Treating Trauma with Somatic Equine Therapy

By: Judith Freilich, MD Recently, I had an opportunity to attend a Spirit Workshop at The Meadows. It was wonderful, and I want to tell you about it. As a 74-year-old woman physician and psychiatrist, I probably am not the workshop’s typical attendee. My lack of experience with horses… Read More

The Trauma Timeline: A Journaling Exercise for Understanding the Impact of Relational Trauma

“The essence of psychological trauma is the loss of faith that there is order and continuity in life. Trauma occurs when one loses the sense of having a safe place to retreat within or outside of oneself to deal with frightening emotions or experiences.”… Read More

From Learned Helplessness to Learned Optimism

Tian Dayton, Ph.D., TEPTrauma can leave us feeling helpless in the face of our own lives, our own days, our own relationships. “Learned helplessness,” a term coined by psychologist Martin E.P. Seligman, describes an aspect of trauma akin to giving up. We learn the negative lesson that no matter what we do, we cannot seem to make a difference in the lives of those we love and we can generalize that feeling to other areas of our lives as well. But Seligman who studied this phenomenon began to ask the question, ‘if we can learn how to be helpless then why can’t we also learn how to be optimistic?’ Read More

The Cycle of Trauma and Addiction

By: Claudia Black, Ph. D. Clinical Architect of the Claudia Black Young Adult Center at The Meadows Addiction encourages trauma and trauma can encourage addiction. This process becomes a vicious circle or negative feedback loop, with trauma contributing to addiction, which in turn fuels more trauma, which encourages still more addiction, and so on and so on. The Claudia Black Young Adult Center treats substance and process addictions, recognizing them to be primary disorders that reinforce each other and are often fueled by traumatic experiences. Here are some examples of how this process plays out: Read More

How We Shortchange Men in Trauma and Addiction

By: Dan Griffin, MA When I went to school to learn how to work with people with addictive disorders, I got a lot of great guidance: Brain science. Internal family systems. Motivational Interviewing. Models of change. Working with the criminal justice population. Working with women. Cultural influences on addiction and recovery. Read More

Codependency: What’s It All About?

By Tian Dayton, Ph.D. The word codependency touched a nerve when it first plowed its way into our everyday vernacular. Initially, it grew out of the twelve-step term co-addict, which was a way of describing the spouse of the addict; however, as it didn’t tell the right story, it… Read More

Somatic Experiencing: Resilience, Regulation, and Self

Note: This article was originally published in the Summer 2005 edition of Cutting Edge, the online newsletter of The Meadows. Somatic Experiencing: Resilience, Regulation, and SelfBy Peter A. Levine, Ph.D., Clinical Consultant for The Meadows and Mellody House My life’s work, encompassing nearly four decades, as a stress researcher and… Read More

A Meditation on Grief

A Reluctant Healing

By: Diane Detwiler-Zapp, MA, LPC Spirit: A Somatic Equine Experience is the one that always called to me when I would read through the list of excellent workshops offered by The Meadows. So when, at the last minute, the chance to attend this workshop came about, one would think I… Read More

Grief Is A Fact of Life

Grief is a fact of life. As much as we hate it, fight it, or hide from it, it still lurks in the background. Allowing time and space for grief is not something I have always done. I would have preferred to detach myself from emotions, put on my armor,… Read More