What is Behavioral Relaxation Training?

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"In my career, I have found a handful of resources that I believe belong close at hand to every clinician, applied researcher, and student of human service fields. Behavioral Relaxation Training: Clinical Applications with Diverse Populations, Third Edition is one of them. I have always been very impressed with the simple elegance of BRT and its adaptability to the gamut of applications so well covered in this volume.

The reader is immediately exposed to a view of the range of applicability of BRT. Each chapter subsequently exposes the reader to a review of the basic components of BRT, its research and clinical history, means for measuring relaxation, rules for relaxation, and of considerable importance, the role of the trainer. Chapters also have relevant supplements providing additional details of assessments and measures and other relevant information such as Behavior Analyst certification. 

The entire book is like BRT itself, simply elegant. It is easy to read, magnificently thorough without in any way being cumbersome, and at the same time, concise. It will be remarkably useful for clinicians and researchers to use it with a singular problem of focus, or with the panoply of disorders covered. It is a gift to clinicians and researchers"

—Dr. John R. Lutzker, Professor Emeritus, Georgia State University
 

A potential alternative is a method known as Behavioral Relaxation Training (BRT; Poppen, 1998; Schilling and Poppen, 1983).

BRT focuses on the training of visible behaviors that allow an observer to independently determine whether or not the trainee is relaxed. The procedures of BRT involve modeling very specifically defined positions/behaviors in 10 areas/actions of the body listed in the accompanying chart. The person is taught to imitate the appropriate behaviors and sit in an overall position that will bring on the relaxation response. The observer can score whether or not the person is relaxed by using the Behavioral Relaxation Scale (BRS), a reliable and valid checklist for recording the presence of relaxed behaviors (Poppen and Maurer, 1982; Schilling and Poppen, 1983).

Over the past five years, we have trained 19 patients referred either for clinic-based services, inpatient treatment, or outpatient consultation. Anecdotal observation indicated that training the 10 behaviors specified in the BRT procedure appeared more difficult when taught in an unspecified order, especially when behaviors involving fine motor skills (e.g., keeping eyes lightly closed) were interspersed with gross motor behaviors (e.g., keeping torso in contact with the back of a cushioned chair). Consequently, clinicians were instructed to train the 10 behaviors in a structured order from large-to-small muscle groups: body, head, shoulders, feet, hands, throat, mouth, eyes, and finally breathing and quiet.

To date, 12 studies have been conducted to evaluate the teaching and treatment applicability of BRT with individuals with mental retardation. These studies demonstrated that the participants could acquire BRT more rapidly and more effectively than other forms of relaxation training. Additionally, participants demonstrated improvement in short-term memory and attention (Lindsay, Baty, Michie, and Richardson, 1989; Lindsay, Fee, Michie, and Heap, 1994; Lindsay and Morrison, 1996; Morrison and Lindsay, 1997).
In the neurobehavioral unit in-patient and out-patient programs at the Kennedy Krieger Institute, we have begun investigating the potential of BRT as an addition to the comprehensive behavioral treatment interventions we use for children with developmental disabilities and severe behavior problems (Paclawskyj, 2002, 2004, 2005).

Dr. John Michael Guercio joins me again to discuss a topic that we briefly covered in his last appearance; Behavioral Relaxation Training.

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In this show, John does a deep dive into this work, drawing on the research of Drs. Roger Poppen, Duane Lundervold, and of course John himself.

Along with the aforementioned Drs. Poppen and Lundervold, John is the co-author of the third edition of the text, Behavioral Relaxation Training. He is also the author of Assessment of Adult Core Competencies: Teaching Skills to Adults with Autism and Severe Behavioral Challenges, which we discussed at length in his earlier appearance in Session 140.

We discuss how BRT was developed, its current applications, and the training required to do it. We also spent a good deal of time talking about becoming trained to implement BRT, scope of practice issues, and protecting client safety. So in case we were not clear in the discussion, if this is something you'd like to do, please seek out the appropriate training and supervision.