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In This Issue:
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Creativity Key To Connecting With Adolescents: Two Innovative Programs
Time For Teens Fundraiser on April 30, 2008
Getting Over Yourself...Because Nothing Else Seems to be Working: May Performance Schedule
Creativity Counts
States of Mind: Excerpt from
Possible Futures: Creative Thinking For the Speed of Life
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Creativity Key in Connection to Adolescents:
Two Innovative Programs
By Jude Treder-Wolff, LCSW, RMT, CGP
An adolescent's inner life often feels a bit like being in a command performance of an improvised play. Intense. Urgent. A work in progress out there for all to see. Teens are living expressions of the change process, with all its upheaval and uncertainty and sense of possibility. Because their development involves so much of the tension inherent to all life transitions, teens have a heightened need for a dynamic balance between stability and flexibility from the people and world around them, which makes them uniquely vulnerable when faced with loss. "Because they are already experiencing a shaky sense of self, grief and loss creates different challenges for teens than for any other age group," states Laraine Gordon, LCSW, an actress and social worker who founded and directs Time For Teens, a not-for-profit organization based in Southampton, NY that offers a bereavement camp in the summer and creative workshops throughout the year, specifically designed for adolescents.
Creativity is key. "Grief that is pushed down will surface eventually," Ms. Gordon explains, "and there is a direct correlation between acting out behaviors such as drinking and drug use and the loss of a loved one. Utilizing creative techniques to help a teen express what they feel and to help explain the normal grief response helps promote emotional health. Psychodrama is an extremely helpful tool, because teens love to be dramatic and creative at the same time, and it does not feel so much like therapy to them." And current research bears this out. A study published in the British Journal of Social Work found that engaging adolescents in an active, dynamic process of remembering and creatively constructing a relationship to the person they lost significantly contributed to identity development.[1]
Another study found that drama therapy aided psychological adjustment to trauma by providing:
- empowerment as well as a healthy form of escape and enjoyment
- a sense of personal space
- an awakening to creativity and a sense of personal effectiveness
- a metaphor to explore personal issues.(2)
Social worker and singer/actress Staci Block, MSW, LCSW uses improvisation with teens as an effective technique for creative communication about important issues as well as for development of a range of life skills with teens. She created and directs Reflections, a group of adolescent performers who present interactive shows on a range of social and educational issues, through the Division of Family Guidance in Bergen County, New Jersey. "The purpose of Reflections is two-fold," Staci states, "to raise issues with audiences on topics which are significant to adolescents, and to have the teens in the cast learn more about themselves and the issues about which they present. Although this is not a treatment program, and all the cast members are volunteers, the teens experience a process that is therapeutic and unique."
These programs allow teens to be themselves, with all their complex and contradictory emotional needs, probing looks at the world they are getting ready to take on as adults, and struggle for independence mixed with desire for guidance. Both emphasize creative experiences and group connections to maximize the healing and learning potential for adolescents. Ms. Gordon believes that resiliency is enhanced when we "give teens outlets where they can show individuality. Give them the ability to feel really good about themselves and to know that it is okay to laugh and have fun after a loss. Creativity gives them the outlet that is not typically provided them in their daily lives. They can begin to recognize what they are passionate about, find another perspective about concepts or perceptions they held about themselves." Ms. Block sees immense benefits from role-playing, which "develops empathy and the ability to see things from another point of view. This of course is helpful in life, in relationships, and in conflict resolution." Through the improvised scenes, the teens get a crash course in role-training. Through the range of issues explored in Reflections' presentations, the teens "experience situations that they may not have encountered yet in their lives. By having the chance to work through the situation in a drama, it often helps them to prepare for what they would actually do if the situation were to occur. If the situation is something the teens has already experienced, the drama can help them perhaps see it in a different way."
SOME ONLINE RESOURCES FOR WORK WITH ADOLESCENTS:
www.time4teens.org
Ms. Block wrote an in-depth discussion of Reflections titled "Reflections: A Teen Issues Improv Troupe" a chapter in Interactive and Improvisational Drama: Varieties of Applied Theatre and Performance, Adam Blatner, MD and Daniel Wiener PhD, eds.Read more about this book at http://www.interactiveimprov.com/contents.html.
Prevention Researcher has information and links to other organizations actively working to help teens create healthy lives and change society for the better.
(1) Anne Cait, "Identity Development and Grieving: The Evolving Processes for Parentally Bereaved Women" British Journal of Social 2008 38(2):322
(2) "Clinical Effectiveness of Dramatherapy in the Recovery From Neuro-Trauma" Disability and Rehabilitation, 21.4 April 1999: 163
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Lifestage, Inc.
496 Smithtown Bypass Suite 202
Smithtown NY 11787
631-366-4265
Nicholas Wolff, LCSW, BCD, TEP
Jude Treder-Wolff, LCSW, RMT, CGP
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Creativity Counts
by Nicholas Wolff, LCSW, BCD, CGP
"Despite our cultural bias that all power resides in the outward, visible world, history offers ample evidence that the inward and invisible powers of the human spirit can have at least equal impact on our individual and collective lives." Parker Palmer, PhD in Teaching With Heart and Soul: Reflections on a Spirituality in Education
Creativity is the capacity to change the way we think, view ourselves, others and the world from new angles and perspectives, and make new connections between ideas, events or things. Developing our creative capacities has real
benefits to our roles at work, at home, and in society.
Research finds that well-being goes up, and symptoms of depression and other emotional disorders go down, for individuals who work to develop greater control over conscious states of mind. Robert Cloninger of the Center for Well-Being at Washington University at St. Louis uses the term "mental self-government" which his studies show can result from becoming more internally directed than externally controlled, more cooperative and compassionate than competitive, more intuitive and thoughtful than rigid or intellectual.(1) These qualities are directly related to the skills and discipline acquired through creativity training.
A study published by Columbia University's Center for Arts in Education Research reports that teachers in schools providing an arts-focused curriculum "spoke of the effects of arts learning along five specific dimensions of ability. These were the ability to:
Express ideas and feelings openly and thoughtfully;
Form relationships among different items of experience and layer them in thinking through an idea or problem;
Conceive or imagine different vantage points of an idea or problem and to work towards a resolution;
Construct and organize thoughts and ideas into meaningful units or wholes;
Focus perception on an item or items of experience, and sustain this focus over a period of time." (2)
Parents, teachers, counselors, and therapists who commit to a process of evolving their own "mental self-government" and expansion of creative capacities are better able to help teens navigate the sometimes stormy emotional seas of adolescence. The more secure our psychological boundaries, the better we are able to assist younger people to establish their own, and to shape their identity as empowered, independent-minded adults.
(1) C. Robert Cloninger,"The Science of Well-Being: An Integrated Approach to Mental Health and Its Disorders," World Psychiatry, June 2006: 72.
(2) J. Burton, et al "Learning In and Through The Arts: Curriculum Implications" Center for Arts Education Research, Teachers College, Columbia University, July 1999: 8.
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Chapter 9. States of Mind
The hallmark of emotional maturity is the willingness to change, evolve or expand our roles to deal with changing circumstances. The impetus for change can come in the form of pain and desperation, sometimes from an inner drive for something better. It can be a crisis that is also an opportunity. Some of us move toward change through bitter experience. In this case, some of us would be me.
Here is what happened. The year was 1981, in the dark ages before cell phones and for me - due to a crippling ignorance about how the world works and a state of financial affairs best described as economically-challenged - before credit cards. I lived in New Jersey, worked in Manhattan, and drove a 1974 Buick Apollo I bought in Wisconsin for a song when it was on life support after a terrible accident. The car was not old, it looked fine to me, and I drove it first from Milwaukee to New York, then from the Bronx to south Jersey to Harlem to wherever else a whim possessed me. Read more
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