Part of this is that between the group Bridges, and taking various support calls and emails, I am finding myself hearing confidential stories of people’s pain and distress. This is really making me aware just how great the need is on a very personal level. It’s very difficult when I so often encounter apathy about the lack of dissociation appropriate resources – the assumption is that very few people experience dissociation. Even if that were true, we still need support! Feeling like I’m one of the few people who knows how urgent the need is, is making me incredibly driven to do more. It’s taking a lot of effort to slow myself down and look after myself too.
One of the things that really helps me is the Dissociative Initiative, because then I’m not alone in my concerns and my passion to change things for the better. It really helps to have other people share this frustration and the dream. We met up again recently, and trialled for the first time using Skype to include an off-location member. I was thrilled with how well it worked, we can now explore using this technology to help rural people access Bridges! We planned the Afternoon Tea this Friday (see What’s On for details and a pdf invite – all welcome!), new resources we will have ready in time to launch at it, and some upcoming talks.
I’m doing a couple of talks about dissociation soon in Melbourne for the Voice hearer’s conference, and Cary and myself will giving a talk at Mifsa on March 28th. We’ve decided to deliver the talk we gave at TheMHS last year, as that venue was only open to people who could pay the fee, whereas this Forum will be free for everyone. So we’ll be sharing our personal Grounding Kits and explaining strategies we use to help manage dissociation!
We’re also talking about ways to develop some support for carers and family. We’ve noticed that some of the information and support we’re providing is for professionals who are inexperienced at supporting people who experience dissociation and looking for good resources and suggestions about how to help. So we’re thinking about ways to support the support people too. 🙂 One of the great results of this is that we can have a much greater impact by helping other people provide support, than what we can do only by ourselves.
One very big exciting development is a new blog! We run a mailing list for people who like to be kept updated with our newsletter and any news about Bridges, but as it’s getting bigger manually emailing everyone is becoming burdensome. We’ve thought of a few ways of managing this while keeping the list strictly confidential, and for the moment we’re going to try using a new blog and the ‘Follow by email’ option to manage the mailing list on our behalf. Every month when we upload a new Dissociation Link newsletter (see back issues on my Articles page), the blog will automatically send everyone on the mailing list an email about it, with no possibility of me accidentally giving one person’s details out to someone else. That thought makes me very happy!
I also like the idea of people being able to read about Bridges, check times and dates, download their own flyer or factsheets, and gather some real information about who we are and what we do before making contact. Some people are very anxious and I think not having to ask for this information would be helpful, especially if they’ve already asked but forgotten (common with dissociation) and feel too embarrassed to ask again. 🙂 Plus, it will give people interested in learning about the Dissociative Initiative the option not to have to wade through my personal blog full of art and poetry and pictures of cats etc. to find it. 🙂 So this week is going to be busy while I pull everything together ready for Friday. I’ll keep you posted and create links here when things are ready to go.
In the meantime, SmART training about how to do grant applications starts this week – get in quick if you were interested! I’m hoping this will come in handy for applying for support to self publish a booklet, and other projects of the DI (Dissociative Initiative). There’s a few other groups and resources I’ve heard about on my What’s On page too, so have a look, I update it regularly.
Sarah K Reece 