One of the most rewarding things that I missed during the two and half years we were in Palm Springs was helping the Women’s Empowerment Program in Sacramento.  I first leaned about this program about four years ago when my wife started volunteering there as a mentor.
 
The program takes a group of homeless women (from 12 to 30 at a time) through a 12 week intensive program to help them gain housing, education, jobs, childcare, and many other community services.  Their track record has been exceptional right from the beginning—they have an 86 percent success at getting women housing and/or jobs or in school by the end of the 12 weeks.

I’ve been to several of the graduations and I’m not ashamed to say I cried at every one of them because of hearing the difference that this program made for these women and their children.  In this group there were some very young children—as young as 6 weeks old—who were homeless.  One woman is in her late pregnancy.  I am very honored to do my part with each group by going in and doing a workshop called “Overcoming the Inner Saboteur,” which helps the women identify and change their self-defeating coping styles.

Another amazing aspect about this program is that it operates without any government support and depends entirely on community and corporate donations to help these women. I’m putting a little information about Women’s Empowerment below from their website.  If you want to learn more about this exceptional program please go to www.womens-empowerment.org/. 

Working with homeless women, we have learned about the causes, the challenges, and the issues that have brought, and in many cases kept a woman homeless. In an effort to break the cycle of homelessness, we have created a safe, supportive and educational place called Women’s Empowerment (WE). Our eight-week classes offer homeless women the training, mentoring and support necessary to obtain and maintain employment. Our curriculum (view curriculum) includes in-depth job seeking and job development skills, but in addition, we offer personal empowerment exploration, personal issue problem solving and job retention support. It is this unique mix of experiences that we feel helps our students be successful.

Homeless women face many unique barriers that make it difficult to succeed in typical welfare-to-work programs. These women need help identifying their strengths, establishing a secure home and developing a recent work history. Individual case management and mentoring helps each women connect to the community resources and services she needs as housing, childcare and transportation. Eliminating these barriers help the women get one step closer to breaking the cycle.

We have found that women lacking a home often lack hope. Through the work in the classes and the support of their classmates, these feelings of despair and anger fade as women discover their strengths and begin to rediscover their potential. Self-confidence takes root and women blossom as they express themselves creatively through journaling, clay work and other experiential activities. Our staff and volunteers provide encouragement and mentoring to help the women participate in many of these unfamiliar and therapeutic activities. Within our safe and intimate classroom setting, the women have the opportunity to develop close personal relationships and begin to trust each other. These relationships, along with monthly support meetings, help provide an ongoing support system for our graduates.

If you want to learn more about various aspects of chronic pain management please check out our website at www.addiction-free.com. You can check out our Ariticles page where you can download free articles or go to our Publications page to learn about my Addiction-Free Pain Management® books—especially my latest book Managing Pain and Coexisting Disorders.

Next week I fly to Florida to conduct my Addiction-Free Pain Management® three day Certification skills training.  I’ve been presenting APM™ clinical trainings for over 12 years now and last week I went back and reviewed the very first training I conducted.  I was very surprised at how far this model has come in the past decade.  I have a commitment to continuously evolve the APM™ model as new research becomes available.

I often get to learn a lot myself during these trainings because I often get healthcare professionals with many years of experience at these trainings.  All of our trainings are a combination of lecture, demonstration and experiential skill building exercises. 

We use these types of exercises for two reasons.  The first reason is to give our participants an opportunity to practice a new clinical skill but the second reason is even more important.  Participants need to play the role of a patient with chronic pain and coexisting addictive disorders.  By being on the receiving end of these experiential exercises they are able to develop much more empathy and compassion for their own patients.  I have a policy not to ask any of my patients to do anything I haven’t done or wouldn’t do.

If you want to learn more about any of our trainings or other various aspects of chronic pain management please check out our website at www.addiction-free.com.  You can check out our Ariticles page where you can download free articles or go to our Publications page to learn about my Addiction-Free Pain Management® books—especially my latest book Managing Pain and Coexisting Disorders that the Addiction-Free Pain Management® trainings are based on.

I’ve seen many people living with chronic pain and/or disability get stuck in various stages of a grieving process and it intensified their levels of pain.  I know this was also true for me in my early chronic pain recovery journey. There were times I became very depressed and felt hopeless that I could ever have a good quality of life again. Today I’m actually grateful for the initial injury that started me on a very exciting journey.  In fact, if it wasn’t for that injury I wouldn’t be writing this Blog.

I believe that to develop an effective pain management plan one of the most difficult and crucial, emotional issues that must be resolved is the grief and loss of your health and/or prior level of functioning. Obtaining support to work through a painful grieving process improves your chances of a successful treatment outcome with chronic pain. I’ve listed the Kubler-Ross stages of grief below and after that I’ll share what I believe is the necessary final stage for someone living with chronic pain and/or disability. It’s important to remember that these stages don’t necessarily happen in the order listed and some people go in and out of the stages until they finally get through them.

Denial: “This can’t be happening to me.”
Anger: “Why me? It’s not fair.”
Bargaining: “Just let me find a better way to live.”
Depression: “I’m so sad, why bother with anything?”
Acceptance: “I know it’s going to be OK.”

Although it is crucial to get to the “it’s going to be OK” stage, I believe we have to get to another level where we can honestly say to ourselves “My life is now better than ever—yes it’s different—but I like my quality of life now.”  It took me over two years to get to that point in my own grieving process and I needed help from a great therapist to guide me through the process.  I call this final stage Reintegration.

I’ve seen some people get stuck in one or more of these stages and it makes their lives miserable—as well as negatively impacting those they love. I’ve seen some people in so much denial and/or the bargaining stage about their limitations that they used massive amounts of medication to keep functioning at a super high level; until they crashed.  I’ve seen others become so depressed they contemplate suicide—and a few people I’ve know have even killed themselves.  Others became so angry and bitter that they drove their loved ones right out of their lives.

If you want to learn more about various aspects of chronic pain management please check out our website at www.addiction-free.com.  You can check out our Ariticles page where you can download free articles or go to our Publications page to learn about my Addiction-Free Pain Management® books.