Eventbrite calls this a “collection”. So here’s our new Summer 2023 Collection.
You’ll find descriptions of each here on recoverynet.ca, or you can go to Eventbrite, go straight to Eventbrite using the the link here:
https://www.eventbrite.com/cc/summer-2023-2079539
Gil Scot Heron
Like the man says:
Lyrics
Well, the first thing I want to say is: Mandate my ass!
Because it seems as though we’ve been convinced that 26% of the registered voters, not even 26% of the American people, but 26% of the registered voters form a mandate or a landslide.
21% voted for Skippy and 3, 4% voted for somebody else who might have been running.
But, oh yeah, I remember.
In this year that we have now declared the year from Shogun to Reagan, I remember what I said about Reagan, I meant it.
Acted like an actor.
Hollyweird.
Acted like a liberal.
Acted like General Franco when he acted like governor of California, then he acted like a Republican.
Then he acted like somebody was going to vote for him for president.
And now we act like 26% of the registered voters is actually a mandate.
We’re all actors in this I suppose.
What has happened is that in the last 20 years, America has changed from a producer to a consumer.
And all consumers know that when the producer names the tune, the consumer has got to dance.
That’s the way it is.
We used to be a producer – very inflexible at that, and now we are consumers and, finding it difficult to understand.
Natural resources and minerals will change your world.
The Arabs used to be in the 3rd World.
They have bought the 2nd World and put a firm down payment on the 1st one.
Controlling your resources we’ll control your world.
This country has been surprised by the way the world looks now.
They don’t know if they want to be Matt Dillon or Bob Dylan.
They don’t know if they want to be diplomats or continue the same policy – of nuclear nightmare diplomacy.
John Foster Dulles ain’t nothing but the name of an airport now.
The idea concerns the fact that this country wants nostalgia.
They want to go back as far as they can – even if it’s only as far as last week.
Not to face now or tomorrow, but to face backwards.
And yesterday was the day of our cinema heroes riding to the rescue at the last possible moment.
The day of the man in the white hat or the man on the white horse – or the man who always came to save America at the last moment – someone always came to save America at the last moment – especially in “
B” movies.
And when America found itself having a hard time facing the future, they looked for people like John Wayne.
But since John Wayne was no longer available, they settled for Ronald Reagan and it has placed us in a situation that we can only look at -like a “
B” movie.
Come with us back to those inglorious days when heroes weren’t zeros.
Before fair was square.
When the cavalry came straight away and all-American men were like Hemingway to the days of the wondrous “
B” movie.
The producer underwritten by all the millionaires necessary will be Casper “
The Defensive” Weinberger – no more animated choice is available.
The director will be Attila the Haig, running around frantically declaring himself in control and in charge.
The ultimate realization of the inmates taking over at the asylum.
The screenplay will be adapted from the book called “
Voodoo Economics” by George “
Papa Doc” Bush.
Village People” the very military “
Macho Man.”
Company!!!”
Macho, macho man!”
Two-three-four.”
He likes to be well, you get the point.”
Huuut!
A theme song for saber-rallying and selling wars door-to-door.
Remember, we’re looking for the closest thing we can find to John Wayne.
Clichés abound like kangaroos – courtesy of some spaced out Marlin Perkins, a Reagan contemporary.
Clichés like, “itchy trigger finger” and “tall in the saddle” and “riding off or on into the sunset.” Clichés like, “
Get off of my planet by sundown!” More so than clichés like, “he died with his boots on.” Marine tough the man is.
Bogart tough the man is.
Cagney tough the man is.
Hollywood tough the man is.
Cheap steak tough.
And Bonzo’s substantial.
The ultimate in synthetic selling: A Madison Avenue masterpiece – a miracle – a cotton-candy politician…
Presto!
Macho!
Macho, macho man!”
Put your orders in America.
And quick as Kodak your leaders duplicate with the accent being on the dupes – cause all of a sudden we have fallen prey to selective amnesia – remembering what we want to remember and forgetting what we choose to forget.
All of a sudden, the man who called for a blood bath on our college campuses is supposed to be Dudley “
God-damn” Do-Right?
You go give them liberals hell Ronnie.” That was the mandate to the new Captain Bligh on the new ship of fools.
It was doubtlessly based on his chameleon performance of the past: as a Liberal Democrat.
As the head of the Studio Actor’s Guild, when other celluloid saviors were cringing in terror from Mc
Carthy, Ron stood tall.
It goes all the way back from Hollywood to hillbilly.
From Liberal to libelous, from “
Bonzo” to Birch idol, born again.
Civil rights, women’s rights, gay rights: …
It’s all wrong.
Call in the cavalry to disrupt this perception of freedom gone wild.
God damn it, first one wants freedom, then the whole damn world wants freedom.
Nostalgia, that’s what we want…: the good ol’ days, when we gave’em hell.
When the buck stopped somewhere and you could still buy something with it.
To a time when movies were in black and white, and so was everything else.
Even if we go back to the campaign trail, before six-gun Ron shot off his face and developed hoof-in-mouth.
Before the free press went down before full-court press, and were reluctant to review the menu because they knew the only thing available was…
Crow.
Lon Chaney, our man of a thousand faces: no match for Ron.
Doug Henning does the make-up; special effects from Grecian Formula 16 and Crazy Glue; transportation furnished by the David Rockefeller of Remote Control Company.
Their slogan is, “
Why wait for 1984?
You can panic now…
And avoid the rush.”
So much for the good news…
As Wall Street goes, so goes the nation.
And here’s a look at the closing numbers: racism’s up, human rights are down, peace is shaky, war items are hot.
The House claims all ties.
Jobs are down, money is scarce, and common sense is at an all-time low on heavy trading.
Movies were looking better than ever, and now no one is looking, because we’re starring in a “
B” movie.
And we would rather had…
John Wayne.
We would rather had…
John Wayne.
You don’t need to be in no hurry.
You ain’t never really got to worry.
And you don’t need to check on how you feel.
Just keep repeating that none of this is real.
And if you’re sensing, that something’s wrong,
Well just remember, that it won’t be too long
Before the director cuts the scene.
Yea.”
This ain’t really your life,
Ain’t really your life,
Ain’t really ain’t nothing but a movie.”
This ain’t really your life,
Ain’t really your life,
Ain’t really ain’t nothing but a movie.”
Source: Musixmatch
Songwriters: Gil Scott-heron
Dr. Judith Herman, who helped launch the field of trauma studies, has returned to publishing after a long, mysterious ordeal
At the age of 81, psychiatrist Dr. Judith Herman has rejoined the conversation, publishing “Truth and Repair,” a follow-up to her 1992 book “Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence — From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror.”
By Ellen Barry
Published: Thu 27 Apr 2023, 6:07 PM
In the fall of 1994, the psychiatrist Dr. Judith Herman was at the height of her influence. Her book “Trauma and Recovery,” published two years earlier, had been hailed in The New York Times as “one of the most important psychiatric works to be published since Freud.”
Her research on sexual abuse in the white, working class city of Somerville, Massachusetts, laid out a thesis that was, at the time, radical: that trauma can occur not only in the blind terror of combat, but quietly, within the four walls of a house, at the hands of a trusted person.
More than most areas of science, psychology has been driven by individual thinkers and communicators. So what happened to Herman — as arbitrary as it was — had consequences for the field. She was in a hotel ballroom, preparing to present her latest findings, when she tripped on the edge of a rug and smashed her kneecap.
“Just, wham,” she said. “Smack.”
On and off for more than two decades, Herman groped her way through a fog of chronic pain, undergoing repeated surgeries and, finally, falling back on painkillers. The trauma researchers who surrounded her in the Boston area moved on with their work, and the field of trauma studies swung toward neurobiology.
“She is a brilliant woman who lost 25 years of her career,” said her friend and colleague Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, whose 2014 book, “The Body Keeps the Score,” helped propel the field toward brain science. “If you talk about tragedy, that is a tragedy.”
At the age of 81, Herman has rejoined the conversation, publishing “Truth and Repair,” a follow-up to her 1992 book “Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence — From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror.” During that period, trauma has gained broad acceptance in popular culture as a way to understand mental health.
But the dominant idea now comes from van der Kolk, who argues that traumatic experiences are stored in the body and can best be addressed through the unconscious mind. “The Body Keeps the Score” has appeared on the bestseller list for an astonishing 232 weeks. TikTok bulges with testimonials from members of Gen Z, identifying all manner of habits and health conditions as trauma responses.
Herman does not want to use this flush of attention to debate her old friend. But in “Truth and Repair,” she picks up where she left off in 1992, arguing that trauma is, at its heart, a social problem rather than an individual one.Drawing on interviews with survivors, she lays out a theory of justice designed to help them heal, centering on collective acknowledgment of what they have suffered. Her approach is frankly political, rooted in the feminist movement and unlikely to go viral on TikTok.
This does not seem to trouble her at all. “In my own life, I feel like I’m in a good place,” she said. “On the other hand, I think psychiatry will have to be dragged, kicking and screaming, into any kind of progressive future.”
A pledge
When Herman and van der Kolk met in the 1980s,she was treating the daughters of working-class Irish and Italian families, who were coming forward with stories of sexual abuse. He had been treating veterans who seemed trapped in the past, exploding with extreme rage at minor frustrations.
She was reserved; he was expansive. Herman likes to call herself “plain vanilla,” doggedly faithful to psychodynamic psychotherapy; van der Kolk is “flavour of the month,” always exploring new treatments, first Prozac, then body work and eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing.
They had this in common: The patients they treated had been routinely dismissed by the psychiatric establishment as malingerers or hysterics. “We were in explicit agreement,” van der Kolk said. “We noted that people in academia were often very cruel to each other, and we made a pledge to have each other’s back.”
The diagnosis of PTSD was brand-new, having first appeared in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM, in 1980, and the Boston area, van der Kolk said, “was to trauma what Vienna was to music.” A trauma study group convened monthly in the elegant stretch of Cambridge mansions known as Professors’ Row.
They argued, Herman said, about “what counted” as trauma. “The guys who worked with the vets, we had some back and forth, shall we say,” she said. “We had some knockdown drag-outs, calling out the sexism of the men who thought combat trauma was trauma and everything else was just whining.”
Herman is widely credited with putting this question to rest. “Trauma and Recovery” addressed a general audience in “measured, gripping, almost surgically precise” language, as the Times review put it, and with the authority of a Harvard psychiatrist.
Her ideas also radiated into the communities where she practised, said Rosie McMahan, whose family worked with Herman and her colleague Emily Schatzow to confront sexual abuse by her father.
“She did this remarkable thing — ‘Wait a minute, the same things that were happening to those soldiers, in a sense, happened in families,’” said McMahan, whose book, “Fortunate Daughter,” describes her family’s reconciliation. “They recognised that it was trauma and called it such. They behaved as if it was.”
Their ideas were gaining ground. In 1994, the editors of the DSM expanded the definition of PTSD, dropping the requirement that the traumatic event be “outside the range of usual human experience.” Herman and van der Kolk began lobbyig for the inclusion of complex PTSD, the result of recurring or long-term traumatic events.
Then came what’s known as the “memory wars” — a pushback from leading psychiatrists against therapy that encouraged patients to unearth memories of sexual abuse. The criticism often zeroed in on van der Kolk, who served as an expert witness in high-profile cases, and Herman, whose work on dissociation was regularly cited by defenders of repressed-memory therapy.
Herman shrugged off this critique as “predictable,” the same resistance that Vietnam War veterans and rape victims had encountered when they came forward. “You know, history is a dialectical process,” she said. “When you have a movement that challenges the power structure, you’re going to have a backlash.”
Since the mid-1990s, the editors of the DSM have consistently opposed further expanding the definition of PTSD. The original definition was “intentionally strict, meant to avoid the possibility that all mental disorders are simply caused by trauma,” said Dr. Allen Frances, who chaired the task force for the DSM’s fourth edition.
While stress contributes to most psychiatric problems, he said, PTSD diagnoses can be made quickly and carelessly, without pursuing underlying mental disorders, such as anxiety and depression. Taking that leap, he added, means “all the rest of the knowledge ever accumulated about mental disorders goes out the window.”
Pain of unexplained origin
On the day she broke her kneecap, Herman was preparing to deliver a workshop on her latest findings, and was carrying a carousel of slides to a projector. She was distracted and did not see that a binding had come loose from the rug.
Herman has offered vague explanations for the 30-year gap between her books. “Life intervened, in the form of illnesses and a move to an assisted-living community,” she writes in a forward to “Truth and Repair.” In an interview, she flicked away the question, calling it “a very long, sad tale which I won’t bore you with.”
But there is a story. Her kneecap healed, but nerve tumours had formed in her leg, and the pain grew steadily worse. For long stretches, daily life became a challenge. There were remissions, but there were also times she could not get out of bed, where even changing positions was “extremely, extremely painful.” At one point, she was so desperate that she asked a doctor if he could amputate her leg.
“All you could think about was pain,” she said. “It wasn’t even thinking about pain. It was being pain. One’s existence was just pain. It’s like being in a tunnel.” Like “your whole existence is pain, and nothing exists outside of it,” she added.
There was a subtext in her doctors’ response, early on, which she, as a fellow physician, was uniquely qualified to identify: They did not quite believe her. “I was a middle-aged woman with pain of unexplained origin,” she said. In the jargon of medical residents, she said, she was a “crock,” or a female hypochondriac.
Eleven years and three surgeries later, her doctors said there was nothing more they could do. This was the worst of it, when there was no hope of reprieve. “It made me not want to live,” she said. “That is literally what happened.”
A remedy appeared in 2019, almost by chance. She had gone to see a surgeon about arthritis in her hand, and instead, he peered at her knee. After she left, he emailed her an article about a surgery that had been developed at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center to treat amputees, war veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan.
Later that year, surgeons removed the damaged nerves, sutured them to a motor nerve harvested from her quadriceps and then implanted them into her muscle. She weaned herself off fentanyl, set aside the brace and the crutches. She compared the relief she felt to the sensation women have when childbirth ends.
“I mean, it’s really heavenly,” she said. “I’m in a permanent state of gratitude.”
And that, she said, was why she had the energy to finish another book.
“It’s a totally crazy story,” she said. “I owe it all to the forever wars.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
From:
https://www.khaleejtimes.com/world/americas/she-redefined-trauma-then-trauma-redefined-her?_refresh=true
We’re back, in-person, and meeting in the cafe.
Coffee and All That Jazz
72 Howard Park Ave
Roncesvalles
T’karonto
Planet Earth
Right on the 506 TTC route.
4pm to 6pm
Big thanks to Su & David “The Jazz” for their ongoing support.
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.
Those who participate in this workshop bill be better able to
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.a
Location:
Note: This workshop is in-person only.
Note: This workshop takes place on first floor- there are two flights of stairs.
Full description follows below: after the registration box.
Limited Spaces. Register now online.
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, much of the talk to date about “trauma informed is just some huge bunch of gold plated, gilt edged, utter, utter bollox.
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 enable us to find a way out of this mess.
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 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.
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.
I expected to unpack my biases about others, I unpacked biases about myself.
Participant
A really excellent workbook of tools and resources !! This is a keeper!
Participant
I’m taking away the idea and knowledge that we can choose our language,
Participant
from: “Victim” & “Aggressor”
to: “One who has been hurt” & “One who has hurt others”.
I love this recognition that we’ve all hurt another + been hurt by another.
this was such a learning for me.
I will be taking away the body and grounding practices that were implemented throughout the session as I felt these were helpful and important in developing awareness and being present with the self & what’s surrounding us.
Participant
There is no one way to heal and healing doesn’t mean I have to relive / remember / remind myself of my trauma (more how I felt as total description).
Participant
I really enjoyed the exercise of identifying what is bollox vs [healing ] with the sticky notes and being able to reflect on what I learned from others and what they were able to take from my contributions.
Participant
I also am taking away the value of how I share my story: What is necessary to share? Why am I sharing? Who is served from my sharing ?
Participant
(Do I feel pressured to share ? Am I sharing to make myself feel better at the expense of others’ well-being ?) What are the valuable pieces of this ? Do I need details or is the focus the feelings, thoughts, etc. “Shitty Shit” is often enough.
I think the main take away has been realizing that trauma isn’t necessarily the shit that happens to you or to others, but what comes after.
Participant
This feels to be like transformative justice in some ways. In other words, practicing and embodying the kinds of environments, relations and world I want to live in.
Raised a lot of questions for me about how I think about trauma.
Participant
I need to learn / explore more.
-And I’m going away with an abundance of ideas where I can do that.
Everyone experiences trauma differently.
Participant
The exercises helped to apply what we learned and further share our narratives and feelings.
Participant
I’m still learning how to understand what the heck trauma really even is;
Participant
learning about my own, but not alone, rather, with others.
I’m doing my best and trying to show up.
A holistic workshop that speaks to the wisdom of your body and how trauma presents itself so uniquely in each of us, as individuals.
Participant
It allows us to transform “US& THEM” language into language we can learn from, shifting accountability and recognizing we’ve all both hurt another and been hurt by another.
Participant
I would describe this workshop as a welcome space to begin opening up a dialogue on trauma. What I mean by this is that there is no pressure to talk about trauma: that is your own trauma. Sometimes we just need spaces like this to exist to even get to a point where we can share respond, and listen. Thank you.
Participant
A way to develop an understanding of what trauma means, and how unhealed wounds affect how we lead our lives and can have a more open understanding & compassion for people (and myself)
Participant
A space to process how “trauma healing” can be helpful & harmful – what works and what hurts.
Participant
A space that uses theory, processing, and sharing circles to better understand what trauma, healing and bollox can look like, and empowers participants to be their own experts in their healing. Its not what we do but why we do it.
Participant
This workshop explores the concept of trauma from non-conventional perspective, allowing for the sharing of lived experience combined with theory. – You will walk away with more questions than answers
Participant
Expect to experience an “unlearning” of what you thought you know about how trauma is conceptualized, as well as its treatment.
Participant
It was an open space to be vulnerable and looks at trauma differently while considering other understandings of these topics.
Participant
There was a feeling of mutual respect and interest in each others’ ideas that was fostered by the facilitators.
Participant
Participant
- I really liked the safe space that was cultivated during the workshop, I liked the interactive style of [presenting] and as previously mentioned, I liked the breaks.
I really learned a lot.
It was an open space to be vulnerable and looks at trauma differently while considering other understandings of these topics.
The exercises helped to apply what we learned and further share our narratives and feelings.
Participant
unbolloxing
articipants in these workshops:
Participant
• 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.
Note:
If you’re looking for training on “how to deescalate anyone in three easy steps” then you’ll not find it here.
However, if you are looking for opportunity to both examine the orthodoxy and trenchant mental models that underpin and restrict our thinking and acting, and how we design and operate services in way that all to often are experienced by those who rely on them as dehumanizing, oppressive, and traumatizing; and that lead us to believe that is our only option; and if you believe that “we can do better – and we must,” then this may a good place to start.
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.
Recent times have made yet more visible the extent to which those who have been pushed out to the margins of society are stressed, beyond their “zone of tolerance” for the way they find themselves treated: the way services deem is the best they can expect.
Workers in services equally feel stressed, and struggle to reconcile best supporting those who come to them and the demands of the organization they work in.
When most stressed we tend to default mode: we download language of “escalation”, “de-escalation”; we heap expectation on staff to be experts in “deescalating” those we deem to be “escalating” and in-need-of “de-escalation”. Behaviour interpreted as aggressive is responded to with yet more aggression and authoritarianism: sometimes overt, more often pernicious yet equally injurious.
“The system” is not failing: it produces the results it was designed to produce. Services are all too often experienced by those who find they need to access for support in meeting needs as injurious, traumatizing and oppressive. Meanwhile service organizations espouse values of “anti-oppression” and “trauma informed”.
Models of “deescalation are typically from, or rooted in those from, war studies.
Are we waging (yet another) war ?
Or are we seeking to the needs of those who have been most marginalized- cast out – from society in ways that can support (re)connecting, learning, and healing ?
Q. How can we begin to question current practices and habits – and the underlying assumptions they are both built upon and limited by ?
Q How might we begin to build approaches and practices at individual, team, and organization levels that are rooted not in fear, authoritarianism, containment, compliance and control but in connecting, and learning, and healing?
Q. How might we build a different approach to working through difficult situations that rely less on more authoritarianism, control, coercion, and compliance and instead focus on building relationships that can enable and support healing ?
Note – This workshop is in person only.
Note – This workshop takes place on 1st Floor, there are two flights of stairs.
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.”
This is a TWO DAY workshop.
Two full days
IN PERSON [How we gonna change the world by hiding behind screens and sitting in our pyjamas?]
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.
Participants in this workshop will be better enabled to:
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”.
Kevin Healey
Church of The Holy Trinity
10 Trinity Square
[next to Eaton Centre]
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:
https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/un-escalate-jun-2023-tickets-618243080697
Developed in response to requests from participants who have already participated in our introductory workshop Accepting Voices Part 1: Introduction.
If you have not already participated in that workshop then you will need to do so first.
This workshop continues from that one and focuses on using the ideas and tools introduced there when supporting an individual who hears voices – whether as part of your work, supporting a loved one, or just in life generally.
Church of The Holy Trinity
Trinity Square
Toronto
This workshop is:
A full day workshop
In Person – no online.
Full Description of the workshop follows below the registration box.
If you have NOT already participated in out popular workshop
ACCEPTING VOICES part 1: Introduction
then you’ll be as lost as a lost thing and wonder what the heck we’re talkin’ aboot if you come to this one first.
Click the link to go there first: https://recoverynet.ca/2023/04/17/hv-workshop-accepting-voices-part-1-jun-2023/
If you have already participated in out popular workshop
ACCEPTING VOICES part 1: Introduction
then you’ve been introduced to..
and, if you’re wondering: what’s next?
Then, you may be ready to explore more and take a next step.
Participants will share from their experiences so far applying ideas from the first workshop, there will be four key elements.
Practical ways of working with The Wormhole when supporting a person who hears voices
Practical ways of working with the Map
For Reclaiming Our Power as a tool or framework for supporting a person who hears voices, especially if they struggle.
We will focusing on the first segment , and the first three steps within it.
These are the basic elements are what a person who hears voices will need from us in order they can feel safe with us, and choose to trust us to support them.
OVERWHELM & ISOLATION
Need To Feel Safe
1. Meeting someone who takes an interest in me as a person.
2. Amongst people who offer a sense of hope, show a way out, and normalize the experience
3. Meeting people who accept voices as real.
The importance of listening in healing and building relationships that can support trust, connecting, learning and healing.
We will share, explore, and practice with, ideas about listening including:
We will share ideas and resources around, and begin to explore ways we can start to listen with and talk with voices that we don’t hear but that the person we support does; including them in the conversation.
Especially for those who do this in their work and are required to keep notes or rport on encounters, we will begin to explore the choices we can make, including the language we use; and some different ways we might report on encounters
HV Workshop: Accepting Voices Part 2 | Aug 2023
HV Workshop
ACCEPTING VOICES Part 2 : More Accepting
If you work supporting people who live with difficult-to-hear-voices who are told what they experience is “not real” and who themselves are dismissed and dehumanized and called names like “difficult”.
If you support a loved one who struggles, and you struggle understanding ways you might best support them.
Or, if not completely bollox, then it at least limits your ability to:
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:
After this workshop participants will be better able to play their role in creating spaces and relationships in which people hearing voices are more likely to find themselves…
And better able to form and maintain relationships with those they support rooted in healing, connecting towards finding health and learning and finding their place in the world.
Register ONLINE NOW at our Eventbrite page.
You can use the direct registration box embedded from Eventbrite below..
…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.
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 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…”
Please note:
The venue is 1st floor up two flights of stairs.
Accessibility will be difficult is stars are a challenge
There is a non-gendered disabled washroom facility on the ground floor.
Other washrooms are also available in the basement, down other flight of stairs.
_________________________________________________________________________
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.
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?
bring compassion into your relationships with your fellow humans, especially those who do hear voices.
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 honours:
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…
This workshop is designed for you.
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 too and you are welcome to join us.
Note:
Refreshments:
We’ll have coffee / tea / water available
Where
Church of The Holy Trinity
Trinity Square
Toronto
[East Side of Eaton Centre]
Fees
Full workshop description follows below the registration box.
Register NOW online- via Eventbrite using the ticketing box below.
https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/accepting-voices-part-1-introduction-tickets-618239319447
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.
“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”
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 categorized 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.
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”.
Note: If you’re looking for a workshop on how to diagnose and categorize 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.
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”.
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…
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.”
This is an intensive workshop covering a lot of ground, together we will :
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…
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.
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 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.
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 ?
The diagnostic manual is concerned with categoriesnot 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.
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.
Those who participate in this workshop bill be better able to
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.
Limited Spaces. Register now online.
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 enable us to find a way out of this mess.
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 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.
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.
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.
agnotarte
dave umbongo
drkenplacebo
highfellow
recovery network: Toronto 
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