Three Quick Quotes and a FREE resource – 10 February 2021
Hi there
It’s been so heartening to receive all the positive messages from our blogpost/podcast ‘Falling down, getting back up again: my journey over the last year’. Thank you so much! It feels so important to speak out against stigma, to uncover the evils of sexual violence, and to continue to give hope for recovery for even the most unjust and undeserved suffering. Please do share the post/podcast as widely as possible so that recovery is our best revenge!
In this week’s ‘Three Quick Quotes’ email our free resource is the PDF version of our ‘Communicating Safety through Therapeutic Presence’ psychoeducational poster (attached). A low-ink version can also be found here.
If you enjoy this email, please forward to colleagues and clients and ask them to sign up to receive it here – where they can also get their hands on a free copy of our ‘Emotional Resource Guide’.
Stay safe!
Carolyn
three quotes
Suzette Boon, Kathy Steele and Onno van der Hart
Coping with Trauma-Related Dissociation
Christine Courtois & Julian Ford
Treatment of Complex Trauma
“Trauma memory processing often is misunderstood as either a revivification or a cathartic release of the recollections and feelings from past traumatic events. This viewpoint omits the crucial ingredient of “processing”. Phase 2 involves more than the recollection or simple retelling of the trauma or a cathartic “venting” of the pain those experiences and memories have caused. Therapeutic processing intentionally focuses on many formerly unacknowledged, unconscious, and unintegrated feelings, thoughts, and beliefs so that the client can gain (or regain) the ability to regulate emotions and to think more clearly. It is focused on building increased emotional tolerance that, in turn, promotes emotional processing to the point of resolving onerous symptoms. Clients may need to move back and forth between Phases 1 and 2, especially in times of crisis and/or when they need to refresh skills or apply or reformulate elements of their safety plan. In Phase 3 the gains of Phase 2 processing are applied to current and future life issues and decisions.”
Carolyn Spring
Recovery is my Best Revenge
“We have to believe that we are more than the sum of our symptoms. When we settle for anything less, we limit our recovery, because we allow ourselves to be defined by what happened to us: the oversensitisation of our neurobiology and the fragmentation of our sense of self. Recovery means that we connect the dots between all the different parts of ourselves: the different experiences, emotions, outlooks; the desires, and hopes and fears; and we become the person that we truly are, the whole that is greater than the sum of all its parts. I had to believe that I was more than a collection of symptoms, and forge forwards into the entirety of my being.”
this week’s free resource
snapshot of my week
Having spent a lot of time in the Highlands over recent years, I thought I knew everything there was to know about snow. Turns out that Buxton, in Derbyshire, being 300m above sea level and surrounded by hills, has a significant edge! This was my car after about 20 minutes of scraping and sweeping this week! Surely it’s going to warm up soon …?