Experiential Workshop: University of Limerick
Experiential Workshop EXPLORING THE SOURCE OF VICARIOUS TRAUMA AND BURNOUT AND EMPTYING...
Experiential Workshop: University of Limerick
Experiential Workshop
EXPLORING THE SOURCE OF VICARIOUS TRAUMA AND BURNOUT AND EMPTYING THE CONTAINERS
Instructor: Heidi Ahonen Ph.D.
Are you a helping professional, therapist, nurse, social worker, or volunteer? Do you work with traumatized people? Do you witness or share heartbreaking experiences day after day? This experiential workshop is for those who listen to the traumatic experiences of others and find those experiences to be traumas that burdens them as well. Vicarious trauma and compassion fatigue affect helping professionals’ physical, psychological and spiritual health as they observe and interact in daily traumatic accounts or react to the traumatic situations of others. Vicarious trauma and compassion fatigue not only steal away a helping professional’s passion, but also deteriorates their health. Many of us have unknowingly experienced it. It manifests as a sense of helplessness and ultimately leads to burnout and depression if disregarded. During this experiential workshop a variety of experiential techniques will be used to help participants identify and explore their vicarious traumatization, burnout, stress and resources.
Place: University of Limerick
Time: May 18, 2013 at 12 – 4:30 pm (Includes a coffee break)
Heidi’s Bio
Heidi Ahonen, PhD, Psychotherapist, Group Analyst, Accredited Music Therapist, and Compassion Fatigue Specialist, is a professor of Music Therapy at Wilfrid Laurier and director of the Manfred and Penny Conrad Institute for Music Therapy Research. Her teaching career includes posts at North Karelia Polytechnic, the Sibelius Academy for Further Education and the Finnish Mental Health Association’s Psychotherapy Training Institute. She has extensive clinical and supervisory experience and has published widely on various therapeutic methodologies and qualitative research. Heidi is the author of Group Analytic Music Therapy (2007) by Barcelona publishers. Heidi has trained music therapists and psychotherapists and conducted workshops for healthcare professionals since 1991. As a clinician, Heidi practices music psychotherapy and in the music therapy field she has developed group analytic music therapy methods, group analytic music therapy supervision model, integrated art and music therapy methods and music listening, imagination and improvisation methods. She specializes in adult clients with childhood traumas, PTSD, burn-out, vicarious trauma, compassion fatigue, and depression.
Experiential Workshop: Finnish Group Analytic Society, Kaupunkilahetys, Helsinki, Finland
Experiential Workshop
EXPLORING THE SOURCE OF VICARIOUS TRAUMA AND BURNOUT AND EMPTYING THE CONTAINERS
Instructor:Heidi Ahonen Ph.D.
Are you a helping professional, therapist, nurse, social worker, missionary worker, pastor, rescue worker, or volunteer? Do you work with traumatized people? Do you witness or share heartbreaking experiences day after day? This experiential workshop is ideal for those who listen to the traumatic experiences of others and find those experiences to be traumas that burdens them as well. Vicarious trauma and compassion fatigue affect helping professionals’ physical, psychological and spiritual health as they observe and interact in daily traumatic accounts or react to the traumatic situations of others. Vicarious trauma and compassion fatigue not only steal away a helping professional’s passion, but also deteriorates their health. Many of us have unknowingly experienced it. It manifests as a sense of helplessness and ultimately leads to burnout and depression if disregarded. During this experiential workshop a variety of experiential techniques will be used to help participants identify and explore their vicarious traumatization, burnout, stress and resources.
Place: Finnish Group Analytic Society, Kaupunkilahetys, Helsinki, Finland
Time: Sept 8, 2012 at 9 am – 2 pm
WORKSHOP CONTENT
9- 10:00 Introduction of Vicarious Traumatization? What it is? What are the sings? What contributes it?
Break
10:15-11:45 Experiential workshop
Lunch Break
12:30 -14:00 Experiential workshop
Heidi’s Bio
Heidi Ahonen, PhD, Psychotherapist, Group Analyst, Accredited Music Therapist, and Compassion Fatigue Specialist, is a professor of Music Therapy at Wilfrid Laurier and director of the Manfred and Penny Conrad Institute for Music Therapy Research. Her teaching career includes posts at North Karelia Polytechnic, the Sibelius Academy for Further Education and the Finnish Mental Health Association’s Psychotherapy Training Institute. She has extensive clinical and supervisory experience and has published widely on various therapeutic methodologies and qualitative research. Heidi is the author of Group Analytic Music Therapy (2007) by Barcelona publishers. Heidi has trained music therapists and psychotherapists and conducted workshops for healthcare professionals since 1991. As a clinician, Heidi practices music psychotherapy and in the music therapy field she has developed group analytic music therapy methods, group analytic music therapy supervision model, integrated art and music therapy methods and music listening, imagination and improvisation methods. She specializes in adult clients with childhood traumas, PTSD, burn-out, vicarious trauma, compassion fatigue, and depression.
Grand Magazine Wellness Feature
Sounds of healing
NEW RULES CLARIFY WHAT PROS ALREADY KNOW – MUSIC THERAPY HAS FASCINATING POSSIBILITIES
By Barbara Aggerholm
Heidi Ahonen, director of the Manfred and Penny Conrad Institute for Music
Therapy Research at Wilfrid Laurier University, says experimenting with a
marimba-like instrument helps depressed people release their feelings.
Photography • Mathew McCarthy
THE POWER OF music to move us, inspire us, release us, soothe us, stimulate us, is never so clear as in the experiences related
by music therapists.
- A dying man writes a love song for his wife.
- A young adult draws a line showing the peaks and valleys of his troubled week which other teens put to music.
- An aggression-prone girl describes banging on a drum as “letting out a big breath.”
- A woman with Alzheimer’s disease and her husband have a rare conversation while she sits in a chair broadcasting low-frequency sound waves.
- War-traumatized refugee women improvise on musical instruments to “speak the unspeakable.”
“Music sounds as our feelings feel,” says Heidi Ahonen, music therapy professor and director of the Manfred and Penny Conrad
Institute for Music Therapy Research at Wilfrid Laurier University.
“I think it was one of the composers who said: ‘When words end, music begins.”
It’s an exciting time for music therapy, says Colin Andrew Lee, head of WLU’s music therapy program.
Once perceived as a “fringe” therapy, more people are acknowledging the clinical use of music as therapy as a powerful way to help children and adults with special needs. At the same time, new Ontario regulations are coming that will protect clients and potentially boost the number of music therapy positions in hospitals and other health-care settings.
Ahonen and WLU’s Quincy Almeida were among a group of University of Toronto collaborators waiting to hear if they would receive a $1-million grant related to “music medicine” and aging. They want to explore the impact of low-frequency sound waves and other interventions on people with Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and other conditions. Ahonen has already seen good results in a sound-wave study involving people with Parkinson’s disease that she conducted with Almeida, director of the Sun Life Financial Movement Disorders Research and Rehabilitation Centre. Now, the question is how long the improvements in symptoms — reduced tremors and better balance among them — will last.
In the music therapy room at WLU, an electronic marimba-like instrument is helping depressed students see light at the end of the tunnel. Ahonen, an energetic, empathetic woman whose smile is as bright as the cheerful colours she wears, was a pioneer in music psychotherapy in Finland before she came to Canada. Now she’s blazing a trail here. Ahonen is working on a pilot study with a researcher in Finland. “Really depressed people, they are numb,” she says. “Feeling numb is a feeling.” Playing the $8,000 instrument helps her clients “release” their feelings. And because it’s a new instrument that can make hundreds of sounds, no one knows how to play it, which makes it less foreboding. “The whole idea is to express how you feel and then to discuss it.”
Ahonen supports the client by playing the piano or another instrument with him. “In psychotherapy, it’s like saying: ‘Uh, tell me more; that’s very interesting,’ ” Ahonen says. “That’s what I try to say with my instrument. . . . It helps the client clarify his feelings. “I think it allows them to see things in a different perspective,” she says. “When you are depressed, it’s darkness, a dark place without a future. This helps them to be playful and create a place in the future.”
In other research, Ahonen helps refugee women envision a future they had trouble seeing after experiencing trauma in their homelands. This winter, a group of Middle Eastern women worked with Ahonen and a master of music therapy student. In a group setting, the women express grief, anger, loss, pain when they improvise with a musical instrument or their voices, Ahonen says. “They have this place where they can
express the experience and be heard and get empathy,” she says. “Sometimes the improvisation might be about stress. It’s stressful to be in a new country.” She records the session and plays it back to the women, who later draw on paper. Music activates the limbic system in the
brain, which includes feelings and strong long-term memories, Ahonen says. Making art helps “externalize” the feelings.
Ahonen says she can see the women gain a sense of hope. “I really feel I’m making a difference in refugee women,” she says. “Music allows
them to express something they can’t speak. The feelings are not so easy to describe, especially if they’re horrible. “It’s almost like they’re in this dark pit and music provides the ladder.”
Ahonen’s two sound-wave therapy chairs — comfortable, recliner-type chairs developed in Finland — are producing exciting results among people with Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s disease. Inside the chair, six audio speakers broadcast low-frequency sound vibrations to body and mind within a range of 27 to 113 Hz (hertz) or cycles per second. A computer, which shows a picture of the body and its muscles on the screen, creates and controls the sound waves, changing the frequencies and focus as programmed. You can’t hear the sound waves because the frequency is so low, and the chair doesn’t move, although the person experiences sensations.
In one instance, a woman with Alzheimer’s disease sat in the chair for 30 minutes with her husband beside her. The chair was programmed for 40 Hz vibration. They were talking together, Ahonen says. “I noticed the husband is emotional and tears are running down his cheeks,” she says. Later, he thanked her. “He said that this is the first time in several years he had had a discussion with his wife where she remembered who he was and they were able to discuss their children and she knew the children’s names.”
In another case, a woman with dementia believed she was sitting on a train in wartime when she was experiencing 40 Hz of sound wave vibration in the chair. Ahonen also played music from her youth. In a couple of minutes, her eyes seemed to focus, and she began noticing things in the here and now, Ahonen says. “She said, ‘You have beautiful jewelry there.’ ” She saw the flowers in the room, and also commented about her “nutty” roommate. “It was like this waking up,” Ahonen says. “There’s something that is 40 Hz that provides a window to get the here and now back.” The window does close again, however. “The next day, she couldn’t remember me.”
Ahonen is excited about studying the effects of 40 Hz sound waves further. The new Music and Health Research Collaboratory at the University of Toronto means neurologists and other scientists would be part of the research. “Obviously, something is happening,” she says. “If we can improve quality of life, it would be huge.”
Read the complete Sounds of healing article By Barbara Aggerholm as a pdf
HEROINE’S JOURNEY—EMERGING STORY BY REFUGEE WOMEN DURING GROUP ANALYTIC MUSIC THERAPY
CANADIAN FEDERATION OF UNIVERSITY WOMEN: BRANTFORD – FÉDÉRATION CANADIENNE DES FEMMES DIPLOMÉES DES UNIVERSITÉS
MARCH 27, 2013
“Music can be a powerful, healing force” Heidi Ahonen, Ph.D.
Music and Women—come to what promises to be a fascinating and informative evening. Heiedi Ahonen, Ph.D. is a Professor of Music Therapy and director of the Manfred and Penny Conrad Institute for Music Therapy at Wilfrid Laurier University. Ms. Ahonen provides a safe and nurturing environment for community members who participate in her sessions to explore emotions that are sometimes too difficult to express with words.
In her presentation “Heroines’ Journey—Refugee Women and Music Therapy”, Ms. Ahonen will be presenting her most recent work with refugee women and their exploration through music of feelings of loneliness, fear, guilt and loss.
Vicarious Trauma Workshop – Israel
Experiential Workshop
EMPTYING CONTAINERS WITH MUSIC: USING MUSIC TO EXPLORE THE SOURCE OF VICARIOUS TRAUMA AND BURNOUT AND EMPTYING THE CONTAINERS
Instructor: Heidi Ahonen Ph.D.
Are you a helping professional, therapist, nurse, social worker, pastor, rescue worker or counselor Do you work with traumatized people? Do you witness or share heartbreaking experiences day after day? This experiential workshop is ideal for those who listen to the traumatic experiences of others and find those experiences to be traumas that burdens them as well. Vicarious trauma and compassion fatigue affect helping professionals’ physical, psychological and spiritual health as they observe and interact in daily traumatic accounts or react to the traumatic situations of others. Vicarious trauma and compassion fatigue not only steal away a helping professional’s passion, but also deteriorates their health. Many of us have unknowingly experienced it. It manifests as a sense of helplessness and ultimately leads to burnout and depression if disregarded. During this experiential workshop a variety of music therapy techniques will be used to help participants identify and explore their vicarious traumatization, burnout, stress and resources.
Place: ______________
Time: May 16, 2012 at 1:00 pm – 6:00 pm
WORKSHOP CONTENT
1:00 -1:30 pm Introduction of participants
1:30-2:00 pm Introduction of Vicarious Traumatization? What it is? What are the sings?What contributes it?
2:00-3:15 pm Improvisation experiential
Coffee break
3:45-5:00 pm Guided Imagery experiential
Break
5:15-6:00 pm Closure
Heidi’s Bio
Heidi Ahonen, PhD, Psychotherapist, Group Analyst, Accredited Music Therapist, and Compassion Fatigue Specialist, is a professor of Music Therapy at Wilfrid Laurier and director of the Manfred and Penny Conrad Institute for Music Therapy Research. Her teaching career includes posts at North Karelia Polytechnic, the Sibelius Academy for Further Education and the Finnish Mental Health Association’s Psychotherapy Training Institute. She has extensive clinical and supervisory experience and has published widely on various therapeutic methodologies and qualitative research. Heidi is the author of Group Analytic Music Therapy (2007) by Barcelona publishers. Heidi has trained music therapists and psychotherapists and conducted workshops for healthcare professionals since 1991. As a clinician, Heidi practices music psychotherapy and in the music therapy field she has developed group analytic music therapy methods, group analytic music therapy supervision model, integrated art and music therapy methods and music listening, imagination and improvisation methods. She specializes in adult clients with childhood traumas, PTSD, burn-out, vicarious trauma, compassion fatigue, and depression.
I was born in Finland (the country in northern Europe famous for cell phones). Now I live in Canada (the country in North America famous for maple syrup). When I present at international conferences, people can read on my name tag that I am Heidi Ahonen from Canada. Yet, do I feel Canadian—where is the Finn in me?
Even though it may not be the most creative way to solve an identity crisis, I introduce myself as a Finnish-Canadian. We can travel to the other side of the world, move our furniture in a container, build a new life, and yet, part of us will always be the same—but yet not the same. Just as my experiences in these two northern countries have changed my identity for good, we all form our identity in our first group experience, and then our next group experiences will change that identity. "
Low Frequency Sound Treatment Promoting Physical and Emotional Relaxation – Qualitative Study
Low Frequency Sound Treatment Promoting Physical and Emotional Relaxation – Qualitative Study
Abstract
Low frequency sound has many applications to medicine but the efficacy and effectiveness of low frequency sound treatment in health prevention remains unclear. The purpose of this study was to explore the perspectives and potentials of physioacoustic chair’s low frequency sound treatment when applied to daily activities among a sample of music students, faculty and/or staff, and to examine how participants view the benefits of the intervention for their well-being, health and health-related activities. The results show that the physioacoustic low frequency treatment added to participants’ subjective well-being by increasing their physical and emotional relaxation level, decreasing pain and stress, and increasing emotional enrichment and concentration. The study served as a pilot, to confirm stakeholder interest and to inform the feasibility of a larger study.
Experiential Workshop: Finnish Group Analytic Society, Kaupunkilahetys, Helsinki, Finland
Experiential Workshop EXPLORING THE SOURCE OF VICARIOUS TRAUMA AND BURNOUT AND EMPTYING...
Grand Magazine Wellness Feature
Ahonen, an energetic, empathetic woman whose smile is as bright as the cheerful colours she wears, was a pioneer in music psychotherapy in Finland before she came to Canada. Now she’s blazing a trail here.
HEROINE’S JOURNEY—EMERGING STORY BY REFUGEE WOMEN DURING GROUP ANALYTIC MUSIC THERAPY
In her presentation “Heroines’ Journey—Refugee Women and Music Therapy”, Dr. Ahonen will be presenting her most recent work with refugee women and their exploration through music of feelings of loneliness, fear, guilt and loss.
Vicarious Trauma Workshop – Israel
Experiential Workshop EMPTYING CONTAINERS WITH MUSIC: USING MUSIC TO EXPLORE THE SOURCE...
"I was born in Finland (the country in northern Europe famous for cell phones). Now I live in Canada (the country in North America famous for maple syrup). When I present at international conferences, people can read on my name tag that I am Heidi Ahonen from Canada. Yet, do I feel Canadian—where is the Finn in me?
Even though it may not be the most creative way to solve an identity crisis, I introduce myself as a Finnish-Canadian. We can travel to the other side of the world, move our furniture in a container, build a new life, and yet, part of us will always be the same—but yet not the same. Just as my experiences in these two northern countries have changed my identity for good, we all form our identity in our first group experience, and then our next group experiences will change that identity. "
Alive Inside
A Powerful Film About the Power of Music Following the screening, Michael and Dan, as...
Low Frequency Sound Treatment Promoting Physical and Emotional Relaxation – Qualitative Study
Low Frequency Sound Treatment Promoting Physical and Emotional Relaxation...