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Posts Tagged ‘
real life story ’
Introduction
JERUSALEM — Some 500,000 Israelis who fled southward from the northern part of the country returned home last week while others left their bomb shelters following the implementation of UN Resolution 1701, which formally ended the war in Lebanon.
Many returned to homes damaged by the nearly 4,000 rockets Hizbullah fired from Lebanon. Others will have to repair businesses dealt a severe blow by the war.
Last week, before the war ended, a delegation from New Jersey that included people from the Jewish Federation of Middlesex County went to northern Israel on a solidarity mission, met with Israelis under fire, and saw sites that had been damaged by rocket attacks.
One day they were home in New Jersey watching coverage of the war on television, the next, they were on Al-Hariri Street in Haifa, outside the headquarters of the Al-Ittihad Arabic newspaper that was destroyed the night before by Hizbullah. They watched as NBC correspondent Martin Fletcher interviewed Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's spokeswoman Miri Eisen inside the wreckage.
The visit to the bombing site made the war all the more vivid for Roberta Sutker, who until recently lived in Edison. She said she came on the mission because she felt a responsibility toward Israelis in need and she wanted to set an example to other American Jews to invest in Israel's future.
"We are all here to demonstrate that we care," Sutker said. "I just had to come. It was the right thing to do because Israel is where my heart is. I'm no martyr, but I wanted people to follow me and say, ‘If she could do it, I could do it.'"
This was no ordinary solidarity mission. The participants knew they were taking a risk going to northern Israel at a time of war. Each signed a release form absolving the federation of "liability for death, personal injury, and property damage." None of the participants, including veterans of many missions, had ever had to sign such a form before.
Barbara and Arthur Cohen of Highland Park had been to Israel six or seven times before. Barbara Cohen said she felt uncomfortable signing the release form, but they saw it as a unique opportunity to help Israel.
"We are not interested in sightseeing anymore, so we thought coming would be a good way to do some good and show support," she said. "When we told people we were coming, people asked us how our children felt about it. We said they were used to it and that they would worry until we got back."
The group visited areas to which thousands of Israelis had fled the rocket attacks, and they brought snacks to hospitalized soldiers and candy to children in bomb shelters. They also learned the complex reality of a war in which many of those injured and killed by Hizbullah rockets were Israeli Arabs living in northern Israel. They included two Christians killed in the Al-Ittihad building. The newspaper — located in Haifa's Wadi Nisnas neighborhood, which takes pride in its Jewish-Arab coexistence — was against Israel's going to war.
Sutker said she viewed the conflict from the perspective of her profession as a social worker. Reflecting on the way Israelis of all political persuasions briefly united during the war, she said Arabs and Jews should be able to settle their differences as well.
"It's important to look for things to focus on and find a common ground," Sutker said. "It's called family therapy when feuding families find a purpose and come together in peace. We're seeing it happen among Israelis, and I believe it can happen between Jews and Arabs too. You can call me a Pollyanna…."
On a visit to the Nahariya Hospital six miles from the Israel-Lebanon border on Monday, mission participants were surprised to find that there were no Israeli soldiers being treated at the time and that the majority of the patients were Arabic speakers. A hospital spokeswoman said 171 soldiers had been treated there since the war began on July 12.
The hospital was relocated to a massive bomb shelter when the war began, which turned out to be a wise move; its ophthalmology department was significantly damaged by a rocket on July 28. While the mission was underground in the shelter, air raid sirens sounded and six rockets hit the town; no one was hurt.
The group later visited the Matei Asher Command Center, which serves residents of 30 northern communities. Founded in a more peaceful time, when the biggest threat to residents was cow theft, the center is now open 24 hours a day, fielding reports of rocket attacks and combating the looting of homes abandoned by fleeing Israelis.
On a visit to a Netanya hotel, the NJ group met with elderly residents who were brought from their homes in the North for a respite. The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee has give five-day "vacations" to some 4,000 elderly Israelis, in a project funded by American donors, the Israeli government, and hotels.
The seniors in Netanya complained about their bomb shelters' lack of showers and air conditioning and their grandchildren's psychological problems stemming from the war. They said they were touched by the visit from the New Jerseyans.
"I am not surprised that American Jews are raising money, but I am surprised that they are coming here," an elderly woman named Leah told the group.
Sutker and Barbara Cohen said Leah's statement was very moving. "She said we had a courageous heart, but I thought she was the courageous one," Cohen said.
The seniors came from throughout the North; one was a Holocaust survivor who had been through every Israeli war. Another said his grandson was born at a hospital in Safed that had been rocketed and the infant was now in a bomb shelter. The grandson's brit was held in the Netanya hotel the day after the NJ group's visit.
The mission also visited a tent city built on a Mediterranean beach by an Israeli millionaire, which housed 6,000 refugees from the North, 300 per tent.
"When we think of a beach, we think of holidays, but this was no holiday," Sutker said. "These people had no privacy — families, children, young and old, stripped of all dignity. As a clinical social worker, if my command of Hebrew was better, I wouldn't have left this country. I would have stayed here and helped people more."
Cohen said that one of the reasons she and her husband came on the trip was that her rabbi, Eliot Malomet of the Highland Park Conservative Temple, said "the Jewish way" was to give comfort and to listen.
"So that's what we came to do, to show them that they are part of us and that we are part of them," Cohen said.
Reprinted with permission of the New Jersey Jewish News.
Tags: delegation, Gil Hoffman, Isrealis, Lebanon, New Jersey Jewish News, real life story, solidarity mission, war
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Researchers are learning more about child pornography offenders, why they’re attracted to it and what treatments are available.
Introduction
As of July 1, life for those involved in child pornography in Kansas got a whole lot riskier.
Kansas punishes child pornography offenders for the crime of sexual exploitation of a child. The sentence formerly was in excess of two years to a maximum of a little more than 11 years, depending on the offender’s criminal history.
As part of a package of revised sex offense laws passed this year, the Legislature adopted a provision that forgoes the use of the a mandatory sentencing range.
So as of July 1, the crime of sexual exploitation carries a sentence of 25 years, 40 years or life, if the victim is less than 14 years old.
Lawmakers also created a new law against electronic sexual solicitation, which includes e-mail, Internet chat rooms and text messaging, Saline County Attorney Ellen Mitchell said. The punishment under the law ranges from a little more than 12 years to in excess of 54 years, if the victim is less than 14 years old.
But this get-tough approach to the growing problem — worldwide, studies show that child pornography is a $6 billion a year business — ignores a couple of basic truths, according to Dr. Fred Berlin.
Those realities are that those sexually attracted to children are born that way, there is treatment that can help, and punishment isn’t the treatment, said Berlin, professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, in Baltimore, Md., and founder of the Johns Hopkins Sexual Disorder Clinic.
Berlin is a nationally recognized authority among his peers, and has more than 25 years experience working with sexual offenders of all kinds.
He’s also among the researchers who believe that people who have recurrent abnormal sexual cravings for children do so as a sexual orientation formed at birth, just as with heterosexual or homosexual orientation.
“Failure to appreciate that has really held us back (as a society),” Berlin said. “Through no fault of his own, the offender (predominately male) is attracted to children. Yet as a society we think we can still punish or legislate it away.”
Attracted to Children
Researchers don’t know very much about why sexual desires develop from birth.
There’s been little research involving pedophilia — those sexually attracted to prepubescent children — because society tends to look at it as a moral issue rather than a psychological or mental issue.
Research suggests that the psychological motivations that drive the lust for child pornography vary — just like the motivations that drive other sex offenses involving children. Stress, problems in a marriage or the lack of an adult partner can be factors. Or those drawn to such material might get an adrenaline rush from their illicit activity.
Kenneth Lanning, a former FBI special agent, wrote an analysis about the sexual exploitation of children that was published by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Lanning, a 30-year veteran of the FBI who was involved with thousands of cases where children were sexual victims, found that often offenders accumulated large collections of images that defined and fueled their sexual fantasies.
Child pornography feeds into obsessive and compulsive personalities, said Jerry Epp a clinical social worker and sex therapist at Prairie View mental health center in Newton. Epp has worked for more than 20 years with sex offender treatment at Prairie View.
Prairie View sees patients referred for treatment from other area agencies, such as the Central Kansas Mental Health Center in Salina.
“I’ve seen people for whom it’s just one more facet of collecting things,” he said. Some have a sexual attraction to children, others are more interested in seeing what’s out there.
“They’re captivated by various forms of sexually deviant behavior,” Epp said.
Prison Won’t Help
When it comes to treatment, prison alone won’t eliminate a child sex offender’s cravings or help those sexually attracted to children to resist, Berlin said.
He said the public’s cries for longer sentences for child sex offenders focus on the exception — the 1 percent of cases where there might be a kidnapping, sexual assault or murder of a young child.
The reality is that such laws put a greater strain on the courts and the prison systems without consideration whether it’s the most effective public policy, he said.
As with those who are treated for drug addictions, child sexual offenders can be helped, he said. But it’s not easy to find treatment.
“There are virtually no places where people who are sexually disordered can go in our society and seek help,” Berlin said.
“Many people think that to the extent that we can throw away the key, we need to do so,” he said. “I’m suggesting it’s not that simple.
“They (offenders) have family members who see them as people and care about them.”
Treatment Can Help
Here are some of the treatments that can help those sexually attracted to children, Berlin said.
Medications such as Depo Provera might be used to lower testosterone levels and are often used in conjunction with other approaches.
The most favored approach is group counseling, to help subjects “recognize they have some vulnerability,” and to imagine the legal and social consequences of such action “to prevent acting on that behavior,” Berlin said.
In a 1999 study, the United States Department of Justice found that, indeed, treatment does help. The study analyzed data from 79 sex-offender treatment programs encompassing nearly 11,000 sex offenders. Results showed that sex offenders who received relapse-prevention treatment had a combined rearrest rate of 7.2 percent, compared to 17.6 percent for untreated offenders.
Most of the studies in the analysis were conducted over a three- to five-year follow-up period.
Another study — conducted through Johns Hopkins over a similar time period — found that of 400 people diagnosed with pedophilia, better than 90 percent did not reoffend, Berlin said.
Berlin said research might one day offer a drug to change the sexual attraction of pedophiles from children to adults.
“We’re nowhere near that in 2006, but we know more about the sex drive,” he said. “We can, by lowering testosterone, provide the equivalent of a sexual appetite suppressant.”
Porn Without Problems
Berlin also said there’s evidence to show that there’s a group of men who use the Internet to look at child pornography without making any attempt at trying for a sexual encounter with a child.
Yet often, their lives are turned upside down by a conviction, which sends them to prison and lists them on a sex offender registry when they get out.
Berlin said registries need to have enough information to help the public understand what an offender did to merit placement on the list. Someone committing incest or looking at sexually explicit photos in the privacy of their bedrooms might not be that much of a danger to their neighborhoods.
Berlin said he doesn’t want to minimize the fact that there are people who commit serious sexual crimes involving children. But declaring them all evil and not deserving of help also is wrong.
Sex-offender registries will cause problems for those who are trying hard to succeed and not reoffend, he said. Likewise, he said, laws that limit where sex offenders may live, “pulls the rug out from under them.”
“These guys are totally demonized, while we know nothing about their backgrounds. We’ve taken all the humanity away from it,” he said.
Reporter David Clouston can be reached at 822-1403, or by e-mail at sjdclouston@ saljournal.com
Reprinted with permission of the Salinas Journal.
Tags: chat, child pornography, Kansas, offenders, real life story, sexual exploitation, social workers, solicitation, text messaging, treatments
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Longtime friends, mom and stepmom bridge personal hurt with maternal love
Christine Cusick and Lisa Smith sat in the stands behind Vince’s Sports Center in Newark last Sunday.
They were doing the mom thing, cheering Lisa’s 5-year-old son, Joseph, as he swung the bat and dashed to first base.
They weren’t always this friendly.
There was a time when their relationship was awkward — particularly after Cusick learned that her friend was dating Joe Smith, the father of her firstborn child, Aleya.
When Joe Smith married Lisa and they had a son, the two women gradually learned to forge a new relationship — for the sake of their children.
Blending families takes time
Today is Mother’s Day. Countless mothers will get the royal treatment — flowers, cards, brunch. But the job of mothering often runs beyond bloodlines.
While there are no state statistics, a national sample survey conducted in 2001 estimated that 72.5 million children under 18 lived in blended families. Those families encompass a myriad of combinations of related and unrelated adults — including stepmoms, like Lisa Smith.
The classic image of a stepmother, brooding and demanding like the one in the fairy tale, Cinderella, doesn’t apply to Smith. Though the relationship was initially strained, Cusick always believed Smith would be a good stepmother.
Today, the women are friends — they can talk about anything, not just their children.
“It takes time” to reach such a point, said Peter R. Goodman, a clinical social worker with a private practice in Wilmington. “Sometimes it takes years. There’s a myth about blending quickly. It’s not true.”
Entwining of lives painful at first
Smith and Cusick grew up together, attending the same schools for 12 years. Smith still has a picture of them taken during a class trip to New York.
At 17, Smith gave birth to her first child, Jailynn. Cusick attended her baby shower.
Two years later, they celebrated at Cusick’s baby shower — for Joe Smith’s daughter, Aleya.
Neither woman married the child’s father.
Later, Smith bumped into Cusick’s ex-boyfriend, Joe, at the St. Anthony’s Italian Festival. They reconnected a year later, and he decided to call her. One date became two, and before they knew it, two months had passed.
All the while, Cusick hadn’t a clue.
She found out when Joe called her to ask for a sleeping bag so their daughter could spend the night with his new girlfriend’s daughter, Jailynn.
“I really couldn’t do anything … but hang up the phone,” Cusick said.
Sometime later, Cusick saw her ex-boyfriend and her friend — together — at a Wilmington nightclub.
“It hit me hard,” Cusick said. “I told my friends, ‘If she gets too close to me, I might hurt her.’ I wasn’t even sad. I was more angry at that point.”
A year later, a friend told her of their engagement. Cusick was hurt, to put it mildly, but she tried never to be mean. She credits her daughter for “keeping me sane.”
Despite her feelings, Cusick knew Aleya was in good hands with ex-boyfriend and his new wife. But the relationship was awkward. When Smith sometimes picked Aleya up to visit her father, Cusick had little to say.
“I don’t blame you for not liking me one bit,” Smith, now 27, remembered saying to her. “If the situation was turned, I’d be the same way.”
Adjusting took time. Cusick realized the relationship was permanent when her old friend and her ex-boyfriend, the father of her daughter, married.
‘I just got over it’
Today, the Smiths and their son, Joseph, and his half-sister, Jailynn, live in Newark. Cusick and Joseph’s half-sister, Aleya, and Cusick’s second child, Dru, live nearby.
All their children are close.
“Once they were married,” Cusick said, “I just got over it.”
When the adults are civilized after a breakup, Goodman said, they are able to co-parent the children. The additional parenting can make a healthy stepfamily.
“You could speculate that people want to do better by their children, so they’re more willing to try to compromise,” he said.
“There are a lot of stepparents who are tremendous parents.”
Both Cusick and Smith were raised by divorced parents. Growing up, Smith would spend every other weekend with her father and his new wife. She felt like like a stranger in their home.
When she became a stepmother, she wanted something more for her stepdaughter, Aleya.
“I didn’t want her to feel out of place being here,” Smith said, “because that’s what I had to go through.”
Cusick and Joe Smith said their daughter, Aleya, has adjusted well to their unique situation. He’s grateful his ex-girlfriend and his wife have been able to move forward.
“I guess I kind of lucked out,” Joe Smith said, “because they get along pretty well.”
“Many people don’t have the history we have,” Lisa Smith said of Cusick. “We have no problem talking about anything.”
Until the children become adults, the women will be seeing a lot of each other. And even if their friendship fades, Cusick and Smith said they will know they’ve put the children first.
Today, Joe Smith has a message for both of them: “I wish them both a happy Mother’s Day.”
Contact Christopher Yasiejko at 324-2778 or cyasiejko@delawareonline.com.
Reprinted with permission of The News Journal
Tags: blended family, Christopher Yasiejko, news journal, real life story, step mom, step-parents
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The single, middle-aged woman had moved from a shelter into a Section 8 apartment. She had one bed and one folding chair.
Last Saturday a truck and two station wagons with two men and four women arrived at the apartment and began to unload a bureau, a couch, two end tables, a kitchen table with four chairs, bedding, dishes, pots, pans and cutlery.
“Within 15 minutes the place was transformed,” according to Diane Mack of Bloomfield, one of the founders of A Hand Up, Inc., “and we were all transformed, too, by the woman’s joy and by knowing that A Hand Up had truly given a hand up. We realized that what had happened in her life – multiple losses of family members and other sorrows – could happen to anyone of us. The woman had applied for Section 8 housing after a stay at the Institute of Living, had battled alcohol, had found a job, finally gotten an apartment and through the Community Renewal Team (CRT) we were notified of the situation.”
How Did A Hand Up Begin?
Robin Gilmartin, a clinical social worker at the VA and also of Bloomfield, begins the story. “We were sitting around our kitchen table,” she says, “about a year and a half ago – Diane, who works for Mass Mutual, Rosemary Cleaves, a retired social worker, Jane Arnold and I. We were four women and a dog, “Jack,” our part border collie, part lab.
“We had been getting together once a month, trying to come up with a project which would make a difference. We thought of starting a special kind of thrift shop. Then one of us suggested cooky baking or marketing Rosemary’s low-carb, high protein pasta. None of those ideas seemed the answer.
“We knew that we could not try to provide housing or food or employment for people who had been homeless – other agencies do that – but then we realized there was a gap – and that gap is, as our brochure states, ‘to help people transition from homelessness to independent living.’ We wanted to distribute donated goods to help people in need establish new homes.”
And so they began, slowly at first, collecting in Diane’s and Robin’s Bloomfield garage whatever surplus household items – beds and blankets, dishes and dressers – that friends and neighbors donated. Another colleague, Christine Pina of West Hartford, was added to their steering committee, now totaling five women.
Rosemary, the group’s president, remembers that their first deliveries were made last September. “So far,” she says, “we have delivered goods to Bloomfield, East Hartford, Hartford, Windsor, West Hartford and New Britain. We work closely with CRT, and their social workers inform us of what each client needs. And it’s important to know that our efforts are ‘one time only’ – in other words, we can only supply a client once.”
“Adopt a List” is one of the schemes A Hand Up uses to engage volunteers. Here’s how it works: CRT provides a list of needs to A Hand Up, describing what one formerly homeless person, now moving into housing, requires to set up housekeeping. The list is given to one of our volunteers who then “adopts” the list, collecting from friends and neighbors and family the items A Hand Up will deliver.
“Horton,” a truck donated to A Hand Up, stands in the Bloomfield driveway, ready to make deliveries when CRT provides the address where the household items are to be taken. Other volunteers help load, drive and unload. Recently, for instance, supplies were unloaded at the apartment of a longtime homeless man, age 71, who has overcome a drug habit and was able to secure some of the needed items himself for his new living quarters. A Hand Up supplied kitchen chairs and a table as well as cutlery and towels.
“We take almost anything in good condition,” according to Rosemary, “except pillows – those have to be new.”
Statistics in A Hand Up’s brochure describe the need in the Greater Hartford area. For instance:
- Nearly 1,500 people are homeless each night in spite of the fact that 64 percent have some kind of income
- Of those homeless people, 40 percent are white; 30 percent are African-American; 30 percent are Hispanic; 10 percent are children; and one-third are female, two-thirds male.
- The average age is 37 years.
A Hand Up also has its own needs: more volunteers to help collect and deliver household goods, more home furnishings and a volunteer grant writer/fund raiser. Financial contributions are sought to supplement expenses currently being met by the new agency’s founders.
So remember that sturdy couch you no longer need? Or that set of Aunt Milly’s dishes that never come out of the cupboard? Or those pots and pans taking up shelf space? And are you looking to help a worthy cause?
To learn more about A Hand Up, go to: www.ahandupinc.org or email:
AHandUp2005@sbcglobal.net.
To receive a brochure about the organization or to make a contribution write to:
A Hand Up, Inc.
P.O. Box 270323
West Hartford, CT 06127.
Reprinted with permission of the Bloomfield Journal
Tags: hand up, homelessness, independent living, real life story, section 8, shelter, social worker, statistics, stories
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Introduction
 |
Dawn Simpson recently became
a licensed clinical social worker. |
Catalina Island Medical Center is now offering mental health services. Dawn Sampson, who received her masters in social work in 2001, recently became a licensed clinical social worker – a designation that required that Sampson provide 3,200 hours of supervised therapy as well as pass two comprehensive examinations. That designation also allows her to provide therapy to the island community.
For the past four years, Sampson has been providing counseling to local residents while being supervised both through the Guidance Center and by local resident Dan Hirst, who is also a licensed clinical social worker. “Dan volunteered his time to help me complete my hours,” Sampson said. “I couldn’t have done it without him.”
Now that she’s completed her hours and passed her exams, Sampson will be able to counsel patients with insurance through MediCal and Medicare. “Those patients haven’t been able to get services locally,” Sampson said. “That’s the gap that I’ll be able to fill.” Through the Catalina Island Medical Center, Sampson will also accept some other insurance programs.
She expects that most of her patients will be contending with depression, anxiety or adjusting to trauma. Many may also have relationship issues or substance abuse problems. “Most typically, people will be referred to me by their medical providers,” Sampson said. “But people can also self refer.” Appointments will be available immediately on Tuesdays, Fridays and Wednesday mornings. Call Sampson at 310-510-0520.
Her new professional title also comes with a new title at Catalina Island Medical Center. She is now the social services director and clinical therapist. Linda Altherr has been hired to round out the social services department. Altherr will now be responsible for discharge planning for patients who are going home from the hospital and for providing information and referrals about medical services to local residents. Altherr will be responsible for grant management.
For more information about the social services department at Catalina Island Medical Center, call Dawn Sampson at 310-510-0520.
Reprinted with permission of The Catalina Island Journal
Tags: Catalina Island Journal, counseling, Dawn Simpson, licensed clinical social worker, mental health, real life story, services, social worker
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Local Mental Health Authority Says Local Trend Is Counterintuitive
One said she was going to kill herself with the gun she had in her hand. Another said she was going to cut her wrists with a knife. One teen boy made suicidal statements to his mother and then took off in an automobile.
In all, the Price County Sheriff’s Department recorded five suicide threats over the two weeks beginning April 10. That’s significantly higher than average. None followed through, but the spike in threats underscores the need to remain vigilant against depression and suicide, according to local authorities.
Gregg Engfer, a clinical social worker and the director of the Counseling and Development Center in Phillips, said in his experience an upsurge in depression and reports of suicidal threats are typical for spring – which bucks conventional wisdom.
“You would think that in the dead of winter people would get depressed, but in the spring it is worse for some strange reason,” he said.
Engfer could not correlate the surge to any particular factors, but he speculated that people are on the move in the spring, which tends to reveal problems that were under cover during the winter months. Alcohol and illicit drug use almost always aggravate circumstances, he added.
Engfer also said current events aren’t helping people’s mental health in general.
“There doesn’t seem to be anything good on the horizon,” he said, citing the war in Iraq, terrorism, gas prices and confrontational politics. “Everyplace you look there seems to be a crisis or a looming crisis.”
Gas prices seem to be a particular source of anxiety for people, he said, because the prospect of $4 per gallon of fuel forces people to evaluate their lives in ways they aren’t accustomed to. Even financially stable people might have to rethink long-anticipated getaways or change other priorities when it costs $50 or $60 to fill a tank.
“If I was to make a prediction, I’d say we’re going to have a long, hot summer,” Engfer said.
There are avenues for people who are struggling with depression or suicidal thoughts.
Suicidal thoughts should be addressed immediately. Suicidal individuals or others who suspect a person might be suicidal should call 9-1-1.
For people who feel they are suffering from depression, Engfer recommends an appointment with a physician so that possible physical factors can be evaluated. Mental health staff at the counseling center can be reached at 715339-3048.
Reprinted with permission of THE BEE.
Tags: clinical social worker, mental health, real life story, Ryan Stutzman, springtime, suicidal, THE BEE, trend
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Psychotherapist comes to Morris to share science of recovering from life traumas big and small
The world is awash in the trauma of war and natural disasters — Oklahoma City, 9/11, the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami and Hurricane Katrina, to name a few.
But a phoenix has risen from the ashes of these blockbuster catastrophes: Data about the human brain and lots of it.
“If you just look at the climate of the world, you can make a very arguable point that there is more trauma now than at any other time,” said Belleruth Naparstek (Bell-a-rooth NAP-pur-stack), Cleveland psychotherapist and author of “Invisible Heroes: Survivors of Trauma and How They Heal” (Bantam, $25).
“Some of the greatest trauma studies in recent years have been from the earthquake in Turkey in 1999. Hurricane Andrew, too.”
Since this data has emerged in the dawn of the age of brain imaging, it has been crunched and studied until it has revealed a true treatment for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD: soothing guided imagery. It’s as simple as that, though the imagery must be delivered in scientifically precise ways, a field in which Naparstek, known for her clear, down-to-earth speaking style, has emerged as a star in recent years.
On Saturday, Naparstek — whose groundbreaking guided imagery audiotapes are used in hospitals, clinics, homes and disaster relief programs worldwide –will talk about this breakthrough in alleviating human suffering. Local people can see her at Morristown Memorial Hospital at an event hosted by the Friends’ Health Connection, a nonprofit organization that hosts an array of educational programs on health-related subjects.
| Why imagery heals PTSD
The ability to self-soothe by conjuring helpful images
is so effective in helping heal Post-Traumatic Stress
Disorder, it could be considered part of a prescription,
according to Cleveland psychotherapist Belleruth
Naparstek in her book “Invisible Heroes: Survivors
of Trauma and How They Heal.”
Imagery works, Naparstek says, because it:
• Is absorbed by the tissue, bone, cells, skin
and DNA of the body.
• Sidesteps analytical brain centers and the
resistances they offer.
• Steers the body back into biochemical balance.
• Restores control for a person suffering panic.
• Affirms strength and hope.
• Opens a wider, spiritual perspective on life.
– Lorraine Ash
|
The Friends’ Health Connection is excited to have Naparstek as one of its guests because her work has increased quality of life for people suffering a wide array of traumas stemming from illness and loss to combat experience, according to Roxanne Black-Weisheit, executive director.
“The fact that Belleruth’s tapes have sold more than 1.5 million copies clearly demonstrates their tremendous impact,” said Black-Weisheit, adding that Naparstek’s work is distinguished by the fact her techniques have been researched by medical facilities and proven to have a lasting effect on people’s lives.
The Symptoms
PTSD is a medically diagnosable condition listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders, or DSM-IV. Some people suffer indefinitely after they participate in, or witness, trauma. Symptoms include re-experiencing the event in flashbacks or nightmares, avoiding triggers of bad memories, and distress to the point of impaired functioning and relationships.
Those who come to Naparstek’s talks may still be suffering from surviving a horrific disaster, or from the effects of more mundane — but real and serious — trauma, such as abuse, crime or the death of a loved one.
Naparstek, now widowed with three grown children and two grandsons, has not experienced a great disaster. But she has suffered mild bouts of PTSD.
“At least in Western civilization the biggest cause of trauma is auto collision. I’ve had PTSD from some car accidents, and a couple of muggings here and there. If you lived in Chicago on the South Side, it was just a fact of life,” she said, referring to her undergraduate and graduate school days at the University of Chicago in the 1960s, where she earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees.
“I could say I’m a trauma survivor of sorts, but that’s not what attracted me to this field. The appeal of working with people who suffer from trauma is that they are so open for growth, it’s dazzling.”
That trauma can undo people to the point of having a new identity is a notion that has been around for a couple of decades, surfacing notably in the work of Dr. Judith Lewis Herman of Harvard Medical School, author of the 1992 landmark book “Trauma and Recovery: The aftermath of violence –from domestic abuse to political terror.”
After trauma, people feel “cast out of the human and divine systems of care and protection that sustain life,” Herman wrote.
So all their assumptions about justice and order in the world are shattered, and their own ultimate powerlessness affirmed. So, too, is their capacity for feeling joy in the moment and, potentially, a realization about a wider spiritual perspective on life. They are never the same again.
As work on trauma emerged, so did studies about imagery, some of them cross-cultural. The results cumulated until technology such as the MRI and PET scans made it possible to see the workings of the human brain. This “magical confluence of information,” as Naparstek calls it, opened a window into the chemical world of the brain and emotion never before perceived.
The Biochemical Loop
The effects of trauma, it turns out, are biochemical, and emotions are psychological manifestations of hormone swings, Naparstek explained. There is not so much a mind/body connection involved as a mind/body unity.
“You can separate them and say: This is what the mind is doing, this is what the body is doing,” she explained. “But the fact of the matter is, it’s going on at the same time. The mind is influencing the body. The body is influencing the mind. It is as one.”
Here’s how it works, according to current scientific understanding: The right, or primitive, brain is about survival and processing nonverbal cues of danger. It’s the part of the brain that snaps to when a trauma is under way.
“It’s a movement out of the corner of your eye. It’s a bristle of alarm in the back of your neck. It’s hearing an odd sound. It’s about sensory fragments,”Naparstek said. “The primitive brain is so critical to safety that it overrides any thinking mechanism and just goes into gear. So you act before you know why. That’s why the thinking brain is out in left field, literally, when it comes to this stuff.”
Going into gear means that the body, for its own protection, is imprinting the brain with the experience to ensure it will not get hurt in the same way again. The imprint comes by way of huge jolts of Adrenalin, cortisol and epinephrine. In the aftermath, the body tries to settle itself with huge blasts of opioids.
The body swings from one state to another, at the mercy of these chemical washes, sometimes for weeks. Most people’s bodies will self-regulate naturally after a time, Naparstek explained.
But for other people the washes of alarm drugs and opioids keep going. They are the PTSD sufferers.
“The most wonderful thing I get from either mail or e-mail or the workshops or talks I do is people coming up and literally bonking their foreheads with the heel of their hand and going, ‘I’m not crazy. This explains me to me,’”Naparstek said. “There is such wonderful relief in that.”
Understanding that the whole process rests in the primitive brain — and not in the left brain, the seat of language and reasoning — explains why talk therapy alone has not helped PTSD sufferers, according to Naparstek. For decades psychotherapists had patients talking about their traumas over and over again, causing those chemical cascades to restart and play out. In the name of healing, much suffering ensued. In her book Naparstek counts herself among the well-intentioned majority who did just that. But no more.
In recovery from trauma, there still is room for “good, old-fashioned, deep-dish psychotherapy,” she said. But not first. Not before imagery has been given to patients as a way to self-soothe and stop their biochemical loop of misery. There also is room for drugs, which may provide people great relief from the biochemical loop in the early stages of their trauma, before they’ve learned the skills guided imagery can afford them.
Power of Metaphor
If the loop of alarm chemicals and opioids is automatic, then the deliberate use of imagery can be thought of as putting the whole process on manual. This is deliberate relaxation.
“You’re reminding the body that it knows how to do this,” Naparstek said.
The guided sensory imagery journeys produced by her company, Health Journeys, leave room for individual PTSD sufferers to conjure their own images. They make reference to a safe, peaceful place, for example, or to gentle guardians. Such things mean different things to different people.
In “Invisible Heroes,”Naparstek tells the story of Frannie, a PTSD patient who experienced multiple traumas and conjured the image of a stone in her chest. As time and therapy passed, the stone softened into a heart.
Nationwide licensed clinical social workers and licensed psychologists are incorporating a variety of innovative imagery therapies into their practices. In the Morris area the BDB group — standing for Victoria Britt of Montclair, John Diepold Jr. of Moorestown and Sheila Bender of Florham Park — happily uses Naparstak’s work.
Britt and Bender agree that the therapies have proven powerful and profound in their practices, and that they are best administered by a well-seasoned clinician within “the trappings of therapy.”
“Imagery therapy uses lovely, very invitational language in urging people to pick the images they need to heal,” said Britt, a licensed clinical social worker. “These images encapsulate metaphors and, somehow, just the healing needed.”
Bender, a licensed psychologist, agreed metaphors are potent.
“We’re wending our way in human capacity,” she said. “There is so much we don’t know about gaining entree to the mind. Metaphors do have a concreteness, though. They can heal. Hypnosis heals, and guided imagery is a form of hypnosis.”
The Next Steps
As exciting as imagery work is, according to Naparstek, it’s still new and needs refining.
There are some people, for example, for whom guided imagery does not work — people for whom relaxation feels dangerous, and veterans whose trauma includes feelings of guilt for having been an instrument of violence.
Imagery work also has potential value for use in traumas of great magnitude, such as Hurricane Katrina and 9/11. Instead of leaving people to the images in their heads, or replaying the same footage of catastrophe for weeks on end, multi-sensory imagery tracks can be used to stop bad biochemical loops from starting.
“We can develop downloads for people to use,” Naparstak said. “If anything should happen where people have to pile up in a place like the Superdome again, as a result of some threat, we could be giving out methods — maybe a combination of imagery with some tapping exercises. We could be explaining to them some of the crazy hormone swings they are going to have.
“You can have maybe five tracks of different exercises people can do right then and there to help them.”
Using imagery at those times, she said, could be more than therapeutic. It could, in her words, be “wildly inoculative.”
Lorraine Ash can be reached at (973) 428-6660 or lvash@gannett.com.
Reprinted with permission of the Daily Record.
Tags: Daily Record, heal, HERBERT ASCHERMAN, images, katrina, Lorraine Ash, oklahoma city, ptsd, real life story, stories, tsunami
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Introduction
A postponed meeting on drug and alcohol use among high school students took on more importance last week after the recent death of a young Homer woman from a drug overdose. Even before Bethany Woodworth, 19, died last month, the Homer High School Parent Teacher Association had planned a presentation to discuss the issue. The PTA postponed the presentation when the featured speaker, Homer Police Sgt. Lary Kuhns, had to cancel because of illness.
 Photo by Michael Armstrong, Homer News
Homer High School Principal Ron Keffer, left, talks about drugs and alcohol at the high school as Alaska State Trooper Sgt. Tom Dunn, center, and PTA President Rachael Roe, right, listen. Sgt. Lary Kuhns, left, and Sgt. Will Hutt, right, stand behind them. |
Last Thursday, Kuhns made it, and fellow police, mental health clinicians and school officials showed up in force to back up his message: Methamphetamine as a drug problem has arrived on the lower Kenai Peninsula.
Kuhns said meth is widespread in Alaska.
"It's been a problem all over, but seems to have increased the last few years," he said.
"It's not a matter of when, because it's already here," added Paul Morton, a licensed professional counselor and former California police officer.
Morton and Kuhns, along with Alaska State Trooper Sgt. Tom Dunn, police Sgt. Will Hutt, high school principal Ron Keffer and Jim Henkelman, a licensed clinical social worker with Community Mental Health Center, spoke to about 70 people — mostly parents. PTA President Rachael Roe said she wanted the meeting to be positive and proactive, with the focus of getting information out to parents on Homer's drug and alcohol problem.
Kuhns said there are about 50 recipes for making meth, using basic ingredients like pseudo ephedrine, iodine and matchbook strikers. Henkelman said a Google search of "meth recipes" yields 120,00 hits — actually, it's more like 689,000 hits.
Henkelman said cooking meth is highly profitable. About $20 in ingredients makes $1,500 of meth. Meth gives a longer high than cocaine, 12 hours instead of an hour, for about the same price, $120 a gram.
Meth may be a monetary bargain, but the psychological cost is greater.
"It is actually much worse than cocaine," Morton said. "It's the most diabolical drug I've seen."
Most of the speakers laid out a clear message to parents. To reduce meth use, the community has to take a strong, zero-
tolerance stand against drugs — including marijuana. Meth is often sprinkled onto marijuana and smoked, Henkelman said.
"I think something we're going to have to seriously think about is our general attitude toward substance abuse," he said.
Dunn and police said they can increase law enforcement and make drug arrests, but they need support from the community. If people see suspected drug dealing or meth cooking, they should take down information like license plates, descriptions of people and other details. Witnesses also have to be willing to go public and testify in court.
"I want members (of the community) to call us and tell us everything they know," Dunn said. "We want you to go the whole nine yards."
Henkelman said meth labs can be identified by frequent visitors and activity at a house, fences, drawn windows, chemical odors and trash with lots of pill or iodine bottles. Meth cooks also smoke cigarettes outdoors for fear of igniting hazardous chemicals.
"It's like walking into a potential bomb," he said.
At Homer High School, suspensions for marijuana and alcohol doubled this year, with 20 suspensions, all but one first-time, Keffer said.
"We haven't found meth," he said. "But that's because we can't detect it."
Keffer said meth isn't as obvious as marijuana and alcohol. Teachers and officials usually catch students by smelling marijuana or alcohol on their breath or clothes. Sometimes officials smell marijuana or alcohol but don't find it. In that case, parents are called and alerted to possible substance abuse.
Police don't want to arrest users, Hutt said. They're after the big fish, the small-time meth cooks and the dealers. If a student had a drug problem and sought police help, Hutt said the intent of the police isn't to get an arrest or conviction.
"It would be to get them treatment," he said.
Keffer called for parents to be firm with their children.
"Kids need to understand what our attitude is," he said. "What kids are hearing in our community is not crystal clear. They are enabled in concrete ways to use drugs."
He noted that in most cases where students are caught with drugs or alcohol, they got it from their parents.
"Parents have to work on the same page. We're in this together," Keffer said.
Mickey Todd noted the relatively low turnout among parents at the PTA meeting is part of the problem. At elementary school PTA meetings, almost 100 percent of parents attend big meetings. With 450 students at the high school, Thursday night's parent attendance was well below 100 percent.
"There are a percentage of parents who care about their kids," Todd said. "But there are a percentage who don't."
Several parents whose children have struggled with drugs spoke at the meeting. Janet Mullen, who has spoken at other meetings about her 17-year-old son's meth addiction, said her son fit the pattern. He was awake for long stretches and then would crash. Mullen's son is now in treatment, and still has cravings after being off meth for four months. Mullen thinks one solution to detect meth and other drugs would be to get a drug-sniffing dog on the lower Kenai Peninsula. She's leading a fund-raising campaign to raise money for such a dog.
Francie Roberts, a high school teacher, suggested simple things like parent teas. Parents could get together for informal gatherings and share information about their kids. She's done this before, and as simple as it sounds, it works.
"It frightens kids to death," she said.
Roe said parents need to stay involved with their children. She told of how when her daughter got into a little trouble, she kept on her.
"When are you going to give up on me?" Roe said her daughter asked.
"I said ‘never,'" she said.
Community involvement is the key, Dunn and others kept repeating.
"The community has to step up and say ‘This is enough,'" he added.
Another town meeting on meth is scheduled for 7 p.m., April 24 at the Community Christian Church on Bartlett Street, said Peter Nagle, the Homer artist who organized a meeting two weeks ago.
Michael Armstrong can be reached at michael.armstrong@homernews.com.
Reprinted with Permission of www.HomerNews.com.
Tags: Alaska, children, HomerNews, law enforcement, meth, meth lab, Michael Armstrong, overdose, parents, profit, real life story
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