Letter from the President
Joanne
Twombly, LICSW
Excerpted from the August, 2003
NESTTD Newsletter
Dear NESTTD Members and
Supporters,
I want to
welcome everyone in advance to the 2003-2004 program, starting bright and early
on September 6th with Joyanna Silberg, a child and adolescent therapist who has
much to offer, even to primarily adult therapists.
I had the chance to go to her excellent presentation last November during
the joint ISTSS/ ISSD morning and found it surprisingly useful in all sorts of
ways, from understanding more about my clients as adolescents, their struggles
to provide their own adolescent children with a different sort of childhood from
their own, and, of course, in dealing with adolescent parts.
By the way, please note: this
program and NESTTD’s new home will be at
Bentley
College
, not Brandeis!
The vicissitudes of the search for new space far exceed this
newsletter’s capacity, suffice to say, Bentley has space for us to meet
(including coffee breaks and networking!), to grow in, and ample parking.
We owe a huge vote of thanks to Norah Lewis who joined the board last
year and took on the huge job of coordinating and negotiating this search, as
well as to Girvani Leerer, Debbie Korn, and Lana Epstein who also participated
in the process.
The following is perhaps a non sequitur, but I wanted to fit it in here
somewhere. I did go to the European
Society for Traumatic Stress Studies’ (www.estss.org)
annual conference last May in
Berlin
, and, if anyone’s
interested, next year’s is in
Stockholm
.
There were over 1000 people there from 52 countries and it was an eye
opener to hear about life and struggles of treating trauma in so many different
places. I often think about many of
the presentations and people I met. One
was a Dr. Hazboun from the Guidance and
Training
Center
for Children and
Family in
Bethlehem
.
Their working definition of sanity is “the capacity to enjoy the time
between problems even if it’s only two minutes per day.”
Out of 100 children treated in their clinic, 80 could not initially
answer the question: If you had 3
wishes… When those 80 kids were
prompted, 15% wished they could become suicide bombers.
When those 15% were worked with even for a short time, they converted
this to wanting to go to school or to study.
This spoke to me of the power of treatment, paying attention, and of
compassion, along with the importance of thinking about trauma not only
individually and societally, but also globally.
These are my thoughts on this hot summer’s night as I anticipate our
fall season. Have a great rest of
the summer and see you on September 6th!
Sincerely,
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