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Lives In Progress
May 2008
published by Lifestage, Inc.
"Between simulus and response there is a space.
In that space lies our power to choose our response.
In our response lies our growth and our freedom."
Victor Frankl, Man's Search For Meaning
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cosmic winks Jude Treder-Wolff, LCSW, RMT, CGP
It is said that Carl Jung came up with the idea of synchronicity during a dinner conversation with Albert Einstein in the 1920's. If true it stands to reason. Jung believed that synchronicity - defined as "meaningful coincidences" or two seemingly unrelated events connected by virtue of a common meaning - occurred because there is a unified field of consciousness, "a fusion of inner and outer reality" in which all past and future coexist.[i] Einstein's relativity speaks to the inter-connected whole, and synchronicity to those moments the cosmos "winks" at us through unexpected, mysterious, seemingly magical connections showing up between people and events. These moments are described as deeply personal, "boundary events" which often occur at periods of major life transitions, attention-grabbers through which we find the strength to endure those times when growth means slogging through a thick fog on an uncertain path. The creative process of change is like that sometimes. Here is an example.
Wandering through the Union Square Green Market in Manhattan one Wednesday afternoon, I ran into an old friend from college. It was April, 1983, almost a year into my first professional job, and I should have been thrilled to see another Midwestern transplant. After all, she was someone who knew the old me, before reality bitch-slapped my idealism, and before my student loan debts came due and I needed a second job to make enough money to stay at the professional job long enough to figure out my life. But thrilled I was not. I felt obligated, trapped into an artificial show of warmth. I was in no mood.
Any other Wednesday at that time I would have been at work, wrapping up morning groups. I was a creative arts therapist on a psychiatric unit in a Newark medical hospital, and my last-minute decision to take a personal day from work had so far had done nothing to shake off the sense of futility that overwhelmed me on there. The gloom of the place darkened my thoughts well into the night, like the claustrophobic gray walls- air so thick with cigarette smoke you could write in it- dimmed our spirits during the day.
Here is what I was thinking when I spotted my old college friend: "what does it say about me that I am burned out after less than a year in my first professional job?" So I did not want conversation about how I was doing and what is new. All I could do was whine that professional life felt sadly like a fool's errand, and that college now seemed a fool's paradise. But there she was, and she seemed so happy to see me, and then there we were in a diner having coffee, going over our appointment books to make dinner plans, when she pointed to a date marked "anniversary."
"Five years ago on that date," she said thoughtfully, "I bought a book and it changed my life," she said. This had to be some important book.
"What is it called? Who wrote it?" I demanded. She went on to describe exactly where she was - at Webster's Bookstore on Downer Avenue in Milwaukee, near the University of Wisconsin where we had been students at the time - and what she was wearing. She remembered exactly what time of day it was - 3 p.m. - and that she often had a drop in energy around then, so she wanted to stop at the Coffee Trader, just a block or so from the bookstore, for a cup of coffee - flavor of the day: hazelnut - and that flavored coffees were sexy back then but now they were just kind of sad.
"What was the book?" I asked.
"I can't remember," she said.
"You say a book changed your life but you can't remember the name of it," I said.
"You're not listening," she whispered.
Now, I did not say to her that listening is what I do better than anything. I did not, at that moment tell her that listening to a rotating group of mentally ill patients when there is no one else around to do it requires epic degrees of attention and empathy if not actual skill, although it seemed petty and dramatic to say how defensive and irritated I felt at her simple accusation. But then again. Here I was, a thousand grueling little tasks on my to-do list the only justification for an afternoon away from work, unpaid of course, but precious as only an afternoon in New York City can be when a person is feeling defeated and disillusioned and depleted. And because I had lost my sense of purpose that sort of compensated for low pay and low status in my profession, and I felt adrift and restless and angry without it, she was going to be damn sure I was listening and she was going to tell me the name of the book that changed her life.
"You must remember who wrote it." I insisted. "One word in the title. Anything."
READ MORE
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things we should know:
CARE FOR WOUNDED WARRIERS
Iraq and Afghanistan veterans are returning from their service with disportionately
high, pervasive, long-term psychological traumatic effects.
A recent study by The RAND Corp about this situation states: "Among our recommendations is that effective treatments documented in the scientific literature - evidence-based care - are available for PTSD and major depression. Delivery of such care to all veterans with PTSD or major depression would pay for itself within two years, or even save money, by improving productivity and reducing medical and mortality costs."
READ THE DOCUMENT
Read "half the battle: healing the spiritual wounds of war"
Including an interview with Larry Winters, LMHC, a Viet Nam combat veteran and author of Making and Unmaking of a Marine.
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turning points
by Nicholas Wolff, LCSW, BCD, CGP
The scene: A psychodrama and group psychotherapy training workshop intensive, conducted by a highly-respected trainer.
The situation: We have been assigned the task of creating an on-the-spot warm-up exercise for a group. Be spontaneous, but use what we have learned.
My dilemma: I am standing in front of this group of twenty-odd colleagues, some of whom are brilliant and a bit intimidating, and here's the thing: My mind is blank.
I am supposed to be speaking. People are staring at me, patient and trusting. But I have nothing. Nadda. No ideas, not even a hint. Time seems to slow down. The anxiety is overwhelming. So I take action.
I drop to the floor of the stage. I lie there with eyes closed. Still nothing. Now my heart is pounding, because I've started something here and it has to go somewhere or I risk total humiliation. I begin to roll around on the floor of the stage, eyes still closed, mind still blank. I pretend to be in a deep sleep, and having a nightmare. Finally my mind clicks on. All in the same moment, I make a decision to sit up and open my eyes. I tell the group that I just fell asleep and while sleeping, had a dream. I say that they were all in the dream, in which I was standing in the middle of Yankee Stadium all by myself and they were all hiding in various places in the stadium. With that I tell them to - right now - find their hiding place. Everyone scatters and creates their spot. I "find" one person, and together we "find" another, until everyone is out of hiding. Then we discuss:
- How did you like your hiding place?
- What were you hiding from?
- What was it like to be found?
This experience was over 30 years ago but I remember it with intensity still today because it was for me a turning point. In this encounter with anxiety and public exposure of my self-doubt, I made a shift. It was perhaps the first time I consciously, knowingly allowed my emotions and inner struggle to guide me rather than shut them down or cover them up. The success of that experience was confirmation that my efforts to challenge old ways of thinking - which often seemed to be plodding along going nowhere - were paying off. I could feel I was on a new road.
As a psychotherapist and a trainer of both healers and teachers, it is my privilege to help people navigate some of the most significant - also the scariest and most high-stakes - changes in their thinking and their lives. Most of us begin a process of change when the roads we have been going down no longer lead to happiness nor health but we are held back by an understandable fear that we will not achieve the life we envision nor realize our desires.
For many of us, this is because our built-in psychological GPS is obsolete and needs an upgrade. The good news is that a creative process of change equips us to navigate new paths of action and expanded directions in life.
If a therapeutic or learning process is successful, it is because the therapist helped a person navigate their own consciousness deeply enough to install an internal, emotional GPS that turns what had been unmanageable or hidden feelings into cues and messages by which we are able to make the proper turns on our journey through life. Change is a creative process, and we simply will not know at what moment the new roads we take will begin to feel like our own. E.L. Doctorow described the writing process in a way we can apply to our own creative process of change,that it is "like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way."
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Featured Article
from April Newsletter
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Creativity With 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]
Social worker and singer/actress Staci Block 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 ON THIS TOPIC:
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.
An extensive library with research and resources is available at The Prevention Researcher
[1]Cheryl-Anne Cait, "Identity Development and Grieving: The Evolving Processes for Parentally Bereaved Women" British Journal of Social Work2008 38(2):322
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