Tagged With "Kathleen Friend"
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Reassessing our Priorities and Healing during the Pandemic: A Resource
Recently a friend reached out to say they finally got to read through the "Healing Program" on Wrestling Ghosts' Website and how helpful it was. It made me reflect on how the pandemic, like most crises in our lives, can open up the opportunity to reassess our priorities and refocus on our and our families' wellbeing. Healing childhood trauma starts with understanding the impact of toxic stress in childhood. That understanding lifts our shame and self-blame. Then comes visualizing what...
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Unbecoming an Armadillo: Recovering from Trauma with EMDR
Unbecoming an Armadillo By: Victoria F. Burns, PhD, LSW Victoriafrances49@gmail.com Instagram: @betesandbites “When you are traumatized, you are basically in a permanent defensive mode” — Gabor Mate I’m sitting across from Meg on her charcoal grey love seat. My forearms are resting on a velvety mustard-yellow throw cushion and I’m holding crescent shaped pulsers in each hand. Meg’s my psychologist; a rare gem who specializes in chronic illness and trauma. Every two weeks, we spend an hour...
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Coping with Stress During the COVID-19 Pandemic: One-Pager
Coping with Stress During the COVID-19 Pandemic: One-Pager
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A Better Normal: Healing Trauma Through Music with Nick Larson - Friday, Aug 14th at Noon PT
Please join us for the ongoing community discussion of A Better Normal, our series in which we envision the future as trauma-informed. Friday, August 14th, 2020 12pm PT // 1pm MT // 2pm CT // 3pm ET Hosted by Alison Cebulla and facilitated by Cissy White of ACEs Connection with Guest Nick Larson, lead singer of band Próxima Parada. >>Click here to register<< "Before any of us had the vocabulary to define ACEs [ACEs = adverse childhood experiences], we were using music as the...
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A Listening Curriculum: School Radically Re-imagined in the Time of COVID-19
Symbolic of our quick-fix culture, I was recently asked to do a five-minute radio interview addressing the challenge of remote learning without the peer group dynamics of a regular classroom. The time constraint motivated me to get to the core of the education crisis precipitated by the coronavirus pandemic. Decades of developmental science research reveal that our physical and emotional health- our very sense of self- emerges in moment-to-moment interactions in our social world. The...
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Loving An Orchid: Understanding Child Abuse Trauma's Impact [psychologytoday.com]
By JoAnn Stevelos, Psychology Today, August 21, 2020 As a child, I was an orchid but lived like a dandelion. I have always prided myself on my resiliency, for surviving a long and painful childhood filled with abandonment, psychological, physical, emotional, and sexual abuse . Child abuse can do that to you—give you a false sense of self and what resiliency really looks like. Resiliency is not just surviving. This false narrative of resiliency can take years to undo. One approach is to try...
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D J Jaffe and A Culture of Fear by Michael Skinner
Dear Pete, I read your blog post, “Influential Critic D. J. Jaffe Has Died: Remembered As “Bomb Thrower” Who Demanded Mental Illness Reforms” and thought of how he has done so much to hurt those of us labeled “mentally ill”. You considered him a friend, he was anything but for those of us struggling with the challenges of trauma, abuse and mental health concerns. These are some of my thoughts on D.J. Jaffe. He did not have the best interests of people struggling despite all of his rhetoric,...
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Connection in Recovery During COVID-19
2020 has been a completely different kind of year for many of us, most notably with the current Coronavirus pandemic. As we have been forced to adapt to the obstacles it has thrown our way, new routines have been established to try to maintain some semblance of normalcy and connection with one another. As it looks like this will be our reality for the foreseeable future, it seems prudent to check in and rehash some of the ways in which we can stay connected— particularly for those of us in...
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New Resource: Coping with Stress During the COVID-19 Pandemic One-Pager (English & Spanish!)
English: The California Department of Public Health, Injury and Prevention Branch (CDPH/IVPB) and the California Department of Social Service, Office of Child Abuse Prevention’s (CDSS/OCAP) , Essentials for Childhood (EfC) Initiative , ACEs Connection , and the Yolo County Children’s Alliance have co-created a newly developed resource, “Coping with Stress During the COVID-19 Pandemic” in both English and Spanish. This material is intended for Californian families experiencing the severe...
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New Resource: Coping with Stress During the COVID-19 Pandemic One-Pager (English & Spanish!)
English: The California Department of Public Health, Injury and Prevention Branch (CDPH/IVPB) and the California Department of Social Service, Office of Child Abuse Prevention’s (CDSS/OCAP) , Essentials for Childhood (EfC) Initiative , ACEs Connection , and the Yolo County Children’s Alliance have co-created a newly developed resource, “Coping with Stress During the COVID-19 Pandemic” in both English and Spanish. This material is intended for Californian families experiencing the severe...
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Creating meaning in our choices as CPTSD survivors
There is a place that we get trapped in the choices that we make. I want to think that conflict happens when there is a collision of values between the person you were and the person you are becoming. In the moments of change in the healing process, we reach plateaus, not as in the end but as in a time to create a shift. When this happens, we are faced with making a choice: do we act according to the person we were or the person we have become and are moving in towards. We hit a wall in...
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What Really Makes Us Resilient? [Harvard Business Review]
Eleven years ago my friend Sally was diagnosed with ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, the degenerative motor-neuron disease which gradually renders you unable to move, to eat, to talk, and in the end to breathe. She had just turned 40, two kids, happily married to a prince of a guy, so much to look forward to, for all of them. And then this horrible suffering. This “very slow car crash” was her husband’s description and I can’t get that image out of my head. The wreckage, the...
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If you want to heal childhood trauma, you have to heal your body.
356 pounds?! Are you kidding me, Michael? What the fuck are you doing to yourself? Every morning I would wake up and watch the number on the scale tick up as I slowly allowed obesity to run wild and consume my body. Fat . I was always the chubby kid. I shopped in the boy's husky section at Walmart as a preteen. Husky for the unware is the polite nomenclature for fat kids. I spent summers running around with my shirt on. I ate entire boxes of gummy bears for dinner. I never ordered just one...
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Self-care is not participating when you don’t want to.
There is power in standing up for yourself and sticking to your personal boundaries regarding how you participate in life as a trauma survivor. I hate the constant barrage of showing up because of obligation. Fuck that. I mean, when I think about the fact that people will shame you over not doing something that you don’t want to do, I get irate. I think about how many times in our lives that we are put in the position of showing up due to social constructs, and I want to smash my face into...
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Self-Compassion Will Make You a Better Leader [hbr.org]
By Rich Fernandez and Steph Stern, Harvard Business Review, November 9, 2020 It’s understandable for leaders to get caught up in fear, doubt, and criticism when facing critical business decisions that will have a major impact on lives and livelihoods. But what’s needed in times of uncertainty and disruption is mental clarity, emotional balance, fortitude, and vision. To move from self-doubt and paralysis to clarity and action, you need an often-misunderstood skill: self-compassion. Based on...
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Sending Love Vibrations to Lost Loved Ones (wakeup-world.com)
When we lose a loved one, we feel the helplessness and heart-wrenching tugs of grief. We are suddenly left alone. For years, the person at our side, a parent, grandparent, sibling, friend, suddenly cease to exist. The void left in one’s life is too wide to stitch. We become a shadow of our former self. Continuing life unfurls as a morbid chore. In recent months many people have lost loved ones in the cruellest of circumstances. Visitors were not permitted at bedsides or at gravesides. But I...
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How to care for yourself during difficult times
Many people with #ACE’s (Adverse Childhood Experiences) are finding that the early #trauma and sense of unsafety they endured growing up are being re-triggered during these fear-laded times, amidst the #Covid #pandemic, political upheaval, and feeling isolated. Stress and uncertainty can trigger old, sticky feelings of fear, anxiety, or loss from long ago and bring up new, painful negative thoughts and physical symptoms. This can be true even when we’ve worked really hard to resolve our...
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List of Books, Therapies & Resources for Healing Chronic Illness and Other Effects of Trauma (Free Downloadable PDF)
These are the books, therapies and resources I wish I'd known about when I was a family doctor and when I first started getting sick with what would turn out to be a disabling chronic illness. This compilation includes the most helpful resources I’ve found over the past 20 years of learning about the science of adversity, why it's not psychological and how to heal the effects of trauma.
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How to Feel More Connected and Less Lonely Right Now (thriveglobal.com)
After nearly a year of living through the coronavirus pandemic, many of us have dealt with bouts of loneliness . The feeling stems from all sorts of places: you might be lonely because you’re spending time in actual isolation , or you might be lonely because you’re feeling disconnected from yourself and your pre-pandemic life. Whatever the cause, feeling lonely can be deeply unsettling, with negative consequences for our mental health. And while we can’t always control the circumstances that...
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The Friend of Love
This article was originally posted on the Forward-Facing Institute Blog written by Rebekah Brown The Friend of Love - Resiliency My best friend is moving away. She’d been dropping hints for months, but I decided to retreat behind a wall of denial and hope for the best. The best was not to be. Ellen is moving, and there isn’t anything I can do about it. We had our share of joyous events over the time we had together. Once, a seafood company sent $300’s worth of prime, unreturnable Maryland...
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"Brush Away Your Tears" - to all the survivors of childhood abuse-past and present
Hi folks, April is National Child Abuse, Sexual Assault Awareness and Childhood Sexual Abuse Prevention Month. This is a song of mine I wrote many years ago to all the survivors of childhood abuse-past and present. You deserve healing and support. Take care, Michael. "Brush Away Your Tears" - YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SpYYc6tl4s&t=4s The song was also used in the film documentary - Boys & Men Healing Healing From Child Sexual Abuse -...
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Left Behind: Surviving Suicide Loss (dailygood.org)
In the spring of 2017, Nandini Murali, a South Indian journalist and author, returned from an out-of-town assignment to an eerily quiet home. Typically, her husband would greet her at the front door, but that morning he hadn't answered her phone calls. It was Nandini who discovered his body, and confronted an unfathomable reality. T.R. Murali, one of the most prominent urologists in India, and her beloved husband of 33 years, had ended his own life. "Space dissolved," writes Nandini, of that...
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Natally Bones
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Deborah Brooks
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Professional Joy Stalker
I was thinking today that I might make t-shirts and coffee mugs that say, “professional joy stalker” and come with a list of blissful things to remind myself and others to appreciate. As my friend Lynn says,” What if joy is stalking us?” and all we need to do is be still long enough to notice and marinate in multiple daily pleasures. I love that idea but it didn't come naturally to me. What came naturally was fear. I was always on the search for danger, betrayal, and disappointment. I hunted...
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Love Your Enemies: What it Means & How to Do It (upliftconnect.com)
The mutual intimacy we share with our best friends is one of the greatest gifts of life, but it is not always given when we call someone a friend. Friendship need not even be mutual. How about organizations like Friends of Our Local Library? Friends of Elephants, and of other endangered species? Friendship allows for many degrees of closeness and takes many different forms. What it always implies is active support of those whom we befriend, engagement to help them reach their goals. With...
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The most important thing you can do with your kids? Play with them! says Dr. Bruce Perry
“The most important thing you can do with your children is play with them!” said Dr. Bruce Perry, noted child psychiatrist and author. He was answering the question, “How do we prepare our children to go back to school next fall?” Perry, a brain expert specializing in how children are impacted by trauma, gave a presentation on his neuro-sequential model of brain development to more than 800 people at an Austin Ed Fund event Monday evening. The co-author, with Oprah Winfrey, of the new book...
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The Surviving Spirit Newsletter May 2021
Healing the Heart Through the Creative Arts, Education & Advocacy Hope, Healing & Help for Trauma, Abuse & Mental Health “ Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars”. Kahlil Gibran The Surviving Spirit Newsletter May 2021 http://newsletters.survivingspirit.com/pdfs/2021-05-The_Surviving_Spirit_Newsletter_May_2021.pdf Hi folks, Greetings from New Hampshire....spring has arrived and the weather has been all over the place –...
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How to support a friend or family member who's struggling with their mental health [ideas.ted.com]
By Sahaj Kaur Kohli, Ideas.Ted.com, May 28, 2021 Every one of us has mental health in the same way that every one of us has physical health. Yet despite the prevalence of mental health struggles, there is still so much stigma around them. Worldwide the leading cause of disability is depression, according to the World Health Organization, and in the US alone, nearly 1 in 5 of adults lives with a mental illness. As a mental health therapist-in-training and the founder of Brown Girl Therapy ,...
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Failing our Children -- What You Can Do to Help
Co-authored by Leanne McEvoy, a mother of two and advocate for children's mental health and well-being who is passionate about making sure kids have solid emotional foundations to navigate life. She holds a Master’s degree in Clinical Social Work with a concentration in children and families and has advocated for improved policy and legislation around school safety. This is a true story shared with me but something similar might be unfolding near you as well. Recently, a ten year old boy’s...
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Creativity may be key to healthy aging. Here are ways to stay inspired. [washingtonpost.com]
By Matt Fuchs, The Washington Post, July 13, 2021 If you’re interested in staying healthy as you age — and living longer — you might want to add a different set of muscles to your workout routine: your creative ones. Ongoing research suggests that creativity may be key to healthy aging. Studies show that participating in activities such as singing, theater performance and visual artistry could support the well-being of older adults, and that creativity, which is related to the personality...
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Resource: Coping with Stress During the COVID-19 Pandemic One-Pager (English & Spanish!)
English: The California Department of Public Health, Injury and Prevention Branch (CDPH/IVPB) and the California Department of Social Service, Office of Child Abuse Prevention’s (CDSS/OCAP) , Essentials for Childhood (EfC) Initiative , ACEs Connection , and the Yolo County Children’s Alliance co-created “Coping with Stress During the COVID-19 Pandemic” in both English and Spanish. This material is intended for Californian families experiencing the severe economic consequences resulting from...
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A Solution to the Desperate Need to Belong
As humans, we have a basic, primal need to belong. Belonging is defined as ‘the feeling of security and support when there is a sense of acceptance, inclusion, and identity for a member of a certain group . It is when an individual can bring their authentic self to others, including friendships, family and work.’ Feeling disconnected, unimportant, or not cared about can translate into feelings of loneliness. This has led to much of the suffering our society is experiencing today. Cigna...
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My Biggest Insight of the Summer (Healing Complex PTSD and Chronic Illness)
Spring in my garden is a riot of color. I caught the above pic of my poppies just past their peak after deciding to replace them and wanting to document the process. Because uprooting a cheery, bright colored plant that makes me happy in order to take the chance that something else might do an even better job can feel, as a friend of mine once quipped, "fraught with peril." And that's what it can feel like when we are in the process of healing. When, instead of believing that this is the...
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I'm Grateful for the Hugs I Can Now Share–and Haunted by the Ones I Can't (time.com)
The first time I invited a good friend not just over to but into my house, postvaccination , sans masks, I couldn’t even wait until she walked up to my door–I ran outside to greet her, and we tackle-hugged each other in the driveway. We both held on tight, the otherworldly buzz of a thousand cicadas in our ears, as we took turns exclaiming how good it was to see each other. We hadn’t hung out in person since January 2020, and of course I was looking forward to talking, sharing a meal,...
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Self-Advocacy: The Basis of Self-Care
Since September is suicide awareness month, learning about self-advocacy is the basis of all healing from complex trauma and defeating suicidal ideation in oneself and dealing with it in others. When you stand up for yourself and meet your needs, it is easier to meet life on life’s terms and respond better in times of crisis. This article shall explore with you who and what a self-advocate is, plus the advantages self-advocacy brings to the lives of those who practice it who live under the...
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The Surviving Spirit Newsletter April 2022
Healing the Mind, Body & Spirit Through the Creative Arts, Education & Advocacy Hope, Healing & Help for Trauma, Abuse & Mental Health “ Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars”. Kahlil Gibran The Surviving Spirit Newsletter April 2022 Hi Folks, The latest edition of the Surviving Spirit Newsletter - sharing Hope and Healing Resources for Trauma, Abuse & Mental Health is posted online -...
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Veterans Find Peace on America’s Trails (yesmagazine.org)
Spending time in nature, or “ecotherapy,” is increasingly recognized as a helpful therapy for people suffering from PTSD. It’s a path to recovery that Cindy Ross promotes in her new book, Walking Toward Peace: Veterans Healing on America’s Trails . She profiles former soldiers who suffer from depression, guilt, nightmares, and hypervigilance as a result of their damaging experience in war. Regaining equilibrium in civilian life is yet another battle for these wounded warriors, sweated out on...
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One Reason to Choose Forgiveness Over Revenge [greatergood.berkeley.edu]
By Elizabeth Hopper, Greater Good Magazine, May 16, 2022 Imagine that you’re at the grocery store, and someone else pushes past you, bumping into you. Or imagine that you’re out with friends, and a friend makes a teasing comment on a topic you’re sensitive about. You might feel a variety of emotions—surprised, shocked, or upset. Experiences such as this—ones where we are insulted, belittled, or made to feel invisible—can even leave us feeling less than fully human . This, in turn, can cause...
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Thoughts & A Song To Share
“ There can be no keener revelation of a society's soul than the way in which it treats its children.” - Nelson Mandela “ Anything that has real and lasting value is always a gift from within.” - Franz Kafka “ Staying quiet about one’s struggles limits that person’s ability to seek proper help or treatment.” - Sarah Bregel Michael Skinner: "Brush Away Your Tears" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SpYYc6tl4s “BRUSH AWAY YOUR TEARS”© Michael Skinner Brush away the tears from your eyes my...
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How You Can Help - Healing Childhood Trauma in Adulthood
Hi Folks, My latest sharing - I read my chapter from the book, " You Can Help - A Guide for Family & Friends of Survivors of Sexual Abuse and Assault " by Rebecca Street. Honored to be a part of this book along with the other 19 survivor/thriver contributors. I also share some words from Rythea Lee's book - " Trauma into Truth - Gutsy Healing and Why It's Worth It " - The healing thoughts and wisdom from both books are applicable to all survivors of trauma and abuse. How You Can Help -...
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The Healing Power of Strength Training [nytimes.com]
By Danielle Friedman, Photo: Vanessa Leroy/The New York Times, The New York Times, July 7, 2022 When Cheng Xu was serving in the Canadian Armed Forces as a paratrooper and infantry officer, he experienced a series of traumatic events in rapid succession — his best friend and fellow officer took his own life, a soldier under his command was injured during a live fire exercise and a close friend’s father was kidnapped. He felt like the world was collapsing around him everywhere except at the...
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Candice Valenzuela: What if self-care isn't the Answer? Tune in for ‘History. Culture. Trauma.’ podcast July 14.
Can collective care heal communities, especially communities struggling with systemic racism and historical trauma? Join PACEs Connection CEO Ingrid Cockhren and guest Candice Valenzuela on PACEs Connection’s podcast “History. Culture. Trauma.” as they address that question. They’ll discuss collective care, especially how communities struggle with system racism and historical trauma as they strive to heal. The podcast airs on July 14 at 1 p.m. PT/ 4 p.m. ET on the VoiceAmerica Talk Radio...