How to cope with change
June 25, 2008
Coping with change is an issue that drives many people to therapy. Me too! Lucky I’ve got two other therapists here to therapise me.
At Imaginif, we have begun the packing process, cleaning process, moving process and….. the insanity process. Agggghhhhhh!!!! There, that feels better 
because I am managing my emotion rather than allow my emotions to become overwhelmed with the constant and demanding change.
Change is somewhat scary and threatening to many. Just as emotions have to be managed, so too does change. If a person can manage to get out of bed and live this hectic life, then they are already managing. If they can manage life, they can manage change, because life changes: constantly.
To manage change, it needs to be seen as a task. The task is then broken into smaller tasks - little parts that can be worked on, one at a time if needed. The completion of each mini sub task is an achievement, an act of management, a success.
Change is constant in life; a good thing or we’d all die of boredom. Unfortunately, what is not always so good is negative thoughts (stinkin’ thinkin’) about change. If your thoughts are telling you that you cannot cope, then you may not. If your thoughts are telling you that you can manage this change by breaking it into small, easily achievable parts then you will no doubt cope with the change.
Moving, divorce and death are all changes that rate high on the stress scale. We are moving, we are stressed, but I don’t think any of us are contemplating divorce or death. Why? Because we are managing our change. We are coping with a stressful situation by breaking the days into smaller moving tasks.
Apart from coping with change, what is different at Imaginif?
Talk doctor Rebekah did the last training at 206 Jensen St yesterday. She still has some clients booked in but apart from that, we are preparing to move to our new premises at 30 James St.
Rebekah and I are both going to have some time off from scheduled appointments: no new counselling, supervision, training or consultations until we kick off at the new place on July 14. Talk doctor Fran (just back from a six week holiday in the Mediterranean) will be working on Palm Island for a week so she’s out of the office anyway (lucky woman - that’s a great way to manage ).
And….when we are firmly entrenched at 30 James Street, we are going to offer telephone counselling. Many people find it difficult to physically access a counsellor. Issues of access, mobility and often even depression or toxic shame prevent some people from thriving in a therapeutic relationship. We have heard this from the many people who ring or email and we are providing you a service that suits your needs. Talk doctor Fran will become the designated life coach telephone counsellor and sessions will be at half the rate of a face to face session. No matter where you live in Australia now, you can access the fantastic therapeutic services available at Imaginif. Sign up for our newsletter so that you do not miss announcements and special deals surrounding this new service.
Want to change manage your anger? Know this:
The Anger Volcano: Anger is a secondary emotion.
The respectable addiction: Workaholism
June 21, 2008
My name is Megan Bayliss and I am a workaholic. Once I was proud of this because that is what my world expected of me, and I had developed the disease to please. Now I am ashamed of it and I struggle daily to keep on the straight and narrow. Last night, a kewl little blonde girl, reminded me that life is not all about work and that sometimes “cracking it” is an okay thing to do.
My second marriage failed because of my workaholism (amongst other things). It was common for me to be writing court reports on my lap top, in bed, at 3am. I spent little time with my family and I failed to hear and see the warning signs. I was disconnected from myself, my emotional intelligence and the people closest to me. I was a disaster waiting for a divorce to happen. It did, I crashed and I took two years out to beat my addiction.
I recovered. For years I stood up to the voice of addiction telling me to work harder, work more, work while the sun shines, work while the work is being offered, just work, work, work. One day, in the previous six months, the stronger voice of addiction snuck back in and drowned my ability to stand up to it. My voice of strength gave up and my old addictive patterns of workaholim returned. I have been working ridiculous hours and taking on more that humanly possible for an aging social worker. I have become disconnected from my emotional intelligence and my family.
But….I love work and I love busy. I love it far more than chocolate because I consume work every single minute of my waking day. Chocolate is no good for me, I know that and I have strategies in place to ensure that I do not become an obsessive chocolate eater. Why the hell haven’t I done that with work then if my style of work is more toxic to me than chocolate?! What sort of a dummy am I?
Today is the day that I again face my demons, that I become emotionally intelligent and I stand up to my pre socialised pattern of over working. I want to spend time with my family. I want to play Uno, I want to have time to go to the eco shop and ask about gray water tanks. I want to become the green child protection advocate that I always wanted to be, rather than the over working lefty daughter of a conservative family. My hard work somehow made my left thinking more acceptable. What a load of rubbish, rhetoric and cognitive dissonance to make my addiction appear nice!
I will not work today. It is the weekend! I will play Uno and Switch and maybe even bribe the boys to play Scrabble with me (see, ever the capitalist ). I will face that which I hate more than Tripe: housework. Imaginif is moving home and office and this one has to be packed and cleaned. In an effort to avoid that which I hate, I easily succumbed to the seductive moves of my old lover; workaholism. Go away workaholism, you may be acceptable in the failing eyesight of a capitalist society, but in my eyesight you are a killer, a perpetrator of child abuse and a part of me that I do not wish to have dominant.
I am stronger than the voice of addiction and the voice of a political ideology that rewards respectable addictions and hides child abuse. I am Megan; a mum, a wife and a lover of the natural environment. I am strong and I am emotionally intelligent.
Thank you to the golden child, Miss J, for helping me to re-perspect “cracking it.” I cracked it last night - I made a decision to stand up to myself and take responsibility for my happiness and health. Thank you J. I’ll go for a walk later on and take a photo of something nice in Cairns for you to fall in love with…and when you come to Cairns, I’ll take you to the beautiful spot so that we can all play there together.
Make family life easier
May 12, 2008
Doing things differently can make the difference between child terror and child safety. Family can be a tough place for a child to survive, even if a family is relatively functional. Mortgage stress, the usual arguments over toilet seat lids and competing demands across the life span development can make for some fiery family times.
Then there’s those who live their life to a social prescription that says good Mums and Dads rear their children in the time tested ways of suburbia. Problem - the time tested ways of suburbia have produced high rates of child abuse and high rates of marriage breakdown. How about we all start to do things differently then: let’s do things that take the pressure off and lessen the domestic terror that many 21st century children grow up with.
Over at Planning with Kids, the Planning contingency Queen herself has e-published a fantastic list of doing things differently in the interests of child safety and parental sanity: Free E-book - Planning With Kids Top 100 Tips, Volume 1. Full of tidbits to sooth the family soul rather than encourage domestic stress and child abuse, the sensible top 100 tips reminded me of one of my most successful family rituals of difference:
My second husband left me. I was devastated. I cried every day for two years; not just a hankie cry you understand, I regularly used a towel to sob my heart into. Our life was in shatters. The kids and I moved town, I went back to work for the Government and life sucked worse than a sour bug on a lemon.
Confused and struggling, we desperately sought for new family meaning and for a reason to all get out of bed in the morning. Being candle lovers (some have accused us of suburban pyromania) we wondered how we could do candles differently. In our old family life when husband/Dad was around, we always had night time candles and huge bonfires where we watched and laughed as the fire fairies danced upward toward the moon. We wanted, and needed, something different now; something that said “this is our new family and we are okay.”
Together we decadently opted to have breakfast by candlelight - every morning. The kids found it hilarious - who has breakfast by candlelight - is it allowed - is it against the law to light candles in the daylight - let’s do it! Every morning for a good few years, we breakfasted with two taper candles on centre tray. We began talking together again, planning life, smiling, laughing and happily teasing each other. We healed thanks to the power of doing something differently.
As family life got easier, so too did every one’s conviction to do things differently when the going gets tough.
What’s your story about doing things differently and saving your children from the horribleness of life’s occurrences?
Child Protection and World Day for Safety and Health at Work
April 28, 2008
Today, Monday, 28 April 2008, is World Day for Safety and Health at Work; an international campaign to promote safe, healthy, and decent work. Occupational health and safety is a real concern for individual workers, advocacy groups and many employers. While easy to understand the need for occupational health and safety in developing and under developed countries, our seemingly sophisticated and advanced work practices often leave much to be desired. Work can indeed be a hazardous place at times.
Child protection focused workers (statutory and non statutory) face daily occupational hazards: abuse of children and systemic abuse of families. With a high propensity toward compassion fatigue and burn out, occupational health and safety should become an ingrained part of our daily work life. It is not just the job of an employer to keep workers safe though, but the responsibility of each of us to keep ourselves safe and protected from the psychological and emotional effects of dealing with the ongoing stress of caring.
The Cost of Caring is also known as Secondary Traumatic Stress, Compassion Fatigue, and Vicarious Traumatisation. While it is not “burn out”, the cost of caring does often lead to burn out. For many front line workers in the social sciences, the impact of working with high-risk children and families is left unaddressed and unacknowledged. Therefore, employers run the risk of having legal and class action taken against them for breaches of occupational health and safety. Flipped on its head though, employers may counter such claims with knowledge that individual employees did not actively participate in their own self care and child protection preservation plan.
Encouraging staff to look after themselves and to remain active in full community life, is our managerial responsibility when working in a sector that does not traditionally retain workers long term. However, it is not up to managers alone - workers also need to stop participating in their own self-care oppression and stay active in managing their own work/life balance.
If you are a worker in the field, do you have a child protection preservation plan? What do you do that keeps you sane and balanced?
There is no better way to combat secondary traumatic stress than to take good care of your physical and mental health.
YOU (not just your supervisor) can take better care of yourself while at work.
• Take a break during the workday;
• Make quiet time to complete tasks;
• Set limits with your clients and colleagues and diversifying the tasks in your workload can be very helpful;
• Learning to say “no!” is another way of managing stress both at work and in your personal life;
• Learn to read yourself;
• Reflect, reflect, reflect;
• Engage with your work team rather than disengage;
• If you find that you are overwhelmed, set clear boundaries and allow yourself the space and, if possible, time to recover.
• Asking for help also reduces stress.Engage in Healthy/Healing Activities
Engaging in activities that are good for you is essential. You are in control of how you treat yourself. The list below includes things you have heard before and inherently know, but as “helpers” we often forget.
• Eat right. Put down the bag of chips and pick up an apple. Drink less caffeine and more water.
• Exercise regularly. Exercise is a stress reliever. Even if the only exercise you have time for is walking around the parking lot at lunch – try it. You will be amazed at how much better it makes you feel. (It also gets you out of the office, away from the computer, fax, etc.)
• Get enough sleep. Your body needs sleep to recover so that you are better able to handle the stress of a new day.
• Practice relaxation techniques. You know them – deep breathing, visual imagery. We often help our clients find ways to relax. Believe it or not, they’ll work for you too!
• Spend time with friends. “A true friend is someone who is there for you when they would rather be someplace else” Len Wein. Being with people you like and who care about and respect you is a great stress reliever. Allow yourself to enjoy the company of others instead of focusing only on work and work issues.
What are you going to do for yourself today, World Day for Safety and Health at Work? I am going to be time rich rather than time poor (always on the run with no time for reflection). I am going to go for a walk around the Botanic Gardens with my Social Work intern. Feeding our souls by visiting a place of great natural beauty is a reminder that not all the world is an abusive black and that sometimes being surrounded by beauty is what helps our learning fall into place.
Related article: World Day for Safety and Health at Work
Plane crash landing. Paul safe and debriefed.
April 9, 2008
Paul works away a lot. He rang last night and allowed me to rabbit on with my day’s news. Took me some time to work out that he was unusually quiet and that something was wrong.
“You know how I was supposed to fly this trip,” he began. “Megan, the plane crash landed.”
My heart fell out of my stomach. The little plane was full of Paul’s colleagues and a very good friend of ours. Despite that, I was eternally grateful that Paul had chosen to drive this trip rather than fly up with his colleagues.
“It is okay, everyone walked away from the crash without injury but it was a full on belly crash landing. I ran them out to the airport, headed back to town and got an urgent message to call them. Apparently, just after the plane took off, the cabin filled with smoke and the pilot turned around and safely crash landed on the runway and skidded off into the grass.”
After talking about trauma reactions and what to expect over the next few days I once again appreciated the importance of people sharing their skills and making sure that as many individuals as possible have knowledge of debriefing models. Trauma is all around us and any of us can help to debrief our friends, family or people we come into contact with. Here’s a model of debriefing that you can use with your friends and family at any time: How To Do A Mini Debrief With Traumatized Friends
And…the Carnival of Australia is up over at Lightening’s place. Check it out and remember to leave a comment of thanks to both Lightening and bloggers who have submitted posts. There’s nothing like a trauma or near miss to bring home the importance of positive and grateful communication. You never know if you will have another opportunity to talk to a blogging friend or to let them know you appreciate their efforts. Thank you for hosting Lightening, and, please stay safe.
Talk doctor Rebekah….thank you for debriefing me after I had debriefed Paul. It is so good to be able to ring up a friend and talk.
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Do you know what bibliotherapy is? Click Megan's book to learn how to use a story to solve a problem.
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