The language of “mental health” pretends to an authority and a scientific exactitude it does not deserve and never earned.And, this language rarely offers much help when it comes to really understanding our pain, making sense of how we got here, and even less when it comes to finding ways we can heal and support others in their healing.
We give this language more power over us than it deserves and more power than is good for us.
Q. What if we choose different language ?
As Daniel Siegel puts it:
The diagnostic manual is concerned with categories
not pain.
Jim Carrey here, taking an idea from Jeff Foster and talking about framing experiences we call “depression” as a call for deep rest.
“People talk about depression all the time. The difference between depression and sadness is sadness is just from happenstance —whatever happened or didn’t happen for you, or grief, or whatever it is.
Depression is your body saying f*ck you, I don’t want to be this character anymore, I don’t want to hold up this avatar that you’ve created in the world. It’s too much for me.
What if we think of the word ‘depressed’ as ‘deep rest’ ?
Your body needs to be depressed. It needs deep rest from the character that you’ve been trying to play.”
The overall aim of this workshop is to begin building an understanding of the many and various ways that life can leave us wounded that is large enough, wide enough, and deep enough it enables us to generate the kind of capacity for supporting individual, family, community and cultural healing that we will need as we face the future.
Learning Objectives
Those who participate in this workshop bill be better able to
Express a meaningful understanding of trauma in simple language that is compassionate, pragmatic, and that need not break our brain, yet enable us to generate maximum capacity for learning, connecting and healing.
Appreciate the limitless ways that life can leave us wounded, and the infinite variety of how that very unhealed woundedness manifests in uniquely personal ways.
Begin to identify our own need for healing.
Appreciate and identify how unhealed trauma-woundedness manifests in the ways we tend to shape our world, especially in our relationships, in our teams, workplaces and institutions and in our culture.
Turn our attention away from categorizing to ways we can support healing individuals, families, groups, communities, cultures, peoples and at societal level.
Play our part in building a world that leaves us less wounded and less often.
Work in ways that support growing our collective capability to heal ourselves, and each other at individual, family, group, communities, cultures, peoples, and societal levels.
Workshop Description
Please Note: This workshop will not seek to offer a definition of “trauma”: what trauma is and what trauma isn’t.
We believe that attempting to do so is futile and restricting, and more often than not results in more people being left traumatized by how they experience life; experience support from services; and also hinders and even prevents healing. It also prevents us finding and treating ways we can support individuals, groups, families and whole communities in healing.
This excludes and silences so many of us; and especially those who need support most.
It denies us support and it disables our whole society society from moving toward collective healing.
We can make a different choice.
No amount of the kind of conversation we are having about trauma to date will heal us.
It will, and can only, result in more of what we have already: only those privileged few who have been deemed to be “just traumatized enough” are offered any kind of support at all.
Register now, or scroll down for more information.
The conversation around trauma is expanding faster that any of us can keep up with. Many are fighting to have their own pain and struggle included a trauma context.
Conversely, many others fight to resist that, claiming only they have knowledge, expertise, power, and authority to define what trauma is and what trauma is not. Some even going so far as dismissing the very real, living pain that others live with others as #nottrauma, or #notrealtrrauma.
This results in many – even the vast majority – of us being excluded from consideration that their own struggle-in-life is related to their experiences in life; and especially how they have been treated since whatever happened did happen; and more especially how they are treated when they seek support from services.
We only need be willing to open our eyes to see that it is plain as day that many of our institutions and services fail wholesale, the many who live with the woundedness of living as a human in this world that seems, daily, to be made by humans to be one that is less and less suited for humans to flourish.
And, more tragically, even many of those health services, and even more so, some of those claiming to be “trauma-informed” also fail us miserably, some even shamelessly.
No amount of more of the same will never be enough
No amount of more of the same will enable us to find a way out of this mess.
No amount of more of the same power struggles between those institutions and individuals who claim sole right to define our pain will help us move towards finding and creating ways to heal our own pain, nor to find and create ways support each other in healing.
No amount of more of the same treating trauma as something that only a highly trained professional can possibly understand or can possibly have anything to offer to help us find our way to healing.
No amount of more of the same thinking that trauma as a very narrowly controlled-by-experts list of very specific life experiences that can happen to an individual will help us understand, help us heal, or support each other in healing.
No amount of more of the same defining trauma as a solely individual experience , will help us truly understand when trauma is also a collective and cultural experience.
No amount of more of the same defining trauma as a deficit, deficiency or disorder, and cf categorizing those individuals, groups families, communities and cultures as being deficient, disordered or just plain not up to living in a cruel, unjust and often uncaring world will lead us to find and create pathways of healing.
No amount of more of the same regarding trauma as something that only a highly trained professional can possibly understand will get us anywhere other than where we are now.
And, no amount of more of the same old bollox will help use create a world that leaves us wounded less or less often.
What if…
What if we took just some of the energy, attention, and resources that are consumed by seeking to win unwinnable arguments, seeking to define what trauma is and what trauma is not, and used it instead to inquire curiously how we could build new ways of understanding that promote learning, connecting and healing?
We will need to have a different conversation about trauma, and the first step to doing that is to resist the temptation to continue having the same conversation that we keep having about trauma.
This workshop offers an opportunity to participate in and to experience a different kind of conversation about trauma, woundedness, learning connecting and healing.
Trauma means wound – and life can be wounding.
The woundedness we can be left living with lives in our body, mind, spirit, relations, and spirit and
manifests in an infinite variety of ways. Each of us is wounded in our own unique way, and each of us can find our own unique pathways to healing.
Wounds can heal – if we have the supports that we need to be able to heal. There are no prescriptions, templates or cookie cutter recipes.
We will need to learn to have a different kind of conversation
If we are to get ourselves out of this mess we made – the mess that we made- then we will need to learn to have different kind of conversation.
The workshop: Trauma: less bollox, more healing offers an opportunity to participate in and experience the beginning of a different conversation.
A conversation intended to find and build a different kind of understanding that can enable us to co create co generate new ways, and re-energize some older ways to, that we can shift focus to ways we can support individuals, families, groups, communities and cultures in healing and supporting healing.
And, the workshop is designed as a first step.
Over the two days we will engage in learning with and from each other, dialogue and curious inquiry
Day One will focus on sharing multiple understandings and hearing multiple perspectives and understanding how our understanding of trauma can itself lead to those seeking services being more traumatized, and how they may be more conducive to healing.
The aim is to allow us to build deeper, more full understanding trauma, how it affects our lives , and implications for how we design, fund, manage and operate services , especially those intended to support healing, and that enables us to generate new ways, and to re-energize some older ways, that support learning, connecting, and healing.
Day Two will shift focus to making more concrete – we will use an open space technology format in which participants design their own projects, and focus on area of interest to them, e.g. a deeper inquiry into some ideas or some aspect or aspects already touched upon, or co creating and prototyping new ways of bringing to bear an understanding of trauma that better healing and that address concerns in work, team or organization.
unbolloxing
Participants in these workshops:
• Trauma: less bollox, more healing,
• UN_ESCALATE
will be invited to join our community of leaning and healing, which we have chosen to call: unbolloxing.
Put on Your Attachment Hat & Change your Romantic Attachment Style |Ashley Harvey @TEDx CSU
A few years ago my husband and I got road bikes so that we would have something to do together.
But what I noticed is on these road bike dates was I wasn’t very happy
Now, when I rode by myself I felt scared but empowered,
In fact, I was often singing. -I’m bad, I’m bad, I know it…
as I rode along.
But when I was getting ready to go on a road bike date with my husband I was cranky before we even left the house.
Now it’s important to know that Jordan had been mountain biking for years and he was a lot stronger than me.
So how these dates would typically go is that we’d start off and he’s up ahead riding with ease and I’m in the back struggling to keep up and already not having fun.
And my feelings of irritation would just intensify as we begin climbing those first hills. and he’s way up ahead standing up on his bike grinding it out…
This cute little spandex butt..
and I’m down at the bottom, grumbling.
and he’d often stop to wait for me at the top of the hill, all chipper…
and then I’d unleash my fury…
If I was at my worst I’d angrily complain.
Things like:
“It’s hot !” “It’s cloudy !” “My butt hurts !” “I hate this !”
I’m a super fun date.
But one day I decided to do something different: I put on what I think of as my
my attachment hat.
That’s basically like putting on your thinking cap.
But I analyzed how I was feeling from an attachment theory perspective
and
I managed to share something with Jordan that brought us together rather than pushed us apart.
So more on what I said soon.
But first I want to help you learn how to put on your attachment hat.
Now, if you’re new to this attachment business, it’s basically just about the bonding that we have in our close, ongoing relationships.
And I’ve been teaching students and couples about attachment for over 15 years in my roles as a university professor and relationship educator.
I’m drawing on the work of so many amazing attachment researchers.
What I’m going to be talking about is mainly about romantic relationships…
but
You can apply it to friends and family as well.
I do have to warn you though:
Attachment tends to stir us up, it makes us feel: uncomfortable, vulnerable, hot around the collar, maybe a little queasy in the stomach.
You might want to escape the room.
But I promise:
You’re not alone in this feeling.
We all have to deal with this attachment business together.
So
Q. What do you need to know to put onyour attachment hat ?
Five principles…
Principle #1 : Attachment is intertwined with fear
It’s important to know that neurobiologically..
Our attachment systems and our fear systems are intertwined.
And that’s across our lifespans.
So let’s imagine I experience a threat: I get some negative feedback at my job. And so my fear system fires up, and it says:
“Danger !” “Danger !” “You are in trouble !”
…and stress hormones are released.
If, during this time I reach out to someone who’s a secure attachment figure for me, like my husband Jordan, and I say
“Oh my gosh ! “I’m gonna lose my job !“
He might say :
“Okay” “That sounds really, really, tough honey. but it’s probably not as bad as you think it is “ “and, if it is, we’ll figure it out together “
So now my attachment system is turned on. It helps calm and down regulate my fear system.
That’s pretty straightforward but what if I call my husband Jordan and he doesn’t give me what I want.
What if he says:
“Honey you are always making a big deal out of nothing and I’m in the middle of something so let’s talk about this later “
Now i’m in a bind because the person who I needed to call …
My fear system is just amping it up.
And this is one of the things that makes our romantic relationships so hard and it ties to what Beckes and Coan call:
“The Distress-Relief Dynamic”
So, I turn to you when I’m in distress, you give me some support, I experience some relief, and we repeat it.
It’s pretty straightforward and it’s the making of a secure attachment in any relationship.
But it’s harder than it looks.
So…
If we think back to me on the bike…
I was in distress but I wasn’t expressing that in a way that was going to get me the support and the relief that I needed.
So,
Principle number one is that our fear and our attachment systems are intertwined.
We didn’t get to choose as kids how well our distress was relieved or how secure was the attachment that we had, and it may have changed over the course of our childhoods.
John Bowlby’s work on internal working models tells us that in our earliest relationships we form internal working models of ourselves and of others.
And if our caregivers were mostly safe and responsive then these models of ourselves and others are pretty positive.
But..
We all struggle in some way with our internal working models.
These are the basic attachment fears:
“Am I good enough ?”
“Am I lovable ?”
“Can I count on you ?”
“Can you handle me ?“
And…
We carry these fears into our current relationships and sometimes they become self-fulfilling prophecies.
So…
Back to me on the bike..
When I put on my attachment hat I was thinking a lot about my childhood fear of not being good enough and how that was tying into my current fear of not being fast enough – to ride with Jordan.
But this was leading me to come across as angry and irritable.
Which was just gonna push Jordan away. and confirm for me that I wasn’t good enough.
So…
Principle number two is about how we carry our fears into our current relationships in different ways.
Principle #3: Our attachment styles can vary
So now we’re getting to what you really want to know.
Q. What are the attachment styles ? – and what’s yours ?
So,
When we are in distress and our attachment needs are not being met…
We have two choices…
We can either amp up -which is higher attachment related anxiety
or..
We can tamp down -which is higher attachment related avoidance
So when I am at my best, I’m more secure.
When I’m at my worst, I’m a more anxious.
Four attachment styles
and these four attachment styles were originally developed by Mary Ainsworth.
So let’s go through them one at a time, starting with
1. Anxious attachment style
If we are higher on attachment related anxiety, then in our dating relationships, we can be worried about being rejected.
We can come across as a little too much in the beginning.. We can over share, We can be hyper vigilant, to our partner’s cues in ongoing relationships
“You look a lot more excited to ride your bike with Dave than you do with me. What’s that mean ?”
And when we’re upset We ruminate, We spin in our heads, And we can maximize our distress.
When we’re upset you know it.
Back to me on the bike…
We both knew I was angry
2. Avoidant attachment style
What if you’re someone who tends to minimize rather than maximize your distress?
Then we are higher on attachment related avoidance.
And so, in our dating relationships we don’t disclose as much about ourselves early on .
We come across as more aloof, or game playing.
In conflicts we want to get out of there and we tend to minimize our distress and distract ourselves with tasks
So my husband Jordan has higher attachment related avoidance.
And what this might look like is.. It’ll be a Thursday and he’ll say to me:
“you know, on Monday I was really upset about such and such”.
And I’m thinking:
“Okay, I was with you on Monday, and I couldn’t tell you were upset, and number two..”
“why didn’t you tell me on Monday?”
“because …”
But Jordan has learned to cope with the stress by sort of ignoring it for a while. And so it can take him a little while to realize what’s going on.
Whereas it takes me like 15 seconds.
This is why I love to ask Jordan’s scaling questions:
“On a scale of one to ten, how upset are you ?”
..because otherwise I can’t tell.
Now,
What if we’re someone who’s higher on both ? We’ve got more attachment related anxiety and more attachment related avoidance.
This is the third attachment style, called the…
3. Fearful – Avoidant attachment style
This can happen for us when the people that were supposed to be safe around, that we were supposed to be able to rely on growing up just weren’t that… that predictable.
And maybe they weren’t that safe.
And so now we’re in this position of really longing for connection but feeling like it could be dangerous and so we do higher amounts of both:
We move towards… and then we pull away.
Now we’re on to our fourth and final attachment style:
4. Secure attachment style
This is like the how-to of relationships – what we’re all going for right ?
um
and it’s when we have lower attachment related anxiety and lower attachment related avoidance. -because we all have some.
So people who are more secure in their dating relationships, they’re able to take it seriously but they’re not holding on to it so tight that they think they’re gonna die if their relationship ends.
And this was a personal favorite, and a life lesson for me, since I tend to be an over sharer:
People who are more secure regulate their disclosures based on how much the other person is sharing.
In their ongoing relationships they’re better able to give their partners the benefit of the doubt.
“If you’re tired or distracted that doesn’t mean that you don’t care about me.“
And in conflict…
They’re more out to understand than they are out to win.
So let’s talk more about how these attachment styles lead into our conflict patterns.
So,
Principle number 4: Attachment underlies conflict.
Therapist and researcher Sue Johnson helped us understand how attachment related anxiety and avoidance feed into a very common pattern of conflict in couples called…
The Pursue-Withdrawal Pattern
So in my own marriage I tend to be
the pursuer, because I have higher attachment related anxiety than my husband. -and he tends to be the avoider or the withdrawer because he has higher attachment related avoidance than me.
But let’s talk about a different couple.
Let’s talk about Maya and Gabby.
So, a little background…
Maya has higher attachment anxiety -and she’s learned to amp-up to get heard.
Gabby has higher attachment avoidance -she’s learned to cope with the stress by putting her head down and working. Which she’s really good at.
So, Gabby’s working late and Maya’s home, lonely and getting increasingly irritable.
By the time Gabby comes home Maya criticizes her:
“You’re always late. “
Gabby defends herself:
“It’s not all the time and it’s just this temporary project. It’ll be over soon.“
But, As soon as one person minimizes another person maximizes.
So Maya makes her case louder, better…
and Gabby starts to get overwhelmed, she feels like:
“Okay whatever I’m saying is making it worse.. so I’m just going to shut down and distract myself with tasks “
And then Gabby’s left feeling like Maya doesn’t care and this cycle will repeat itself.
Maybe on another day with a different topic.
It also shows us four important things about the four principles of attachment that we’ve talked about so far…
So it helps us understand that:
#1: Attachment is intertwined with the stress
It shows us what it looks like when that distress relief dynamic isn’t working..
So both Maya and Gabby are in distress but they’re unable to really help each other.
#2: Our childhood fears can play out in our current ongoing conflicts
Our fears that we aren’t good enough and that we can’t rely on the other person.
#3: attachment related anxiety and avoidance
can feed into a pursue-withdrawal conflict cycle
and
#4 number four
and perhaps most important, it shows us that a lot of times couples think they’re fighting about someone coming home late, or chores, but what they’re really fighting about is:
“Do you see me ?”
“Do you value me ?”
“Do you need me ?”
“Can I count on you?”
and until that gets addressed and articulated they’re unlikely to be able to resolve the conflict.
So what do we do about this ?
We can begin to talk and think about our attachment styles so..
Principle #5:Attachment is key to connection
So we can explore our own attachment style as well as the attachment styles of the people that we’re connected to.
We can watch for that pursue-withdrawal pattern in our relationships.
And
When we see it we can name it:
“Oh, we did that thing again.”
“Where I am up.. ..and then you tamp down… ..and I amp up some more… ..and ..then you shut down.”
And so
Once we name it then we can begin to change it.
And then the last one is
We can take a risk … and share our attachment needs and fears.
So if we go back to Maya and Gabby…
Maya might have been able to say
“When you are late I’m worried that it’s about me.”
And Gabby might have been able to say: something like:
“You know work is how I bring value and when you dismiss that I feel really unworthy. “
Here’s how I did it on the bike …
So
I used all five principles:
Number 1 I understood that I was in distress and I was going to need my husband Jordan to reassure me.
Number 2 I realized that my childhood fear of not being good enough was getting triggered .. and that was leading me to come across as the more anxious attachment style.
Number 3 and that was going to just push Jordan away in that pursuit-withdrawal pattern
Number 4
and I used
Number 5 To take a risk and tell him what I was feeling. and this is what that sounded like ..
When he waited for me at the top of the hill, instead of unleashing my fury, I said:
“You know what, honey I’ve been riding along here and feeling really cranky and I wasn’t sure why “
and I realized it’s because I’m worried that you don’t really want to be out here with me that you wish you were riding with Mike or Dave, somebody faster. That I’m just too slow. That you’re not even getting a workout.”
And
Jordan, being the supportive person that he is was able to say:
“It’s okay that you’re slow “ [Laughter]
I was slow !!! [Laughter]
“I was slow once too – and today isn’t about getting a workout. Today’s about being together.
Do you want to lead ? Because we can go at your pace.”
And I said:
“Are you sure ? because we could just ride separately and meet back at the house ?”
And he said:
“I’m sure. “
So,
To wrap this up…
Talking about attachment is scary, it’s uncomfortable, we hate it.
but
If we can take the risk and talk about our fears then we can decrease conflict and increase connection with the people that we love.
Steve Silberman, author of the book Neurotribes, offers a brief history of autism, from Nazi extermination plans and a discredited journal article about vaccinesand how that has shaped our current understanding of autism. Through to autistic people reclaiming their power, finding their own voice and coining the term neurodiversity, calling themselves neurodiverse and others neurotypical.
Q. Why is it that we still insist on regarding those who are different as “not normal”, “deficient” and categorizing them as “mentally ill”.
Difference is neither illness nor disorder.
Difference is just difference.
Difference is the space from which we can learn and understand.
Embracing difference is how we learn.
Human history is replete with examples of treating human difference as deficiency and disorder – and is, perhaps, one of the greatest disorders afflicting humanity.
As Silberman puts it
“we need every form of human intelligence on the planet working together to tackle the challenges that we face as a society “
Steve Silberman
00:00 / 13:39
Transcript Steve Silberman • TED2015
The forgotten history of autism
“Just after Christmas last year, 132 kids in California got the measles by either visiting Disneyland or being exposed to someone who’d been there. The virus then hopped the Canadian border, infecting more than 100 children in Quebec. One of the tragic things about this outbreak is that measles, which can be fatal to a child with a weakened immune system, is one of the most easily preventable diseases in the world. An effective vaccine against it has been available for more than half a century, but many of the kids involved in the Disneyland outbreak had not been vaccinated because their parents were afraid of something allegedly even worse: autism.
But wait — wasn’t the paper that sparked the controversy about autism and vaccines debunked, retracted, and branded a deliberate fraud by the British Medical Journal? Don’t most science-savvy people know that the theory that vaccines cause autism is B.S.? I think most of you do, but millions of parents worldwide continue to fear that vaccines put their kids at risk for autism.
Why? Here’s why. This is a graph of autism prevalence estimates rising over time. For most of the 20th century, autism was considered an incredibly rare condition. The few psychologists and pediatricians who’d even heard of it figured they would get through their entire careers without seeing a single case. For decades, the prevalence estimates remained stable at just three or four children in 10,000. But then, in the 1990s, the numbers started to skyrocket. Fundraising organizations like Autism Speaks routinely refer to autism as an epidemic, as if you could catch it from another kid at Disneyland.
So what’s going on? If it isn’t vaccines, what is it? If you ask the folks down at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta what’s going on, they tend to rely on phrases like “broadened diagnostic criteria” and “better case finding” to explain these rising numbers. But that kind of language doesn’t do much to allay the fears of a young mother who is searching her two-year-old’s face for eye contact. If the diagnostic criteria had to be broadened, why were they so narrow in the first place? Why were cases of autism so hard to find before the 1990s?
Five years ago, I decided to try to uncover the answers to these questions. I learned that what happened has less to do with the slow and cautious progress of science than it does with the seductive power of storytelling. For most of the 20th century, clinicians told one story about what autism is and how it was discovered, but that story turned out to be wrong, and the consequences of it are having a devastating impact on global public health. There was a second, more accurate story of autism which had been lost and forgotten in obscure corners of the clinical literature. This second story tells us everything about how we got here and where we need to go next.
The first story starts with a child psychiatrist at Johns Hopkins Hospital named Leo Kanner. In 1943, Kanner published a paper describing 11 young patients who seemed to inhabit private worlds, ignoring the people around them, even their own parents. They could amuse themselves for hours by flapping their hands in front of their faces, but they were panicked by little things like their favorite toy being moved from its usual place without their knowledge. Based on the patients who were brought to his clinic, Kanner speculated that autism is very rare. By the 1950s, as the world’s leading authority on the subject, he declared that he had seen less than 150 true cases of his syndrome while fielding referrals from as far away as South Africa. That’s actually not surprising, because Kanner’s criteria for diagnosing autism were incredibly selective. For example, he discouraged giving the diagnosis to children who had seizures but now we know that epilepsy is very common in autism. He once bragged that he had turned nine out of 10 kids referred to his office as autistic by other clinicians without giving them an autism diagnosis.
Kanner was a smart guy, but a number of his theories didn’t pan out. He classified autism as a form of infantile psychosis caused by cold and unaffectionate parents. These children, he said, had been kept neatly in a refrigerator that didn’t defrost. At the same time, however, Kanner noticed that some of his young patients had special abilities that clustered in certain areas like music, math and memory. One boy in his clinic could distinguish between 18 symphonies before he turned two. When his mother put on one of his favorite records, he would correctly declare, “Beethoven!” But Kanner took a dim view of these abilities, claiming that the kids were just regurgitating things they’d heard their pompous parents say, desperate to earn their approval. As a result, autism became a source of shame and stigma for families, and two generations of autistic children were shipped off to institutions for their own good, becoming invisible to the world at large.
Amazingly, it wasn’t until the 1970s that researchers began to test Kanner’s theory that autism was rare. Lorna Wing was a cognitive psychologist in London who thought that Kanner’s theory of refrigerator parenting were “bloody stupid,” as she told me. She and her husband John were warm and affectionate people, and they had a profoundly autistic daughter named Susie. Lorna and John knew how hard it was to raise a child like Susie without support services, special education, and the other resources that are out of reach without a diagnosis. To make the case to the National Health Service that more resources were needed for autistic children and their families,
Lorna and her colleague Judith Gould decided to do something that should have been done 30 years earlier. They undertook a study of autism prevalence in the general population. They pounded the pavement in a London suburb called Camberwell to try to find autistic children in the community. What they saw made clear that Kanner’s model was way too narrow, while the reality of autism was much more colorful and diverse. Some kids couldn’t talk at all, while others waxed on at length about their fascination with astrophysics, dinosaurs or the genealogy of royalty. In other words, these children didn’t fit into nice, neat boxes, as Judith put it, and they saw lots of them, way more than Kanner’s monolithic model would have predicted.
At first, they were at a loss to make sense of their data. How had no one noticed these children before? But then Lorna came upon a reference to a paper that had been published in German in 1944, the year after Kanner’s paper, and then forgotten, buried with the ashes of a terrible time that no one wanted to remember or think about. Kanner knew about this competing paper, but scrupulously avoided mentioning it in his own work. It had never even been translated into English, but luckily, Lorna’s husband spoke German, and he translated it for her.
The paper offered an alternate story of autism. Its author was a man named Hans Asperger, who ran a combination clinic and residential school in Vienna in the 1930s. Asperger’s ideas about teaching children with learning differences were progressive even by contemporary standards. Mornings at his clinic began with exercise classes set to music, and the children put on plays on Sunday afternoons. Instead of blaming parents for causing autism, Asperger framed it as a lifelong, polygenetic disability that requires compassionate forms of support and accommodations over the course of one’s whole life. Rather than treating the kids in his clinic like patients, Asperger called them his little professors, and enlisted their help in developing methods of education that were particularly suited to them. Crucially, Asperger viewed autism as a diverse continuum that spans an astonishing range of giftedness and disability. He believed that autism and autistic traits are common and always have been, seeing aspects of this continuum in familiar archetypes from pop culture like the socially awkward scientist and the absent-minded professor. He went so far as to say, it seems that for success in science and art, a dash of autism is essential.
Lorna and Judith realized that Kanner had been as wrong about autism being rare as he had been about parents causing it. Over the next several years, they quietly worked with the American Psychiatric Association to broaden the criteria for diagnosis to reflect the diversity of what they called “the autism spectrum.” In the late ’80s and early 1990s, their changes went into effect, swapping out Kanner’s narrow model for Asperger’s broad and inclusive one.
These changes weren’t happening in a vacuum. By coincidence, as Lorna and Judith worked behind the scenes to reform the criteria, people all over the world were seeing an autistic adult for the first time. Before “Rain Man” came out in 1988, only a tiny, ingrown circle of experts knew what autism looked like, but after Dustin Hoffman’s unforgettable performance as Raymond Babbitt earned “Rain Man” four Academy Awards, pediatricians, psychologists, teachers and parents all over the world knew what autism looked like.
Coincidentally, at the same time, the first easy-to-use clinical tests for diagnosing autism were introduced. You no longer had to have a connection to that tiny circle of experts to get your child evaluated.
The combination of “Rain Man,” the changes to the criteria, and the introduction of these tests created a network effect, a perfect storm of autism awareness. The number of diagnoses started to soar, just as Lorna and Judith predicted, indeed hoped, that it would, enabling autistic people and their families to finally get the support and services they deserved.
Then Andrew Wakefield came along to blame the spike in diagnoses on vaccines, a simple, powerful, and seductively believable story that was as wrong as Kanner’s theory that autism was rare.
If the CDC’s current estimate, that one in 68 kids in America are on the spectrum, is correct, autistics are one of the largest minority groups in the world. In recent years, autistic people have come together on the Internet to reject the notion that they are puzzles to be solved by the next medical breakthrough, coining the term “neurodiversity” to celebrate the varieties of human cognition.
One way to understand neurodiversity is to think in terms of human operating systems. Just because a P.C. is not running Windows doesn’t mean that it’s broken. By autistic standards, the normal human brain is easily distractable, obsessively social, and suffers from a deficit of attention to detail. To be sure, autistic people have a hard time living in a world not built for them. [Seventy] years later, we’re still catching up to Asperger, who believed that the “cure” for the most disabling aspects of autism is to be found in understanding teachers, accommodating employers, supportive communities, and parents who have faith in their children’s potential.
An autistic [man] named Zosia Zaks once said, “We need all hands on deck to right the ship of humanity.”
As we sail into an uncertain future, we need every form of human intelligence on the planet working together to tackle the challenges that we face as a society.
and Katherine and I thought I would play around with the title because the Commonwealth has connotations of money and riches and economic growth and to be perfectly honest
I’m fed up hearing about it
So that’s what I thought…
we talked about the Common Welth well as in wellness
Adam Smith talked about this not in his book The Wealth of Nations
but the book he wrote a few years earlier what was it called again?
The Theory of Moral Sentiments
in which he talked about the fact that there is something in us that requires us to see the happiness of others
even although we derive no profit from it except the pleasure of seeing it
he said at one end of the scale he saw people behaving for their own good in terms of their involvement with the market
and at the other end of the scale he saw people behaving for the good of others
and there’s clearly a spectrum between either end he said even
‘the greatest ruffian, the most abject violator of the laws of society is subject to this notion of sympathy’
he called it,
He didn’t actually mention bankers but I guess they’re probably in there somewhere.
So what I thought I would do is to pose the question:
What Causes Wellness ?
What is it that creates wellness in society ?
What is it that makes us well ?
and you’re probably sitting there thinking:
“Stupid question, isn’t this guy a doctor ? “
Doesn’t he know that what causes wellness is avoiding the causes of illness ?
Doesn’t he know that what makes us well is not being sick ?
Well that’s fair enough for you to believe that because we have for the last hundred and fifty years been brainwashed into thinking
that what matters is not being ill
but the reality is there is a spectrum here, just as there was in Adam Smith’s thinking
about well-being and wealth
there’s a spectrum between pathogenesis at one end and salutogenesis at the other.
Doctors are trained exclusively in pathogenic thought: the causes of disease.
We’re trained to diagnose it
We’re trying to take histories to detect it
We’re trying to treat it
We’re trained to even sometimes – if we go into public health – try and find ways of preventing it
That’s a disease focus.
Salutogenesis
… on the other hand is a term that comes from Salas. Salas was the Roman goddess of well-being.
also interestingly, Roman goddess of safety -interesting combination of thought there.
The idea that there is a spectrum first occurred to me best part of 30 years ago when I went to work in the Royal Infirmary as a surgeon and I was there for about two weeks and I noticed something strange they took longer to heal their wounds than all the East End hospitals I had worked in previously
If we did an abdominal incision, by about eight to ten days it was healed up and they could go home
At the Royal it was about ten, eleven days.
Subtle, but wasn’t just me
Others had noticed it and we put it down to the fact that, well, they smoke or eat the wrong kinds of food, and so on.
That will slow down healing.
Over the next few years it became very plain to me that that wasn’t the cause
and since then, in the last twenty five years our analysis has shown that
– now don’t get me
Wrong, smoking is very, very bad for you okay? if anyone here smokes stop it at once.
but we cannot ascribe the gap between rich and poor to the commonly held beliefs of smoking, fatty diet –
These have an effect
but they don’t explain nearly enough of it
so I began to look for other theories that would begin to explain what it is
that was missing in the lives of people
in the poorest parliamentary constituencies in Britain
At the lowest life expectancy, what was it that they didn’t have that others had ?
and that’s when I stumbled on the notion of salutogenesis.
and I’ll just mention one or two theories.
Emily Varner, for example, is a psychologist who studied the health of children living in a particular island in the Hawaiian archipelago where there was a high level of alcoholism, child abuse, just general chaos in life.
She found that
70% of the children grew up to have serious difficulties followed their parents into these particular patterns of living
but 30% of them survived and did well
and what she said was they acquired resilience, and what allowed them to acquire resilience was they had developed the positive attributes: they were outgoing, positive, optimistic, bright they had a significant relationship with a sensible adult – who may have been a parent or a grandparent- but it was a mentor there to help them and they received support within the community from their peers.
Another theory came from Viktor Frankl
Viktor Frankl was an Austrian psychotherapist who spent the war years in Auschwitz and he wrote a book. He went on to live till he was 95.
He wrote a book entitled Man’s Search For Meaning
and the introduction to it says if you have a Why ? to live then you can deal with almost any how
Meaning and purpose allows you to hang on to life and make the best of it no matter how miserable the circumstances are
and if you think about the way meaning and purpose and lives began to disappear in West Central Scotland: Yards closed when the steel foundries disappeared, when men suddenly had no jobs that gave their lives meaning and purpose
another notion is the notion of flourishing q
Quarry Keys an American psychologist who talks about flourishing as a cause of well-being.
People who flourish are happy, satisfied,
they see themselves as having a purpose, they are optimistic they have a degree of mastery, they have a sense of control over their lives and they have a degree of self-esteem, they accept themselves for what they are
all of these themes run through all of the different theories of well-being
but it was when I came across an American sociologist called Aaron Antonovski that things began to make sense because I was looking for a link between psychology and biology.
When I was a surgeon at the Royal Infirmary I would sign death certificates all the time but I never signed a death certificate that said he died because he was unemployed,
You died of a molecular event.
So what was the link between the social circumstances and the increased risk of molecular events, like thrombosis, and malignancy, and so on ?
And Antonovski began to fill in that space. He said unless we learn that the wonders comprehensible manageable meaningful unless we learn that we can make sense of the one then we can control to a certain extent events round about us and want to engage with that we would experience a state of chronic stress an
Antonovsky derived that thought from interviewing many hundreds of concentration camp survivors
he found that 70% of them are unhealthy but again 30% same as Verna’s discovery
30% of those adults as children had been in concentration camps survived, he said,
children who don’t acquire that sense see all the events around about them as noise not as information and they become stressed by it
and, I don’t have time to go into the detail, but we’ve followed through in great detail the biological consequences of social chaos
and I’ll just show you one example the way in which stressful events and early life change the way brain structures develop
We know that even from the earliest months children living in children’s homes, a Canadian study, the longer a child is being looked after away from a single significant parent, the greater the stress hormone levels are
and they grow up to have changes in structures in the brain – that squiggly bit in the middle of that brain picture is an area called the hippocampus, that’s the bit of the brain that among other things allows you to learn and remember appropriately,
but it allows you to suppress the stress response.
We know from measurement of the volume of the hippocampus and affluence- deprived people not just in the west of Scotland but in other parts
that chaotic early life leads to a reduced ability to manage stress
regulation of stress responses reduced ability to learn reduced ability to make sense of the wound round about you and behave appropriately
The biology is very clear:
chaotic difficult circumstances lead to increased risk of physical ill health
So let’s not spend a fortune trying to find drugs to fix that
let’s change the chaotic and difficult circumstances so that they don’t happen.
In 1971 I was a medical student when we elected the great Jimmy Reed, Lord rector of Glasgow University.
His Rectoral address was reprinted and full in the New York Times, which called it “the single most important speech since the Gettysburg Address”
and those of us who were there thought that comparison rather flattered Abraham Lincoln to be perfectly honest .
Reid’s speech was about alienation.
‘Alienation
Which he defined as
“the cry of men, the victims of blind economic forces beyond their control
the feeling of despair and hopelessness
that pervades people
who feel with justification they have no say in shaping
or determining
their own destinies “
This is what I think is happening in West Central Scotland
The cycle of alienation that may begin with chaotic early years leads to mental health and childhood leads to behavior problems at school
or, and by the way,
When a child who is becoming alienated has behavior problems at school what do we do ?
We exclude them from school: alienating them even futther
I heard recently about a kid who was permanently truanting. What did they do ? They excluded them from school !
Madness !
They fail in education. The end up, often, in prison.
When I visit the young men in Pullman, I say to them:
“what are you’re going to do when you get out?”
“I’ll never get a job “
So what are you going to do ?””
“I’ll just sit at home and watch telly and drink.
The lives are ended, aged 18.
The consequences of that are poverty which feeds even more into the sense of alienation.
We think if only we fix poverty it will all be alright.
Poverty is part of a cycle and poverty can often be as much a consequence of this cycle as a cause of it. Action that is required has to happen across the whole of that life course:
we have to deal with early years we have to deal with teenagers we have to help young people who are being alienated even further we have to help older people who become isolated
and we’re doing it we’re doing things in Scotland that the rest of the world is looking on enviously.
Tomorrow down in the SECC we will have their fifth meeting of the collaborative brings together 800 practitioners plus some senior people one of the guys in the foreground is the permanent secretary in the Scottish Government who comes to all of these things
cause he thinks if he comes then ministers come they come and they stay they don’t just do the 20 minute speech and go away and what’s happening as practitioners have decided that they will change childhood that they will stand up and they will walk out what’s happening
they will test things for example: you improve attachment between parent and child you improve cognitive function by bedtime stories.
I was probably the only chief medical officer in the world who knew from one day to the next how many children in Scotland got bedtime stories because we counted
If this is a nursery that says ok we’ll ask all the kids “did they get their own story ?”
and if it falls below 90% we’ll do something to make it better
and just like the British cycle team made huge performance improvements by attention to lots of little details those bedtime stories those breastfeeding those- the smoking cessation- there’s a whole range of things going on across the whole of Scotland to make Scotland the best place in the world for children to grow up
With will and with method we can transform Scotland.
Last April I went to visit a lady called Roseanne Haggerty in New York
In 2010 Roseanne decided to set out find a hundred thousand homes for homeless people
I checked this morning, the counter on her website shows that she has found homes for ninety nine thousand six hundred and fourteen people.
Four years later she found that by connecting with people, volunteers would go out walking up folks sleeping under bridges and ask them the names and once they had asked them the names connections are cut and they found them homes.
These people had been homeless for an average seven years and she’s doing it.
and I’ll just finish by a court quoting this guy…
The guy in the middle with the daft grin on his face is a priest who thirty years ago was sent to a parish in South Los Angeles
the police told him he would be lucky to survive a week, because of the gang warfare that was taking place
Thirty years on he is surrounded by adoring fans because he connected with them. He just went out and asked them their names and he found that the thing was they felt as if they had no meaning and purpose.
So he got a rich friend of his to buy a disused bakery and Homeboy Bakeries was born.
He employed them. He quickly found he had to start a second enterprise called Homeboy Tattoo Removal
Many had gang tattoos and they were all fighting with each other so a plastic surgeon friend of his gave him a laser and showed two or three of the gang members how to take tattoos off.
Greg came to Glasgow a few months ago at the request of the violence reduction unit and I took him to visit a school at lunchtime.
He told me that the 14 and 15 year olds he spoke to there asked far harder questions than most academics asked.
but I just want to leave you with one final comment that he made to these kids
and it’s the comment that should drive us to strive harder to fix the broken bits of Scotland
What he said to them was
“What we need is a compassion that stands in awe at the burdens the poor have to carry rather than stand in judgment of the way they carry them.”
If we live by that we will make Scotland a much better place.
Oi! That feeling when… you’re certain… that’s when you know fer sure that you’re wrong.
Dave U
I’ve been doing a lot of reflecting lately, through COVID I was working on developing and refining a new workshop – UN_ESCALATE, probably the most complex one I’ve done.
UN_ESCALATE came about in respons to a question that would always come up at one of my other workshops that has been running for ten years
“do you do anything like this on de-escalation?”
To which I’d respond with
“”no because I don;t really think about it that way.”
Then one day someone I really respect came to that workshop and asked the exact same question in the exact same way.
I responded in my usual way but then something inside me compelled me to say:
“But let me have a think on how I do think about it and what I might have to offer.”
And since I’d decided I wanted to offer, in the words of Monty Python,
“And now, for something completely different…”
I needed to call it something different.
I did almost call it “un-deescalate” which might have offered more of a clue to what its about and how it is different, but I decided to do what academics and psychiatrists think they are the only ones who can do it without being called a symptom of serious mental illness: I neologised the ass off it and made up a word.
I started working actively on UN_ESCALATE four years ago, and since its been difficult to bring people together in a room for much of that time, opportunities to try it out and develop it have been few. Every time we did manage yo invite folks to a workshop that we’d developed using the feedback response was the same:
“Wow, this is great, more please!”.
So it grew in three stages from a simple single half-day ideas sharing session, then a three half-day version, and finally into a full-on two-day immersive workshop, which we were able to offer twice in summer and fall of 2023 and its settling there as being just about right.
Folks who’ve attended this version no longer ask for more time in a workshop [ “hell no!” ] but through a series of dialogues it is emerging as the basis of a new project- a “community of learning and healing” that we will be calling: “unbolloxing”. [Watch this space.]
Though I was working on the workshop it for four years, since some of the core ideas in it first came to my awareness early in the 1990s it’s probably true that this project has been in the making for some thirty years. and now – going by what folks who came said about their experiences – its working fine.
Over the last three months, starting the week after the last offering of the workshop, I’ve been immersed in writing a piece sorting out and connecting some of the the many ideas I was wrangling together over that four years. I started out with the intention of writing an op ed, but it resisted being constrained to eight hundred words. I am much better at designing workshops than I am at writing op eds.
I shared the draft yesterday with a handful of friends I trust to offer me robust feedback. I expect it’ll turn into a backgrounder for those interested in participating in the workshop.
Especially over that period, and more especially when thinking about moving forward with unbolloxing, I’ve been turning a lot to the words and language and ideas of one of my favourite writers: Margaret Wheatley.
So, here’s a piece that seems a fitting reflection as the clock time moves us from the end of one year and into a brand new one…
Most of us weren’t trained to like confusion or to admit when we feel hesitant and uncertain.
In schools and organizations, value is placed on sounding assured and confident.
People are rewarded for stating opinions as if they’re facts.
Quick answers abound; pensive questions have disappeared from most organizations.
Confusion has yet to appear as a higher order value, or a behavior that organizations eagerly reward.
Partnering with Confusion and Uncertainty | Margaret Wheatley
Partnering with Confusion and Uncertainty” Shambhala Sun November 2001 Margaret Wheatley
Most people I meet want to develop more harmonious and satisfying relationships–in their organizations, communities, and personal lives. But we may not realize that this desire can only be satisfied by partnering with new and strange allies-uncertainty and confusion. Most of us weren’t trained to like confusion or to admit when we feel hesitant and uncertain. In schools and organizations, value is placed on sounding assured and confident. People are rewarded for stating opinions as if they’re facts. Quick answers abound; pensive questions have disappeared from most organizations. Confusion has yet to appear as a higher order value, or a behavior that organizations eagerly reward.
And as life continues speeding up (adding to our confusion,) we don’t have time to be uncertain. We don’t have time to listen to anyone who expresses a new or different position. In meetings and in the media, often we listen to others just long enough to determine whether we agree with them or not. We rush from opinion to opinion, listening for those tidbits and soundbites that confirm our position. Gradually we become more certain, but less informed, and far less thoughtful.
We can’t continue on this path if we want to act more intelligently, if we want to find approaches and solutions to the problems that plague us. The world now is quite perplexing. We no longer live in those sweet, slow days when life felt predictable, when we actually knew what to do next. In this increasingly complex world, it’s impossible to see most of what’s going on. The only way to see more of the complexity is to ask many others for their perspectives and experiences. Yet if we open ourselves to their differing perceptions, we will find ourselves inhabiting the uncomfortable space of not knowing.
It is very difficult to give up certainty-these positions, beliefs, explanations define us and lie at the core of our personal identity. Certainty is a lens to interpret what’s going on and, as long as our explanations work, we feel a sense of stability and security. But in a changing world, certainty doesn’t give us stability; it actually creates more chaos. As we stay locked in our position and refuse to adapt and change, the things we hoped would stay together fall apart. It’s a traditional paradox expressed in many spiritual traditions: By holding on, we destroy what we hope to preserve; by letting go, we feel secure in accepting what is.
I believe that this changing world requires much less certainty, and far more curiosity. I’m not suggesting we let go of our beliefs, only that we become curious about what someone else believes. As we open to the disturbing differences, sometimes we discover that another’s way of interpreting the world actually is essential to our survival.
The global system we inhabit is dense and tangled. We each live in a different part of this complexity. And, no two people are identical. Therefore, it’s impossible for two people to see things exactly the same. You can test this out for yourself. Take any event that you’ve shared with others (a speech, a movie, a current event, a major problem) and ask your colleagues and friends to describe their interpretation of that event. I think you’ll be amazed at how many different explanations you’ll hear. You’ll end up with a rich tapestry of interpretations much more interesting than your single one.
I find that the first step to becoming curious is to admit that I’m not succeeding in figuring things out alone. If my solutions don’t work as well as I’d like, if my explanations of why something happened don’t feel sufficient, I take these as signs that it’s time to begin asking others about what they see and think. I try to move past the lazy and superficial conversations where I pretend to agree with someone else rather than inquire seriously into their perspective. I try and become a conscious listener, actively listening for differences.
There are many ways to sit and listen for the differences. Lately, I’ve been listening for what surprises me. What did I just hear that startled me? This isn’t easy-I’m accustomed to sit there nodding my head as someone voices what I agree with. But when I notice what surprises me, I’m able to see my own views more clearly, including my beliefs and assumptions.
Noticing what surprises and disturbs me has been a very useful way to see invisible beliefs. If what you say surprises me, I must have been assuming something else was true. If what you say disturbs me, I must believe something contrary to you. My shock at your position exposes my own position. When I hear myself saying “How could anyone believe something like that?” a light comes on for me to see my own beliefs. These moments are great gifts. If I can see my beliefs and assumptions, I can decide whether I still value them.
If you’re willing to be disturbed and confused, I recommend that you begin a conversation with someone who thinks differently than you do. Listen as best you can for what’s different, for what surprises you. Try and stop the voice of judgment or opinion. Just listen. At the end of this practice, notice whether you learned anything new. Notice whether you developed a better relationship with the person you talked with. If you try this with several people, you might find yourself laughing in delight as you realize how many unique ways there are to be human.
We have the opportunity many times a day, everyday, to be the one who listens to others, curious rather than certain. And the greatest benefit that comes to those who listen is that we develop closer relationships with those we thought we couldn’t understand. When we listen with less judgment, we always develop better relationship with each other. It’s not differences that divide us. It’s our judgments that do. Curiosity and good listening bring us back together.
Sometimes we hesitate to listen for differences because we don’t want to change. We’re comfortable with our lives, and if we listened to anyone who raised questions, we’d have to get engaged in changing things. If we don’t listen, things can stay as they are. But most of us do see things in our life or in the world that we would like to be different. If that’s true, we have to listen more, not less. And we have to be willing to move into the discomfort of uncertainty and confusion.
We can’t be creative if we refuse to be confused. Change always starts with confusion; cherished interpretations must dissolve to make way for the new. Of course it’s scary to give up what we know, but the abyss is where newness lives. Yet if we move through the fear and enter the abyss, we rediscover we’re creative.
As the world grows more strange, perplexing and difficult, I don’t believe most of us want to keep struggling through it alone. I can’t know what to do from my own narrow perspective. I know I need a better understanding of what’s going on. I want to sit down with you and talk about all the frightening and hopeful things I observe, and listen to what frightens you and gives you hope. I need new ideas and solutions for the problems I care about. I know I need to talk to you to discover those. I need to learn to value your perspective, and I want you to value mine. I expect to be disturbed, even jarred, by what I hear from you. I expect to feel confused and displaced-my world won’t feel as stable or familiar to me once we talk.
One last thing. As I explore partnering with confusion and uncertainty, I’m learning that we don’t have to agree with each other in order to think well together. There is no need for us to be joined at the head. We are joined already by our human hearts.
______________________________________________
Bio
Margaret Wheatley is a well-respected writer, speaker, and teacher for how we can accomplish our work, sustain our relationships, and willingly step forward to serve in this troubling time. She has written six books: Walk Out Walk On (with Deborah Frieze, 2011); Perseverance (2010); Leadership and the New Science; Turning to One Another: Simple Conversations to Restore Hope to the Future; A Simpler Way (with Myron Rogers); and Finding Our Way: Leadership for an Uncertain Time. Each of her books has been translated into several languages; Leadership and the New Science appears in 18 languages. She is co-founder and President emerita of The Berkana Institute, which works in partnership with a rich diversity of people and communities around the world, especially in the Global South. These communities find their health and resilience by discovering the wisdom and wealth already present in their people, traditions and environment (www.berkana.org). Wheatley received her doctorate in Organizational Behavior and Change from Harvard University, and a Masters in Media Ecology from New York University. She’s been an organizational consultant since 1973, a global citizen since her youth, a professor in two graduate business programs, a prolific writer, and a happy mother and grandmother. She has received numerous awards and honorary doctorates. You may read her complete bio at http://margaretwheatley.com/bio.html, and may download any of her many articles (free) at http://margaretwheatley.com/writing.htm
The overall aim of this workshop is that participants are better able to reduce the number and impact of situations in which those seeking support from services experience that in ways they find dehumanizing, degrading and oppressive.
Why “UN_ESCALATE” ?
As if it were not abundantly so before, the last two years has made crystal clear the extent to which just how stressed beyond limits are our systems and individuals who work in them and those they are intended to serve.
When most stressed we tend to default mode and talk of escalation – de-escalation, and place expectation on staff to be experts in deescalating those said to be in-need-of “de-escalation”.
We create a completely bonkers binary of escalate<>deescalate, in which we assume and expect that:
those we call “clients” [amongst other terms] will act in a way we get to call “escalate”
and those we call “workers” are then tasked “deescalate” them.
And, so doing, we keep creating results that nobody wants:
including but not limited to “burnout”, which in turn generates more “escalation”.
This is perhaps an unintended consequences a system strained beyond limits, and experienced as injurious and oppressive, and all this in a system espousing important principles of “anti-oppression” and “trauma informed”.
Q. How can we begin to question current practices and habits and the underlying assumptions they are built upon and limited by ?
Q. How might we stand back and examine eth mindset – habits of thinking – and the orthodoxy lays the foundations of this and thus creates the patterns we see repeated dozens of times a week, even each day ?
Q. How might we begin to look at how we design and deliver services?
Q How might we begin to build approaches and practices at individual team and organization level rooted less in fear, containment and control but in connecting and healing?
Please note: If you’re looking for the kind of training that offers something like… “Three easy steps you can use to deescalate anyone, any time”, then UN_ESCALATE really is not it
UN_ESCALATE is…
Different, and intentionally so.
Starts in a different place and carves a different path.
Shares ideas, tools from many sources including: systems thinking and relational dynamics, peace building, peer support, health promotion.
Focused on ways we can critically examine how services are designed and operated , to not do – or to undo – some of the many things that get done to people who access services that lead them to react in ways that get called “escalating” and results in them being deemed a “person in need of de-escalation”.
If we do this then, maybe, we’ll find ourselves thinking that we need to “de-escalate” another person less often.
“Yeah, we do things round here all the time that ‘escalate’ people.”
UN_ESCALATE : Some basic assumptions.
No individual escalates all by themself. We each “escalate“: in response to [something in] our environment, and in context of our whole life experience.
Whatever a person is doing is both an expression of a deeply felt need, and a survival response.
Whatever survival response we tend to fall back on is likely one that we’ve learned from how life has treated us and one that’s worked so far… but is also not the only one and may not the best one for this moment.
The only person I can “de-escalate” is me. None of us can “de-escalate another”.
We can though, de-escalate the situation in which we both find ourselves.
Questions
Q. How might we draw upon experiences of being in the role of worker required to “de-escalate” a person said to be “in need of de-escalation”?
Q. How might we draw upon experiences of having been that person said to be “in need of de-escalation”?
Q. How might we go beyond the operationalization, steps, and rules-based approach of “de-escalation” and instead UN_ESCALATE?
This is a TWO DAY workshop.
Two full days
IN PERSON
Learning Aims and Objectives
Aim
The overall aim of this workshop is that participants are better able to reduce the number and impact of situations in which those seeking support from services experience that in ways they find dehumanizing, degrading and oppressive.
And, especially
-When working with individuals who have been marginalized and stigmatized…
-In those encounters that that lead a person seeking support to react in ways that services then deem that individual to be “escalating” and “in need of de-escalating”.
Also, that staff in services feel better equipped, more competent, and better able to work in ways that they can bring forth their full humanity and enjoy their work. The goal? : Number of encounters experienced by clients as as oppressive: zero.
UN_ESCALATE: Learning Objectives
Participants in this workshop will be better enabled to:
Participants in this workshop will be better enabled to:
Recognize for many of those who seek support from health and other services that their experience of doing so can often be degrading, dehumanizing and oppressive.
Inquire into our current practices, habits, and the underlying assumptions informing them; and how they can contribute to clients often experiencing services as degrading, dehumanizing and oppressive.
Understand the complexity of dynamics at work in a situation we might call “escalating”.
Explore new models of understanding and working with situations we call “escalation” that are less violent, coercive, oppressive and more focused on building relations that promote connecting, healing,
Recognize the part we might play in generating or contributing to a situation that might be regarded as “escalation” – when in the roles from designing and directing to daily running of services that many people experience as oppressive.
Identify ways we can act differently to reduce the likelihood of “escalation” arising, and to reduce the damaging impact whenever it does.
Reduce defensiveness in-after-action reviews and debriefings following encounters that go all “Pete Tong”
Work in ways that can reduce both the number and severity of instances in which individuals who seek support from services experience that as oppressive.
Offer support to those seeking services who find it difficult and who wish to enhance their ability to self-advocate: Express their needs for support – in ways that make it more likely they will receive it.
Offer support to those seeking services who find it difficult and who wish to enhance their ability to Communicate any dissatisfaction they may experience with service in ways that makes it more likely that they will be heard and be addressed.
Initiate and maintain relations and relationships between those we call “worker” and those we call “client” that are rooted in mutual dignity and respect and, which generate connection, learning and healing.
a WORKshop for WORKers…
Sharing ideas, thinking tools and practical stuff you can use so you can suck less.
This workshop is designed to share some ideas , tools and approaches we can use to examine how we can change the way we approach situations in which it is usually said that an individual is “in need of de-escalation”.
Shares and examines some ideas on how we might look upon and understand how escalation works and how power plays out in that.
Creates opportunity – to use some of these ideas, individually and or in combination, to examine how we work in services in ways that lead people to “escalate” and generate practical ideas for changing how we work in these situations, including systemic changes and also personal choices we make in how we go about the work.
Including generating ideas for change in our workplace individual, team and organisation level – or different choices we can make starting from our next shift.
Skills Practice. Working in small groups, you’ll create real scenarios you come across in your work and want time to practice: thinking, doing differently, using the ideas and tools shared in parts 1 & 2, feeling how it feels in your body, reflecting and building confidence.
Designed as small, interactive, participatory workshop .
Spaces are Limited [20 spaces].
IN PERSON
NO ZOOM!
Facilitator:
Kevin Healey
Location:
Church of The Holy Trinity
10 Trinity Square
[next to Eaton Centre]
REGISTER NOW
Register online now via Eventbrite using the checkout box below.
If you prefer to go to the full event page at Eventbrite use this link:
The workshop formerly know as : HV Workshop#1 Accepting Voices
We’ve now added a new follow-up workshop:
Accepting Voices | Part 2
Coming soon.!!
What if everything you think you know about hearing voices is wrong?
Or if not wrong, then it at least limits your ability to:
• understanding a person’s struggle with experiences like difficult-to-hear voices and others that get called “psychosis” and dismissed as “not real” ?
• support them in navigating their struggle and finding ways they might heal.?
Who this workshop is designed for…
Leaders
If you are in a leadership position and seeking ways to develop capacity at individual, team and organization level to support clients in ways that fully honors:
Truly understanding trauma and the many ways it can manifest, and in ways that are fully congruent with other approaches like harm reduction and health promotion.
Centering our interconnectedness and shared humanity; and drawing on them as resource and source of power and practical action for bringing change that supports community and healing.
Workers
If you work in health or social services, and especially supporting those who have been pushed out to the margins of society, then you likely…
Meet many people who live with difficult-to-hear-voices are told what they experience is “not real” and many of those who struggle.
Know too how that can leave you feeling uncomfortable, confused, lost, or powerless.
This workshop is designed for you.
Supporters and carers.
If you support a loved one who struggles, then you likely do too: to understand the nature of their pain and ways you might best support them and support healing.
This workshop is for you tooand you are welcome to join us.
This workshop will enable you to…
Offer yourself as a one-person safe space to those who struggle with painful experiences that get categorised and labelled as ‘psychosis” and dismissed as “not real”.
Understand what hearing voices can feels like to those who experience them, those around them.
Open options for support other than those rooted in fear and control and – put them into practice in supportive environments that promote connection and healing.
Free yourself from downloading thoughts, language, and acts of stigmatization used against those who hear voices that you don’t hear.
Join with a community of practice that is informed by the International Hearing Voices Movement and individuals who experience voices.
Workshop #1: Accepting Voices
When
Mon 23rd JANUARY 2023
9:30am to 5:00pm
Note:
This is a full day workshop
IN PERSON
We take an hour interval for lunch.
Refreshments:
We’ll have coffee / tea / water available
Lunch is not provided. We do take 1 hr for lunch.
Where
Church of The Holy Trinity Trinity Square Toronto
[East Side of Eaton Centre]
Fees
Worker / Full $250
Family Member / Carer $150
Concessions From $100
REGISTER NOW
Register NOW online- via Eventbrite using the ticketing box below.
If you prefer to go to the full event page at Eventbrite use the link:
This introductory and foundational workshop will open doors of new understanding, in non-diagnostic, non-categorizing ways, of a range of human experiences that get called names like “psychosis”and dismissed as “not real”, when at least to the to the person experiencing them, they are very real indeed.
This workshop is designed especially for those who work in health and social services but is open to all who want to learn how they can better support a person who struggles.
Many who find themselves struggling to support loved ones who struggle and find themselves bewildered and frustrated by the help offered by services have also attended and found it useful for them. Indeed, we find it creates a richer experience when we can come together and learn with and from each other.
The world, society, and culture that we have created for ourselves and each other is not fit for humans. Join in co-creating one that is.
What Participants Have Said About This Workshop
“You gave me a whole new way of thinking about voices.”
“I’m not quite sure what I learned but I feel like my whole Universe has been tilted.”
“Eye opening, Stunned”
“Best workshop I ever attended”
“I learned more from one day with you and Dave than in seven years of training to be a psychologist”
Who needs to attend this workshop?
Really, whether you need to attend is your choice, the above is what some who’ve attended said, here’s another.
“Everyone working in mental health. Scratch that: EVERYONE !!!”
This workshop offers a beginning, an introduction to a non-diagnostic, non-medical, human experience perspective understanding of the kinds of experiences – like difficult-to-hear voices- that are often categorised as “psychosis”.
A key part is making connections between pain, trauma psychosis powerlessness and disconnectedness we can experience when we find ourselves feared and discarded by society.
Q. Do you…?
Work with people who hear voices and who struggle with their experience of that?
Have someone in your life who hears voices and struggles with difficult experiences that get called “psychosis
Feel limited in your ability to understand and support them?
Feel frustrated at how the story that voices must mean illness limits us – not only the lives of people who hear voices, but all of us?
Feel weary of the notion that we must fear ourselves and fear each other?
Want to understand connections between adverse events, trauma , injury woundedness, pain and difficult-to-hear voices.
Want to minimise the additional trauma generated by how services are typically designed and operated when working to support those who face being rendered powerlessness and disconnected from society?
Feel ready to learn more, and find you keep asking yourself “what else can I do?”.
Want to know more about how you can be part of creating the future, and join in with enacting a world that understands and is better able to offer real support?
Q. Are Ready to “tilt your universe”?
If so, then this workshop might help you tilt your universe and emancipate yourself with very simple and very human ways to understand and begin to act to support a person who struggles with difficult experiences that get called names like “psychosis”.
Our aim is that you can feel more confident in your ability to offer yourself as a one-person safe space to people who live with experiences that get called names like “psychosis” and that can be difficult to live with and more difficult to talk about.
Note: If you’re looking for a workshop on how to diagnose and categorise your friends, family and colleagues then please know that this workshop really is not that workshop.
Join us in enacting a world that understands voice hearing, supports the needs of people who hear voices and regards them as full citizens.
How this workshop fits with others we offer…
This Workshop is part of a structured and modular approach to learning ways of supporting people who struggle.
As a first step that is designed to offer a basic grounding but also foundation for further, deeper learning and practice in supporting people who struggle with experiences like difficult-to-hear voices that get called “psychosis”.
Participation in this workshop is step towards to other more advanced and learning opportunities, around Hearing Voices approach (sometimes called Maastricht Approach) to living with and supporting those who live with experiences that, though remarkably common, get dismissed as not real, mystified, made taboo and dismissed as “not real”.
Working With Voices– Starting and Sustaining Hearing Voices Groups In Your Community
Carnival des Voix [running your own]
Working with Maastricht Interview
Facilitating Voice Dialogue
What you can expect
This workshop is a whole day and a full one, too.
This unique and innovative workshop offers you a non-diagnostic understanding of the kinds of experience like hearing voices that are that are sometimes called “psychosis”.
We offer you simple, everyday language to show you how you can understand such experiences not as “disconnected from” but intimately connected with reality and in ways that can be overwhelming, painful, frustrating, sometimes terrifying response to the reality we share,
It also offers a framework – we call it “The Wormhole”- a heuristic that you can use to held you be more open to your own experiences draw from that to help you truly empathize and understand how better to support people who might be undergoing such difficult experiences.
You’ll leave feeling more at ease with both yourself and your ability to offer yourself as a one-person safe-space to people who struggle.
Join us in enacting a society that understands voice hearing, supports individuals who hear voices and views them as full citizens…
This workshop will enable you better to …
Understand hearing voices [and other experiences] as a normal human experience, that can become problematic when a person is left to struggle without support.
Share simple data and stories about just how common it is to hear voices – how it is not in itself a problem and many people do – some cultures regard it as bringing great benefit.
Peer through and beyond diagnostic frameworks – resist the urge to catalogue and categorize everything you witness as “symptom” and instead.
Take an interest in the person struggling with their experience of voices and other experiences called “psychosis” as a human being having a hard time.
Begin to accept even the most difficult of human experiences as something that can be understood, explored and even valued.
Look within your own experience and relate with different experiences like hearing voices, visions, unshared beliefs.
Explore how you can be at ease in your role and be more real with people who have difficult experiences.
Offer yourself as a one-person safe-space to people who struggle with experiences like hearing voices.
Connect yourself with a community of people doing just that.
We believe the hearing voices approach is part of broader human liberatory approaches around the world and is emancipatory for all. As Lilla Watson is credited with put it so wonderfully…
“If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”
Workshop design…
This is an intensive workshop covering a lot of ground, together we will :
Gain insights from people who hear voices, and from others who work with people who hear voices.
Learn how we can think differently about voices and other experiences that are sometimes called “psychosis”.
Explore how, as workers, we can accept ourselves and each other, relax and enjoy our work: the better to offer support for people who hear voices.
Interact – with deep personal reflection, shared sense-making and dialogue.
We will also share some simple, practical approaches that you can use in your practice on return to work.
Connect with resources and both local network and the global hearing voices community.
This workshop is designed to leave you feeling more competent and confident in your own ability to offer yourself as a one-person safe space for people who hear voices.
You will not become an expert in one day but you’ll have a good basis for starting and feeling more comfortable – and more human – as you do.
Please feel free to help us let other people know about this workshop by printing, posting, distributing, however you can with your networks…
About the Presenters, Facilitators, Designers
Kevin Healey
hears more voices than you can shake a stick at, so many that even his voices hear voices, and has done so for longer than either he – or they – care to remember but its over fifty years.
Founder and coordinator of http://www.recoverynet.ca, Toronto Hearing Voices group, Anglophone Canada’s longest running, and of the Hearing Voices Café.
Creates and delivers innovative, taboo-busting talks, trainings and workshops that enable people to find new language, and simpler ways to understand surprisingly common human experiences that we’ve made fearful and taboo, so making life even harder both for those who struggle and also for the rest of us to understand.
Shows how we can make simple sense of trauma, pain, psychosis, taboo, and butt-hurt voices, and how they interweave and interconnect our inner-struggle with living in an outer-world that is fast becoming unfit for humans who built it and in which we keep creating results that nobody wants. After you’ve heard him talk you may join those who say they don’t hear voices but now wish they could.
Dave U
For many years Dave would only say only one word, now he authors articles at http://www.recoverynet.ca and moderates online support groups for voices to talk directly with each other round the world, he codesigned this workshop – in fact there’s a lot of Dave in this workshop – if you come you’ll get to meet him/ them.
Enjoys creating memes: out of things voices say, about living in a universe that mostly comprises what he refers to as The Weird, and his own wry observations on the human obsession with calling each other horrible names, categorizing and crushing each other into boxes that don’t fit.
As Dave points out, voices have stories too.
Dave’s favourite pastime is pretending to be a jelly while swearing a lot.
Next second is remarking upon how “voices” and “humans” behave in ways that are often very much the-one-is–like-the-other. Dave doesn’t really have a bio – like other superheroes he has an “Origins Story”, and like “The Truth…”, at least some of it, is already “ Out There…”
Mark Roininen
Mark has many years experience as “worker” with a major social services agency, and has worked with many who struggle with the kind of experiences that get called “psychosis”.
He shares his personal perspective of how being confronted with his own dark side enabled him to relate more simply and authentically with difficult experiences of the people he works with, in-process, freeing himself from merely following “the script” and playing “invisible worker” so that he can be both more professional and more human.
His ability to share stories of his own experience of learning how to do this work offers others hope that they can too.
Why we choose to use the term hearing voices, what we mean by it…
Hearing voices is intentional, ordinary language descriptive of a range of human experiences that in Western cultures has been mystified and made taboo, and that we have been taught to fear – and yet which are also remarkably common, likely much more common than you think. No everyone uses this language, all kinds of people live with experiences they might call voices, some choose other languages.
Hearing voices does not presuppose neither that a voice can only come from a human body, nor must be heard by more than one person, or more especially must be also heard by someone called a “mental health professional” .
Hearing Voices as Approach also refers to broadly emancipatory ideas and ways of working that accepts such experiences as very real and meaningful- if sometimes difficult to live with, and that seeks to share ways we can learn to live with such difficult experiences and support and connect with each other.
This approach also includes many other similar experiences that can be hard to live with and harder to talk about and make sense of.
When we learn to put aside our fear of both ourselves and each other we generate possibilities, to create new roles, to connect with each other, and to find richer experiences of being human and co-create a world that’s easier to live in for all of us.
‘Trauma is not only an individual experience: because some of what happened, happened to us as a people. And some o… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…- 2 weeks ago
Trauma is not an event.
Trauma is not in the past.
Trauma is an experience.
Here, now.
Two day workshop shifting th… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…- 2 weeks ago
agnotarte
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recovery network: Toronto 
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