Posts Tagged ‘trauma’
Mental Health Monday: Announcing August’s CELEBRATING THE JOY OF SURVIVAL TELESEMINAR
Celebrating the Joy of Survival: Coping with Trauma Anniversaries
…will be the first event of its kind to allow survivors to come together in a live virtual format and trade ideas and suggestions for how to deal with difficult dates.
I have been asked, and am honored, to participate in a wonderful roundtable TELESEMINAR with MICHELE ROSENTHAL at HEAL MY PTSD, LLC. August 31st is her trauma anniversary and the day she will be launching her book Before the World Intruded: A Memoir About Trauma, Survival, Identity, and the Pursuit of Joy. She has asked me as well as the following other 3 speakers to participate in a panel discussion on trauma, recovery, and dealing with trauma anniversaries. I am truly honored to be a part of this event and with such esteemed and passionate co-panelists. As a trauma survivor, a therapist, and a believer in everyone’s capacity to not just survive life but thrive at living I think this groundbreaking event is a beautiful thing. To find joy out of sadness and brokenness, to be able to celebrate what once was a point of darkness, and to be able to speak one’s experience out loud to help others. I hope this event will be just the precipice, the beginning of a new way to conceptualize trauma anniversaries. Empowering. Strengthening. Reflective. Reverent. Beautiful.
The next few Mondays I will be discussing trauma and healing as a primer for this wonderful virtual roundtable event!
John W. Fisher, DC
Dr. Fisher served in the U.S. Army with the 4th Infantry Division, Vietnam, in 1968 at the age of 20. One year later, he returned home appalled, angry and unbeknownst to himself, stripped of his own identity. The sport of surfing and later discovering his professional desire in chiropractic kept his shattered perspectives on life “alive,” but he knew he was different. After a twenty-year marriage dissolved, he began his search for healing, using the same model that had been successful in his Wholistic chiropractic practice — heal by correcting the cause of the disorder without treating the symptoms.
Psychological counseling was important in this process and led him to become an author of two novels: “Angels in Vietnam” and “Not Welcome Home.” He has traveled back to Vietnam several times and now leads trips through Soldier’s Heart initiative, an organization founded by Dr. Ed Tick, author of “War and the Soul.” The latter writing was the icing on the cake for John’s healing venture of PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder). Dr. Tick redefines the disorder to read post-terror soul distress, or estrangement of one’s soul or identity during trauma and leads his readers to understand why it happens and how to get it back. Dr. Fisher is now the Senior Veterans Liaison for Soldier’s Heart and travels nationally to speak of the methodologies necessary to heal PTSD. For more information about Drs. Fisher and Tick, please review the following websites: www.johnwesleyfisher.com,www.soldiersheart.net
CPL Eric Cox
US Marine Corps combat veteran CPL COX is not a hero. He’s an average American who joined the military during peacetime with the dream of honor and willingness to sacrifice in the service of his country. On February 6, 2003, he left loved ones behind, stepped into the darkness of the unknown and found himself in the midst of Operation: Iraqi Freedom.
This memoir, rewritten from the pages of his journal, delivers an informative, personal, thought-provoking and sometimes poignant look into his wartime experience. But, even more remarkable, is the insight it provides regarding the inner struggles CPL COX had to face as a member of the United States Military ¾ the physical, emotional and psychological challenges faced similarly, yet in their own individual ways by American servicemen and servicewomen all over the world.
Kellie Greene, SOAR Founder
Kellie Greene is a rape survivor and now activist and founder of Speaking Out About Rape (SOAR). Kellie has been National Spokesperson for the Pfizer/YWCA “Moving Past Trauma PTSD Community Outreach Program”. In 1999, she founded SOAR, a nonprofit organization dedicated to protecting the rights of victims of sexual assault. SOAR is committed to raising awareness about rape and its consequences, including PTSD. Kellie also coauthored Florida’s “Sexual Predator Prosecution Act of 2000?. The law mandates consecutive sentences, rather than simultaneous sentences, for any repeat sexual offenders. In addition, Kellie helped pass legislation that prohibits hospitals from charging rape victims for forensic teams. As a result of her efforts, Kellie earned the Survivor Activist Award from the Florida Council Against Sexual Violence.
To join us for this special event all you have to do is register to receive the call information. That’s it! Just click on the link below to go to the REGISTRATION PAGE!
VIRTUAL ROUNDTABLE DISCUSSION will be held at 8pm EST/5pm PST on August 31st.
REGISTRATION: Access registration through the link below
http://healmyptsd.com/awareness/celebrating-the-joy-of-survival-coping-with-trauma-anniversaries
If you’re on Twitter, we’ve set up a hashtag for the event: #TraumaAnniv. You can follow and tweet along with Michele and the rest of us @healmyptsd and@michelePTSD.
If you are on Facebook Michele has designed a Facebook page where survivors can post their own ideas about coping tips. Feel free to add your presence: http://www.facebook.com/home.php#!/pages/Heal-My-PTSD-The-Joy-of-Survival/142523485765647?ref=ts
Mental Health Monday: Therapy Soup Interview with Me, Horses, Trauma, & Addiction Discussed
A horse doesn’t care how much you know, until he knows how much you care. by Pat Parelli
Richaard Zwolinksi, LMHC, CASAC and his wife CR Zowlinksi right a great blog/article repository over at PSYCH CENTRAL, one of the only comprehensive virtual hubs for discussions on issues of mental health. I was honored when this wonderful team/couple asked me if I would do a question/answer interview with them on horses, trauma, and addiction. Of course I would! One of my favorite things to discuss. They are presenting it in a THREE PART SERIES over at Psych Central in their virtual article space called “Therapy Soup”.
You can check out part one at : http://blogs.psychcentral.com/therapy-soup/2010/07/ptsd-addiction-and-healing-with-horses-part-one/
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Creativity Tuesday: Vibrancy of Life Through Art {& creativity lifeboats}
I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for the echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of hunger for life that gnaws in us all. byRichard Wright, American Hunger, 1977
The ex-English Major in me wants to deconstruct this sentence from start to finish. Every word, every comma, every part of it’s structure is dripping with boldness and defiance. It makes me want to get out of my chair and take action. What action? I don’t know but the potency inspires. Just me? Ok. So, I can get a little excited and emphatic about words. That has always been the case. Since early readings of LM Montgomery’s prose by my mother before I could utter full sentences I have been incited to action by words and brought more alive and bold in my own life by words I have read on a page. I have dug in with my fingers to the prose and come out invigorated. Just me again? Maybe.
But there is something about the creative experience, both imbibing it and creating it, that is profound and brings to life our own lives and living worlds to even greater vibrance than before we explored it through the lens of creativity. Whether painter, scupltor, woodworker, photographer, writer, or needlepointer there is osmething about the experience of art (creating or absorbing) that makes us be present, be in the now, and explore our own inner landscapes in new ways and to greater depths. We mine ourselves and our world and up comes something, as Richard Wright states, that is worth saying. And, as he describes, with every bit we create, every word that we write, even the tiniest reverberation draws us forward to create more and speak louder onto the page or the canvas or film.
Writing has been in my veins ever since I picked up my first pencil. I had dreams of writing a novel when I was still scribbling on those giant pads with dotted lines in elementary school. When I went through my traumas in my late teens and suffered for years with PTSD I stopped writing. My inner landscape had gone numb and I lost myself. Without the reflection of the word or the will to pick up a pen and speak I had no way to reflect back to myself who I was. My voice had always been first in paper and then outloud. When I came crawling out of PTSD years later I had to rediscover me–both in life and on the page. Who was I? What was my voice? What did I have to say? My writing life was so imbedded in my “self” and definition of self that I had to rediscover my voice on the page to know what I wanted to say in my life.
I wrote yesterday about empowerment and for me writing has been my voice, my picket sign, my empowerment far more than anything else. I can write it before I say it. Whatever “it” is. Even my own rauma story came out on paper before it ever came off my lips.
What creative experience gets your blood pumping, your energy blazing, your vision of the world more acute and finite? What creative experience makes your heart sing? Maybe it is an actual creative art: writing, painting, photography, film, dance, theatre. Maybe it is just something that brings you fully alive: swimiing, surfing, motorcycle riding, fishing, parenting.
What makes your heart sing? What do you wish you had in your life to make it more vibrant and alive? What do you have in your life that brings you that joy and energy for living that you are grateful for?
I thank writing for many things. I thank my mother for teaching me the love of words. Words have been my lifeboat. What is your lifeboat?
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