The Lifeworks Group, Inc.

  By: Dwight Bain, LMHC, NCC    Community Care After a Crisis- Identifying Emotional Warning Signs and Trauma Symptoms   A community crisis can terrorize an entire community in just a few minutes, while the recovery process to rebuild from a major critical incident may take weeks or months to sort through. The more you know about how to survive and rebuild after the crisis, the faster you can take positive action to get your personal and professional life back on track.   Since community crisis events like shootings at schools, malls or churches, bombing or terrorism are unpredictable, it requires a different course of action than the crisis brought on from natural disasters like hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, fires and floods. What can you do right now to cope with the psychological impact of a major community crisis brought on through violence?   1. Deal Directly with Your Emotions   This will reduce the tension and stress on you, which allows y...

  By: Elizabeth McKeehan, LMHC When the Other Shoe Drops…   Surviving the unthinkable. Extreme loss & hard happen.  When multiple tragedies happen all at once or close together what do you do?   What is shoe dropping, much less the other one? Is it even possible in this life to keep both shoes on? Who does it happen to? When does bad happen?   What if more bad happens when things are already bad? What happens in our brains and body? How can we keep moving forward? How can we support those in it?   If Haley Joel Osment’s famous line (from the 1999 movie The Sixth Sense) “I see dead people” has become your mantra of “I see devastating/doom/danger/dreadful/dark/deplorable things”, this may be a sign you have experienced more than your share of compound loss. You may be experiencing PTSD symptoms and your body may be feeling the weight of carrying too much trauma. Notice and pay attention to what your body is saying.   Trauma = Unexpe...

By: Megan Brewer, LMHC   Did you grow up in a home with psychological abuse? For as long as Jane could remember, she struggled with depression and anxiety. After carrying her struggles on her own for years, she decided to seek the help of a counselor. As Jane began to explore her feelings and the stories attached to them, she and her counselor started talking about the kind of home she remembered growing up in. “My home life was OK,” she said. “We were never physically abused or anything like that, and my parents provided for what we needed.” But as Jane continued to explore and unpack the relational dynamics of her childhood home, a different story began to emerge. While her father was involved in different areas of her life, she remembered being afraid of him most of the time. She remembered fragments of memories about how her dad used to treat her mom, and it never seemed right. It often felt confusing to think about. No one outside of the family seemed to really know abou...