|
Have You Ever Considered Public Speaking? Well, here's your chance to learn from a professional. Writer Joan Detz tells you in her book, "How To Write & Give A Speech." While this is a practical guide for executives, PR people, managers, fund-raisers, politicians, educators ... anyone can benefit from her practical advice. Visit her website at http://www.joandetz.com/ |
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Members List:
Update Members List from Page or Office.
Links Section
Member
Member
Member
Member
|
|
Welcome to The St. Clair Foundation For Battered Women
For some people, going solo in life can be the most challenging ... because if feels like we are all alone.
This is the ultimate time for growth and the premier opportunity to drive home effective personality traits that will sustain you your entire life.
For instance, knowing that who you are is more valuable than what you do. Your worth as a person is not based on your intelligence, your grades, how hard you work. It is quite enough to be just you.
Respect and value the opinions of others - but realize that ultimately you must respect and satisfy yourself.
If you find yourself experienceing negative repercussions from impulsive choices ... learn to practice impulse control by imagining the consequences of your actions. How will
you feel afterwards?
Then, act so that you will be satisfied with yourself.
Write out a plan for yourself. Jot down personal and academic goals and priorities, and reread them when you're in a slump.
Don't worry about or dwell on things that go wrong. Concentrate on your successes. Remember that little successes build up just as quickly as little failures.
Give yourself time to change. Forgive yourself for backsliding and making mistakes.
Don't be a perfectionist. Make approaching your goals the basis of your self-respect rather than reaching your goals.
Don't allow feelings of inadequacy to get you down. Think about all the things you do have going for you.
If you're feeling down or hopeless, imagine the worst that could happen - exaggerate your fantasies - and then laugh at them. Do this to put yourself and your current situation in perspective.
When you're down, go to someone whom you know cares for you and ask him or her to give you a "pep talk," reminding you of your good qualities and talents and abilities and/or make a list of your good qualities and read them when you need to.
Be willing to risk failure for something you really care about. Be willing to risk success, too!
If you're irrationally afraid of something, do it a lot; the fear will wear off.
Learn to recognize, sooner, events which are not turning out as they should - and act to redirect them to your satisfaction.
Everything that cannot be proven concretely, if we are to believe it, must be taken on faith. Much upon which we base our lives does not exist in this concrete sense. What we believe is truth is often nothing more than ideas that we have made up.
We make up these ideas and proceed then to create a reality that follows such ideas. If we do this often enough, the ideas that we have made up become seemingly concrete truths. They are provable, however only by the very same events of our lives that we have used to invent the ideas in the first instance.
We believe in that which we have made up and feel it is impossible to believe anything that flies in the face of these "facts." Many of these "facts" are not facts at all but irrationalizations.
It would not pay for you to look up the word "irrationalizations" in any dictionary for it does not exist. It is a word I have made up to describe our attempt to impose order on a disorderly universe. A rationalization is pretty much the same idea. It is our logical mind, our left brain, inventing ideas that "make sense" to us when what we see, when what happens to us is otherwise unexplainable.
But irrationalization seems a better term when we lose sight of
the fact that we are attempting to rationalize something and instead believe that the rationalization is the truth.
These are some irrationalizations:
We believe, as children, that we are unloved. As we grow, "unloved" becomes "unlovable," and that means to us that we do not deserve love. It means to us that we are unworthy of being loved. So we seek out real world experiences in order to make sense out of our world. By reinforcing in our minds that life has given us "facts" to show us that we are not worthy of love, we believe we have proven our initial premise to be so. What we do not seem to understand is that we have only sought out life experiences for the very purpose of proving our premise. Of course, therefore, we will prove ourselves right. We have lifted ourselves by our own bootstraps. There is no "proof" that we are unworthy other than the "facts" we have used to prove it to ourselves.
But we believe these irrationalizations.
We believe that there is love in the universe, even if we ourselves have been unable to find it. This is the alternative irrationalization to number 1.
We believe this to be so and continue to search it out, in relationship after relationship, never believing that a universe can exist without it. Each is as much an irrationalization as the other. But 2 is sweeter for some than is 1.
For others, 1 is better than 2 if considerably more pessimistic. We believe that there is an order to the universe. We seek facts that enable us to make sense out of things that occur and when we lack facts, explanations that can be proven, we attribute the unanswerable to the need to have faith.
We do not understand our pain, our sorrow but believe at some point the answer
will become clear to us because the universe will show us the reason these things happened. And in order to prove that we are right, we find "explanations" that explain the result as some life lesson from which we can grow.
We believe that we cannot change our original irrationalization. Even if we are sensitive enough to recognize an irrationalization when we see it, we may still feel powerless to change that which we have lived by for decades, if not the entirety of our lives. If that irrationalization is, for example, that we are unworthy of love, then we feel that it is nearly impossible for us to ever have another idea, one that makes us change the initial one.
We may want a new irrationalizations but cannot find the power to create one.
Irrationalizations are not, standing alone, either good or bad things. If they work to bring you joy, love, peace and abundance, then for you they are good.
If, on the other hand, they only bring you misery, and pain, and unloving relationships and experiences, then you might want to take a look at your irrationalizations. At some point, when we reach spiritual intimacy, enlightenment, we may be able to live without the need for irrationalizations, merely accepting without attempting to make sense out of any of it.
I know there is pain and sorrow in the world but I only believe in my irrationalizations that create love and joy. Perhaps that makes me irrational.
Behind any theory are concepts and principles, a point of view about the nature of the phenomenon that is being explained by the theory. Our theory of domestic violence has twelve such underlying principles. 1. Domestic violence is unacceptable human behaviour. Domestic violence cannot be tolerated by members of the gay community, and it must be unambiguously condemned by our entire society.
2. Domestic violence is not difficult to identify. There is a clear, easy-to-remember definition of domestic violence, and the victim is the one who decides if violence is happening or not.
3. Domestic violence is a crime. There are both criminal and civil consequences for assault, battery, rape, and property destruction.
4. Federal, provincial, and local laws stand properly behind the victims of domestic violence. The judicial branch of government, law enforcement, and social service institutions of Canada exist to protect those who are victims of domestic violence.
5. Domestic violence is the most primitive method of solving power problems and "getting your way" known to humankind. Resorting to violence is ample evidence of a lack of proper development in the perpetrator and evidence of his lack of adequate methods of reasoning.
6. Batterers choose to be violent, decide to be abusive and with premeditation, intend to harm, but they are not insane or crazy. They suffer from a learned, progressive, diagnosable, and curable mental disorder. There is no other way to view these men. No well-functioning, mentally healthy person engages in domestic violence.
7. Nothing justifies domestic violence. All attempts at rationalizing and justifying it are to be repudiated. (Self-defense is not domestic violence.)
8. Perpetrators are responsible for every act of violence that they commit. No victim is ever the cause of violence done to him or her, nor does he or she ever deserve it. Perpetrators choose violence and are accountable for their decision.
9. The victim is responsible for staying in a relationship with a violent partner. It is always up to the victim to exit such a relationship.
10. Domestic violence occurs in the gay and lesbian community with the same or greater frequency as in the heterosexual community. 11. Violence is learned at home by imitating and modeling significant others, and through many other societal and psychological mechanisms.
12. Violence in the home can be stopped. Violent behaviour can be curbed and unlearned by the perpetrators, and rejected by the victims.
These columns operate in tandem because of the way HTML tables work.
If you want your entire Home Page to be in text that goes across the whole page (no 1/2-column sections), just turn off the two tandem sections and put all your material into the full-page sections, separating text with headings. Use your HTML coding for paragraph breaks and font size and color changes. Or you can do your entire page in two columns by turning off all your full-page sections and using only your tandem sections.
Notice that we have turned off the second 1/2-column section below this one so you can see what it looks like to turn a section off.
Another 1/2-column section (connected to the one on the right). We've turned this section off so you can see what that looks like. Turn it back on when you want it to show.
Be sure to use our HELP GUIDE for more detailed information on every section of your page.
This section is connected to 2A. It has to be on if A is on and will be off if A is off.
APPROPRIATE PAIN
If we are fortunate in our lives, we may learn to recognize appropriate pain. If we open our hearts to that pain, we can perhaps see the blessing it can bring. I suppose all pain is in some sense appropriate but it often does not seem so. Sometimes the question becomes: "What could God possibly have in mind here?" And other times we just "get it" and understand what the pain is about.
As such, if we learn from the pain, it is appropriate pain. Any pain that teaches is appropriate pain.
We shy away from most pain because, well, because it is painful. That seems axiomatic but it is the very depth of pain that can create the blessing.
Perhaps the deeper the pain the more significant is the lesson, the learning experience it can bring. This is, I imagine, one of the reasons we have the cliché that says "God works in mysterious ways." Pain is often the best if indeed not the only teacher. Changing ourselves is so very difficult that we are
willing to let go of who we are and become someone else only when the pain is simply unbearable. It seems no one changes when things are wonderful.
Airports bring out the loneliness in my heart. They also bring out the leap of adventure that resides there. But mostly they rip open the vulnerability of my soul. I have been a traveler, a flyer, since the early 1950's and some of my most painful moments have occurred at airports. I have shed many tears inside
lonely lounges.
My two sons were in town a couple of weeks ago. We had not all been in one city at one time for nearly two years. And the week was wonderful. It was like friends spending time together. And then, in a millisecond, they left. And when I was sitting at the airport, my loneliness returned--the loneliness of when I was a child, bouncing between New York and Los Angeles and waiting with one of my parents for my plane to leave and take me to the other. And the ripping open of my heart last week was as painful as it used to be then.
When parents say to their children "Just wait until you're a parent!," the children cannot imagine the parent's pain until they are themselves parents. I couldn't as a child. Now I can. I do not know if my children experience the pain of separation from us, their parents and grandmother, in the same way as a
parent does. I didn't as a child. We can only know pain from our own place until we experience it from another place. Another axiom. And since my children, like me as a child, can only know what they know to that moment in their lives, they have no reference for another version of life, of leaving, of pain.
I have been fortunate because my pain of seeing my children leave is appropriate. I have come to see it as such because it has taught me things. It has opened wounds of loneliness that had scarred over since my childhood. It has enabled me to see my parent's pain when I left. It has enabled me to understand
their love as love for before I did not know that it was love.
I did not know that it was love because I did not know what love looked like when I was a child. When I left, I did not experience their pain. I experienced my own version of pain but it was not a parent's pain. It was a child's pain.
Qualitatively different. Not less. Not more. Just different. It was then the only pain I could understand for I had not yet been a parent and experienced a parent's pain.
I feel that I have been gifted with the pain of seeing my two sons grow and move away. Of course it hurts terribly when they leave. But I have been gifted by being given a parallel event in my life so that I could see the same event from the distance of many years and different roles.
This pain is appropriate because I believe that we must know all sides of ourselves if we are to reach spiritual intimacy, that total connection to God, to ourselves, that is known as enlightenment. We must become completely selfless, without separation from our hearts. And for me, the pain of seeing my
children leave has enabled me to see more of who I am because it has made me understand more about my parents.
It has enabled me to see the parent side of me being much different than the child side of me. It has enabled me to see the arc of my life set out before me, if from the inside of air conditioned airport terminals.
Without the pain, I would not know these parts of myself. Quite
painful but appropriate.
God works in mysterious ways.
