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Resolving Difficulties
Follow up on this month's article on Forgiveness. Get continuing education for delving deeper into how to resolve conflict. Learn about three important factors that impact whether or not conflict is resolved successfully: skillfulness, emotional availability, and empathy. Become proficient with a five-step process.
There are many CE E-Courses that you can browse online. |
Workshops & Trainings
Hailey, Idaho
The Heart of Ethics in Community
April 26, 2015
Presented by Carrie Thomas Scott, M.A., LCPC
Click here for more information
Siler City, North Carolina
Right Use of Power
May 8, 2015
Presented by Julia Corley, LMBT
Click here for more information
Boulder, Colorado
Right Use of Power Workshop:
July 25-26, 2015 (Saturday/Sunday)
Facilitator's Training:
July 27-28, 2015 (Monday/Tuesday)
Presented by Cedar Barstow, M.Ed., C.H.T.
Click here for more information
Reminder to Guild Members that you can re-take the training(s) for 50% discount at any time! Great way to update your skills and increase your confidence. Just register and make the $100 deposit at cedarbarstow.com
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Don't Fool Yourself: Use Technology Intentionally
by Christine Carter
Last week, the Pew Research Center released a report on social media use and stress, and subsequent media coverage has boiled its message down this kind of headline: “Using Facebook and Twitter a lot can actually decrease stress,” to quote the Washington Post.
Wishful thinking. Pew surveyed the associations between people’s self-reported social media use and how stressful they perceive their lives to be, but it did not attempt to determine how Internet and social media use affects stress levels.
The Pew report did find that “women who use Twitter, email and cellphone picture sharing report lower levels of stress.” But we have no idea if there is a cause-and-effect relationship. Perhaps the low-stress women Pew surveyed have more leisure time, which both lowers how stressful they perceive their lives to be, and also gives them more time to send their friends pictures from their smartphones, and to post to Twitter.
Or perhaps these women were feeling the positive effects of communicating with friends. That would be consistent with 150 years of research that has found a person’s well-being is best predicted by the breadth and depth of their social ties.
Read the rest of the article here.
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The Act of Rigorous Forgiving
by David Brooks in The New York Times
There’s something sad in Brian Williams’s need to puff up his Iraq adventures and something barbaric in the public response.
The sad part is the reminder that no matter how high you go in life and no matter how many accolades you win, it’s never enough. The desire for even more admiration races ahead. Career success never really satisfies. Public love always leaves you hungry. Even very famous people can do self-destructive things in an attempt to seem just a little cooler.
The barbaric part is the way we respond to scandal these days. When somebody violates a public trust, we try to purge and ostracize him. A sort of coliseum culture takes over, leaving no place for mercy. By now, the script is familiar: Some famous person does something wrong. The Internet, the most impersonal of mediums, erupts with contempt and mockery. The offender issues a paltry half-apology, which only inflames the public more. The pounding cry for resignation builds until capitulation comes. Public passion is spent and the spotlight moves on.
Read the rest of the article here.
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 The Power of Forgiveness: You Decide when the Harm Ends
by Cedar Barstow
In the largest context, forgiveness has the awesome power to stop the cycles of revenge and violence that drive egregious abuses of power. Dr. Frederic Luskin, author of Forgive for Good, says, “By choosing to forgive, we stand in awe of the horrors that can happen to people in this world, and we decide neither to participate in them nor to repay them. It’s not a matter of whether or not we will have conflict; it’s a matter of what we do with that conflict.”
Forgiveness is often misunderstood. It does not require forgetting or condoning or even reconciling. Luskin, as quoted by Vesela Simic in an article titled “The Challenge of Forgiveness” (Shift: At the Frontiers of Consciousness, Issue 13, pp. 32), defines forgiveness as “the ability to make peace with your own life by no longer arguing and objecting to the way it unfolds. It means that difficult things happen in life, and first you have to grieve them, then accept them, and finally move on. … Forgiveness means that unkindness stops with you. … This is not a one-time response. … It’s about becoming a forgiving person.”
Simic adds, “Forgiveness is a pro-social change in someone’s experience after a transgression. When people choose to forgive, they change.”
Forgiveness is the end point of a process of coming to terms with enormous harm and with the reverberations of that harm. Forgiveness is ultimately liberating and life-restoring. Although it is about a relationship, forgiveness is for yourself. “Instead of letting the person who caused the harm ‘off the hook,’ forgiveness is about taking the hooks of hurt, anger, and helplessness out of our aching hearts so we can grieve and heal and let go of destructive feelings,” as longtime Boulder, Colorado-based psychotherapist Jack Lavino puts it.
By forgiving the seemingly unforgiveable, you gain freedom from responses of revenge, further suffering, martyrdom, rage, helplessness, and retraumatizing. The energy that has held the pain and anger is released, and you can move on. The cycle stops.
Read the rest of the article here. |
 Oliver Sacks on Learning He Has Terminal Cancer
by Oliver Sacks
in The New York Times
A month ago, I felt that I was in good health, even robust health. At 81, I still swim a mile a day. But my luck has run out — a few weeks ago I learned that I have multiple metastases in the liver. Nine years ago it was discovered that I had a rare tumor of the eye, an ocular melanoma. The radiation and lasering to remove the tumor ultimately left me blind in that eye. But though ocular melanomas metastasize in perhaps 50 percent of cases, given the particulars of my own case, the likelihood was much smaller. I am among the unlucky ones.
I feel grateful that I have been granted nine years of good health and productivity since the original diagnosis, but now I am face to face with dying. The cancer occupies a third of my liver, and though its advance may be slowed, this particular sort of cancer cannot be halted.
It is up to me now to choose how to live out the months that remain to me. I have to live in the richest, deepest, most productive way I can. In this I am encouraged by the words of one of my favorite philosophers, David Hume, who, upon learning that he was mortally ill at age 65, wrote a short autobiography in a single day in April of 1776. He titled it “My Own Life.”
“I now reckon upon a speedy dissolution,” he wrote. “I have suffered very little pain from my disorder; and what is more strange, have, notwithstanding the great decline of my person, never suffered a moment’s abatement of my spirits. I possess the same ardour as ever in study, and the same gaiety in company.”
Read the rest of the article here.
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Brene Brown: The Power of Vulnerability
Brené Brown studies human connection — our ability to empathize, belong, love. In a poignant, funny talk, she shares a deep insight from her research, one that sent her on a personal quest to know herself as well as to understand humanity. A talk to share.
Watch the video here. |
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