March 17, 2011
Two months after gunfire and bonfires in the streets interrupted our first Haiti Professional Training Program our participants are back – with stories of how they have used what they learned from us and what they have taught to others.
Their faces are eloquent with change as we sit together in the circle of our small group. Marilyn the pediatrician, looking almost as young as her twenty something daughter, is laughing as she greets us. James, the head of psychology for the National Police, has put on ten much needed pounds. And Ty Rose the anesthesiologist looks as content as she says she is.
“I am teaching the nurses to give anesthesia.” Ti Rose begins, after we have done our opening “soft belly” meditation. “And of course there is never enough equipment and much that we have doesn’t work. But I am somehow easier in my mind. I breathe deeply and do my best and teach my students to do the same, and it is going very well indeed.”
“Police work,” James says,
“is an at risk job.We lost many colleagues in the earthquake and many more of us are still living in the streets. There is great stress. But I am doing the CMBM techniques and teaching them. And I am these last two months usually calm – and even calmer now after breathing together.”
photo by Mark Silverberg for CMBM
The next morning the riskiness of his profession will be brought home once again. “I woke to learn that two of my colleagues were killed, but the soft belly I did at home and here, and this morning’s yoga helped so much. You know how here in Haiti we put coffee in a sock and drip the water through and afterwards the coffee is just lying there – very even, but also full of energy. That I believe is how I am.”
Marilyn has begun to move through the melancholia that engulfed her in the year after the earthquake, beyond the deaths of her brother in the quake and her husband in the political violence that has followed it. “I remember my loss and I cry, but then I use the guided imagery and the deep breathing and dance like I did when I was a teenager and I watch my mood change, and the insomnia has gone. And I am sharing what I am learning with my patients and in my church.”
by Mark Silverberg for CMBM
The next day she will discover in her genogram – her family tree – another source of strength: “My father’s brother disappeared in the Duvalier regime and my auntie raised six children on her own. Many in my family have faced difficult situations” - she laughs now – “and I am finding strength from them as I look at this genogram, and from God too – I think he is all over this genogram – and the love he still has for me.”
And Mercedes, who has metamorphosed from impassive to expressive, cannot wait to “partager,” to share what has happened to her.
Continued–to read about Mercedes’ transformation, click here
Posted in Global Trauma Relief, Haiti by Dr. James S. Gordon
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March 3, 2011
Dear Friends,
I’m delighted–NBC Washington online just posted a wonderful profile of our work in Haiti. Read about our program and the many people it is helping here.
Hope, Healing in Haiti: How Locals Are Rebuilding A Nation
Posted in Announcements, Global Trauma Relief, Haiti by Dr. James S. Gordon
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February 28, 2011
I’m not quite sure when or even how it happened but Haiti is starting to feel like home. Not in the sense that I have my family with me, or know where to do grocery shopping, or can lay my hands on the books I love most.
It’s something else, an ease with people, a sense of words and actions contributing to something really good – right now and for the future — a welcome, even an embrace that keeps expanding. It swells from the team around me, and from the 120 people — doctors, psychologists, nurses, midwives, teachers, priests and nuns and voudoun healers — who come to our training with great fidelity and teach the techniques they are learning from us to friends, family, and patients as soon as it is humanly possible. “In order to keep the training inside me always, I have to share it with others,” one young teacher announced this morning.
In the days after Yehlie’s first communion we complete the training we began in December. My ‘small group’ of participants, gathered together again, begins as always with a few minutes of soft belly meditation – slow deep breathing, in through the nose, out through the mouth, with the belly soft and relaxed — quieting our nervous systems, our minds and bodies. And then we “check in”, tell each other what has happened since we last saw each other and share what we are feeling “right now.” Already it is becoming a commonplace for us, a way to regularly connect with those around us, outside as well as within the training. “Check in,” laughs one priest, “is almost now a second religion.”
photo by Mark Silverberg for CMBM
There are still major problems and issues – almost half of our group is still not living in their homes, and there is abiding sadness for those who have died, but there is more energy for understanding and meeting current challenges.
We discuss the short term memory loss that bedevils several people and makes them apprehensive, even in their thirties or forties, about Alzheimer’s disease. I say it is highly unlikely, that trauma has long been known to obscure memory. And one of the other doctors in the group assures us that her memory – devastated amidst the loss of her brother and her husband — has begun slowly to return: “Sharing my emotions, accepting help from others, permitting my own tears – it as if the memory flows back with them.”
This doctor’s face is no longer constricted in pain as on our last visit, but open, changeable, easy with laughter as well as tears. Many of the faces I see are equally changed. James, who is head of psychology for the National Police, scrupulously kind, but painfully thin and equally serious in December, is ten pounds heavier, relaxed, expansive. And the woman I think of as “the Teacher,” as immobile and expressionless as mahogany in devastated grief at the loss of husband and home two months ago, is now a river of feeling and words.
One participant says, “The earthquake brought us so much pain, but also we are seeing it brings good things to the people who survive. Psychology [i.e. traditional therapy] was useless to me and my community – no one could go because it meant you were crazy. Now with CMBM approach I am helping myself and others too.”
Says another, “On January 12th, the anniversary, when everyone in my church was so tense, I taught them the breathing. And as I relaxed I let myself cry, and found my strength, and then we cried together, my children and my friends. And then I sang a song – I have never led a song any time – and I asked everyone to sing with me and praise god. And we did, three songs, and then we all felt more calm.”
It is so encouraging to see the positive changes in our trainees, and to hear that our participants are taking the techniques back to their homes, churches, workplaces. Giving the people of Haiti practical tools for their own emotional healing, and empowering them to teach these tools to everyone they meet, will, we hope, help the Haitian people heal themselves.
Photo by Mark Silverberg for CMBM
Posted in Global Trauma Relief, Haiti by Dr. James S. Gordon
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February 23, 2011
I am honored to be at Linda’s daughter Yehlie’s first communion – surprised at first, quickly engaged, and soon moved.
The church turns out to be a metal shed, spacious, vaulted, open on one side, doing duty on other days as classroom, auditorium and gymnasium. There are permanent concrete bleachers against the long wall, and for today worn wooden pews imported, in stately rows facing the altar and lectern that are even now being carried in. The communicants’ chairs are arranged in several rows of nested crescents. Yellow flowers overflow the basketball hoops at either end of the floor.
Parents, siblings and friends fill the pews and bleachers, smiles breaking out in greetings, cameras at hand. Sweet music pours from surprisingly faithful speakers. Nine and ten year old girls in strawberry jumpers sit opposite me, close to the altar – the choir – looking expectantly toward where the younger children will enter as they take their place in the church and with their God. Such gentle order in the midst of Haiti’s general chaos.
100 or 120 little girls in white dresses with wide fluttering skirts and white crowns of linen flowers enter -walking, skipping a little, so pleased and proud. During the course of the morning’s service I notice that each one has a different hairstyle, curls and braids, straight and natural, falling in cascades or caught up in geysers, billowing toward every point of Nature’s compass, saying, I imagine: “This is how I like it” or “This is how my mom and I like it”. Some are obvious leaders, engaged from moment one, with the girls in the next chairs, or eyes bright with ones across the way. Others are more internal, sitting with some poise or fidgeting for a comfortable place.
I count only a few boys, heads shaved, in white dress shirts and grey pants, bow ties like red blossoms under their chins.
Linda’s family and friends make sure I am comfortable, out of direct sunlight, able to follow the service. I am bathed in their kindness, the little girls’ pleasure and anticipation, the sweet yearning of the choir’s voices and the words of the hymns calling, crooning, praising: “Ton amour nous appelle” (Your love calls us); “Merci mon dieu pour ton amour, pour le don de la vie.” (Thank you god for your love, for the gift of life.”) My heart cracks and I cry with appreciation for these girls and their parents and the priest, and the joy and hope they – and now I – feel.
When it is time for the “kiss of peace” everyone is thrilled to share and receive the love. I am too.
Posted in Global Trauma Relief, Haiti by Dr. James S. Gordon
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February 22, 2011
On our first night in Port-au-Prince, while Lee Ann and I are going over the next day’s schedule, Father Fredy appears at our table on the Plaza Hotel’s terrace.
Fredy is whippet-thin and angled slightly forward, a living emblem of his eagerness to share what he has been learning and doing even before the CMBM training begins on Tuesday. “The children who have lost their homes and parents are the ones I work with most. I have them breathe deeply to relax and then draw their biggest problem and imagine its solution – a new home, people who care for them. And then we sing together, and I ask them to imagine that place they have created.”
© CMBM
He has also worked with parents who, displaced and frantic since the earthquake, have been abusing their children – having them do dialogues with their “problem” (the abuse), and the unending frustration that seems to compel them to it. For the first time they are able to talk about what shames them, to gain a little perspective.
“They thank me,” Father Fredy says, a huge smile opening his face.
“On the anniversary of the earthquake,” he goes on, “I used an image of a river. I told our whole congregation to imagine they were on its banks, that the river was helping to take away the memories and the sorrow. They were so happy. ‘It’s just like we are there’, they said.”
Father Fredy is still fresh but Lee Ann and I are getting tired. We do a ”dialogue with a symptom” and he realizes something that is just below the surface of his consciousness. “I know I should be tired too. I want to help, but it is too much – seven days a week, long, long hours. I am awake when I should be asleep and then I fall asleep during the day when I should be awake. My Inner Guide says I have to change that,” he says, laughing.
“You have planted a seed,” he tells us, before we all go off to bed. “Other ways, like medication and just talking, weren’t working or were too difficult, or even if good, like prayer, were not enough. But this seed is now becoming a tree and it is bearing fruit.”
We are in Port-au-Prince this week doing an Advanced Training in Mind-Body Medicine with 120 Haitian health, mental health and education professionals and caregivers. Please look for more posts in the days to come. More info on our Global Trauma Relief program in Haiti can be found here.
Posted in Global Trauma Relief, Haiti by Dr. James S. Gordon
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February 17, 2011
This weekend I’ll be headed back to Haiti with my team of international faculty, to continue training Haitian caregivers in Mind-Body Skills that they can bring to their traumatized families, the more than 1 million who still live in tent camps, colleagues, patients, and students at their workplaces. This is the next step as we create a nation-wide program of psychological self-care for Haiti. I can’t wait to be back in Port-au-Prince with our faculty, and the wonderful, caring group of Haitian professionals we’re gathering together and training to be the nucleus of society-wide change.
Haitian caregivers in our training, at our Port-au-Prince Office. © CMBM
You may remember our first training in December 2010, which was cut short by election riots. Here are a couple of moving testimonials from attendees who are practicing what they learned . . . Saint-Juste Desir, Teacher at the Public school in Raymond and at the Family Care Program for Better Future International, in Cayes-Jacmel, Haiti, writes:
At the end of December, I lost one of my cousins who was about 30. I was really shocked because she was not sick. So hearing the news shocked me very hard. After that I could not sleep at night, I also had headache. By chance, I recalled the CMBM training and I decided to try it so I could sleep. I tried the “soft belly technique” and I slept all night. Since then, I use it every night before going to bed.
As I am a teacher, after the training in December, I was teaching math to my students. I realized that they were tired and could not concentrate. I asked them if they would like to experience some relaxation techniques. They agreed. I put music, I asked them to stand up and we did some “shaking and dancing” for about 5 to 10 minutes. After that we continued working with no problem. They were relaxed and they asked me why I didn’t do that with them before. They loved it.
I expect to know more techniques during the Advanced Training so I can help myself better and also help my students.
Jacques Africot, Project director, Better Future International, from Jacmel, Haiti, writes:
The technique I use the most is the “soft belly”. It can be practiced anywhere, any moment. It is the easiest technique for me to calm down my nerves, reduce my stress. Any time, I feel stressed or depressed I use it.
An Experience that surprised me: I was talking to a friend and she was suffering in her breast. I asked her if she wanted to make an experience. She said yes. I put a soft music and I asked her to close her eyes. After some deep breathing, I started to guide her slowly with the “body scan technique.” After finishing, she was smiling: Her pain was completely gone. I was myself surprised.
I practiced different CMBM techniques with my children: soft belly, shake and dance, drawing, imagery. I realized that after practicing those techniques they sleep better. Less nightmares, no headache if someone had one before we practiced it. And they sometimes ask me to practice with them.
I expect that the advanced training will give me more techniques to guide others.
By the time our training is finished—the end of February– these Haitian caregivers will all be taking the CMBM model out into the wider world and leading “small groups.” Each person will begin helping others manage their own stress and anxiety (still lingering from the January 12th 2010 earthquake, cholera outbreaks, and continued hardship and displacement). If each caregiver leads 1 group of 10 Haitians, that means the 120 caregivers we’re training will immediately be able to reach a minimum of 1200 Haitians in rural areas as well as cities; and that number will grow as our trainees continue to use these skills with the individuals and in classrooms and with additional small groups.
Making Haiti a community of healers—that is our goal. “This program,” as our Haitian Program Director Linda Métayer has said, “is a gift to the Haitian people.”
Haitian Participants at CMBM Training © Mark Silverberg for CMBM
If you’d like to support us as we bring this gift to the Haitian people, please click here.
Posted in Global Trauma Relief, Haiti by Dr. James S. Gordon
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January 27, 2011
Richard Sloan’s op-ed in the New York Times (“A fighting spirit won’t save your life”, January 25, 2011) is guilty of precisely the faults he attributes to those who believe that attitude can affect health – smug, self-righteous, and short on scientific evidence.
Prof. Sloan is of course correct when he takes to task those who believe that “requests to the universe” ensure good health, or that good people always receive good prognoses. But these are extremes, rhetorical straw men. There have in fact been years of important scientific investigations on the very real benefits of hopefulness and positive expectation.
Here are several examples: a 15 year follow-up of Steven Greer’s landmark study showed that a fighting spirit didn’t, over the long haul, enhance survival for women with advanced breast cancer; on the other hand, the follow-up did demonstrate that feelings of helplessness and hopelessness significantly decreased longevity. Contrary to what Prof. Sloan suggests, the pioneering work of Redford Williams and others has clearly shown connections between hostility and heart disease. And a number of investigations over 20 years have demonstrated that people with lung cancer who are more optimistic actually have better prognoses than those with a similar stage of disease and physical findings who are less sanguine.
Prof. Sloan does a disservice to readers and to the truth when he categorically denies the power of hope in healing.
Posted in Cancer Care, Depression, health care by Dr. James S. Gordon
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January 20, 2011
Because our training in Mind-Body Medicine was interrupted by election riots in December, we scheduled half day workshops for our December trainees on January 11th, 2011. It was a place for us to share feelings just before the anniversary of the earthquake, a refresher course, a time for questions and guidance, the opportunity to gather and sit and eat together in our new CMBM Port-au-Prince office. What a treat to have space for people to come- 60 or 80 at a time if we need it – windows that shed light, and a kitchen to cook in.
Linda Metayer, our Haitian Program Director, tells me that the response to her phone calls and emails a few days earlier was “formidable”. And it shows: 85-90 people out of 120 from our December training come to the morning or afternoon sessions; others, too far away, out of the country, or tied up in emergencies of cholera care, are regretful. Already 118 out of 120 (I’m not sure I’m hearing Linda correctly, but she assures me her count is precise) have committed to the continuation of our training in February.
Listening to “check-in” – Laurent Scheineider a former prison guard who is bringing our work to the Petionville tent camps which he helps to organize translates in the morning, Rene Domersant, a high ranking Ministry of Health official who recognizes the pressing need for self-care, in the afternoon – I am touched and amazed by how deeply our approach and our techniques have penetrated and improved the daily lives, and even more so the nighttime lives, of so many.
For the first time since January 12, 2010, “je dors tous les soirs (I sleep every night)” say half a dozen; “tres reposant, (very restful)”. Men and women not accustomed to writing or reflection are keeping journals, “dialoguing with symptoms”, with me today and on their own at home. They are discovering in the words, images and drawings that emerge from the wisdom of their unconscious mind that they need to slow down, spend more time with their children, or deal more honestly with”orgeuil”, the pride that distances them from others . Migraines have disappeared and fears dissipated, the promise of mind-body medicine fulfilled in their remarkable experimentalism and commitment to practice.
The anniversary has however awakened old fears and symptoms that had abated, sometimes in every member of their households. We hear about children shaken by nightmares of earthquakes that do not end, about headaches erupting once again, and family members who have gone to the countryside and refuse to return to Port-au-Prince till after the day of the anniversary.
At the end of our time together we sit silently for a few minutes, morning and afternoon, remembering losses, allowing tears to wet our cheeks and spot our clothes. And then we hear about the help that these men and women are already offering others — in hospitals, schools, churches and tent camps. We make plans for how we will work together with Haitian people everywhere, and the ways we will continue to share ourselves and what we are learning.
Posted in Global Trauma Relief, Haiti by Dr. James S. Gordon
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January 19, 2011
Sometimes, on this first anniversary of the earthquake, it feels like very large, steady hands are needed to pull together the two sides of the gaping wound that is Haiti, hands that Michelangelo might fashion for this purpose.
I find myself looking around as we circulate through tent camps with little food and water, no health care or education or employment for the tens of thousands of people I see, for the hundreds of thousands who still live like this all across the region. “How can this be?” I shout – but only inside my head – how can we, Americans, the world community, all of us, let this continue? Our hearts were touched a year ago. Politicians said the right things, famous people answered phones on television and lent their shine to the pleas for help. Billions of dollars were pledged. Where are they? Why is there scant organization, no plan, so little mercy and fellow feeling?
It worries me, as much for ourselves–the privileged, literate, and apparently protected– as for those who live exposed to heat and rain and hurt.
In one of our workshops on January 11, 2011, the day before the anniversary, two men – a priest who tends a devastated parish and an accountant who has left his paying job to bring whatever order he can to two tent camps– share their drawings. (Read more about CMBM’s drawing exercise in this earlier Haiti entry.)
The accountant, a large serious man, sees himself planted in the midst of a quilted crop of families, cooking fires and plastic sheeting; the priest’s drawing of his slim black-clad figure is bright with God’s light refracted through a mirror framed in rainbow colors. The drawings of their “biggest problems” are, with no other guidance, no consultation, virtually identical. One side of the pages shows effort – to salvage and succor, hands reaching out, shovels in the earth – and a row of disconnected figures: “the ones who could help but don’t” “the rich and powerful who do not care.” They are barely sketched, drained of color. On the other side of the page, the people in the camps are suffering, but they do have bodies and expressions.
We need to offer them help, ourselves, in order to be human; and we need this at least as much as they need our help. That is the key to a happier future anniversary.
Posted in Global Trauma Relief, Haiti by Dr. James S. Gordon
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January 12, 2011
On the anniversary of their earthquake, Haitian men, women, and children are more likely to tremble anew with fear and contend with reawakened physical, emotional and behavioral symptoms. Chronic headaches and stomachaches that had subsided over months are now returning with renewed force in those living in their own homes as well as in the more than a million demoralized tent dwellers. Sleep, increasingly restless, is more often riven with nightmares of family members buried in the rubble. Children whose beds were dry are once again wetting them. The free-floating anger that had ebbed in many is rising, increasingly visible in family quarrels, child abuse, and street conflicts.
These phenomena, occurring at the same time as the original trauma, a year later (or indeed 5 or 10 years later) are called “anniversary reactions”. They were observed by Freud in 1895 and have been the subject of case reports ever since.
Sometimes a quite conscious understanding and anticipatory dread of the anniversary appear to set the stage: Winston Churchill dying at the same age, and on the exact same day as his father; Elvis Presley, who had announced that “my life is ended,” after his mother died at 42 in August 1958, himself dying early in August 1977, also at 42.
Often, however, the person suffering the anniversary reaction seems to be unaware of the connection. There is ample documentation of people who are surprised to learn that their unexpected anxiety attacks, nightmares, blood clotting disorders, chest pain, or heart attacks have occurred a day or two before the date a family member had died.
Some investigators have hypothesized that ”incomplete mourning” makes one more vulnerable to anniversary reactions, but it’s hard to say, especially in a situation of catastrophic loss and ongoing horrific hardship, like Haiti’s, what ‘complete mourning’ might be. Others see the reactions primarily as conditioned responses triggered by preparation for a memorial, for example, or an awareness of the coming of the season of loss, producing a variety of psychophysiological reactions.
Whatever the mechanisms, it is clear that these anniversary reactions take place on a population wide as well as an individual level. Many New Yorkers report a growing apprehension on clear days in early September that precede each 9/11, and since Hurricane Katrina, New Orleanians’ level of distress increases precipitously each August . Scientific observations confirm these reports. A study of Gulf War veterans published in the American Journal of Psychiatry in 1999 revealed a significant increase in symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder (agitation, reliving of the traumatic experience, emotional withdrawal) in the same month that the original trauma occurred. And a 2007 study in Stress and Health, showed that a gradual decline in physical and psychological symptomatology in the months after a flood in Thailand, was followed by a marked increase in symptoms as the one-year anniversary drew near.
It is certainly possible to mitigate these anniversary reactions and indeed transform them into opportunities for mastery. The commemorative services that religious and civic groups, and governments organize often combine mourning with a shared experience of gratitude for what survivors do have. The work The Center for Mind-Body Medicine is doing in Haiti and elsewhere unites this approach to practical instruction in self-care techniques like deep breathing; self-expression in words, drawings and movement; and small group support.
Still, the usefulness of commemorations and therapeutic instruction depends in part on the circumstances in which people find themselves. In Thailand, those who were still living in tents had the most severe anniversary reactions. I have observed that it is far easier for children going to rebuilt schools in postwar, independent Kosovo to move through reawakened pain than for those in Gaza, who continue to attend overcrowded, still damaged schools in a besieged and isolated territory.
Today on Haiti’s earthquake anniversary the situation is far more desperate and discouraging for many than it was in the first months after the earthquake. Some are of course putting their lives back together – kids going to school, adults back at work, many selflessly teaching and helping others. Well over 1 million, however, are still living in tent encampments and the conditions are, if anything, less supportive than they were six or 10 months ago. Supplies of food and water are less reliable; robbery and rape seem to be more frequent. The government is in disarray and is, after the recent postelection rioting, fearful rather than welcoming of public gatherings like the helpful and cathartic day of mourning it organized on February 12, 2010.
After the earthquake, there was an enormous, spontaneous outpouring of goodwill toward Haiti, particularly from the United States – and commitments of funds to match. Since then, the Haitian government and local and international nongovernmental organizations have done much good work, but it has often been poorly coordinated by a still devastated bureaucracy;, and only a small portion of committed funds have actually arrived.
The Anniversary brings up memories of the extraordinary pain that the entire Haitian population has suffered, that old symptoms of demoralization and despair as well as renewing emotional and physical distress. We are working, along with the Ministry of Health, Partners in Health, and other organizations to address these symptoms and mobilize the Haitian people’s resiliency and hope. Our efforts, however, depend significantly on whether the international donors and the American people will fulfill the commitment to rebuild we made a year ago –a commitment that can help transform this anniversary crisis into an opportunity for the Haitian people to recover their wholeness and celebrate their surviving community.
Posted in Global Trauma Relief, Haiti by Dr. James S. Gordon
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Welcome--I hope you enjoy these stories of healing through mind-body medicine from our programs around the world. 
