Dignity

President Obama said he’s proud of Jason Collins, the NBA player who disclosed that he’s gay this week, and said he called him to tell him so.

The president said Americans should be proud that “this is just one more step in this ongoing recognition that we treat everybody fairly. And everybody’s part of a family, and we judge people on the basis of their character and their performance, and not their sexual orientation.”

Traumatic Transference and Countertransference: Minefield or Gold Mine?

As part of our foray into the blog world, we would like to increase your awareness of events Womencare Counseling Center is involved in or hosting. Please take a look at this event, which is happening at the end of May. We'd love for you to join us!

Event Details
Traumatic Transference and Countertransference: Minefield or Gold Mine?

• Date and Time: Friday, May 24, 2013, 9:00 a.m. - 4:00 p.m.
• Location: Hilton Garden Inn, Evanston
• Presented by: Laurie Kahn and Janet Migdow
• 6 CEUs are available
  

Many therapeutic dilemmas and disasters described in clinical literature are with trauma survivors. The interpersonal terrain of these therapeutic relationships is filled with opportunities for the therapist inadvertently to retraumatize the client.

On the other hand, the awareness and the successful management of traumatic transference and  countertransference open doors that can deepen our understanding of the client's dissociated traumatic injuries and associated affects. We believe that the provision of safety in trauma therapy is intimately connected to the management of traumatic transference and the traumatic countertransference engendered in the therapist.

In this workshop we will explore therapeutic opportunities and challenges presented by this transferential field. We will pay special attention to the particular difficulties of both erotic and sadistic transference and countertransference with clients who have experienced relational traumas.

How To Register

• Register online
  Once you have completed the online registration form you will be directed to the payment page. You can also return to this page and then make your payment. 
• Call us at 847-491-0530, and provide us with your name, mailing address, phone number and payment information. 
• E-mail Julie Dinelli at jdinelli@womencarecounseling.com and provide us with your name, mailing address, phone number and payment information. 
• Mail a completed registration form with a check or credit card information to:

Womencare Counseling Center
1740 Ridge Avenue, Suite 201
Evanston, IL 60201
Attn: Registration

Keep on Running

Today at an interfaith prayer service, President Obama addressed the city of Boston, a city in shock, a city grieving its losses, a city grieving the wounded.

He spoke to a city also brimming with pride, celebrating their goodness, their shared humanity, and their resilience. 

 Many honored the city where in the midst of bomb blasts people ran towards the wounded, not away.

I am humbled and awed today by the collective insistence on love, strength, and determination that pervaded every speech given by the city’s leaders, and that poured out of the hearts of every-day folk on the streets of Boston.

 In the face of adversity these voices are resounding and inspiring.

My thoughts move to my clients who face of adversity. They witness and experience cruelty and abuse. Their voices are quieter, and sometimes silenced. In President Obama’s words "Even when our heart aches, we summon the strength that maybe we didn't even know we had, and we carry on." My clients too run marathons that require perseverance, guts and determination.

May we honor all those who persevere, and all those who run towards the wounded.

Thank you President Obama for insisting, “in the face of cruelty, we chose compassion.”  

Laurie Kahn

Vacation; Cure for Compassion Fatigue?

I am a recent convert to vacations as a method to combat ‘the cost of caring.’ 

There is a cumulative toll when we, professionals or other caregivers, are exposed to the suffering of other human beings. We may come to feel exhausted, helpless and numb.

There are reams of articles and literature on this subject.  We call it Compassion Fatigue, Vicarious Trauma or Secondary Trauma. I have addressed audiences on this topic over the years. Though I am a believer in self-care, I have always put more stock in community care. I have always noted that walking beside compassion fatigue is compassion satisfaction.

I believe the cost of turning away from others’ suffering is greater than the cost of caring. Strategies that sustain our spirit are essential: mindfulness, surrounding ourselves with gentleness, embracing our creativity, the use of consultation, making meaning in the company of others, and social activism all seem quite promising to sustain our resilience in the face if adversities.  

I have been baffled when surveys of counselors, and other providers of care, list vacations as one of the top antidotes for Compassion Fatigue.

Aren’t vacations a form of denial or avoidance? Aren’t vacations reserved for the privileged, those who would never choose to be social workers?

Truthfully I dreaded vacations.

When the noise stops and my to do lists vanish I felt more panic than the relief predicted by the self-care books. Waiting at the threshold of my well-chosen vacation spot are swirling feelings that my daily busyness allows me to avoid.

There are also ghosts that breathe down my neck or pull at my skirt insisting that I pay attention to them. They are your everyday ghosts that carry the commonplace personal and interpersonal issues I like to put on the back burner, losses that I hoped time alone would resolve. What good, I wonder,  is a vacation if I have to spend it being haunted and bombarded with unwanted feelings?

Maturity, experience and humility are great teachers. I now know that during vacations, no mattered how brief or extended, I must make room for reflection, for feelings of all shapes and sizes. Whatever is haunting me must be welcomed, not avoided.

Now on vacations I write each morning and wait to see what appears on the page that has been waiting for words. This ritual often includes weeping, a few revelations and reconnection with ignored parts of myself.

Last weekend I stayed in a cabin next to Warren Woods State Park, less than a two- hour drive from my home.  My dog Kali, my favorite role model for the practice of enjoying the moment, came too. I walked in the woods. My mind wandered to my mother in hospice care. I cried. Kali chased squirrels, and we walked up hills and discovered a beach. The smell of wet sand, the sound of the waves caressing the shoreline and seagulls squawking as Kali ran behind them put my world back in balance.

I am now a fan of the quiet spaces in addition to the precious connections with friends, colleagues and family who refuse to turn away.

Laurie Kahn
Director 

Pressing Pause

PRESSING PAUSE

ens-newswire.com

“Before printing was discovered, a century was equal to a thousand years.” -Thoreau

I wonder what Thoreau would have said about the invention of the internet.

Recently, the staff at Womencare invited child and adolescent therapists to come share in a conversation that struggled to assess and consider the impact of technology on our kids, our relationships, and our lives. In the brief 1 ½ hour discussion, we touched on many things.

We discussed communities- the creation of new, and the strain on old.

We pondered social rules- what it means to be a friend, and what it means to be a friend on Facebook, and when and how to bridge those relationships.

We thought about information- how to wade through the seemingly endless stream of data and finding ways to sift the good from the bad.

We wondered about neurological changes- if the very fabric of our brains is changing because of the new ways we receive and process data.

We considered safety- how to protect our children and ourselves in a world with even more ambiguous boundaries.

Eventually, an important question emerged- when and where do we stop to consider all of these pieces in order to act, as opposed to react? As therapists, we try to provide a space in our client’s lives for them to begin to consider their own choices with wisdom and grace. As people, we do this while trying to forge our own path through this changing scenery. Some try to abstain almost entirely, while others immerse themselves in the new world, rushing to keep up with the latest development. Either option limits our opportunity to best serve our clients, who look to us for guidance and balance. So how do we play that role in a world where people frantically feel that speed is of the essence, and feel frantic about keeping up?

Ultimately, the answer may be to do exactly what we did. We took a moment to press pause on the information overload and come together to share our knowledge, in order to best help our clients. It seems we all came away from that conversation with something new- a new thought, new guideline, or new piece of information. We wish to offer a sincere thank you to everyone who came, and an invitation to them and others to continue to take those moments when we can find them. Together, we can hold that space to think and make choices in a more powerful way than we can traveling alone. (And no one’s phone went off during that whole hour and a half… at least not audibly!)

Ellen Lonnquist 

Yoga Group: Listening to Your Body, Listening to Your Heart

As part of our foray into the blog world, we would like to increase your awareness of events occurring at Womencare Counseling Center. Please take a look at this Yoga group, which will be occurring in March and April. We'd love for you to join us!

About the group: In our bodies we experience the challenges and tensions of life hardships, yet the body can be the most forgotten element in our healing journey. This six week group will introduce participants to a supportive and soothing yoga experience through physical postures, breathing techniques, hand gestures, and meditation. The facilitators are therapists who work with the many faces of trauma, mind/body connection and are trained yoga instructors.

Group Details:

• When: Saturdays, 3:00-5:00, March 16 - April 20, 2013
• Where: 1740 Ridge Avenue, Suite 201, Evanston, Illinois 60201 
• Led By: Merari Fernández Castro
• Program Fees: The Yoga Group is $210 per person for the series. Group fee includes program materials. Scholarships are available. Refunds permitted until one week before the workshop and are subject to a $30 administrative charge.
• RSVP:  To join one of our therapy groups, please contact our Intake Counselor at 847-475-7003.

Invisible Victims of PTSD

Thank you Alex Kotlowitz, author, neighbor, and Northwestern University’s Writer in Residence, for insisting in your New York Times article (The Price of Public Violence, 2/23/2013) that we expand the conversation about children and murder.

Thank you for insisting that in addition to mourning the victims, in addition to sending our deepest regrets to the families of the children, in addition to all our attempts to console by smothering schools with cards and teddy bears, that we speak about the less visible victims.

Kotlowitz reminds us that when “Hadiya Peddleton, the fifteen year old public school student and band majorette, who just a week earlier had preformed at president Obama’s inauguration, was killed on Jan. 29, she was standing under an awning in the park with a dozen friends.” Her treasured friends huddled under the awning on Jan. 29, and that day their world was also changed forever. 

The witnesses, the ones who were missed by the bullet, the ones who were spared, the ones who watched Hadiya Peddleton, all the Hadiya Pendeltons in other neighborhoods. The friends and family members of fourteen year old Dajae Coleman of Evanston, the children of Sandy Hook Elementary, all of them were witnesses and they are haunted by trauma. Kotlowitz reminds us that their sense of future is altered by what they experienced.

In 1994 the DSM-IV (the diagnostic manual) added one word to the criteria for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder from the previous edition. The word was witness. It stated that one criteria for PTSD was that “the person has experienced, witnessed, or been confronted with an event or events that involve actual or threatened death or serious injury, or a threat to the physical integrity of oneself or others.”

The children and families, who walk the streets where the murder of youth is frighteningly commonplace or for those who sleep in nicer bedrooms and once imagined it could never happen here, they may all be the hidden victims of PTSD. 

And thank you Alex Kotlowitz for also paying homage in your article in the New York Times to the impact on other witnesses, those of us on the front lines. The social workers, the child advocates, the schoolteachers, the first responders whose souls and bodies are also infected. We call it secondary trauma, vicarious trauma; we call it heartbreak. 

The witnesses multiply and so too do those who suffer from PTSD, this has become a hidden public health crisis.

Let us also remember that the solution may reside in the witnesses. Those who refuse to turn away; those who refuse to think it is somebody else’s problem, the enlightened witness: communities that refuse to be indifferent, who are committed to sustain their outrage when a child, anyone’s child, is murdered and those who are determined to seek solutions even when it would be easier to turn away. 

Laurie Kahn

Co-Director of the Trauma Training and Consultation Program

Director and Founder Womencare Counseling Center