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A Letter to the Police
My mother was looking in boxes the other day attempting to have a clear out of unnecessary stuff that had accumulated over the years. What she found amongst trinkets and change was the below letter. In 2009 I was arrested and hospitalised under Section 2 of the Mental Health Act. Before, thankfully, being arrested, I had tried to kill myself in my boyfriends car, which I had stolen while he was asleep. With cuts to my arms, rips in my clothes and a desperate mind I was, after some time driving around roundabouts trying to get lost so I couldn’t turn back from my suicidal plans, picked up, taken to a hospital to get my arms stitched and then taken to a Police Station in the middle of London. There I sat on a bench for many hours while they tried to figure out what to do with me.
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RADIO: The Business of Digital Wellbeing
Sam Flynn has been training businesses in the use of social media for 12 years. Her own addiction to her smartphone and research into why this happens along with a background in Business Psychology has led Sam into a career as a digital wellbeing coach. Sam works with individuals and businesses to manage their relationship with the digital world to promote positive use, rather than causing a negative impact on their lives and she joins Louisa “Wizzi” Magnussen to discuss The Business of Digital Wellbeing…
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SUPPORT: A Comprehensive Guide to Mental Illness
Mental illnesses are medical conditions involving changes in behavior, thinking or emotions that interfere with a person’s ability to do daily tasks or care for themselves. Common mental health disorders include anxiety disorders and mood disorders such as depression, schizophrenia and ADHD. Other disorders include autism, borderline personality disorder, disassociate disorders, eating disorders and obsessive compulsive disorder, also known as OCD. People diagnosed with serious mental illness typically need a combination of medication and talk therapy to get better. Mental illness isn’t the fault of the person diagnosed. It’s a medical problem, just like diabetes or heart disease, and it’s also common in the United States.
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SUPPORT: The Power of Communication
Recently, in my work as a counsellor, I came across a situation which appeared to be the break up of a marriage. The couple had been married for several years and together even more years. The partner who came to see me was very unhappy, feeling entirely alone, could see no way forward with the relationship and was making plans for leaving the marriage and starting life again as a single person. On further exploration, it became clear that she/he had not told the partner, let alone discussed it with them. She/he felt that enough time had been given for things to change and, had the partner wanted the marriage to work, they would have changed their behaviour. I asked if she/he had made it clear that he/she wanted the partner to change to which she/he replied well, yes, maybe a bit but didn’t want to be a nag and anyway the partner should know. Ah, I thought, tricky, an assumption here that the partner should be, and in fact is, a mind reader! You want change and the other person in the relationship should not only know that you want change but also know how that change might look.
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SUPPORT: Anxiety and me
By Tracy Douthwaite from Way to Wellbeing I lived with anxiety most of my life, mostly I masked it, but sometimes it would completely overwhelm me. Even when doing okay and masking it well the anxiety controlled a lot of…
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Gender
Gender identity is freedom, freedom from the boxes society makes, the boxes I tried to make myself fit in for so many years. Freedom from a mask so heavy I wonder how it took so long for me to see…
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Mini-Wife Syndrome
So, hi everyone. We are a blended family. I have a son from previous marriage and hubby has a daughter. He was a widower when we met and I was a divorcee. We always put the kids first, they bonded really well and some time after dating we moved in (kids also wanted it). We then started having problems with my SD jealousy towards her dad. She would want to kiss and hold him and to always have his attention. She would throw tantrums, etc. It’s hard to give all the examples but it was really extreme at times. It was kind of irritating I admit, but I thought, well she needs time and we will adapt.
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RADIO: The Business of Overcoming Burnout
Have you ever had a moment of AWE? Do you know what a moment of AWE is? MICHAEL AMSTER, MD, co-author of The Power of AWE, is a physician and faculty member at the Touro School of Medicine. With twenty years’ experience as a pain management specialist, he is currently the founding director of the pain management department at Santa Cruz Community Health. He’s been a student of meditation for over thirty years, as well as a certified yoga teacher and meditation teacher. He splits his time between clinical work, research on awe, teaching mindfulness, and leading awe-inspiring retreats around the world. Michael joins Louisa “Wizzi” Magnussen today to discuss The Business of Overcoming Burnout…
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RADIO: The Business of Mental Health Skills
Lisa Jones is the Founder and Director of HeadStrong Training, a UK-based provider of wellbeing and resilience training for businesses and education providers. A qualified psychotherapist, Lisa specialises in helping high-performers cope with chronic stress, mental health, emotional wellbeing, and resilience issues, through understanding the brain-body connection. Lisa has won multiple awards for her work, believes that prevention is better than intervention and she joins Louisa “Wizzi” Magnussen to discuss the Business of Mental Health Skills…
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RADIO: The Business of Resilience
What does resilience mean? Can too much focus on building our own resilience lead to burnout? How connected are these two very prominent topics? Aubrey Wrenn is the Chief Operating Officer and Senior Consultant for Proven Valor Professionals. Aubrey enlisted in the Marine Corps in January of 2001 as an Artillery Cannoneer and retired as a First Sergeant (Senior Enlisted Leader/Advisor). How has his transition from the military into the civilian world been? How can others hope to make a smooth ride of this somewhat complex and often challenging period? With over 21 years of military experience, Aubrey has served in multiple locations across the globe. Through multiple combat deployments and challenging assignments, Aubrey has honed his craft as a passionate and dedicated organisational leader that strives to enhance the resiliency, culture, effectiveness, efficiency, and leadership acumen of every organisation he has been a part of.
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SUPPORT: What is Resilience?
I seem to keep hearing the word resilience everywhere I turn right now, and it’s got me thinking about what resilience is, why might we need resilience and how we might develop it in ourselves. So firstly what is it? Resilience seems to be about finding a way to not only deal with life’s difficulties, but to bounce back after dealing with them or, at least, be able to function and get on with our lives. ‘Our lives’ may well be altered by events we experience, and even if we are resilient, we may have to make changes to go forward. It may be that this is where we need the resilience – not just to survive the challenge, but to find our way in the new circumstances. So what do we need to be resilient? Are we born with a certain amount of this, different for everybody? Does it develop in response to challenge? It is so hard to say whether or not we are born resilient. Different theorists have different views. Some say we are a blank slate when we are born and everything is put in place by our experience of life, i.e where in the world we were born, what was the culture we were born into etc.
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RADIO: The Business of EFT Healing
What is EFT Healing and how can it help soothe anxiety, help to heal past traumas and lead to a healthier mind? Find out in this 50-minute radio show, amid EFT Master Practitioner and Life Coach Tamas Konya’s choice of music as he chats to our founder Louisa “Wizzi” Magnussen on Connections Radio. As Tamas tells his emotive story of battling addiction, depression, anxiety and more feel comforted that you can get through to the other side with the right support and help. “Connection, connection, connection.” One of our favourite quotes from Tamas when asked by Wizzi what he would say to someone struggling to simply carry on today.
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POEM: Reconnect
This poem is about reconnecting to a tender, sacred part of oneself as part of healing from traumas. The poem reflects on our sacred connection to the earth and our divine selves – and so also each other. Really it’s about reconnecting and healing…
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POEM: Greeting shadows
Im reaching out, don’t know what for My tools won’t work, in need of more My mindset shifts from dark to light And Nightmares haunt me day and night My safe routine is out of whack My mood is wobbly, mostly black
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What is wrong with me?
I woke up hung over with so much regret. I drank too much and embarrassed myself by crying to the man who denies my little girl. In front of everyone. Pathetic. One of my friends just had her son yesterday. There wasn’t a father. This has to be one of my triggers, because I was fine or so I thought. Now I sit here with my three children knowing that the wounds of my womb have deep rooted pain. I pray for healing but where do I start? I was a teen mom in an abusive relationship, I had my second child (that I hid from my family) two years later. After multiple deaths in the same year, in my deepest grief, I had my youngest. She kept me alive. There was a ten year age gap from my eldest to my baby. I was alone in that hospital. It was below zero and the nurses said I could go home because I didn’t have anyone to sit with the older two children. I know they pitied me. My mother just learned she had cancer and at the time was hospitalized. It was the four of us and the icing on the cake, my tire was flat. My ten year old son and I changed that tire in below zero weather. I just had a baby. I can still feel the anger and disappointment in myself. I did my best to hide this. I was not ok.
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SUPPORT: Don’t let a diagnosis limit you
You have probably been waiting a very long time for a diagnosis. During that time you may have been battling with numerous questions regarding how you have been feeling. Why do I feel so down? Why do I feel so anxious? Why do I feel so confused? Sadly, whilst the profile of mental health has certainly been raised in recent times, it is still very difficult to get the help needed from the mental health services within a comfortable time frame. Indeed, the actual raising of the profile has perhaps made it even more difficult as the number of people dealing with mental health issues has also been raised. It is, of course, a good thing to raise, and to continue to raise the profile but perhaps what we, as users of the services, need to do is to start to think about our own role in terms of our mental health. As with our physical health, we need to be thinking about this before there is a problem. So what do we do to take care of our physical health in advance of illness? This probably seems fairly obvious but we’ll look at some of the factors because there is a tendency not to think about these things while we are well. We have our diet to consider – many of us know what makes a healthy diet and some of us adhere to it, but many don’t. It does seem extremely unfair that chocolate, or in fact many things containing sugar, are not part of a healthy diet but there we are – nobody said it would be easy!
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My Son Kevin
This is my story, how I see things as a parent and caretaker. Let me introduce you to my son, Kevin. He likes to write poetry, paint, draw, play with his cat, take walks, and watch documentaries. He learns new facts about the things he’s interested in. I grew up eating sliced American cheese and Velveeta. At any given time, Kevin chooses deli wedges of different cheeses. He’s talked about the smooth taste of cheeses or the aroma, color and texture. He knows his cheeses. He was eating aged cheddar one day and told his brother that it’s similar in taste to Gouda. He’s vegetarian and manages his own diet. He likes to eat oysters, crab, salmon and lobster. He’s a food connoisseur.
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RADIO: The Business of Grief and Loss
We will all experience a bereavement at some point in our lives, so why is grief not spoken about more openly and how can we support those grieving? In this The Business of… episode on Connections Radio, our Founder Louisa “Wizzi” Magnussen interviews the Founder of Grief Coach, Emma Payne, posing the below questions and more: What inspired you to set up Grief Coach? How does the text service work and how can people access it? Do you have professionals on the other side of the text service, offering real time support to those grieving?
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SUPPORT: Just Listen
We often talk about the person who is living with mental illness, how it might be for them, strategies to help deal with it all from day to day, sources of help and support they may reach out to, but we don’t often talk about the carers and support workers trying to be there for them and offer whatever it is that they need to get through the demands of every day life. This is clearly an enormous subject when you consider that each person has different needs and are likely to need, and be looking for, different kinds of help. The word ‘carer’, and indeed ‘support worker’ can mean anything from a live-in carer who is totally responsible for the physical and mental care of another, to a neighbour who pops in each day to prepare lunch or check that the other person is okay. The first carer could be a spouse, a sibling, a son/daughter, any other relative or, a paid professional carer. Their role would very much depend on the specific needs to be met but would also depend on the skill, abilities, willingness and commitment of the carer/support worker. With physical need there may be a need for physical fitness in order to lift, manoeuvre from bed to chair, make more comfortable and actually support physically. There are probably clear requirements of the carer/supporter who will likely be aware of their own limitations and will know when to ask for further support. That support may be from other family members or more formal sources. Whoever is doing the caring, it is a daunting and often exhausting task requiring the carer to be available every day always needing to put the other person first. This can be particularly hard for the elderly when frequently the carer is the spouse who may have physical limitations themselves.
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Where are we?
Where are we? Something isn’t right. I can see you walking through the door of the ward, holding my first ever classical guitar within its battered 15 year old case. The case is dripping in scraps of shoelace, red, yellow and green bits of string, badges, stickers and pins, all held together with gaffa tape. You smile at me, trying to hide the hurt you feel as you look upon the one you love who is not well enough to love you back. I feel your warmth as you walk in and reach out to embrace my malnourished body. But wait. I’m not in that body. I look down and there is a swollen belly, strong legs, meaty arms and large breasts under the sheets. Something isn’t right. Where are we?
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RADIO: The Business of Cultural Grief
The intercultural atmosphere Martina Famos grew up in has formed a talent for understanding different cultures and the clashes that can arise when people have contrasting sociological reasoning. This has set the ground for contributing professionally to a peaceful multicultural society. Besides her experience as a counsellor, working with international individuals and couples in difficult situations, Martina guides expatriates with a pragmatic and compassionate concept throughout their integration process. She is here with Louisa “Wizzi” Magnussen to discuss The Business of Cultural Grief…