How To Be A Healing Presence Without Becoming Anxious, Power-Struggling, Or Referring the Mad Person To A Hospital
How It Works
Starting this November in two-hour sessions on Sunday evenings, I will teach you a new model for understanding psychosis that will help you be able to relate with a person in madness in a manner that helps them heal. We are looking for nine volunteers who will receive the training for free in a webinar format on zoom. Volunteers may be professionals (including peer counselors) looking to hone their skills, family members seeking better relationships with their loved ones, or people with lived experience who want to share their perspective and contribute to a new model. The sessions will be taped and edited and eventually sold at an affordable price. Come bring your stories and perspectives to the discussion, ask questions, and we will all learn in community.
Here’s what we’ll go over:
Week 1
- How listening to stories and reflecting on commonalities helped me deconstruct experiences into solvable problems and formulate the structure of the rest of the presentation
- Why the medical model definitions lead to limited solutions and ultimately to the poor outcomes, stereotypes and the dehumanization we see.
- The way the thirty differential diagnoses that include psychotic experiences in them may have kept us from creating a counter culture and focusing on solutions.
Week 2
- Why the notion that this is a thought disorder is wrong, and the importance of considering the conglomeration of experiences that cause one to experience a break from reality.
- The reason trying to stop a person from perseverating about their experiences by telling them that they are ill only decreases mindfulness and thwarts efforts to stop perseveration.
- Why it is often important to research and know about real government conspiracies to gain a message receiver’s trust and learn about what they think.
Week 3
- How expanding the ways message receivers think about what causes their experiences adds to flexibility and can have a positive impact on functioning.
- Learn to use what we term “the trickster concept” to likewise increase flexibility and open up faith without reality checking and sabotaging your trust with the message receiver.
- Why processing past behavior and negative outcomes is essential to help a message receiver start to accept boundaries and use the social skills that work for them.
Week 4
- How social, institutional, and internalized stigma are linked to a message receiver’s irrational thinking making timing and context important as cognitive therapy is used as a tool to help them.
- How a mindful understanding of special messages can still be a valid part of an individual’s effort to discern reality without leading to a crisis or an emergency.
- How to use this system of care in group and individual contexts so that you can meet the message receiver where they are at and develop intervention strategies.
Hi, I’m Tim
Early on in my 27 years of working in the trenches of community mental health, I thought I was a good worker when I did things like: 1) take care of people who were experiencing a break in reality by doing things for them to build trust; and 2) reminding them to take their medication. As I realized what people were living through in impoverished warehouse circumstances and fought for better services, I started to notice ways I was being followed by the company that owned the housing project where I worked. When I received a threat from a close friend, I myself descended into madness. I tried to flee to Canada and was rapidly warehoused as a ward in a last resort State Hospital. I learned very quickly that madness wasn’t what I was trained to believe it was in school. I learned 1) that being treated like I was incapable of doing anything myself felt insulting; and 2) being told to take my medications was pointless; these kinds of interventions were not the help I needed.
It was a lot harder to get ready to go back to work in mental health than I thought it would be after three months in an institution. Enduring housing insecurity, moves, and underemployment was very hard. When I did manage to get my license I started to run professional groups that explored not only what psychosis was, but also what could be done that was helpful. I used my lived experience to help other silenced individuals open up. The things we all learned in the process of sharing stories were astounding. I have documented these learnings over the past fifteen years and want to release to you my findings in a course that will help you know how to intervene when faced with someone who experiences a break from reality.
Click to Schedule Interview with Tim
There will only be only nine to ten participants so set up your interview today
