Reblogged from Kmareka.com:

The Susan G. Komen foundation just released a letter stating that they will continue to fund Planned Parenthood. Well, that’s a relief, but only a small one for me. The big thing I worry about in cancer activism is that the corporate influence is pushing us to look too much toward treatment and not enough at prevention. But that’s a story for another day. Today’s story is that the Sisterhood of American women and its supporters are still strong enough to carry the day and Planned Parenthood will continue to provide needed medical care for women.

• When:  Monday, March 19, 9 am to 12 noon

• Where:  390 Pontiac Avenue, Cranston RI  (in The Education Room in the rectory of Church of the Ascension)

• This 3-hour educational seminar is approved for 3 CEU (Continuing Education Units) through the Rhode Island NASW, including 1.0 CE in Cross-Cultural Practice.

Course Description

This seminar will serve as an introduction to using archetypes as both a diagnostic tool and treatment tool for children and teenagers. The training will review the definition and origin of archetypes in psychology and will use the “Know Thyself” handbook to review each of the twelve archetypes. There will also be video clips to show examples of children behaving in ways that express the archetypes. The trainer will demonstrate and provide case examples for how to use the handbook to evaluate a child’s symptoms. The trainer will also show how to use the book as a tool for children and families to further explore feelings and move toward greater emotional awareness and stability. Participants will have opportunities to apply the new information in group discussion of the archetypes and discussion of how to apply the archetypes in a clinical setting when working with a child or family therapeutically.

Learning Objectives

1. Participants will be able to name at least three archetypes and show how to use them to assess a child’s feelings of isolation, their likelihood to engage in conflict, their ability to attend to their own needs, their ability to express empathy for others, and/or their ability to use creative expression to relieve stress and problem-solve.

2. Participants will be able to use the handbook to work with children clinically and improve the child’s ability to talk about feelings and process experiences.

3. Participants will be able to educate parents about how to use the handbook to help their child express feelings, become more aware of the different parts of their identity, and use the suggestions to improve emotional coping.

The cost of this course is $45.oo.  Please email Kiersten Marek at kiersten.marek@gmail.com to register, or call (401) 744-8933.  To learn more, you can also visit the Facebook page for the event.

Reblogged from Class[room]-Conscious:

Published Online: January 17, 2012 Published in Print: January 18, 2012, as What Really Works in Turning Schools Around? By Alan M. Blankstein and Pedro Noguera              An important feature of the Obama administration’s Race to the Top initiative is the call to turn around failing schools. The policy calls for persistently failing schools to be subjected to specific turnaround strategies, and $3.5 billion in federal School Improvement Grant funds has been allocated to support the effort.     …

Good article on what works to turn a school around.

Oh, the warriors within us!  Longfellow said it eloquently:  ”If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each man’s … suffering enough to disarm all hostility.” Indeed.  And yet, we do find many things to argue about.  Usually it’s not so much about the subject as it is about someone being on your turf.

As parents we spend a certain amount of energy interacting with our warrior children. Hopefully this is only a small part of your relationship, but sometimes it can go on for too long. If this is the case for you, it might be worth exploring your internal warrior — the part of you that engages quickly in conflict, that escalates even as you know it isn’t good, not right or healthy or even sane.

Same holds true for marriages.  Hopefully you are not spending the majority of your time interacting with your partner’s warrior, but we’ve all been there, and when it gets really ugly, it’s no fun.  John Gottman talks about the four horsemen of the relationship apocalypse and one of them is “contempt.”  When the conflict gets to the point that you genuinely begin to feel contempt for your partner, it’s time to get help.

I enjoy helping clients explore the parts of them that get in the way of harmonious relationships, the parts that bring more conflict into their life than they need or want. Sometimes what lies beneath the fightin’ mad part of us is a very interesting part — a creator or a fool or an innocent — who wants to enjoy life or work at something more important.  But with the warrior always being in conflict, these other archetypes don’t get the time and attention that they deserve.

We all start out as innocents — sentient little beings wondering at the world in all its intricate and magnificent glory. The innocent is the child amazed at studying a flower or hearing a new kind of music, or in the case of the baby above, ripping paper. This to him is amazing and hysterically funny, as the surprise of the sound and the creating of little pieces gets him more and more entranced by the activity. Interestingly, the story behind this paper being ripped up is that it was a job rejection letter the father had just received. Perhaps that added another level of depth to the child’s experience of innocent joy with his father as they rip up the letter.

Newsweek’s Julia Baird provides a short review:

[...] In her new book, Bright-Sided: How Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America, Barbara Ehrenreich calls positive thinking a “mass delusion.” She argues that an unrelenting drive to train our brains to overlook problems and blame ourselves for failures has blinded us to inequality, incompetence, and stupidity.

The philosophy of positive thinking, she argues, developed both as a reaction to the negativity of Calvinism and a salve for the sick and anxious, but has, over time, been turned into a kind of blind optimism. At the heart of positive thinking is a belief that you can will anything you like into happening: recovering from cancer, getting a promotion, becoming a millionaire. Often, the worse things are, the more vehemently people are encouraged to be sunny. The more companies downsized and restructured in the ’80s and ’90s, the more popular affirmation-chanting, team-building consultants became. And all the while, as the country’s wealth shot up, the gap between rich and poor ballooned.

While positive thinking does not equal behavior change, I do sometimes encourage my clients to actively envision their future in positive terms. Doing so helps you to realize what you are striving for and what you want in life, and possibly how to get it. I do not think it causes things to magically come your way, but I think it can be a therapeutic and useful exercise.

It looks like Patricia Love and Steven Stosny, the co-authors who wrote the new self-help marriage shocker, How to Improve Your Marriage Without Talking About It, have some compelling research to present about how men and women differ in communication patterns. From MSN:

[...] According to Stosny’s analysis of several hundred human and animal studies, male and female responses to stress are distinct from birth. “When a baby girl hears a loud noise or gets anxious, she wants to make eye contact with someone, but a baby boy will react to the same sound by looking around, in a fight-or-flight response,” he says. What’s more, while newborn girls are much more easily frightened, boys have five times as many “startle” reactions, which are emotionally neutral but pump up adrenaline. Boys need to intermittently withdraw into themselves to keep from becoming overstimulated. These differences hold true for most social animals and correlate with our biological roles: The female’s fear response is an early warning system that serves to detect threats and alert the males of the pack to danger.

As girls grow, they go beyond needing eye contact and refine a coping strategy identified by UCLA psychologists as “tend and befriend.” If there’s a conflict, girls and women want to talk about it. Boys and men, however, need to pull away. A man’s greatest suffering, Stosny says, comes from the shame he feels when he doesn’t measure up—which is why discussing relationship problems (i.e., what he’s doing wrong) offers about as much comfort as sleeping on a bed of nails.

Similar to Stosny and Love’s approach is the idea of the diversity of ways to express love described in The Five Love Languages. For many couples, there is a much greater need for showing their partner that they care about the relationship by attending to the children, or doing chores, or being on top of finances — by what Gary Chapman calls “Acts of Service.” For others, gifts and quality time are more important, and still others are primarily concerned with physical touch. Finding out which of the love languages is primary for you and your partner can help you reflect and build a better relationship. And sometimes what you might learn is that you want to talk less.

These do not seem to be burning questions in the minds of many other people. In America today, we seem to be too busy trying to exclude people from marriage (i.e. same-sex couples, although this is changing, slowly, state by state, with NH signing it into law yesterday and RI destined to be dead last in following suit) to notice that our institution is in serious disrepair, with 50% of US marriages ending in divorce, and a rate for children growing up in single-parent households that continues to steadily rise.

In my quest for information on what makes marriage work, I discovered some fascinating research called State of Our Union by Barbara Dafoe Whitehead and David Popenoe, who work out of the National Marriage Project at Rutgers University. The Project at Rutgers has studied marriage from several different angles including a comparative study with Scandinavian families and their divorce rates. Here is how they describe the ideal family environment for raising young children:

[...] I have suggested that the ideal family environment for raising young children has the following traits: an enduring two-biological parent family that engages regularly in activities together, has developed its own routines, traditions and stories, and provides a great deal of contact time between adults and children. Surrounded by a community that is child friendly and supportive of parents, the family is able to develop a vibrant family subculture that provides a rich legacy of meaning and values for children throughout their lives.(9) Scandinavians certainly fall short on the enduring two-biological parent part of this ideal (yet even there they are currently ahead of the United States), but on the key ingredients of structured and consistent contact time between parents and their children in a family friendly environment, they are well ahead of us.

The authors go on to describe how difficult it is in America to achieve this ideal environment:

In America today the achievement of this ideal family environment requires what many parents are coming to consider a Herculean countercultural effort, one that involves trying to work fewer hours and adopting the mantra of “voluntary simplicity” for those who can afford it; turning off the TV set and avoiding popular culture; seeking employment in firms that have family-friendly policies such as flexible working hours; and residing in areas that are better designed for children and where the cost of living is lower. Families in Scandinavia need not be so countercultural to achieve these goals because the traits of the ideal child-rearing environment are to a larger degree already built into their societies.

If you want to keep going with learning about marriage, Poponoe and Whitehead publish a yearly version of “State of Our Unions.” In the most recent version I could find online, Poponoe talks about ways to recommit to marriage, and suggests we’d need a cultural awakening to pull it off. Here is a link to the 2007 essay.

With regard to the question of what the key ingredients are of stable long-term relationships, here are some very telling statistic from Poponoe and Whitehead:

By now almost everyone has heard that the national divorce rate is close to 50% of all marriages. This is true, but the rate must be interpreted with caution and several important caveats. For many people, the actual chances of divorce are far below 50/50.

The background characteristics of people entering a marriage have major implications for their risk of divorce. Here are some percentage point decreases in the risk of divorce or separation during the first ten years of marriage, according to various personal and social factors:

Percent Decrease in Risk of Divorce:

Annual income over $50,000 (vs. under $25,000) — -30%
Having a baby seven months or more after marriage (vs. before marriage) — -24%
Marrying over 25 years of age (vs. under 18) — -24%
Own family of origin intact (vs. divorced parents) — -14%
Religious affiliation (vs. none) — -14%
Some college (vs. high-school dropout) — -13%

So, you want to reduce your risk of divorce? Have a household income of more than 50 K. That’s right, all those people who try to tell you money doesn’t count in love, well guess what? It does. If you have a household income of less than 50 K and you are still married, you are beating some pretty stiff odds. You should probably find some cheap way to celebrate your amazing luck and good fortune in relationships.

You want to do something else to reduce your risk of divorce? Be at least 25 before you tie the knot. Go to college and think about what kind of person you want to spend the rest of your life with.

Want to reduce your risk even more? Join a church. Get around a good group of people who share your core values.

Oh, and one more thing. Use birth control (and hope that it doesn’t fail) until you are married. It helps.

And finally, if you are having trouble in your marriage, you might want to consider going to a professional (not that I’m biased!). The biggest problem I see with couples is that by the time they get to making an appointment to see a therapist, they are often feeling extremely burned out about the relationship. They are sick and tired of fighting and want things to be better, but their ability to feel hopeful about the other person or the relationship is quite damaged.

Couples therapy does not need to be a long, involved process. Many times the process of a therapist suggesting some reflection and communication exercises is enough to get the ball rolling. You can also read up on your own and try being your own therapist. I recommend John Gottman and the Gottman Institute, particularly the book 10 Lessons to Transform Your Marriage. For a more spiritually-centered approach, I also recommend Gary Chapman and The Five Love Languages.

For more than two thousand years people have insisted that reading fiction is good for you. Aristotle claimed that poetry—he meant the epics of Homer and the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, which we would now call fiction—is a more serious business than history. History, he argued, tells us only what has happened, whereas fiction tells us what can happen, which can stretch our moral imaginations and give us insights into ourselves and other people. This is a strong argument for schools to continue to focus on the literary arts, not just history, science, and social studies.

But is the idea of fiction being good for you merely wishful thinking? The members of a small research group in Toronto—Maja Djikic, Raymond Mar, and I—have been working on the problem. We have turned the idea into questions. In what ways might reading fiction be good for you? If it is good for you, why would this be? And what is the psychological function of art generally?

Through a series of studies, we have discovered that fiction at its best isn’t just enjoyable. It measurably enhances our abilities to empathize with other people and connect with something larger than ourselves.

My first serious novel was about a teenage girl who unwittingly conspires with her boyfriend to knock off her mother, manipulating him into thinking he is rescuing her from her terrible family. My second novel, The Pyramid of Human Growth, is a sort of romance between an introverted technocrat social worker (and lifelong procrastinator) guy and a lovable but difficult social worker gal trudging through the early years of her career, still trying to get over her early life trauma and move to the ultimate stage of marrying and childbearing. Currently I am at work on a novel about a woman’s death by overdose. It’s something we social workers get to have intimate knowledge about, for better (when we help prevent it) and for worse (when despite all the efforts made toward prevention it happens anyways). The working title (forgive the sarcasm, but it helps to keep the demons of writer’s block away) is “Twelve Easy Steps to Suicide.”

Hopefully someday all of my labors at fiction will result in some more published works. Earlier in my career I made a point of sending out my fiction and getting it published, both online and in smaller literary journals, but since having two children, I had to give up some of my goals (as I write this, I am being pestered for snacks). Anyway, even if they are not published, I take pride in working these things out in fiction — and believe that doing so helps me both personally and professionally. Viva the writing life!

It happens a lot with foster children, naturally, if they have been moved around a lot, or if their reunification plans with bio family keeps falling through. I also think there is an argument to be made that reactive attachment can start off in utero, when a child is exposed to high levels of stress hormones. Mark Brady, PhD, has a great post in which he describes the developmental problems resulting from neglect and early stress. He quotes Dr. Bruce Perry, author of The Boy Who Was Raised by a Dog, talking about how the human brain responds to childhood neglect:

“As you grow, the brain is essentially like a sponge. It’s absorbing all kinds of experiences. So if a child is not held, touched, talked to, interacted with, loved, literally neurons do not make those connections, and many of them actually will die.”

“Big, big ventricular spaces (show up in stressed out kids), which will impact sleep, regulation of anxiety, regulation of mood, whether or not you’re very happy or sad.”

“Simple things like eye contact, touch, rocking and humming can make all the difference to a baby. It makes neurons grow, it makes them make connections. Then, it makes the brain more functional.”

One of the most impactful experiences I have had working with a RAD client was working with a little boy who had been raised for his first three years in an extremely neglectful environment — to the point where when he was moved to foster care, he did not know how to play other than to lay on his belly on the floor and put his fingers in front of his face and move them around. There were very few toys in his early home, and even less of a primary person paying attention to his needs and giving him the closeness he would need to understand the world emotionally. He had come a long way by the time I was seeing him, could play and interact with others, had probably quadrupled his vocabulary in the year he had been in a stable home, but he was still a very skinny kid with rotted teeth that had to be capped and lots of ear infections and other illnesses constantly weighing him down.

Part of my message to RAD kids is the constant reminder to them (and to their brains!) that they are growing, expanding, developing, changing, become whole, becoming strong. I say these things not only because they are true but also because they are the mantra of our shared hope — that their growth will now take place, that they will be able to make up for lost time and accelerate fast enough to get the ABC’s and color identification and some decent social skills in before kindergarten starts. And most of all, because I want them to know that I see them. I see them. They are here.

The importance of this knocked my socks off one day in session with this little guy, who I’ll call James. I was giving him the message that he was growing, asking him how old he would be turning on his next birthday, reinforcing that he would soon be in kindergarten, when suddenly James said, “When I was a baby, I was invisible. Now that I’m older, I have skin and bones.”

“Indeed,” I said, to draw out the moment. “And you have your whole body. And you’re growing bigger all the time.” When I had James create himself on “Mi” on the Wii (I did the controls as he was behind most kids on video game skills) he created a person who was as tall and big-boned as possible, with a big head of black hair. He wanted to be big. And compared to how small he had been made to feel in his birth home, he was indeed a big guy now.

We all need closeness in order to know we exist. If no one knows who you are, knows you internally, knows your needs and how to fill them, you grow up feeling invisible. Anyone who has ever been in a situation where everyone around them was deliberately ignoring them knows how awful it is to feel invisible. Imagine this being the world you are born into. Imagine how devastating that would be.

The good news is that most of us are not born into such cruel environments. Even in families where there is physical and emotional abuse, there is often still a sense of attachment for the child — that their needs are still very high on the list of things that get taken care of. It was enlightening, but also frightening, working with James — realizing just how powerfully he was experiencing the arrival of his identity, and how much catching up there was to do.

(cross-posted at Kmareka.com)