Art Therapy as a Healing Tool for Sub-fertile Women

Although fertility is fundamental to spiritual health, it is often taken for granted. When a desired pregnancy fails to occur, stress and grief frequently follow. Visual expression of feelings through “art therapy” has proved a powerful healing tool for women brave enough to give it a try at the McMaster University Fertility Clinic. The objective and subjective findings of this ongoing project suggest that through simple visual self-expression, stress, anxiety and hopelessness may be reduced. This form of art therapy also provides a joyful social experience of sharing with other women, who are dealing with these issues.     

Comadres: The Healing Power of a Female Bond

The author discusses the use of comadre therapy in feminist psychotherapy. Within the Latino culture a comadre is the relationship between the mother and her child's godmother. Literally meaning co-mother, a comadre is special bond between women who are intimate friends. A clinical case is provided to illustrate the use of comadre therapy.     

Attributions in a Spiritual Healing Context: An Archival Analysis of a 1920s Healing Movement

Research on religious attributions has been limited by a preoccupation with disentangling “religious” from “naturalistic” attributions and a failure to capture the attributions that people make in response to meaningful events. Thirty years of research has shown that even under optimum conditions religious attributions are rare compared to naturalistic ones. This research draws on unique archival materials comprising letters written to the Panacea Society containing self‐reported effects of a spiritual healing treatment based on water‐taking practices. This analysis examined attributions over time among a sample of letter writers (N = 19) from the 1920s using the Leeds Attributional Coding System to examine patterns of attributions that correspondents made in response to improvement and worsening of health outcomes. In line with previous research, religious attributions were more common for positive outcomes than negative outcomes. Contrary to previous research, religious attributions accounted for the majority of attributions made compared with nonreligious attributions. We discuss the implications for future research in studying attributions in real‐life meaningful settings and in expanding the repertoire of attributions to include religious ritual and community.     

Helping South Asian Immigrant Women Use Resilience Strategies in Healing from Sexual Abuse: A Call for a Culturally Relevant Model

This article calls for the counseling and psychological field to construct a culturally relevant model for working with South Asian immigrant women survivors of sexual abuse to support their resilience and healing. Patriarchal norms of South Asian culture and acculturative stressors in the United States are examined to understand how they influence survivors' abuse experiences. The literature on South Asian women's experiences of intimate partner violence is reviewed in addition to resilience studies with women of color who have survived sexual abuse. Practice and research implications are presented.     

The Healing Power of the Imagination

In this conceptual article, the author demonstrates how fairy tales, folk tales and myths offer the child medicine for the unconscious. Through the power of the imagination children develop the ability to incorporate an image of God as eternal presence and limitless consciousness, a sense of object constancy, a sense of self to help battle the intrinsic hardships of childhood, and a map for the journey of oneness, separation, and reunification with oneness at a higher level of consciousness. The article also calls upon the power of a particular therapeutic fairy tale from a collection by this author and demonstrates its value as a teaching aid in the classroom, a tool for psychotherapists who work with children and adults who were traumatized as children, and a resource for parents in the development of their children's spirituality.

     

Book Reviews of Group Psychotherapy for Women With Breast Cancer and The Breast Cancer Notebook: The Healing Power of Reflection

Book reviewed in this article: Group Psychotherapy for Women With Breast Cancer by James L. Spira & Geoffrey M. Reed (2003). The companion book is The Breast Cancer Notebook: The Healing Power of Reflection by Ava Louise Stanton & Geoffrey M. Reed (2003).     

Relationship building in Clinical Pastoral Education: a Confucian reflection from Asian chaplains

The authors reflect on the intentional model of relationship building in Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE) and its roots in the Western concept of the self as a rational, autonomous, and bounded agent. They compare the Western idea to the Confucian two-dimensional self orientation as relational as well as autonomous, and discuss possible difficulties that Asian students from Confucian background may encounter entering CPE. The chaplains explore implications and suggestions for how CPE supervisors and students may enter into dialogue in order to create mutual understanding and help Asian students translate CPE learning methods into meaningful cultural contexts.     

Standing in Between: The Healing Praxis of Mayan Women Intermediaries in Post-Genocide Guatemala

ABSTRACT

This article examines how Mayan intermediaries make meaning of their roles in accompanying Mayan women survivors of gross violations of human rights as they search for truth, justice, and reparation in post-genocide Guatemala. Using a constructivist grounded theory approach, the authors analyzed in-depth interviews with six intermediaries who worked with survivors in the context of a seven year feminist participatory and action research project. The findings reveal that healing from the legacies of armed conflict as well as from historical racialized gendered oppression are at the core of Mayan intermediaries’ work with the Mayan women survivors with whom they established an intersubjective relationship, contributing to each other’s healing. The importance of economic justice for survivors’ healing and the scant and circumscribed talk about sexual violence—the grievance central to the work with most of the survivors—emerge as important findings of this study and require future exploration.     

Expanding the View: The Lives of Women With Severe Work Disabilities in Context

The purpose of this investigation was to explore the ways that women with severe work disabilities (SWDs) attributed meaning to their lives, experiences, and decisions. The author used qualitative research methodology and grounded theory procedures to analyze data obtained from videotaped interviews, discussion of videotaped interviews, and prolonged and persistent participant observations to shed light on the lives and experiences of women with SWDs, a previously understudied group. Implications for counseling are discussed.     

The Mentoring Relationship as a Context for Psychological Contract Development

This study examined the mentoring relationship as a context for the development of psychological contracts and investigated the obligations that mentors and protégés feel that they owe and are owed in the mentoring relationship. By using psychological contract theory, we develop new insights into the dynamics of the mentoring relationship and extend psychological contract research by applying the theory to a relation outside the employer–employee context. Results indicate that both parties perceive that they owe and are owed obligations, and these perceptions are influenced by the formality of the relationship and the supervisory status of the mentor. Implications and suggestions for future research are discussed.     

Giving Words to the Unsayable: The Healing Power of Describing What Happened

This discussion elaborates on Dr. Slade’s paper about the centrality of fear in the etiology of emotional problems and discusses the transmission from parent to child of unaddressed sources of parental fear.     

Dueling Experiences and Dual Ambivalences: Emotional and Motivational Ambivalence of Women in High Status Positions

A laboratory study demonstrates that women in high status positions experience emotional ambivalence (simultaneous experience of positive and negative affect) and motivational ambivalence (simultaneous desires to build relationships and display power). These effects were found with 2 different measures of ambivalence, 1 derived from the attitudinal ambivalence literature and the other from the structure of affect literature. These findings have implications about the experience of women in the workplace, as well as the current debates concerning structure of affect.     

Context effects: the role of collectivism as a moderator

Social cognition experts have shown that participants' answers to research questions can be influenced by previous questions, something known as context effects. It has been suggested that participants from collectivist cultures pay more attention to the context, resulting in larger context effects. The present investigation examined context effects in an experiment that involved manipulating the order in which two questions, one about satisfaction with life as a whole and one about satisfaction with romantic life, were answered by a representative sample of participants from Mexico City. The results were consistent with other investigations that used samples from collectivistic cultures. Participants' responses to questions about satisfaction are influenced by a previous question, and country of origin affects the amount of attention given to the context. The implications of these results are discussed.     

Asian Women in the Ecumenical Movement: Voices of Resistance and Hope

Throughout Asian ecumenical history, Christian women have found ways to organize themselves and create structures that give them the space to articulate their concerns and contribute their theological and leadership skills to the church and society. Asia's complex context has played a pivotal role in framing the contributions of women to the ecumenical movement, while the ecumenical movement in Asia has played a key role in helping define feminism, feminist theory, and feminist theology for this continent, contributing to national‐level initiatives in each Asian country as well as to regional and to World Christianity. At the same time, ecumenical women in each nation of Asia have linked with secular women's efforts and with women of other faiths to bring transformation in the lives of women, to challenge violence in all its manifestations, and to demand justice and dignity for all women and men.     

Resisting the Logic of Ambivalence: Bad Faith as Subversive,Anticolonial Practice

This article critiques Homi Bhabha's proposal that mimicry, as a transgressive performance of ambivalence, disrupts the colonial violence of the stereotype, and as such, generates emancipatory conditions for postcolonial subjects. I am critical of this naming of mimicry as enabling a possible liberation from colonial violence not only because it fails to address the loss of belonging that significantly marks the experience of being so violated, but also because it seems to intensify this loss in the hybridity and fragmentation that it celebrates. Through the work of María Lugones and Mariana Ortega, I propose a reimagined sense of Sartrean bad faith as one that corrects for this failure. This account of bad faith—as subversive, anticolonial practice—legitimizes my longing for a stability made impossible by the violent ambivalence that pervades both the colonial and postcolonial condition. Lugones's accounts of multiplicity and ontological plurality, as well as Ortega's conception of hometactics, help me argue that this reimagined conception of bad faith ought to be considered productive when it comes to existential strategies that pursue the possibility of free black life.