For You Mental Health Champions

“Main & 25th,” painting of Vancouver’s Homeless, and Heidi’s New Project, “Know My Name,” to Help Them.

This is my painting, “Main & 25th,” which is my former home where I abided for a spell, not un-recently.

I know the persons in this painting, and  painted them with acrylic and pastel on a linen cloth with tenderness and care.  I spent days and nights with these folks, and know a bit about their troubles, frustrations, senses of humor, their loves,  their aspirations and private griefs.

This is the homeless row of downtown Vancouver, Washington, around the corner of Main Street and 25th Avenue.  Most ironically, this is where sits the lusciously designed and expensively constructed Vancouver Housing Authority building.

Most of the time, in my experience living on this street, the VHA building is unfrequented by the homeless who live there.  Much of the building’s space seemed underutilized to me while I was homeless, and came in to use their restroom and printer. It was also curious to me during this time, that although from various news sources that huge sums of monies had been granted to VHA and Council for The Homeless, For transitional housing, I never saw it going to that, could not figure out where that money was going, and absolutely not one of the persons who work for these and other homeless organizations and city-county government, would not respond to my requests to see the accounting of those funds.

My name is Heidi Hansen, and I was one of these invisible persons, part of the collective Throwaway population of Vancouver’s unresolved homeless culture.

Homeless culture is a sad fact of life, many Vancouver residents and politicians say over and over and over but from what I have seen on the ground, the voters, and  persons of credibility and power fail to implement solutions that actually make it different.

In family systems — found in counseling psychology as well as on a macro-level in sociology — when a pervasive and unwanted problem exists in a group and is a continual source of source of problem-solving dialogue and vague attempts at solutions, which fail,  we must face ourselves honestly and ask the question “Is this problem actually undesirable?  Do Vancouver people really want the homelessness problem to be fixed? Is there secondary gain for keeping the homeless right where they are?  Is there some scapegoat value that our society does not really want to give up?  And what might that be?””

Shocking words eh?  Outlandish and nervy question?

But it must be answered.

Sometimes groups act in ways to preserve their “problem child”  — their scapegoats — because of an overall and pervasive, unspoken commitment to their base need for the function of that problem staying right where it is.

That’s what I want Vancouver to think about when they look at “Main & 25th.” That is why I am proposing “Know My Name,” — a viable solution to getting more homefullness outcomes, more sustained and maintained homefullness culture, and a visible transformation for individuals from living out homeless culture to transforming themselves in homefull culture.

Homelessness strips away a person’s identity, and then, a person’s self-esteem.  Both are required for a person to survive, thrive, remain stable and become fruitful in their lives.

This blog post was featured as an article in the Camas – Washougal area newspaper, “River Talk Weekly.”

“Know My Name” is a project I propose that recruits a volunteer force of homefull persons who have become sustainable in homefullness culture, and are stable and confident enough to be a mentor,  a sponsor, for an up-and-comer homefull person.

A homefullness sponsor does not do social work or donate money or housing itself.

A homefullness sponsor will go through a training with me, (I’ll be the leader and organizer here) and be matched with a sponsee who is willing and determined to not relapse once housing has been achieved.

A homefull sponsee and their sponsor will set out an attainable goal plan to get strong in their identity in their new homefullness culture and get strong in their areas where relapse back into homelessness is a risk or vulnerability.

In other words, a sponsor shows the sponsee the ropes of homefullness culture, walks beside them to guide and support them in building their own new personal identity and by so doing, prevents relapse into homelessness — and instead, finds a meaningful and valued niche, homefull relationships and groups, and becomes useful in homeful culture.

This operates on the premise that we become more like the people we hang out with.  If we want certain successful traits and habits, we will get them by spending more time around people who have achieved those success habits and traits

I am inviting interested persons to email me and sign – up to be sponsors, and then I will set up some Zoom meeting trainings to review the expectations, skills, and nuts and bolts of goal setting and communication.

Each week a sponsee will communicate with me to stay on track, while they stay in weekly communication with their sponsee, sharing their experience, strength and hope, motivating and encouraging and celebrating those goals, reinforcing their new positive relationships and activities,  and be there for their sponsee when homefullness stress and discouragement hits.

Remember, this is not social work and not monetary.  It’s humanity at its own best reservoir for solving a very human set of problems.

Then, I will look for sponsees who want to participate in this project, and match them up with a suitable sponser.

I am asking you, reader, and asking those in social services to help spread the word on this project, and send referrals my way so I can start to organize matches.

This is brand new for me, and brand new for sponsors and sponsees, so this is the time to float your ideas and suggestions and be a part of the building up of this project, if you desire.

I do believe that homelessness relapse can be prevented, and that newly homefull persons can contribute so solidly to their new culture — once they know what that is after living in a marginalized culture — and that this “Know My Name” project can be a viable, life-affirming action with observable, measureable series of viable results.

Interested in helping out?

Please email me at dog.hotel.hansen@gmail.com, or call me at 360-835-8591, room 111 in Washougal to discuss your thoughts, questions and suggestions.

Thank you for your interest and your help.

You can get to know me better by exploring my websites at:

http://www.theartistschronicles.wordpress.com

http://www.thetraumaproject.health.blog

http://www.thementalhealthdetective.wordpress.com

http://www.doghotelbooks.wordpress.com

http://www.themuseacademy.wordpress.com

http://www.nativicabook.wordpress.com

Thanks, and take great care of yourself — you are definitely a great person, and I love it that you read this!

Heidi Hansen

The Trauma of The Vacuus

Do you have, or have had, a Vacuus in your life?

Are you a Vacuus in someone else’s life?

As most of my readers know, I am writing and publishing a tell-all trauma book about my own personal story living in a family filled to the brim with sex abuse, emotional and physical abuse, crimes, sex and drug addiction, deceit, exploitation, and manipulative games that destroyed my bond with my son.

If what happened to me as a child was happening now, several family members and siblings, some of whom are high profile public figures, would be in jail.

In my childhood era, my family got away with keeping the secrets and living in duplicity. One world, sordid, dirty, twisted, sociopathic. These same persons also created a simultaneous world for people outside the family to see — solid mormons, close-knit, service oriented, caring and compassionate, prominent politicians, big-name business owners, published and famous artists and writers — while actively participating in the abuses, and making decisions that kept my sex abuse experiences a secret that led to severe post traumatic stress and clinical depression in childhood on into adulthood.

My new book will feature the sly, hidden destructive dynamics of my siblings Leif Hansen of Leif’s Auto Collision Centers in Portland, Oregon, Diana Hansen-Young of Hawaii State Legislature and painter-writer fame, Melanie Silvester, professional genealogist in the Mormon church, evangelist for the Mormons, and others.

How these individuals became Vacuus is unknown to me, as they are all about 14 years older than me, but I will be speaking directly to the choices they made that knowingly allowed sex abuse to run rampant in my young life, and the sadistic manipulations they used to cover it up, and assist in helping my ex-husband, Aaron Stewart Heusser, to get away with domestic violence in the marriage, and extend his domestic violence into child custody and get away with turning our son against me with dark lies about me that has caused my son not to want to talk to me or see me in nine years. He is 22 now.

The Vacuus.

Vacuus is a term I have given the vile, viscous villains in an imaginative tale I wrote called “The Muse Academy.” (www.themuseacademy.wordpress.com).

But Vacuus are not entirely fictional, in fact, they exist and thrive in hiding in plain sight in realtionships, settings, tasks and contexts of all variety.

Vacuus are persons who steal your narrative, or manipulate it to suit their own sadistic needs, the lust for drama gossip, the pornography of fabricating crisis, conflict and chaos, the evil of splitting close bonds apart, splitting people apart and sowing contention just for the sport of getting a drama fix — that would be sibling Melanie Silvester and Diana Hansen-Young.

Hard to believe, given Melanie’s presentation of the supra-righteous poster woman for the Mormon church and its holy values, that she would destructively align herself with my ex-husband, Aaron Stewart Heusser to fabricate high drama and crisis for her own drama fix, while partnering with him in such a way that he could lie in court testimony to underhandedly and illegally seize custody of our son.

Hard to wrap my head around, how Leif Hansen and Diana Hansen-Young can deceive the public, their voters and constituents and customers and advertisers and vendors — with such sly duplicity, and keep all their dark, twisted behaviors a secret from all of them.

This is the passive-aggressive, sneaky, depceptive and duplicitous way in which the Vacuus work their wiles.

You wake up one morning and your life is turned upside down and you don’t know how that happened, but then you spot the stink of Vacuus footprints all over the home and you know, Melanie and Aaron and Lei and Diana have been at it again.

For what purpose? So Melanie could get her drama high, and Aaron could control her to the point of making her lie to the judge because he didn’t want to share our son, he wanted to own our son. Our son was a possession for Aaron, and a game pawn for Melanie.

Like any addict, the drama fix, the gossip fix, the crisis fix, the power fix, the control fix, the ownership fix, must get bigger each time to get the same addicted satisfaction.

Its how Vacuus get their jollies.

I cannot get back what was lost, and likely to remain lost, with my son from the sociopathic duo of Melanie and Aaron, but there is a legal option for me to sue them both for child estrangement. I am actively researching that as a point of my recovery from their trauma, which is restorative justice.

So, there is The Dramatist Vacuus, the Gossip, the Empty, the Void, the Sadist, the Destroyer, the Stomper, the Bully, the Thief.

The Bully and Stomper would be Leif Hansen.

You’ll have to buy the book to find out how.

Do you have any of these Vacuus in your life? Are you secretly hiding and denying the fact that you might be one of these to other people?

Ammends must be made, accountability taken, consequences allowed to take their natural course and the burdens and pain put back on the shoulders of the perpetrators, not any longer on their victim’s backs.

Persons of trauma learn to suspend their judgement, to mistrust or second-guess their inner voice, their gut instincts, so they tend to go along with the Vacuus instead of claiming and displaying their own truths, the facts that Vacuus want to deny.

My encouragement is to trust your Self, your perceptions, your initial judgement-calls, so the Vacuus don’t have a void to fill. You’ve claimed your space and are outwardly making it known that the Vacuus no longer have a seat at your table.

Know that speaking your truths, or simply acting with choices based on your truths, will bring some blow-back. The Vacuus do not like paradigm shifts. Not only do they not want to give up their power and control, they are deathly afraid of being exposed. Shining a flashlight under the bed poofs away the boogey-man. Shining light on dark secrets will bring you peace, ultimately, because you are no longer allowing Vacuus to rent rooms in your head and heart and soul without paying rent while destroying your property.

Self-care is a necessity, not a luxury. Self-care includes setting boundaries, maintaining your privacy, disengaging from persons who do not respect these. Distancing your Self from destructive person’s manipulations, stop being the focus of their possessiveness, get out from under their ownership, dodge their compulsions to write your narrative for you.

Build yourself a place of peace in your home, and inside your Self that you can carry with you everywhere you go, and quietly dwell in there, and communicate with others from that space, everywhere and anywhere.

This place of peace is still, it is reasonable and from that posture life becomes reasonable.

It is both a refuge and a shield from Vacuus storms.

Your mind, you heart and personality are yours and only yours. You are a child of creation, creativity is innate within you — so go on and create your Self the way you want that artwork to be.

Thanks for reading,

Heidi D. Hansen, M.A.

email: dog.hotel.hansen@gmail.com

“…Because Life Is Beautiful, and We Must Celebrate It Everyday.” –from The Countessa, of Dog Hotel Fame.

Puppies?? Puppies at Dog Hotel? A new Dog Hotel Courtesy Taxi roaming around town doing courtesies for homeless persons? What ‘s this that the Countessa said?

Yes.

It’s all here with an unexpected outcome in the new animated song -story Dog Hotel short story.

It’s the only holiday movie you’ll need this year. It will pull your heart up and off the couch and get you up celebrating life, because, as the Countessa said, “…Life is beautiful, and we must celebrate it every day.”

Coming soon to this and the official Dog Hotel website by Heidi Hansen at http://www.doghotelbooks.wordpress.com.

oh — and what is Dog Hotel doing on a trauma recovery website?

Because practicing joy, practicing comfort, is necessary, not a luxury. These are vital to good mental health. Life-affirming activity with high engagement is central to trauma recovery.

See you soon at Dog Hotel — take care, — and carpe woofum!

Heidi

cash.app/$doghotel2018 is the link to make a very much appreciated cash donation to The Trauma Project, and this Dog Hotel art/video/music/story series. Donations of printers, good print and photo print paper, ink cartridges, stamps and mailing envelopes, phone minutes cards, etc., are also much appreciated and needed. I will write you a personalized detailed receipt for any type of donation to these two projects, which are free and of goodwill to everyone, to use for your records and tax purposes. Email me at dog.hotel.hansen@gmail.com, or call me at 360-635-3373. Thank you! Carpe woofum!

“Pup, it’s Time To Come On Home” — a very special video about Maile Lei, Heidi’s service dog illegally adopted out by the humane society — can you help get her home to Heidi?

Last week my hemotology – oncology doctor heard my pain over this, and my fears for her not knowing where I was or why I wasn’t coming to get her, or if she was in harm’s way. doctor said, ”put your dog in a prayer field in your mind and heart.” Doctor talked a bit about his love for Hawaii, which is my homeland, and we came up together that the prayer field would be my child hood beach, and there would be a Hawaiian tutu, a grandmother to all, a healer of Hawaiian islands, on that beach watching over my dog, Maile Lei. this video and song was prompted by that meditation of her on the prayer beach with tutu. sorry about my singing on the video, I just just couldn’t do it without my voice catching and cracking. — heidi