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Seven Benefits of Working with a Therapy Animal from a Handler's Perspective

Sometimes I feel selfish for walking away from our therapy dog sessions with my heart overflowing with joy, a smile radiating from my face AND heart. I love watching this dog turn a child’s tears into giggles. Sammie has a thing for kids. Her tail wags every time she sees one. Whether we are walking the halls at a school or the trails at a nature preserve. She wants to meet them all and offer a snuggle. As a result, her tail thumps in canine happiness, and I just can’t help but grin.

To Heal CPTSD, Do You Need to Love Yourself?

One of the messages that’s been drilled into us by popular culture is that “you have to love yourself before you can love someone else.” This is something people tell you when you get your heart broken and you feel like you must be… no good! And for a lot of years, every time I heard this I felt like a different species than everyone else. Because there were times when I didn’t particularly love myself – and here and there when I was younger, times when I hated myself. But there was a never...

How Making Music Can Help Students Cope with Trauma [KQED News]

By Juli Fraga, MindShift Podcast, KQED News, July 15, 2019 Studies about the Ten Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) have shown that most people have experienced one of these traumas in childhood, such as being abused, having a parent who is incarcerated, experiencing homelessness, among others. The trauma one experiences in childhood can affect adult mental and physical health in later years, especially if a person has multiple ACEs. While the harm can have lasting impacts, health...

Mind Matters: Overcoming Adversity and Building Resilience Two-Day Intensive Training

with Author, Carolyn Rich Curtis, Ph.D. 8:30 AM–5:00 PM $399 for 2-day Intensive Training CEUs are available for an additional charge. Each trainee must have a copy of Mind Matters ($299 plus tax (CA and SD only) plus S/H) As a result of this training , you will learn to teach: Self-soothing skills to manage emotions Ways to analyze stressful thoughts How to deal with intrusive memories Ways to develop a protective lifestyle And you, as an instructor, will learn . . . How to provide a safe...

CRI is hiring an Associate Director!

Community Resilience Initiative is seeking an innovative and passionate individual to join our organization as an Associate Director (AD). The AD reports to the Executive Director and to the Board of Directors. Job Overview The role of the Associate Director is to sustain the resilience-based, trauma-responsive capacity building work at the local, regional, state and national stage for which CRI is recognized. Success in this position will be evidenced by recognition of its exceptional...

How to Have Difficult Conversations (dailygood.org)

Google has spent millions of dollars proving that trust is the bedrock of constructive communication. They wanted to know why their best teams succeeded, and after not being able to prove any of their assumptions and going back to observe those teams, they found that what they had in common was not personality or intelligence or confidence or prior success, but something they called ‘psychological safety.’ That’s the kind of safety that’s built on feeling able to be real and vulnerable in a...

Young People are Using Musical Theater to Heal Their Trauma — and it's Working [nationswell.com]

By Monica Humphries, Nation Swell, July 12, 2019. On the drive home from Priya Shah’s first Storycatchers musical, she pulled over to cry. Shah, who now serves as the executive director of Storycatchers, had just seen a musical at the Illinois Youth Center, a juvenile detention center in Warrenville, Illinois. She watched girls tell stories of sexual abuse, battery and neglect. She also saw stories of hope and resilience. “It struck me that these characters I had just watched struggle, joke,...

Structure of brain networks is not fixed (neurosciencenews.com)

Summary: Brain networks are spatially and functionally fluid, and not static, as previously believed. Source: Georgia State University The shape and connectivity of brain networks — discrete areas of the brain that work together to perform complex cognitive tasks — can change in fundamental and recurring ways over time, according to a study led by Georgia State University. The interaction and communication among neurons, known as “functionally connectivity,” gives rise to brain networks.

Crafting Provides Cross-Body Therapy Which Helps Mental Health [blogs.psychcentral.com]

I recently had the opportunity to chat with Sharyn of Homespun Dreams about how she uses craft as therapy. She lives with both anxiety and chronic pain. She enjoys crochet, knitting, sewing, tatting, and other crafts, sometimes mixing them together in one project. She also happens to have a nursing degree so she understands the benefits of crafting from both a personal and professional perspective. It was through her that I learned about the idea of crafting as cross-body therapy. What is...

How Helping Others Benefits Your Mental Health

Addiction, anxiety, and depression can be all-consuming and enslaving. When I was spending every night, isolated in my room, indulging in opiates and vodka - my entire world hyper-focused and revolved around my pain. It was certainly not the life I was choosing - or so I thought. My messy head was tortuous, chaotic, and I felt absolutely powerless against it. All of my thoughts were amplified extensions of: “You are never going to be enough and you are unworthy of love and happiness.” I did...

Transforming Trauma: Healing Through Connecting with Animals [psychologytoday.com]

By Mark Bekoff, Psychology Today, July 10, 2019. An outstanding forward-looking new book called Transforming Trauma: Resilience and Healing Through Our Connections With Animals recently crossed my desk and it's my pleasure to spread the word about it through an interview with its editors, Philip Tedeschi and Molly Anne Jenkins of the Institute for Human-Animal Connection in the Graduate School of Social Work at the University of Denver. Transforming Trauma is a book many people have long...

How do we make America happy again? We start by studying well-being [latimes.com]

By Carol Graham, Los Angeles Times, June 17, 2019. To make America happy again, society has to figure out how to make our country whole. Understanding what divides Americans – and what gives them hope — could be critical to improving their well-being and the nation’s. By tracking patterns in well-being, and creating programs based on the results, we can take steps toward tackling the malaise that afflicts many of us, including the physically and mentally stressed, the jobless, the aging and...

Announcing CRI's Newest Trainings- July and September!

CRI is excited to announce new trainings! We will have online trainings in July, and an in-person training in September. July Online Trainings CRI Course 1 LIVE WEBCAST: Trauma-Informed Training A dynamic 2 part six-hour LIVE WEBCAST course, Course 1 introduces CRI’s capacity-building framework for building resilience, KISS. Knowledge, Insight, Strategies and Structure describes our community’s learning and movement from theory to practice and how to implement evidence-based strategies into...

When It Comes to Your Mental Health, Listen to Your Body [verilymag.com]

In our culture, lack of sleep is worn like a badge of honor. We glorify busyness. Very few things cause us to change up our usual routine or do anything other than what we expect of ourselves. We tend to run on overdrive, barreling through the day’s to-do lists regardless of what we are feeling, to the point that we often don’t even realize what we are feeling—and not just emotionally. We often suppress or ignore physical and emotional feelings that get in the way or slow us down—feelings...

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