Moving Past Sexual Abuse Group Starting Soon

Raeburn House, Auckland, New Zealand, is running another Moving Past Sexual Abuse group. In the past the group was organised as a support group in which participants would be surrounded by survivors who understood their experiences and sharing one’s stories and supporting each other was the strongest emphasis.

This new Moving Past Sexual Abuse group is about discovering ways of how to leave the abuse and the legacies of the abuse behind oneself. Rather than concentrating on what happened in the past the emphasis is on having a life worth living NOW, today, and the days to come.

You will be shown how it is possible to regain control and reconnect with joy, wisdom, and peace of mind. You will find that the capacity to live in wellness has always been dormant within you waiting for you to connect with it. The Moving Past Abuse group is geared to help you realise that potential!

You can expect that we will address how to deal with anger, difficult emotions, social connections, relationships with self and others, depression, perceptions, thought, and in general how not to be ruled by the past.

Here are the starting dates and details:

When: Mondays, 8 weeks, Starts 30 July
Time:·7:00pm – 9:00pm
Total Cost: $80
Facilitator: Gudrun Frerichs
Venue: Raeburn House, 138 Shakespeare Road, Milford

For more information contact Raeburn House, phone: (09) 441 8989 or emaillearning@raeburnhouse.org.nz.

Find more interesting groups run by Raeburn House by going to their website.

Learning Some Tricks of the Trade

Have you ever wanted to learn some tricks of the counselling trade? I find myself often intrigued by the numbers of people who want to ‘GET OVER IT’ as quickly as possible. And fair enough! Why would you want to spend months walking down a certain path when there is a quicker way to reach your destination?

Over the years I have found that some things – especially in the field of human development – take time. Like a seed you plant into the earth needs time to germinate and grow for a certain time to become a flower, brush, or tree, people need time to grow. But there are conditions that can speed up that growth: for the seed that would be fertile soil, enough water, warmth, and protection from bad weather or weeds.

For people’s growth and healing similar ‘speeding up’ processes are possible. You can learn to connect better with people, you can be more confident, you can stop being anxious or depressed … and it doesn’t have to take much time at all. NLP, or neuro-linguistic programming, has given us plenty of great tools to speed up certain growth processes.

I am offering a series of 6 Saturday workshops, starting 30 April 2011, where I will pass on a range of very useful NLP tools and skills that people can then apply in their daily life.

If you are curious and would like to know more about it, go to my website, drop me an email, or call me for a chat about the workshop.

The Importance of Eyebrow Position

April / May is usually the time Aucklanders enjoy the Comedy Festival. Warming up to a performance she wants me to go to with her, my daughter showed me the following video clip! Have Fun!

http://www.youtube.com/v/O6KBPGQPswQ&hl=en_US&fs=1&color1=0x5d1719&color2=0xcd311b

Identifying Personal Responses to Conflict Situations

When it comes to dealing effectively with conflict situations, knowing about your own conflict style will come as a great help. Everybody reacts differently to conflict. Basically, how we react to conflict, what triggers conflict, and what constitutes vulnerable areas to could lead to conflict depends very much on a person’s history and his/her formative experiences in childhood. For example, growing up in a family where conflict often led to violence might cause a child to grow up dealing with conflict either by acting violently or by avoiding it altogether.  

What Is Passive Aggressive Behaviour

Conflict situations with an angry person are characterised by noticeable contact in the form of friction or even collision. The angry person’s point of view and wants are generally obvious whether they are unrealistic or not. This is very different when dealing with passive aggressive behaviours. Like pathological anger, passive aggressiveness is caused by a person’s inability to express anger healthily. 

The anger could be repressed or suppressed to such extend that the passive aggressive person is not even aware of his/her anger. When confronted with being called angry, the passive aggressive person may be convinced the other person has most certainly got the wrong end of the stick.

What Is A Pathologically Angry Person?

How will you know whether you or a person close to you is a pathologically angry person? A sure sign is when you notice a pervasive behavioural pattern that can range from being negative, irritable, bitter, resentful, or having temper tantrums on one side to being hostile, aggressive, self-destructive, furious, or having regular rage attacks on the other end of the continuum of anger.

Is Your Anger Appropriate or Inappropriate?

What is appropriate anger – and is there such a thing as inappropriate anger? Anger is one of the eight basic emotions (they are joy, acceptance, fear, surprise, sadness, disgust, anger, and anticipation) we observe universally in people all over the world. Anger is a valid, necessary, and appropriate human emotion.  I consider anger, like all other emotions, as data, or better: emotional information about the quality of an experience we have. Whereas in the distant past anger has informed humans about immanent threat to their lives, nowadays anger rather informs us about a trespassing, injustice, disrespect, or pending  physical or emotional harm.

Sexual Abuse Survivors: Parenting Model

The theme of the November Edition of the Blog Carnival "Recovery From Sexual Abuse" has the theme PARENTING. Parenting brings up a whole lot of issues caused by people's perception of having been not good enough in parenting their children.

This may have been due to struggling with the legacies of sexual abuse to such an extend that survivors are barely abe to fully there for their children. It may be that they did not have good role models that showed them what good parenting looks like or feels like.

I would like to kick of the discussion with a video clip I found. Let me know what you think of the following piece.

http://www.youtube.com/v/IQO7h9MNCqI&hl=en&fs=1

How To Build Trust

How can you go about building trust? When you don’t trust anybody at all, it might seem like an unachievable task. I want to look at building trust from a practical, pragmatic point in the hope that it might give you some hands-one ideas how to go about it. Trust will develop in any group or team when

•    The team is successful and reaches the goals they set themselves
The most important pointer for people in recovery is that they achieve progress. Without having a sense that things improve it will be difficult to keep being motivated. When everyone becomes aware that progress is achieved, they will not only trust the process, but also trust each other and the ‘team-leader’.

Friends Inside & Out

How about you get together with a friend – either from the inside or from the people around you and have some fun time … or cuddly time?

I found these two Teddies and thought, how much fun must it be to snuggle up with a cute blanket.

How about you come up with some ideas and tell me about them? I'd love to hear what people are up to!