I come to you now, at the turn of the tide.

My apologies, I have been away from this blog for a long time. I had intentions of moving this blog completely to a new page, but after I realized I could just link to this page and keep it, I have come back. I have found that no one else is doing the kind of work that we are doing, commercially using Acceptance & Commitment Therapy in tandem with restorative practices. But now, we have something brand new to add to our arsenal of techniques to help children in crisis. It is a brand new, cutting-edge technique called Emotional Intelligence Mapping. We currently have a new study just about to send to peer review that tests just much ACT and EIM can be in helping us improve our mediations, and the initial results are quite staggering. But first, let me show you what an EIM looks like.

Thank you to the creator of EIM, Dr. Carl Garner, for letting us post the image. We primarily use this as a tool to work on two of the core principles of ACT, defusion, and self as context. In fact, we often pair those two together. First, in our study, we created a standard celeration chart with an ABAB design just for VORP alone.

This is from our mediations alone, using VORP, or "the peacemaking process" to mediate between parties in conflict in public school settings that had high rates of violence. Below is a new graph that shows an additonal lineo of data.

The green line has been added to contrast with the black one. The green line shows what happened during mediation when we had each of the participants attend at least three one on one ACT sessions prior to the mediation. As you can see, the rate of learning and demonstrating prosocial behaviors during mediations increased dramatically. Below is a similar graph, but this time we used the EIM in three sessions prior to mediation.

As you can see that, at least in our cases, the EIM and ACT performed pretty comparably to each other. I don't have the newest graphs yet, but they show that a child who has BOTH ACT and EIM sessions performed even better, AND it does not appear to matter which one is taught first. This is exciting news and a possible way we can improve our mediation outcomes.