December 18, 2012 

Please listen to my video message to you this month. You will find it below.  I attempted to capture the crushing yet challenging and even joyful dichotomy we find ourselves in this season.  Celebrating Hanukkah! Christmas! Kwanza! Winter Solstice! and many other Spiritual, Cultural, and Religious Traditions!  Experiencing joy and beauty, friends and family, even strangers in a spirit of kindness, joy, peace, love, and faith.  And we also find ourselves violently plunged into the horror of the recent murders of our nation's little ones, our children, just days after Christmas shoppers were attacked in a Portland, Oregon mall while celebrating the spirit of giving.  There are no words for the unthinkable trauma we have experienced in our Collective.  As parents, aunts, uncles, siblings, grandparents, and friends; as health care providers to children, families and parents of children; as citizens; as Americans; as human beings our souls have been spent, our hearts truly broken.  It is not a leap to recognize the physical expression of trauma as each of us to varying degrees experienced the revulsion, the physical sensation of pain and sickness in response to being poisoned by the very news of the recent tragedy at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.  Those of us in the mental health field also struggle with our keen knowledge that a young man suffering from severe mental illness was so deeply mentally, emotionally, relationally, and behaviorally disturbed that he made the crazed and depraved choice to kill his mother, 20 children, 6 adults, and then himself.  I believe we are at a precipice in our nation and culture.  We must make drastic steps as Health Care Providers and specifically as Mental Health Professionals to communicate loudly and steadily what we know to be true.  Regardless of your stance on guns, and our current and ever-increasing culture of violence, both of which I personally believe are at issue in this increasing pattern in our American culture of mass murders of increasingly innocent and unrelated people by severely mentally ill young men, the issue of the murderers' Mental Illness is the one we as Mental Health Professionals, must speak to.

Taking a stand as Mental Health Care Professionals (MHCPs) is a form of self care.  The level of stress that we as MHCPs live under as we attempt to provide treatment in an ever crumbling system of mental health care has been overlooked.  To know what is needed and to make treatment recommendations that are simultaneously necessary and difficult or impossible to fulfill for the patient or his/her parents even with our help leaves us as the MHCP feeling vulnerable, incompetent, and/or helpless.  We are not incompetent.  Our system of care is broken.

Speaking the truth and requiring what is needed to truly offer hope and a promise of stabilizing treatment and improved functioning and quality of living can attend to this overwhelm, vulnerability and sense of helplessness. 

How you or I speak and stand will vary for each of us.  I do not offer a formula in this writing, only a call to acknowledge that we are the experts.  We know what is needed.  Funding for treatment, development of accessible and funded programs at every level of care, from occasional outpatient to weekly to multiple sessions per week to intensive outpatient/day treatment/partial hospitalization to short and long term hospitalization to residential treatment facilities of varying levels of structure.  Those children, adolescents, young adults, adults, and older, geriatric adults with mental illness will need to move between all levels of care over their lifetime.  We know that. 

We have a clarion call.  We must answer.  To stand takes care not only of those we treat as healers.  To stand takes care of ourselves, the Mental Health Care Professionals. 

How do we move from this intensity back to celebrating the miracle of Christ's birth, the miracle of the oil and lamp of Hanukkah, the peace of the Winter Solstice, the fun of Santa, and the delight of the beautiful children who do live vibrantly among us?  We light a candle and quiet inward and outward with others as we honor and experience both the joy of this incredible season and the grief of this unspeakable tragedy.  We do both.

We have many things to look forward to in 2013 at Moonstone Center.  Check out the rest of the newsletter to see them.

I look forward to writing you in January of 2013.

Until then, we at Moonstone Center wish you Happy Holidays full of peace, joy, and yes, healing.  We pray a blessed New Year for each of you!

With Peace, Joy, Love and Light, 

The Healer's Life - December 2012 - Honoring Holiday Wishes and Our Collective Trauma

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__________________________________________________________________
Elisabeth's  Speaking Schedule 

Come Join Me!

Saturday, March 16, 2013   Dancing the Transference: Honoring the

  Relationship Between Therapist and Client

                                      Moonstone Center 

 6 CEUs

Spring, 2013          West LA CAMFT 

        Santa Monica/West LA AAMFT 

 Expressive Arts & Somatic Psychotherapy SIG

 Somatic Transference:  The Body's Process in  

    Psychotherapy 

____________________________________________________________________________________________________  

To Invite Dr. Elisabeth Crim to Speak!

Topics:

 Dancing the Transference: Honoring the Relationship Between Therapist and Client

 Power of Collaborative Treatment Teaming: Bridging Complementary-Alternative Therapies with Traditional Mental Health Treatment

• Integrative and Holistic Mental Health Treatment
• Yoga Therapy, Acupuncture, Psychiatry and Psychodynamic Psychotherapy

        Restoring the Healer: Exploring Somatic Transference and Compassion Fatigue

• Somatic Transference for the Therapist, Health Care Provider
• Compassion Fatigue, Vicarious and Secondary Trauma, Burnout
• Yoga as Restorative Intervention 

Please Contact Julie Brown,

Dr. Crim's Speaking Manager

Events@MoonstoneCenter.com

310.938.3203