Gudrun Frerichs, PhD

Petition: Stop the Proposed Changes to the ACC Sensitive Claims Scheme

My colleague Kyle MacDonald initiated a petition to stop the implementation of the proposed changes to the ACC scheme. Please, find more information about the changes further down on this blog. If you too feel passionate about maintaining opportunities for survivors of sexual abuse, we invite you to sign the petition as well. Every voice counts! Here is what Kyle wrote:

The Art Of @#$&&*@!)>>*^%

I think our Universities have a lot to answer for - or do politicians learn to talk a lot without saying anything of substance in a political-party-membership-bootcamp and not at varsity?

This is what the member of parliament Patsy Wong had to say when questioned about ACC

Open Letter to Nick Smith, Minister for ACC

Please let me share with you a document that we have worked on for the last two weeks and that will be presented today to the Minister for ACC.

If you want to to make your voice count as well, write to your member of parliament.You can find the contact emails here! Or you write to the Dr. Peter Jansen, one of the chief medical advisers for ACC, Peter.Jansen@acc.co.nz. Tell them how your counselling experience was, how long it took for you, and how it has impacted on your life!

Here is the open letter the NZAP has sent to the Minister for ACC:

ACC or How To Eat An Elephant

ACC is changing their rules! A lot of counsellors/psychotherapists are not aware of what is in the pine-line and there are - to put it mildly - shock-waves running through the profession. Something needs to be done, and maybe now is the time to do it! 

Its great to see that Rape Crisis is planning another meeting with ACC. Auckland Sexual Abuse Help is also about to approach ACC management. However, it's a huge task and everybody's help is needed to 'eat this elephant'.

ACC - Fairy Tale Or Nightmare On Elm Street?

You can ask anybody: Having ACC funding counselling for survivors of sexual abuse has been in the past a blessing for many. Certainly for clients because where can you get counselling if not from a psychotherapist or a counsellor? Public Mental Health services have long waiting lists and don't provide counselling. The cost of private therapy is often way out of reach of survivors. Thanks to ACC many survivors have been able to turn their lives around and recover from the legacies of childhood sexual abuse.

Improve Your Sex-Life

Sex is the most profound and intimate way people express their love to each other. Through the ever increasing access to information through traditional media and the internet we are very well informed about the many different ways people enjoy and pursue sex and sexual gratification in their lives. Even though one might think we have been 'immunised' and desensitised by explicit sexual depictions in public, in movies, and in the media, sex or the lack thereof is still a very reliable barometer of the quality of people's relationships with each other.

The Grieving Process

A lot has been written about the grieving process. The Kuebler-Ross model, also known as the grief cycle, is probably the best known description of the grieving process. Dr. Kuebler-Ross’ model offers 5 stages of grief that needs to be traversed for grief to be resolved. However, grieving does not always, or better hardly, follow a clean model of stages. Kuebler-Ross has already pointed out that grieving is a very individual process. People may wander back and forth in the grief cycle, repeat stages over and over again, and may get stuck at some point. The 5 stages are:

Grief And Social Support

Although loss is a normal part of life for everyone people are rarely prepared to deal with it on their own. One characteristic of human societies is that people come together and seek closeness with others in the face of traumatic experiences. Emotional attachment to supportive others is seen by many as the most important protection against feelings of helplessness and meaninglessness. Emotional attachment is probably the primary protection against feelings of helplessness and meaninglessness. Emotional attachment is essential for adults to make meaning out of their existence.

How To Get Over Childhood Stress: The Process Of Healing

I have explained in the previous article “How to Get Over Childhood Stress: The Process of Getting Hurt" how childhood experiences became part of the child’s neurological physiology that over time, through re-enforcement and repetition becomes an aspect of its personality structure.

The task of recovery is to stop the process of repetition and re-enforcement of the unwanted beliefs, thoughts, and behaviours and to encourage new, positive ways of being in this world. Thus new neuro-pathways need to be created (if you remember that has to happen through experience!!) or if they exist but are just faint connections they have to be strengthened through more and regular traffic. At the same time it has to be avoided to go down the familiar path of neuro-connections that are negative and unhelpful so that they wither away. On paper that sounds very easy, doesn't it?

How To Get Over Childhood Stress: The Process Of Getting Hurt

This is the first of two articles about how to get over childhood stress or - how does therapy work - in which I will explain how people get hurt by childhood stress (1^st article) and how they can recover from it (2^nd article “Healing from Childhood Stress and Abuse: How Therapy works”).  I have included the impact of childhood stress seen through neuro-biological eyes because it shows clearly the pathways to how the healing can take place