Mental Health, Conflict Management and Social Action (2) (in Conversation)

An Interview with Amber Gray on Dance Movement Therapy and Social Engagement.

Movement is a way of organising experience and a way of facilitating healing in traumatised individuals and communities.  Amber Gray is a dance/movement therapist, working with the ways that trauma invades the body and our capacity to move in our worlds.

Polyvagal Theory 1: Basic principles (phylogeny, neuroception, dissolution, social engagement system)

What if many of your troubles could be explained by an automatic reaction in your body to what's happening around you? what if an understanding of several mental and emotional disorders, ranging from autism to panic attacks, lay in a new theoretical approach of how the nervous system integrates and regulates bodily and psychological processes? Stephen W. Porges, Ph.D., thinks it could be so. Dr. Porges, professor of psychiatry at the University of Illinois, Chicago, and director for that institution's Brain-Body Center, has spent much of his life searching for clues to the way the brain operates, and has developed what he has termed Polyvagal Theory.

Refugee Women; War, Rape and Sexual Abuse (in Conversation)

Refugee women and their dependent children account for 80 per cent of the world’s refugees. Refugee women are arrested, abducted, imprisoned, persecuted, tortured, raped, sexually abused and sold for prostitution. Rape and sexual abuse is the most common form of systematized torture used against women, which are used as weapons of war.  

Sekai Holland in conversation with Sejla Tukelija

Voices of Trauma: on contextual thinking of complex posttraumatic damage (In conversation)

Although modern psychiatry, based on the science of the western world, has many universal values, serious gaps and problems can arise when practised in situations where helpers and victims are of different cultural backgrounds.

Tending the Helper’s Fire: Creative, Clinical and Organizational Approaches to Mitigating Secondary Stress and Trauma in the Workplace (In conversation)

Ms Amber Elizabeth Gray, the Director of Restorative Resources Training & Consulting International, is interviewed by Nooria Mehraby on the basic theory of stress accumulation and secondary traumatization, or compassion fatigue, based on current neuropsychiatric research.  In this interview Ms Gray discusses how to identify the “onset” of compassion fatigue and mitigate its effects which she illustrates with a personal account.