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Using Abstraction In Suicide Prevention
There’s a powerful, hidden skill in suicide prevention. Read this article and you’ll be able to practice it in every day conversation – maybe even with people in distress. Who knows, it might help you support someone down from the edge. It’s called ‘Abstraction’. Abstraction is very popular and well understood in other fields like…
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Healing Trauma With Journaling: An N=1 Experiment
Hello, this is a write up for a long term behaviour change and transformation experiment. Please hit me up with any questions, feedback, input etc. I will do my best to remain not-too-emotional-yet-still-authentic. TL;DR: I’m going to identify my problem behaviours, trace them to core wounds, tear them open in a controlled journal setting, knit…
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Said Bouziane’s 2023 End Of Year Review
I closed my eyes to shut out the countdown. Images of humiliation flashed by. You’ve completely forgotten the rest, you’ll have to walk off the stage in shame. Everyone will know you as the one person who only got half way through. I’d spent probably over 60 hours for this chance. And there I was,…
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How To Fight Less With Your Lover – Flow Chart
full blog post is coming soon 🙆🏽♂️💝
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How To Write With Life Saving Clarity In Digital Crisis Support
In learning suicide prevention there’s a tonne of obstacles and challenges. It’s hard, scary work and you’re here remove some of those obstacles and equip yourself with tools, skills and mindset to lower the barrier for others too. Long term this kind of work – preventing suicide – changes people, changes families, changes communities and…
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Why Couldn’t I Let Go Of Happy Sad Man?
Happy Sad Man is a beautiful, moving portrait of masculinity. But… that alone doesn’t explain the mystery of why I found it SO captivating. Allow me to get a little reflective here and pour these thoughts into the internet. I’m trying to capture precisely what it is about this film that has slipped through my…
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How To Finally Stop Asking ‘Why’ To People In Crisis
‘Why do you think he lied to me?’ she asked yet again, as though we hadn’t covered it a hundred times this week. My eyes wanted to roll as far back into my head as they could, I didn’t let them. I’d been here so many times in my life, with my mum, my exes,…
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Said Bouziane’s 2022 End of Year Review
Intention For Sharing These yearly reviews have become something of a tradition around these parts. A tradition I look forward to, each new year a chance to reflect and observe, to count, and be held to account. It’s a chance for you to measure my optimism against reality and ask how well things went according…
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Stop Procrastinating And Get Productive By Mastering The Mundane
After a life of wrestling with time, I finally found easy productivity. My life these past few weeks has run so smoothly, I can hardly recognise it. It’s a shock to look back at. The house is clean every morning and night. Budget accounted for. Tasks aren’t building up unbearably. I sleep well and regularly.…
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Non-Judgement FAQ
What is non-judgement? Non-judgement is a way of listening to people (and even to ourselves!) where we remove agenda and opinion, all that’s left is pure listening. Learning non-judgement is deeply uncomfortable for most people, because most of our opinions and agendas happen without our awareness or even our conscious choice! So non-judgement requires lots…
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Why You Get Triggered
Introduction I always knew about trauma, but only as a concept. You know, images of some homeless guy dodging imaginary gunfire. Recently I realised just how much of my life – in fact how much of everybody’s lives – have been shaped or touched in some way by wounds of trauma. The gunfire isn’t imaginary,…
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A Formula For When Life Sucks
Subtracting Expectations From Reality Leaves You With Happiness Let’s do math! 85 reality minus 100 expectation equals happiness / disappointment level -15. Expectations were too high! Or reality was too low.. (You can define reality how you like, money, flights, intimacy, feeling understood, validating someone, what’s important to you is up to you.) In other…
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Why Updating Your Me Map Is So Challenging
If you want to understand why it’s so difficult to improve your life, this post is for you. You’ll learn about Me Maps in light detail. A Me Map is basically the internal map you have of yourself. They make up half the picture of how accurate maps are key to connecting with people. So…
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How To Validate Without Taking Sides
When navigating the often uncomfortable journey to non-judgement, there can be a lot to balance. Between staying within the framework, balancing professionalism with authenticity and learning to gain, spend and repair trust… it’s a lot! On my journey into mental health support work and non-judgemental listening, I always found it helpful to simplify as much…
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Accurate Maps, The Key To Connection
Real misunderstandings all come down to a simple, easy to understand concept. Hold on to your seats because I’m about to take you on a RIDE. We’ve got to lay out a lot of ground work so bare with me as I first illustrate and I promise it’ll be worth it. My whole life before…
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Ultimate Beginner’s Guide To Overcoming Resistance
Defining Resistance I think of resistance like a chill. Imagine with me the absence of heat. The wrong kind of stillness. The more resistance we have the more frozen we become. Frozen by our fears. By our judgements. By inaction. Here are some examples of what resistance looks like. I really want to apologise but…
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Said Bouziane’s 2021 End of Year Review
Intention for Posting My 2021 Review I’m posting this in the hopes that it’ll inspire you to take action. There, I said it. I want to offer the same light I would have really appreciated in my own life. The encouragement to dare to dream, to go boldly and have courage. I want to show…
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Sentence Stems to Invite More Information
When I first started I really struggled. I had no idea what was professional and what wasn’t. How was I meant to be authentic without colluding? Hell I had a hard enough time even holding down basic conversation! Well over time I figured some stuff out, that’s why there’s a lot of theory in this…
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Trust As Currency
In mental health work the trust you’re developing is like a bank account. You deposit and withdraw. Over the time you have with your help seeker, the level of trust in your account will change. Sometimes due to stuff you can control (like what you say / income you generate), sometimes due to stuff you…
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Edit Less, Impact More with Sentence Stem Workshopping
Why to Practice Workshopping Sentences When you’re in the hotseat and providing support to someone in crisis, you don’t have time to edit. You’ve got their words waiting for you on the screen, or their voice waiting for you over the phone. You don’t have the luxury of crafting a perfect reply if they’re waiting!…
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Afraid To Interrupt During Crisis Support?
When starting out supporting people in mental health, students often get caught in cyclic minimal encouragers. This is particularly easy the more the help seeker talks. As you can imagine… This can become problematic. Multiply passive crisis support listening skills by non-stop help seeker rambling skills and you have the formula for… a very ineffective…
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Sentence Stems for Asking About Suicide
Resistance can show up in many forms. Any of the following might be a sign that asking about suicide is something you may want to work on; This isn’t an exhaustive list of course. But if you find yourself falling into doing one or more of these, the following sentence stems might really help you…
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Contextualising the 5 Senses Grounding Technique
Intention Offering the five senses grounding technique has a bit of an art to it, for today let’s look at what to do when someone has already agreed they want to give it a try. By the time we’re done, you’ll see how you can elevate the 5 senses grounding technique through subtle turns of…
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Attending to both Feelings and Safety
Often when learning something it’s easy to rulify things. This helps to simplify the complex. When used in the right way, simple rules for practice can make a huge difference in developing our skillset and comfort level engaging compassionately with self awareness. When used poorly, over simplification of rules or guidelines can really hurt connection.…
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Are We Aligned?
We all slip out of alignment with the framework sometimes. Perhaps we get caught up in a story. Maybe we offer some advice, moving away from collaboration toward direction. Could be we don’t feel comfortable to sit with a help seeker saying brutally critical things about themselves, so we accidentally deny their feelings in an…
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Balance Appropriate With Authentic By Swimming Between the Flags
Learning crisis support can come with tension. In our training room we’ve heard things like ‘I’m just not sure how much of myself to keep, and how much to leave out‘ and ‘I don’t know if I’ll fit into the role‘ or ‘I feel like I wont be able to change enough in time before…
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Hold Your Goals Gracefully
‘Stop beating yourself up’ is good advice… until it isn’t. It works for anyone with an intermediate level of self awareness and compassion… or at least emotional regulation. In other words, this advice fails most who hear it. Probably, it fails you too. Advice so simple misses the importance of the following complexity; if you…
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Power of Yet
Doubt cripples by building walls around our potential. You can inoculate yourself against the disease of doubt. Start by adding the word ‘yet’ at the end of each doubt. For example; ‘I don’t see how I can solve this… yet.’ Take atomic steps, be forgiving when you fail and keep your eyes on the goal.…
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Stop Shoulding All Over Yourself
‘Should’ holds you back But it feels good to use… We ‘should’ ourselves and get a tiny hit of gratification. I know I should… (insert whatever we’re not doing) With that tiny hit of gratification, kind of like the feeling of calling out hypocrisy, what do we do? Do we declare war and march upon…
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Said Bouziane’s 2020 End of Year Review
Firstly, gratitude As I write this I’m able to look up from my laptop at a beautiful view. Bright, sharp sunlight brings out a variety of rich greens across Kangaroo Point. The evil Telstra building stares down ominously with it’s insane array of coms dishes like Sauron’s Eye. And I’m lucky to be here. My…
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THE TIME I DIDN’T KILL MYSELF
SET AND SETTING I grew more distant and despondent as the new year approached. We wandered the cliffs overlooking a long glittering river. Exaggerated caricatures of ourselves only a group of drug addled boys at the cusp of manhood can achieve. Boisterous, arrogant and fragile. A heady mix. Nineteen year old me lagging further behind…