I found this paper on the use of drama techniques for helping young people affected by trauma and violence.
There has been some discussion in the interim about how to use these methods safely, with professionals like Van der Kolk feeling they may re-expose and re-trigger if not done properly.
Friday, November 20, 2009
Monday, October 26, 2009
Keeping it Simple
Top Ten from Sandy Davis
Here are 10 tips that will help you keep your self-care activities simple and effective:
(1) Because you cannot give what you do not have, make it a daily habit to pay yourself first. Once you’ve done so, you’ll be able to pay others generously, compassionately, and continuously.
(2) To ensure that you pay yourself first, you may need to invert your priorities. As much as possible, make your daily self-care your first priority, and then schedule everything else in your day around that sacrosanct priority.
(3) As much as possible, turn your ongoing self-care activities into consistent daily routines. Make them unfailing habits.
(4) Make sure you set up self-care structures for yourself that are ecological and that work well for you. If you find a particular structure to be causing you more stress than it is relieving, redesign that structure.
(5) Chunk down your daily practices until they are manageable ongoing commitments—and then do them without fail. It’s better to aim just high enough to hit the target right in the center, than to aim way too high and miss the target completely.
(6) Remember to embrace your failures with honesty and humility. If something is broken, fix it.
(7) Remember also to joyfully celebrate all your successes—big, small, and even miniscule. Small successes beget big ones.
(8) Keep your sense of humor about you. A little bit of laughter goes a long way.
(9) Dare to imagine outrageously wonderful adventures and successes, and then pursue them with abiding courage, patience, and faith.
(10) Practice, practice, and practice some more.
Sandy Davis | (207) 563-7263
Sandy@ResilienceWorks.com | http://www.ResilienceCircle.com
Here are 10 tips that will help you keep your self-care activities simple and effective:
(1) Because you cannot give what you do not have, make it a daily habit to pay yourself first. Once you’ve done so, you’ll be able to pay others generously, compassionately, and continuously.
(2) To ensure that you pay yourself first, you may need to invert your priorities. As much as possible, make your daily self-care your first priority, and then schedule everything else in your day around that sacrosanct priority.
(3) As much as possible, turn your ongoing self-care activities into consistent daily routines. Make them unfailing habits.
(4) Make sure you set up self-care structures for yourself that are ecological and that work well for you. If you find a particular structure to be causing you more stress than it is relieving, redesign that structure.
(5) Chunk down your daily practices until they are manageable ongoing commitments—and then do them without fail. It’s better to aim just high enough to hit the target right in the center, than to aim way too high and miss the target completely.
(6) Remember to embrace your failures with honesty and humility. If something is broken, fix it.
(7) Remember also to joyfully celebrate all your successes—big, small, and even miniscule. Small successes beget big ones.
(8) Keep your sense of humor about you. A little bit of laughter goes a long way.
(9) Dare to imagine outrageously wonderful adventures and successes, and then pursue them with abiding courage, patience, and faith.
(10) Practice, practice, and practice some more.
Sandy Davis | (207) 563-7263
Sandy@ResilienceWorks.com | http://www.ResilienceCircle.com
Thursday, October 15, 2009
Wrongly Pathologizing Populations
Vanessa Pupavac's article "Pathologizing Populations and Colonizing Minds: International Psychosocial Programs in Kosovo" appeared in Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, Vol. 27, 2002.
It is worth a read: http://tr.im/BXxh
Pupavac correctly cautions against superimposing Western notions of how whole populations (e.g. refugees) get traumatized because it interferes with self-government potential (among other things).
It is worth a read: http://tr.im/BXxh
Pupavac correctly cautions against superimposing Western notions of how whole populations (e.g. refugees) get traumatized because it interferes with self-government potential (among other things).
Saturday, September 19, 2009
Friday, August 21, 2009
Better Health Care Depends on a Stronger Democracy
A Statement from Everyday Democracy, AmericaSpeaks, Demos, and Professor Archon
Fung of Harvard’s Ash Institute for Democratic Governance and Innovation
August 13, 2009
excerpts:
A key founding principle of our democracy is that the voice of the people should have an influence on public policy, at elections and in between them.
Beyond simply having a voice, people should have a chance to be informed, to hear each other, to work through tough decisions with each other and their elected officials, and to use democratic processes to figure out how to solve the problems that face us.
At a bare minimum, efforts to spread misinformation and to insult people who have different views and concerns harm our social fabric and weaken our democracy. We must find ways to move beyond stereotyping and preconceived notions of what “the others” believe and care about.
As critical as this is, we need to go further than encouraging more civil behavior. What we urgently need is a vibrant, inclusive democracy where people from different views and backgrounds can routinely meet, hear each other out in productive ways, and find ways to move forward.
Tuesday, August 11, 2009
22 ways to de-stress
Although it is annoying to have to click anew for each one, a very fragmenting reading experience, these 22 tips are great!
Wednesday, July 29, 2009
Developing resilience intentionally
(The following is Copyright © 2009 Alexander M. (Sandy) Davis. To find out more about Sandy Davis and the resilience-related manuals, programs, services, and newsletter he offers, visit http://www.resilienceworks.com.)
Developing Resilience-Readiness via Ongoing “Micro-Preparation”
The process of continually meeting small daily challenges that you intentionally set for yourself [i.e., handling well-chosen micro-disruptions] amounts to “micro-preparation.” It is akin to lifting weights.
If you want to strengthen your muscles, all you need to do is to start working with weights in such a way as to stress your muscles repeatedly, in small daily ways. At first, you won’t see much change. But as you methodically develop an ability to lift heavier weights and increase your repetitions, you can both strengthen your muscles and increase your overall physical power. The results of stressing your muscles in this slow, steady, and deliberate manner are predictable, and, indeed, they are all but inexorable.
In a similar way, you can strengthen your figurative resilience-readiness “muscles.” Instead of lifting physical weights that stress your body’s actual muscles, you can use intentional micro-disruptions to gently stress your whole self in whatever worthy ways you choose.
Once you make the process of enhancing your resilience-readiness through micro-preparation a longstanding daily habit, when “the big one” (i.e., a full-scale catastrophe) finally comes along, you will find yourself to be well-practiced and fully prepared to handle just about any disruption with surprising ease. Your resilience-readiness “muscles” will be strong.
Why Choose Self-Care Challenges?
If you decide you would like to use this process of micro-preparation to strengthen your resilience-readiness, the most effective and rewarding small challenges to practice on are those that pertain directly to your own daily self-care.
When it comes to taking good care of ourselves, most of us tend to cut corners. Because we tend to assume that we are virtually invulnerable, we imagine we can afford to neglect the very things that are most central to leading a long, healthy, and fulfilling life. We are prone to overlook the importance of making ongoing investments in our health, our well-being, and our natural creativity. This oversight can land us in big trouble.
When you fail to take good care of your own “power plant,” you can expect to live a life in which you will likely face major setbacks such as significant health challenges, a chronic lack of energy and stamina, a discouraging lack of engagement with your work, debilitating boredom, depression, and/or a near-total lack of personal fulfillment. In other words, you will most likely be neither healthy nor happy.
The good news is that all of the above personal setbacks are largely avoidable. By making small daily investments in your own self-care, you can safeguard yourself from being set back by these and other personal misfortunes. Moreover, you can do so relatively quickly, painlessly, and in a manner that is easy to sustain. (If you are already experiencing any of the above misfortunes, sustained improvements in your self-care can greatly accelerate your recuperation.)
The bad news (or at least it may appear to you at first to be bad news) is that you first have to choose worthwhile self-care “practice” challenges, and then you have to actually do the work required to meet those micro-challenges successfully. When you do, how you experience your own life will start to shift in positive ways—more often than not both quickly and dramatically. And you will be pleased.
"Disruptions are inherently stressful. They seed change.
Intentional disruptions seed intentional change."
– Sandy Davis
Developing Resilience-Readiness via Ongoing “Micro-Preparation”
The process of continually meeting small daily challenges that you intentionally set for yourself [i.e., handling well-chosen micro-disruptions] amounts to “micro-preparation.” It is akin to lifting weights.
If you want to strengthen your muscles, all you need to do is to start working with weights in such a way as to stress your muscles repeatedly, in small daily ways. At first, you won’t see much change. But as you methodically develop an ability to lift heavier weights and increase your repetitions, you can both strengthen your muscles and increase your overall physical power. The results of stressing your muscles in this slow, steady, and deliberate manner are predictable, and, indeed, they are all but inexorable.
In a similar way, you can strengthen your figurative resilience-readiness “muscles.” Instead of lifting physical weights that stress your body’s actual muscles, you can use intentional micro-disruptions to gently stress your whole self in whatever worthy ways you choose.
Once you make the process of enhancing your resilience-readiness through micro-preparation a longstanding daily habit, when “the big one” (i.e., a full-scale catastrophe) finally comes along, you will find yourself to be well-practiced and fully prepared to handle just about any disruption with surprising ease. Your resilience-readiness “muscles” will be strong.
Why Choose Self-Care Challenges?
If you decide you would like to use this process of micro-preparation to strengthen your resilience-readiness, the most effective and rewarding small challenges to practice on are those that pertain directly to your own daily self-care.
When it comes to taking good care of ourselves, most of us tend to cut corners. Because we tend to assume that we are virtually invulnerable, we imagine we can afford to neglect the very things that are most central to leading a long, healthy, and fulfilling life. We are prone to overlook the importance of making ongoing investments in our health, our well-being, and our natural creativity. This oversight can land us in big trouble.
When you fail to take good care of your own “power plant,” you can expect to live a life in which you will likely face major setbacks such as significant health challenges, a chronic lack of energy and stamina, a discouraging lack of engagement with your work, debilitating boredom, depression, and/or a near-total lack of personal fulfillment. In other words, you will most likely be neither healthy nor happy.
The good news is that all of the above personal setbacks are largely avoidable. By making small daily investments in your own self-care, you can safeguard yourself from being set back by these and other personal misfortunes. Moreover, you can do so relatively quickly, painlessly, and in a manner that is easy to sustain. (If you are already experiencing any of the above misfortunes, sustained improvements in your self-care can greatly accelerate your recuperation.)
The bad news (or at least it may appear to you at first to be bad news) is that you first have to choose worthwhile self-care “practice” challenges, and then you have to actually do the work required to meet those micro-challenges successfully. When you do, how you experience your own life will start to shift in positive ways—more often than not both quickly and dramatically. And you will be pleased.
"Disruptions are inherently stressful. They seed change.
Intentional disruptions seed intentional change."
– Sandy Davis
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