In Transition

Behind Closed Doors - service faced with closure

Behind Closed Doors provide an outreach support service to women in the West and North West Leeds, whose lives have been affected by domestic abuse. They are currently under threat of closure due to lack of funding.  The closure of this service will leave a lot of women without access to much-needed support.  The work that the BCD team do is brilliant and makes a real difference to the lives of so many women and their children.  They deserve to be funded.

Please sign this online petition and also forward it to your friends too.  

The online petition is at http://www.PetitionOnline.com/BCD275/petition.html

You can find out about the work that Behind Closed Doors do by looking at their website - http://www.behind-closed-doors.org.uk

Happiness, depression and control

This evening someone at a networking event said she had recently been doing a lot of reading about happiness.  Research indicates - she said - that how happy a person feels is directly related to how much control they have over their lives and the circumstances of their lives.  I'm not sure about this, because I do believe that people who have very little in the way of material things can be, and are, happy.  Yet, these are people who have very little control over their lives, because they do not have the material advantages that give us choice.

I would agree, on the other hand, that lack of control in life may make a person more vulnerable to depression.  Or perhaps that is only the case if control is important to that person.  I seem to recall that Dorothy Rowe's 'laddering' exercise divides people into two types: those for whom the most fearful state was one of being alone; and those for whom the most fearful state was one of not having control.

Beyond Closed Doors

One of the things I do is to run a 'recovery group' for women who have been in abusive relationships.  The programme was commissioned by Behind Closed Doors and we ran the first group as a pilot between January and May 2007. We call the programme 'Beyond Closed Doors'. We are now running two group programmes a year, each lasting between 12 and 15 weeks.  The fifth group begins later this month.

This work is linked into the theme of transition as these women are making massive changes in their lives, moving out of their comfort zones and dealing with all of the fear that such change creates. 

The chart below plots the information taken from the pre-group and post-group evaluation forms completed by the women who attended the most recent recovery group.  The blue line shows on average, where women were before the start of the group and the pink line shows where they were at the end of the group. It's a great pictorial representation of how the women have moved on.

What is it about transitions anyway?

This theme of 'transitions' is one that I have kept on coming back to.  It's a theme that interests me and one that seems to be a common factor in different areas of my life and work.  It's a theme that I wish to follow, to explore.

Definition

Transition may be seen as the psychological aspect or face of change.  If change is an external manifestation of shifting events, situations and circumstances, then transition is the internal, psychological re-orientation that people go through as they come to terms with change.  Transition is an inner experience or process and is often outwardly manifested as resistance to a shift in the individual's external situation; it is often the transition, rather than the change itself, which is being resisted.

Transitions are uncomfortable, being often associated with a feeling of loss of identity.  The ground is no longer firm beneath our feet; we feel as though we are in limbo, in a state of suspended animation; we seem to have temporarily lost our grasp on reality - or at least on reality as we have known it to be.