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.
“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
A lot of people think that it is the physical and emotional abuse acts that define the trauma experienced by domestic violence. Remember, from my previous posts, that trauma comes with subtle, even invisible, undertows that are perhaps the most damaging and destructive over the long-term.
One of those undertows comes from how the people around the victim react and respond to the abuse, and how the perpetrator responds nd reacts to his violence.
There is such a thing as “normal.” A big player in a person’s mental health is the personality cog – wheel of empathy, ability to be authentically remorseful for causing pain and destruction, the depth and spontaneous degree to which the perpetrator experiences the pain of his victim, and being genuinely motivated by that pain to make amends, go through a deep and insightful reflection that leads to personality change such that he does not commit violent acts again.
But the undertows get in the way of all that.
Violent and sociopathic people do not have those capacities. Where we would expect to see that remorse and accountability process, instead, when we look closely, we see self-pity. We see how the perpetrator quickly and powerfully turns himself into the victim, needing justice for himself, requiring comfort and care and tending and succor to raise his self-esteem and make him feel valid, loved, even appreciated and respected.
Because these blog posts are chapters of the book I am writing on trauma, I draw from not only my clinical acumen and professional experience and observations and training, but from my personal perspective and experience as a victim.
When my son’s father, Aaron Stewart Heusser physically assaulted me at a mother’s day brunch at Cannon Beach, Oregon, I found him naked and curled up in a fetal position in the bathtub, trying to cry but without tears. He moaned and whined about being unworthy of love.
And, despite my years of training as a trauma psychotherapist, I found myself kneeling over him in the tub, patting his back, rubbing his shoulders with an outpouring of tender loving care, using a soothing, comforting tone as I reassured him and buoyed up his self-esteem, trying to heal his wounds.
Then I caught myself. The undertow was sweeping me out to sea and I knew better and was allowing it. I was comforting the offender. Wait.. Isn’t the offender supposed to be comforting me? Healing me? SAying he is sorry?
So I got up, changed my posture and told him I was insisting he go to a therapist first thing in the morning.
That psychologist diagnosed him with Anti-Sical Personality Disorder, Major Depression, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder.
The first thing Aaron Stewart Heusser did was call his mother. After that, he was enraged as was she, that someone had the gall, the audacity to say that her “golden boy” had a flaw.
Then Aaron Stewart Heusser’s violence and other forms of abuses towards me really took off, and no, there was no more therapy for him. I was stuck in the undertow, vulnerable and frightened, being pregnant with our son.
The undertow of perpetrator manipulating the victim into providing him succor and self-esteem boosters continued ad nauseum.
Later in the process of child custody mediation, the mediator asked Aaron Stewart Heusser what he felt was the main problem in our marriage, and Aaron Stweart Heusser replied, “she doesn’t respect me.”
The mediator told me it was a lost cause, Aaron Stwart Heusser’s anti-social personality was not capable of insight or remorse or change.
During our divorce, I represented myself, Pro se. I subpeoned and deposed Aaron Stweart Heusser’s supervisors nd adminsitrators and financial officers of Timberline Software of Beaverton, Oregon, where Aaron Stewart Heusser worked.
I was aware there was a financial undertow occurring, but needed to provide hard evidence to the judge. And Timblerline would not comit perjury, and so revealed to me that Aaron Stwart Heusser had indeed solicited administrative decisions to hide his salary increases, bonuses, stock options, other forensic accounting matters revealing other hiding of assets from his son, by financially abusing me in the divorce.
When I revealed this in Multnomah County Court, and Timberline administration testified to all that, the Judge threw is pen down and struck his fist three times on his desk, yelling to Aaron on the witness stand, Do you know what a lousy thing that is to do to your wife?” Over and over, 3 times.
Aaron Steweart Huesser began to cry in the witness chair. The judge rolled his eyes, stared at Aaron and yelled, “those are crocodile tears. You are not sorry for what you have done to your wife, you are sorry you got caught. Do you need to take a moment to cry for yourself outside?”
Right there, the Judge stopped the undertow with a strong whiff of reality and sane perspective.
The Judge called out what normal should look like, and called out Aaron Stwart Heusser using the oldest trick in the book for domestic violence perpetrators, which is to make himself the poor pitiful victim who needs other’s pity and cossiting, manipulating his victim to buoy him up and ignore the bruises, broken parts, and carry the burden of the consequences of his actions that truly do belong to him.
Just like with my older brother Leif Hansen of Leif’s Auto Collision Centers, Portland, Oregon. On more than one occasion, Some friend of Leif’s would call our father to come immediately because Leif was actively suicidal, had a gun and a knife laid out and was going to comit suicide.
Being the designated caregiver in our family, I was dragged along and told to talk Leif down from suicide. I was in late elementary school-middle school at the time.
I found Leif Hansen in these times in a drunken state, with visible lines of cocaine on the dresser or bedside table, half dressed and filthy, reeking of booze in visible clouds of pot smoke, with weapons out beside him for suicide.
I did what I was told, used my innate counseling skills and talked Leif down. I was patted on the head by my father and mother and older sister Diana Hansen-Young for being such a good counselor and such a good girl.
But I had this nagging undertow making me seasick inside… I knew why Leif Hansen was suicidal — He had participated and supported the sex abuse his BFF committed against me in The marriage bed.” And Leif kept it all silent.
And I was comforting him, making him feel safe, loved, appreciated, valued.
There’s the real trauma for persons of domestic violence and child abuse — how victims are manipulated to caretaking and protecting their perpetrators.
See, if the statute of limitations was still in place right now, Leif Hansen of Leif’s Auto Collision Centers would be on the state Sex Offenders Registry.
There will never be true justice for many many victims of domestic violence.. there really cannot be true justice, even if the legal and our family systems supported the notion that it is the offenders who carry the consewuneces, not their victims.
But calling out these patterns to offer experience, hope and strength — and validity and setting the healthy and sane perspective straight, is well within our power.
Don’t swim in the undertow, post a sign to keep others out of the water.
————————-By Heidi D. Hansen, M.A. copyright2020, reproduction prohibited
. Contact Heidi: dog.hotel.hansen@gmail.com.
There are five masteries — high life-affirming skills — to learn in our recovery and resiliency of traumatic experience:
I am hosting another Trauma Project workshop to provide safe, private and renewing education on these 5 acumens — and I really hope you’ll join us for this. It’s on Saturday, September 28, 2019, at 9 a.m. in Vancouver, Washington.
It’s free, and I’m bringing the coffee — the good kind!
Journals and sketchbooks will be provided at no charge, and good pens.
Email me at dog.hotel.hansen@gmail.com to RSVP and confirm location details.
Remember, trauma changes us, but we get to say how.
So until then, rest, restore, and renew.
— Heidi D. Hansen, M.A.
cash.app/$doghotel2018 is the link to donate a tad of cash to help fund The Trauma Project. Heidi is an experienced clinician and understands the necessity of providing truly excellent mental health care to those who can least afford it, and everything about the Trauma Project is free to all. So, donations here at this link go directly and exclusively to fund the overhead and upkeep of The Trauma Project, and I will write and sign a receipt for your tax purposes and also express exactly where your donation went — was it printing costs, or stamps for mail-outs, was it to pay for the meeting space, the sketchbooks/journals we use in our workshops, was it for refreshment in the workshops — I’ll let you know. That’s Heidi’s promise, your money goes exactly where I say it goes. Thank You!
I made this dog-story art-song video to represent that living creatures, including people, can only thrive when they have environments to live in that are permanent, safe, secure, predictable and nourishing as well as in their control. This is also a segway to a mural I am starting that represents some insights around the experience of homelessness that the typical stereotypes don’t capture. I’ll be posting the progress of that mural, with photos, and there will be a charitable auction for ownership of it when it is completed. Thank you for your time, your energy, and motivation to upgrade our city neighbors who do not have secure, safe, predictable homes in which to grow and thrive as persons. And their dogs.
‘the dandelions bloom at midnight’
this was the secret password my son and i used when he was young, used in cases when we were not able to communicate directly but a change of plans needed to be made, for example, if someone else was to pick him up after school at the last minute. the password was used to let him know the situation had my permisssion, my knowledge, and was safe.
but the phrase is more than a secret code — it is true that some flowers and plants bloom in the night hours.
this is also a metapor, that some persons bloom in adversity. in times of our greatest despair, we can choose to act out our troubles, or do something extraordinary with them.
we are all children of creation – creativity is innate within ourselves. we are capable of innovating solutions, finding new ways, summoning up coping skills we have not thought of before.
trauma changes us, but we get to say how.
if you find yourself in a spot in life when everything has crashed around you, the things you normally hang onto for sanity have abandoned you, you feel frightened and alone and shaking in your boots — but yet you are still standing — shout out loud in celebration, ‘i’m still standing.’
the one hidden blesing of trauma is that it clears the decks. when everything is lost or damaged, everything becomes a new blank canvas upon which to paint something new and different — perhaps this is the opportunity for you to become a version 2.0 of yourself — a self you always imagined you might want to become someday – and since all is lost and theree’s nothing left to do but re-create yourself, perhaps you can strategically create that self you had previously only imagined, but now you can make it real.
trauma is mesy, it is unpredictable, it will sneak up and bite you from behind when you least expect it. but truma is not an illness. it’s an event that has caused great pain and fear. the side order that comes in tow with that is shame, guilt, rage — even though you have nothing to feel shame or guilt about, we do anyway.
that’s where restorative justice comes in. ‘putting the monkey back on the back of to whom it belongs.’ within lawful limits, a person must make some justice happen in order to be whole again.
trauma can make us feel as though we’ve gone dead inside. that is why it is so important to fill up our lives with life-affirming actions. things that are creative — you are a child of creation, remember — so fill your days with creative things — anything of your choosing, it does not mean artsy or crafty things although those are great too – it can be anything — making up a new song or joke, walking through the library and picking books at random off shelves you haven’t been to before, and reading one paragraph out of the page the book opens to. it can be creating your own coffee specialty item at your local coffee shop — you might want to tip them for this. making a friend froma different culture and listeinging to their family stories. throw yourself into anything and everything that is life-affirming and validates your sense of self, safety, and sanity.
the self, our personality — is a trememdous gift. trauma will try to rob you of that. but remember there is only one person who owns your self, only one person who can make the decisisons for the development and healing and thriving of that self — you.
you’ll need someone to talk to about the pain, the awfulness, the horrors, the ‘world has caved in on me’ experience. one who can use life-affirming strategies to help you re-connect with your sense of self and esteem in a manner of your own choosing, finding a center of joy that you can trust.
find a trauma-skilled therapist. not everyone has the training and expertise to this field. i happen to be a therapist who is, and my trauma project workshops will provide you with a knowlege structure around three types of trauma — the trauma of abuse and violence, the trauma of abandonment and neglect, and the trauma of dehumanization. i’ll also teach you five specific masteries that will help you grow through and even thrive after trauma and throughout your life development.
so call or email me and let’s talk and set up a trauma workshop for you, or individual therapy sessions to addres more personal needs. i want you to be well, mentally and physically, and i’m here to help you do that. thanks for listenting, and let’s talk soon — bye for now..
Are you a health care professional? Work in social or human services? Legal services or law enforcement? Sales? Are you in a management or executive position where you train, supervise, organize and motivate employees or departments of the business? Teacher or educator or in childcare? Do you work in non-profit or philanthropic organizations including churches or are you thinking of starting one?
everybody has a story. there are many types of traumas, and they show in up in the workplace, classroom, sales calls, and in patient/client/congregational care. the more you understand how trauma affects a person’s way of relating to their environment, the people and stressors around their environment, the more effective you will be in helping them, and your organization, achieve their goals..
let’s start with the basics. empathy and perspective.
sense of security, personality structure, and esteem are damaged by trauma in invisible ways.
except they are not invisible to the person of trauma. a person of trauma goes to great lengths to hide their dysfunctions so as to appear as normal as can be, because for all intents and purposes, they are normal. they want to work, play and love just as much as everybody else and most persons of trauma are just regular, average people who are skilled, educated/trained, available for relationships and hobbies and life adventures. normal.
except that we know now that the more trauma children and adolescents are exposed to, the more problems they will have in later life with rocky relationships, trouble with the law, with homelessness, domestic violence, unemployment, substance abuse, and mental illness.
we now know that in adulthood as well as childhood, trauma alters the structure of nuerons in the brain that are not reversable. these nuerons are responsible for the chemicals that produce anxiety, depression, impulsivity, low frustration tolerance, poor decision-making.
as a professional, you may have more contact with these individuals struggling with these risk factors than what you see on the outside.
trauma survivors live in a world invisible to most. it is a lonely, isolated world of fears and needs and a sense of being so very different from everyone else sometimes that alone-ness itself is a barrier.
the cure is to be able to connect deeply in life – affirming ways with other people, meaningful work, making the world better for others, but the symptoms of traumatic stress handicap people right at that point — it can be a sensation of living in a tupperware box, almost able to reach out and touch what they see others doing – not being afraid, not over-reacting, not withdrawing or being aggressively controlling but able to really honestly enjoy being with each other, engaged in the moment and find find joy in the day without self-punishment. but they can’t get past the fuzzy tupperware wall. how to live like that is just too foreign a concept for trauma sufferers.
you can begin to assist your people move past those barriers by deepening your empathy for what is happening inside a person of trauma — in a world you are not experiencing. a world which is invisible to you. the following chart will show two columns that may help you see and hear the invisible reality of the person your chosen profession has given you stewardship.
to set up a workshop for professionals, or a private consultation on how being more trauma-informed can help you be more effective in your work, email me at dog.hotel.hansen@gmail.com, or call me at 360-600-8745. thanks, and be well — heidi
please take advantage of this coupon to upgrade your acumen on trauma and how that can help you and your work be more successful. I accept payments made to ally online bank, via western union money transfer services, or by money order.
the trauma project 