Bullying: Causes, Consequences and Interventions

This episode was pre recorded as part of a live continuing education webinar on demand. CEUs are still available for this presentation through all CEUs. Register@Allce.com Counselortoolbox you I'd like to welcome everybody to today's presentation on bullying. Over the past few years, bullying has become something of a hot button topic. So over the next 45 minutes or so, we're going to define bullying, explore the different types of bullying, identify characteristics of bullies and motivations for their behavior. We will also identify the effects of bullying on those who are bullied, and we'll explore interventions to stop bullying and help bullying victims. So what is bullying? It's a pattern of aggressive behavior involving unwanted negative actions which involve an imbalance of strength or power. Now, this strength or power can be either physical or social. So if someone is higher on the social status ladder, if you will, that qualifies as them having more power. If someone is older, maybe they are a coach or a teacher or a parent, they have more power. And it's also referring again to a pattern of behavior. Not just one incident where somebody says something ugly, but a pattern of behavior that is actually intentionally directed at someone for the purpose of causing harm or making them uncomfortable. How big of a problem is it? It's a pretty big problem. More than half of adolescents have been bullied online, and about the same number have engaged in bullying. So not only are some bullies producing the behavior, but they're also getting bullied back themselves. So this is not a good situation. Only one in ten adolescents tells a parent that they've been a victim of bullying. Why do we care? Well, because we need to know. Because the consequences of bullying are pretty far reaching. According to a Yale School of Medicine study, adolescent suicide rates have increased more than 50, 50%, 5 0% in the last 30 years. So I hate to admit it, but thinking back 30 years ago is about when I was starting high school. So it's increased 50% since I went through high school. And I know high school wasn't, you know, aren't the fondest memories that I have. I can only imagine what it's like for Youth today. Approximately 19,000 victims of bullying will attempt suicide each year. That's one adolescent will attempt suicide every 30 minutes, according to the American Psychiatric Association. Those are pretty staggering numbers. I mean, so during the period that we're talking in this presentation today, two children, two adolescents in the United States will attempt suicide. What are we talking about when we talk about bullying? What does it look like? Verbal Bullying is degrading or demeaning in order to give the aggressor power. Verbal bullying can also kind of roll over into cyberbullying when we talk about emails, text messages, hashtags, and a whole bunch of other stuff we'll get into. At cyberbullying, physical bullying involves pushing, shoving, hitting, stealing, and even sexual assault. So stealing somebody's lunch money for forcing someone to, through physical force to make them do your homework for you. You know, those are the old fashioned types of bullying that we remember and you see sometimes in the media, but it's much more prevalent than that. Relational bullying is when behaviors are used as a means of achieving a goal. So maybe in order to achieve or to get into a certain clique, you have to behave a certain way and reject a person or reject a certain set of ideals in a negative fashion. I mean, there's, it's one thing to say, you know, I don't want to be part of that, or I don't agree with that, or that's not, you know, my favorite person in the world. But it's a completely different thing to actually aggressively attack someone else's person or ideals. Cyberbullying is the use of the Internet and related technologies like iPhone, Snapchat, Instagram, the list goes on to harm other people in a deliberate and repeated manner. Unfortunately, with cyberbullying it seems inescapable because even if you're not there, cyberbullying can be going on throughout the World Wide Web. People can be posting pictures of you or posting unflattering pictures, like somebody picking their nose and then hashtag or tag you in it. And you know, that happens without you even being there. It's kind of like talking behind your back used to be, but times like a thousand. So it's very distressing for a lot of people. Can they turn it off? Why can't they just get off the Internet? Why can't they just get off Instagram? Well, it's kind of like knowing something's going on and saying, well, I'm not going to pay attention to it. When you are an adolescent, would you have been able to do that even as an adult? Most people aren't able to do that. Cyberbullying takes many forms, including harassment, leaving unkind comments on people's pictures, on people's Facebook, on their Instagram impersonation, creating an entire profile on a social networking site pretending to be someone and making it a very unflattering profile. Use of photographs, either photographs of the person that are Unflattering or using Photoshop to put their face unflattering photographs. Creating websites and blogs that are actually demeaning to the person, like everybody hates carrie.com and participating in happy slapping, which I learned about doing this presentation is when people intentionally engage in physical fights or altercations or physical bullying for the purposes of videoing it and putting it on TV or YouTube. So who does this? The characteristics of bullies vary widely. Some have low self esteem, some have high self esteem. Some feel a need to get power because they feel disenfranchised. Others have high self esteem and have more antisocial type behaviors and low empathy. So we can't just say let's look at self esteem because that's not just it. Lower parental supervision is a common theme. It's not necessarily that the parents are absent or don't care insofar as like they're emotionally unavailable or they're depressed. A lot of times it's parents who are just extremely permissive. Oh, Johnny will do whatever he wants. It's a phase. He'll grow out of it. There's no correction, there's no boundaries set. Drug and alcohol use by the adolescent promotes some aggressive behavior because we know that drugs tend to be a disinhibitor and alcohol tends to be a disinhibitor, which takes off your filters that say, you know what, maybe we shouldn't do that. Family conflict is correlated with being a bully. Why? Because they see conflict at home. They see these behaviors modeled. They take it into school and say, well, if it works for mom or dad, then I guess it'll work for me. At school. Parents or coaches who show power and aggression by hitting and yelling and I think we all remember, well, maybe we don't. I'm pretty old Bobby Knight back in, I think it was the early 80s, he threw a chair across the basketball floor. He got upset and he didn't, I think it was, he didn't like a ref's call and he threw a chair that modeled for other people that aggressive outbursts in order to try to get your own way were okay. There was a tennis player and his name escapes me at the moment, who also had a habit of throwing temper tantrums. When adults, especially high profile adults or parents, exhibit these types of behaviors, children learn that hey, that's an okay way to behave. Bullies tend to be from families where there may be other siblings or friends who bully them. So they learn this behavior and they say, well, you know, I get bullied at home and I'm the weak one, but when I go to school, there are other weaker kids. So I can bully and I can kind of get my power back. Some bullies have trouble standing up to peer pressure. Their friends say, you need to go do this. You need to go give him a wedgie. You need to go shove him in a locker. You need to go whatever the threat is or the challenge is, it's like when we used to play dare or double dare back in, you know, the olden days. Bullies often have a hard time standing up to this peer pressure because they want to be accepted. And they may relate to others negatively, finding fault in everyone else to give themselves power. And in order to kind of gain a following of people, making them feel like they are, they should be grateful that the bully is their friend. Many bullies have a desire for power and control. Some bullies lack empathy. Some bullies do it. They've been hurt so much they want to hurt somebody else. Most of the time, the bullies that we're talking about just don't have empathy. They don't care how the other person feels. There's a strong need for power and dominance over someone or something. Now, whether that's because they have been told at home that the only way to be a success is to be the most powerful and the most dominant, or they've seen it at home, or they have had their power and control taken away somewhere else, there's a lot of reasons. Ultimately it comes down to they are trying to get power and dominance and they're often rewarded in some way for this behavior material. They get lunch money, they get homework done, social, they gain status or psychological, they just feel powerful and they feel more invincible. So what are the motivations for bullying again, power and control. Sometimes it's to get respect through intimidation. And you know, we can talk to kids about and grown ups about the difference between respect and intimidation. They're not the same thing. You can gain power and control through intimidation. It doesn't mean people have to respect you. And it can be a way of getting revenge if you're jealous or envious of someone or if you have been felt like you had your power taken away by someone else. Sometimes bullies will take it out on easier targets and they're like, okay, you know, I can't get my power back at home, or I can't get my power back from my big brother, but I can take it away from this person. So I feel better about myself and I can kind of get revenge on somebody else. So the questions I would posit to you are where does the need for this power and control come from? And it's going to be different with each and every bully. What are the long and short term benefits of bullying and how can they be reduced? Again, it's different for each and every bully. If it's part of being a status thing, then removing that status. If it's part of being part of the cheerleading squad and being captain of the cheerleading squad, then if that person gets caught bullying, they need to be suspended from the cheerleading squad as does or as do all of the people who stood around and supported the behavior and cheered it on. What other ways can be provided for youth to achieve the same benefits in a pro social manner? So if you want to gain social status, how can you do it without putting other people down? Characteristics of victims and some interventions A lot of victims don't fit in for whatever reason. They may be overweight, underweight, or just not physically attractive. They may be new students. So if somebody's new to your school, maybe assign them a mentor that can help show them around and help them get to know the place so they don't make mistakes, so they're not late to class. They may not be considered cool. They may wear different clothes, maybe they can't afford the fancy name brand clothes, or maybe they just don't want to wear them. Whatever the reason, one of the things we can do as adults, parents, teachers, is emphasize and reward students strengths beginning in elementary school. I remember when my son started school, he was just so proud that he would make the reading wall every single week. And that was a big deal for him. And he started taking pride in his academic accomplishments, his sports prowess, not so much. You know, that's not his strength. But he doesn't care because he knows that he is really good in academics and he's really good in martial arts and a few other things. Some of the victims of bullying are perceived as weak or unable to defend themselves. So as gatekeepers, if you will, adults, teachers, coaches, parents, we want to pay particular attention to students who are bully prone, those people who might be picked on. And we can think back to when we were in middle school and high school about the kind of kids that got picked on. It hasn't changed all that much. It's gotten more vicious, but it hasn't changed all that much. So we want to pay particular attention to how students interact with them. People who are victims of bullying tend to be more depressed and or anxious. So one of the things that we can do is help teach them age appropriate coping skills. And I say age appropriate because there are some interventions that we use with adults that deal with values and the big scheme of things and identifying how bad something really is. Realistically, that may fall flat when you're working with an adolescent. Because not fitting in or being bullied does feel like the end of the world to a lot of youth who are in this position. So we don't want to minimize how they're feeling, we don't want to minimize their emotional reaction, but we can teach them how to cope with the emotional distress. We also want to educate them about depression and fear and anxiety so they know what it is and they know how they can start to deal with it or think about starting to deal with it. Low self esteem. If you're bullied enough, you're going to start feeling kind of bad about yourself. So we want to look at how can we increase self esteem in children. Positive reinforcement too often in the classroom and at home. You know, I know that as parents we've been guilty of it as well as, you know, as teachers and everything else. We can focus too much on correction and not enough on praise. You know, because we take for granted our children or our students or our employees are going to do things correctly. We don't say, hey, you know, thank you very much for being so dedicated and not missing a single day in the last six months doing such a good job getting your reports in on time. Yes, that's an expectation. However, it does people a lot of good to get praise for meeting expectations, for meeting standards. That's when we say, you are doing what I expect. And you know, thank you, I appreciate it. We also need to help reduce the need for external validation so people can tell themselves even if they're not getting it from someone else, I get my work done on time. I am a really good employee or I get my schoolwork done and you know, I don't cause problems in class and I'm a good friend. So if X and so doesn't like me, you know, so be it. How am I going to deal with this if X and so posts on my Facebook wall that I'm ugly and I might as well kill myself, which is a very common post. Unfortunately, we need to teach kids how to deal with this, you know, and my first reaction as a parent is to sit my child down and say, okay, what must have been going on in that person's head for them to say that? What's their motivation for just randomly posting that on your Facebook. Children who may be more likely to be victimized by bullies tend to be unpopular and don't socialize well with others. It's easy to pick on the lone wolf. If there are four people around that person all the time, or if they have one good friend that's just kind of like their shadow, then you're kind of attacking two people if you try to pick on that person. So a lot of times they don't get picked on as much. And when they do, their friend is there to go. Don't let them bother you. And they're there to help them kind of deal with the initial emotional upset because that situation can get played over and over and over again in the adolescent's head. We also want to teach communication skills how to say what's going on instead of bottling it all up to the point that life is unbearable and they feel like they've got to end their own lives. We need to teach them how to articulate how they're feeling now, maybe not to the bully because again, the bully generally doesn't have a lot of empathy or doesn't care. They may know exactly how you feel and just not care. But that's not necessarily where we're talking about communicating, but communicating with adults about how you're feeling, communicating with your friends and just communicating with yourself. Maybe your journal in order to get that stuff out. Effects of bullying include unwillingness to attend school if it's a negative place. If you feel like every time you go there you're going to be verbally or physically attacked. Yeah, you're not going to want to go. Which can result in lower grades, not only from not attending school, but for being so overwhelmed with negative emotions and self esteem and being so distraught not able to concentrate on learning the material at hand. Increased somatic complaints, headaches, backaches, belly aches, sicknesses. Stress goes up, immunity goes down. But a lot of times we take stress and we kind of feel it throughout our body and as grown ups, we do the same thing. We get backaches, we get headaches when we get really stressed. Lower self esteem. If somebody already had a low self esteem and they keep getting picked on, it's likely just going to go lower. They're going to feel helpless and hopeless, which leads to anxiety and depression. Anxiety and depression may cause people to turn to alcohol or drug use, A to feel like they fit in or B just to numb the pain from this situation that they're in right now. And there's also an increased risk of eating Disorders for both males and females from bullying. Because a lot of bullying will pick on some of the most salient features important to young people, and that's how they look. When that starts to be a focus of attention, it can become a clinical issue and result in an eating disorder. So what are some bullying myths that we hear about? Only boys bully. No, girls bully at least as much as boys. So that's not true. Now, the physical bullying may be a little bit more leaning towards the boys, but the cyberbullying and the verbal bullying, definitely not just the boys. Kids will outgrow bullying. No, if it works for them, if there's a reward for it, guess what? Any behavior that's rewarded is likely to continue. So they will become adults who seem to be bullies, narcissistic, whatever you want to label it as. But they will tend to perpetuate this behavior into adult life until at some point it has a negative outcome that, you know, outweighs the bullying. You know, there, there are going to be little sometimes that it doesn't work and it's just a little hiccup. But when it starts to consistently not work, or when the consequence is severe enough that it causes them to check their behavior and go, well, maybe that wasn't the best course of action, they're going to keep doing it. People who bully have low self esteem, and I talked about that earlier. Some people who bully do have low self esteem, okay? But there is a big preponderance of people who bully who feel pretty darn good about themselves and have, or at least are perceived to have very high self esteem. And they lean more, almost more towards the narcissistic where they think everything they do is right and nobody else can do anything right. They feel entitled to pick on everyone else because they feel superior. Bullying will resolve itself if you ignore it. No, just like kids won't outgrow it. If you ignore it, it's probably going to escalate. But because if there's no consequences, negative consequences for the behavior, then the people who are doing it now are going to say, hey, if I can get away with that, I wonder what else I can get away with. And kids who aren't bullying are going to go, well, hey, if Tom gets away with it, I bet I could get away with it. Because that seems like kind of the way to go to be a big old bully. Teachers intervene to stop bullying. Unfortunately, the statistics indicate that teachers only intervene about 14% of the time in the classroom and 4% of the time out of the Classroom. Does this mean that teachers are just turning a blind eye? No. My experience working with teachers in public schools at least has been that they are so just completely overwhelmed with trying to manage just general behavior problems and trying to teach the curriculum which their job is contingent upon, and trying to manage overly heavy class loads and trying to manage teachers. And not teachers, but parents, and all these other demands. They don't see it. They are just doing good to get through the day. And you know, even in elementary school, when my son was in public school, a lot of the teachers just look shell shocked. You'd see them walking through the halls and you would think they'd been up for three days. Reporting bullying will make it worse. Much of the research indicates that this isn't true. The reason it's not true is if bullying is reported and there are consequences, then it's likely not worth it to the bully to retaliate or to continue that behavior with that person. Now, does it mean the bully will stop bullying? Maybe not. But if the bullying is reported and there are consequences, preferably both at home and at school, then it tends to stop, at least for that person. Some of the protocols that have been put in place for bullying prevention programs in schools do call for a comprehensive approach to addressing bullying, which, which means when a bullying event is reported at school, there's a call to the parent, then there's a parent teacher administrator conference, and there is an action plan developed, and sometimes the school counselor is involved and there's an action plan developed in order to address the bullying behavior. Once it gets to the point that there is bullying, you know, you're going to have to kind of backpedal to teach new skills and have people unlearn these ineffective or bullying behaviors. That's more difficult. A lot of the bullying prevention programs that are out there start with working with kids when they're in elementary school. Why is that? Because it's in elementary school and preschool that kids start to learn to have empathy, that kids start to learn to have tolerance, that kids start to learn how to communicate and basically play nice on the playground with each other. So if children are taught assertiveness skills back then and they don't have to resort to aggression, if parents are modeling these kinds of behaviors at home, then the child is a lot less likely to engage in aggressive bullying behaviors. One technique that I read about that a school district uses is a family contract that every student in school is asked to sign where the child agrees to not engage in certain bullying prone aggressive behaviors at home or at school and then the parent co signs that the benefit to that and, and the really kind of neat thing with that is when the parent signs that they become aware of those behaviors and they're watching for those behaviors in junior, but it also makes them more aware of those behaviors in themselves. So it's sort of a indirect double whammy. Interventions educate kids about the consequences of bullying. Now, if you're dealing with the bully, the bully likely has very little empathy for the victims. So they're going to hear the consequences and they're going to be like, sucks to be them. But if we educate all the children, then you're going to have the children in there who are the victims bullying and you're going to have the children in there who are the friends of the victims of bullying. And then you're going to have the kids in there who are neutral, who just happen to be bystanders. And you will have the group in there who are sort of the henchmen for the bullies. They're not involved directly in the bullying, but they are somehow connected to the bully. Now, all of those people potentially can hear the consequences and learn from the consequences and make different choices based on hearing the consequences of bullying. We want to encourage victims not to respond and feed into the bullying. If somebody says something nasty, we want to encourage them not to respond back with something else nasty. You know, I'll see you a nasty comment and raise you a nasty comment plus a hashtag. Keep computers in the public area of the house. That's helpful, but it doesn't do a whole lot. I'm sorry. It does help with some stuff and helps you keep a little bit on top of what the kids are doing. But if they have a cell phone or a tablet, that's where 90% of their social networking and their bullying happens. Encourage children to develop friendships. Now, not everybody's going to have 15 friends. You know, that's just how they're wired. They want one or two really good friends, but that's all they need. So encourage them to find a number of friendships or a level of friendship that's comfortable for them so they feel supported, teach effective communication skills. And this can be parents. You know, we can start this when they are little, when they're having a bad day, we can paraphrase for them and go, it seems like you're angry or it seems like you're having a really difficult time holding it together. My son, when he was little, he has adhd, but when he was little he was born premature. And one of the things he's always had difficulty with was the ADHD and filtering out extra stimuli. And I remember to this day he was about 23 months old because he started talking late. He didn't start talking till he was about 2. And he just walks up to me one day and he goes, mommy, I overstimulated, popped his binky in his mouth and toddled off into his room, got into his bed all by himself and just. We had one wall in his room that was just completely blank white. And he just sat there and sucked on his pacifier and stared at that for 15 or 20 minutes. And then I gave him some space and then I went in and checked on him and how you doing? Let's talk about it. And when he was ready, he came out of his room. Overstimulated is not a word that most like 22, 23 month olds know, you know you're doing good if you know, bottle at that point. But we had worked with him on identifying that he was overstimulated. And we wouldn't usually say it to him. I would say to his father, seems like Shawn's getting overstimulated. Let me take him so we can take a break. Or I think we would even say that to him. It seems like you're overstimulated. Why don't you go take a break? But he picked up on that and he used that as a word. He said, okay, when I feel like this, the word is overstimulated. And he did the same thing one day when we were at my office. He was a couple years older and I don't remember what triggered him, but we're walking down the hall and he just looks at me and he goes, mommy, I so angry. Okay, let's talk about that then. So I pulled him aside. But to be able to articulate those feelings, you know, granted he's a shrinks kid, so he kind of had to learn those words. But we can help children identify those different levels of emotional upset. And instead of invalidating them and just telling them to get over it or straighten up, it teaches them to say, okay, this is how I'm feeling now. Let me look at a prosocial way to deal with it. And as adults, it's our job to teach them what those pro social ways are. My point, good communication skills and emotion identification can start as early as, you know, infancy and toddlerhood. Identify ways to cope with bullying. It happens. Not only does it happen at school, it happens in the workplace, it happens in public life. It happens at church. So don't fool yourself to think that once you get out of school, nobody bullies anybody. It happens. So how do you cope with it? If you don't cope with it well, how do you wish you coped with it? And what can we teach our kids about how to cope with bullies? Facilitate school successes and commitment. Kids that are more committed to school success than being the most popular aren't as swayed by public opinion, if you will. You know, you have some kids, maybe it's not the coolest thing. At least you know, where I came from, being in shop wasn't necessarily the coolest thing. There was the whole industrial arts wing, you know, that's fine, but the kids who are down there formed a nice sort of community where they supported one another and they didn't care what we had to say. Drama was another group or clique if you will. And they were very successful in what they did. And because they got support from one another, they didn't care what anybody else in the school said. They didn't care what the jocks said or what the people in industrial arts said. So encouraging children to find success and to find strengths to be proud of and people who share those strengths goes back to friendships really helps buffer against bullying, improve school organization and student monitoring and enforcement of anti bullying rules. So we need to find a way to free up those teachers so they can help monitor the hallways a little bit better so they have the energy and the time to help prevent some of the bullying because their students are going to be more successful, the whole school is going to be more successful if the teachers are able to help make the environment conducive to learning. Parent volunteers are also very helpful in monitoring and enforcement of anti bullying school resource officers. To a certain extent, most schools only have one resource officer so you know, they can only be so many places at one time. More interventions support open expression of objective opinions. And I put objective in there because it's important to be able to say I disagree with your opinion because or my opinion is XYZ without saying you're stupid. The right way to think is blah blah, blah blah blah. We want to teach people non aggressive diplomatic ways of expressing conflicting opinions because we don't have to have the same opinions. We want to teach problem solving. You know, this happens. There are generally two, three, maybe even four or five ways to solve the problem. Encourage people to learn how to problem solve instead of always going with their knee jerk reaction and provide opportunities for cooperative group work in the classroom. It's amazing how many times you put groups of kids together where they don't know each other or maybe they wouldn't normally be together and get along. They don't know each other that much, so they have preformed negative opinions of one another. But once they get to know each other, it's like, hey, you know, you're pretty decent human being. So cooperative group work in the classroom where it can be supervised. That's not giving students a group assignment and saying two weeks from now I want you to bring this in because that generally ends badly. But if you can give group work in the classroom where you can monitor student interactions, it can be very, very effective. So bullying is far more prevalent today than before. Cyberbullying, unfortunately feel inescapable because it's going on even if you're not participating in it, even if you're not online. Bullying related suicide attempts have increased drastically over the past 30 years. Bullying often leads to feelings of depression involving feeling hopeless and helpless. You can't get out of it. You can't get people to be nice. You can't make that image go away that was posted to the web. So what do we do? We build on children's strengths. We build their self esteem. This goes for the bullies and the victims. We teach them how to cope with adversity, both the bullies and the victims. If the bullies are bullying because they want power that they feel they've been disempowered, then if we teach them how to deal with adversity pro socially, they won't need to demean others in order to feel powerful. Provide tools and opportunities for social skills development and friendships. In my old school, in high school Wednesdays we had club day and every class period there were eight class periods and they were all abbreviated 10 minutes on Wednesdays. So in the middle of the day we could meet with our club. The benefit to this was for kids who had to ride the bus to and from school, we still got to participate in extracurricular activities. We weren't just limited to academics. We were able to interface with our peers in more of a social setting than based on similar likes and interests than necessarily just doing group work in the classroom. So anything you can do to provide tools and opportunities for children to interface, learn about one another and maybe develop friendships, maybe not is a good step in the right direction. Educate children, parents, teachers, pretty much everybody about the difference between respect and intimidation. Enforce a no bullying policy at school and home. Remember we talked about that family contract for non bullying teach Children how to Report Cyberbullying if your child is on Instagram, on Snapchat, on any of the social networking sites, on the computer at all, make sure they know how to report cyberbullying. When a cyberbully gets reported enough, their account gets shut down and for many of them that is very consequential. Eliminate the rewards bullies get for bullying, so don't feed into it, don't give them power. And again, if you report it enough and they can't bully online, if their account gets shut down, they may open a new account, but it makes it more difficult for them and it eliminate some of the rewards. Broaden consequences for bullying to not only the primary bullies or the person who did whatever the behavior was, but to his or her henchmen. You know, the people who surround them. Not just the ones that cheer them on, but the ones who indirectly participate in the activity and increase rewards for prosocial behavior. Make a big deal about Drama Club. Make a big deal about exhibitions in Industrial Arts Our industrial arts wing had a car repair unit and they would fix cars up and then they would sell them at the end of the year. So I mean, that's a big deal. So promoting that instead of going, yeah, that's just the industrial arts wing. Make the school proud to be able to host something like that. Any way you can increase pro social behavior is going to be beneficial. Give students opportunities to volunteer. Give students opportunities to get recognition and limelight for doing things that are helpful for others. If you enjoy this podcast, please like and subscribe either in your podcast player or on YouTube. You can attend and participate in our live webinars with Dr. Snipes by subscribing at allceus.com counselortoolbox this episode has been brought to you in part by allce.com, providing 24. 7 multimedia continuing education and pre certification training to counselors, therapists and nurses since 2006. Use coupon code counselortoolbox to get a 20% discount off your order this month.