the addiction. Roles and behavior follow predictable patterns. Children are particularly vulnerable to developing life-long dysfunctional ways of coping, including developing serious mental health issues or becoming alcoholic or drug dependent themselves. Treating an alcoholic or otherwise addicted individual and not helping the entire family change as a unit frequently leads to treatment failure. Family education is not enough. Conjoint family therapy or multiple families group therapy has worked well in disrupting the dysfunctional homeostasis of addicted families, and then helping them construct a much healthier system of relationships. The chance of addicts recovering increases as their whole family recovers. Dr. Don Osborne delivers a webinar on counseling the family unit as a focus of addiction treatment.

What You Will Learn:
• An Introduction to systems theory
• Systems theory’s application to understanding human interaction
• How to get family members to participate in therapy
• An introduction to transaction analysis as a communication tool for changing family interactions
• A historical perspective of the special application of systems to addicted and dysfunctional families
• Family roles
• Family Scripts
• How to use genograms to identify life scripts and repeated patterns of behavior
• How to use Olsen’s Circumplex family model to help families change
• How to help families contract for new behavior

Please click here for registration information.

Foundational Story Psychotherapy Webinar

We are happy to announce the next in our line of Professional Development webinars: Foundational Story Psychotherapy: Understanding and Co-Changing Clients’ Stories (Part 1) presented by Dr. Hugh Marr. Below is additional information on this workshop:

We humans are narrative creatures. Much of our communication, our cognition, our memory, and even our understanding of our self is storied. By late adolescence virtually all of us have developed a life story, a story that helps determine what we expect from others, in which settings we are most comfortable, how we treat ourselves and what we can hope for. Our life story is comprised of smaller vignettes or foundational stories. As a result, the coin of psychotherapy is narrative, and clients tell an average of 4.1 stories in each session.

Despite the ubiquity of narrative, most of us receive very little education in the structure of narrative and its application to substance abuse and mental health counseling. Given our narrative bones, all therapies must deal with narrative, although most of them do so implicitly, focusing on only a limited number of aspects of story.

In this workshop, we will examine the narrative underpinnings of substance abuse counseling and psychotherapy; and we will broaden our understanding and use of different approaches to alter both foundational and life narratives. We will look at the special impact of trauma on clients’ life stories and the resultant substance abuse and emotional struggles. Participants will come away with greater ease and more tools to understand and help clients change the problematic stories they live.

This workshop is designed to enable participants to:

  • Define foundational and life stories and describe the relationship between the two
  • Gather and use client’s stories to help them understand and change substance abuse and emotional problems
  • Describe the importance of witnessing and demonstrate thematic listening
  • Identify the relationship among substance use, mental illness, and trauma
  • Describe one use of story-based ritual to assist therapists in creating healthy boundaries between work life and home life

Visit www.sassi.com/other-training-online for registration information, provides 4 CEs. 

New Professional Development Webinars Available

The SASSI Institute is pleased to announce that we are launching a line of Professional Development webinars. We will be doing these in partnership with guest lecturers on topics that may be of interest to professionals in the addiction field.

Our first such webinar is Comprehensive Screening & Advanced Assessment of Addiction presented by Dr. Don Osborne. Below is additional information on this workshop:

The Screening and assessment processes are critical to effective addiction treatment. In fact, treatment can only be as effective as the thoroughness of the assessment process. The screening and assessment processes can and should result in clients’ reduced denial or “resistance” and easily transition into therapy.

In this training program you will be able to:

  • Understand screening and assessment.
  • Be able to describe a comprehensive concept of addiction’s progressive nature with problems, tolerance and loss of control.
  • Be able to determine the kinds of questions to ask a client that are most relevant during an initial interview.
  • Be able to formulate specific relevant questions to ask during the interview process.
  • How to use Motivational Interviewing to engage clients and develop a rapport with them.
  • How to obtain collateral information about the client.
  • How to use the DSM-5’s criteria for SUD to diagnose clients and decrease clients’ resistance to treatment.
  • Gaining clients’ trust, reduce denial and resistance to treatment.
  • Gain clients’ agreement that they are addicted to some substance or behavior at a particular stage of the addiction process.
  • How to determine the specific level of care advocated by ASAM.
  • How to transition from screening to the assessment to the therapy stages of treatment.

Visit www.sassi.com/other-training-online/ for registration information, provides 4 CEUs. 

Criminal Justice Publication Accepted

Hello friends and colleagues,

We hope you and your families are all doing well. We wanted to call your attention to our very latest peer reviewed publication, released earlier this month. The title is: Criminal Justice Alcohol and Drug Screening in Practice: Using the Substance Abuse Subtle Screening Inventory to Identify Substance Use Disorder in Offenders.

Now in its fourth iteration (SASSI-4), this article discusses the SASSI screening tools’ utility with criminal offenders and reviews a case study of a young male’s clinical evaluation while incarcerated. While SUD is not the only contributing factor to criminality, it significantly increases the likelihood of legal infraction and violations, placing these individuals at a higher risk of re-offending. Thus, identifying SUD as early as possible in the clinical relationship helps provide tailored treatment to those who need it, while simultaneously reducing the risk of future legal difficulties.

For this case study, we reviewed the SASSI-4 screening results of a 24-year-old male. The case presents an excellent example of the value of early identification of substance use disorder and potential problems in criminal justice settings.

We hope you enjoy the article, and as always, we look forward to your submissions and comments.

Addiction Professional Spotlight: Charlie Stookey, MA, LADC, LADC-S

I have had the pleasure of being on staff at The SASSI Institute for 22 years. Throughout that time, I have had the opportunity to work closely with many addiction professionals. Their dedication and passion for helping individuals in recovery or in need of recovery have always astonished me.

One of these professionals whom I have known throughout my time at the Institute is Charlie Stookey, MA, LADC, LADC-S. Charlie was a trainer for the SASSI when I started my career at the Institute. He presented training on the earliest versions of the SASSI, having been taught by none other than our late Founder and SASSI creator, Dr. Glenn Miller. Charlie retired from training many years ago, and while we have never met in person, we have stayed in touch over the years, and I am glad to call him a friend. He attended Whitman College and the University of Nevada, Reno, and is currently a substance abuse counselor in Reno, Nevada. Charlie also has a passion for poetry and has been published in the West Coast Poetry Review, Blue Moon, and The Meadow. He believes in the gift of the Wounded Healer and Joseph Campbell’s The Hero’s Journey. I want to share one of his poems with all of you today and encourage you to take the time to read it peacefully.

Charlie asked me to share that he hopes the heroine in Phases of the Moon, finds the beginning of her sober journey in the reflection in the detox mirror. And that she finds the “life that awaits us.” In our groups, we are in a gathering of miracles and he is grateful for the opportunity to sit with them.

Phases of the Moon The new moon is a cat’s claw in the night sky. Clint C. Ricketts

Beneath Thunder Moons and Corn Moons, she names her four rescued cats, Moon Beam, Moon Light, Moon Shadow, and, of course, Moon Shine. The phases of the moon
are tattooed on the nape of her neck “to honor the mystery and permanence of the moon over time. It’s reliable.” It’s so easy to turn the course of her disease into the curse of the disease 
with its hungry ghosts. No glass Japanese floats lie atop the scarred nightstand; but earrings, ER receipts, doubts, matches, butt ends of relationships.
She regrets the drunken, meth-fueled fights with her husband, who later committed suicide. “Killed himself over…whatever. Me,
all that lottery money, heartache, whatever.” Moonlight creek sings to Cottonwoods in the darkness. Grief waxes and wanes.
When loneliness strikes, she writes lamentations: Full October moon Drowns pinpoint constellations. I miss your bright eyes.
The riptide from the fifth of a gallon a day floods the road of good intentions. Its ebb leaves tide pools of anxiety and depression ripening in a sour stomach. 
Each morning’s hangover brings the pounding of relentless reality, the ever-present eternal goddam now. Last night’s shame haloes her head in hangover vises. She pukes. Starts the hands-and-knees
search party for dimes or quarters or pennies for a half-pint of mercy. She ignores the snores of an anonymous cowboy under a throw and the spray of clothes.
She wipes withdrawal’s sweat from her face, swipes at the brain fog. The riptide created by her moons leaves an empty curse. She flings the empty purse
of promises into the furthest corners of cobweb resolve, another tourist attraction. When the new moon slides between sun and earth, the eclipse covers her soul like a shawl.
She peers into the silvered glass of the detox bathroom mirror, where a stranger greets her. A shadow of comfort arises when she strokes her new moon, colored and frozen on her neck

New Publication!

The SASSI Institute is pleased to announce the publication of its newest manuscript “Mental Health and Substance Use Disorder Co-Morbidities Among Teens in Treatment: SASSI-A3 Correlations in Screening Scores.” Within this article, we review data from teenagers in treatment focusing on mental health diagnoses alongside a DSM-5 diagnosis of substance use disorder. Our hope is that by identifying possible correlations between SASSI-A3 scale scores and diagnosed mental health disorders, (depression and anxiety in particular), will provide clinicians with additional tools to direct the course of subsequent clinical interviews, in particular for teens suffering from co-occurring disorders. This Open-Access article is available here: Mental Health and Substance Use Disorder Co-Morbidities Among Teens in Treatment: SASSI-A3 Correlations in Screening Scores