AHP Perspective is a magazine published bi-monthly for members of the Association for Humanistic Psychology. It includes interviews, articles, essays, updates on member activities, conference announcements, and book reviews. Members receive the complete AHP Perspective as part of their membership.

AHP PERSPECTIVE Februsry/March 2001 Table of Contents

VOICES FROM INSIDE (video)
By Karina Epperlein Berkeley, CA: Transit, 2000

FROM VIOLENCE TOWARD LOVE: One Therapist’s Journey
By Marjorie Holiman
New York: W.W. Norton, 1997, 324 pp., $29, ISBN: 0393702553

WHO’S LISTENING?: What Our Kids Are Trying to Tell Us
By Jerry Johnston Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Pub., 1992, $20

The video Voices from the Inside poignantly presents a four-year experiment with women in federal prison. Each participant’s individuality was encouraged and supported by others in the group, as they shared movement, artwork, poetry, song, and other self-expression in a circle of women who came to trust each other and the theatre artist Karina Epperlein.

Within the prison walls, where privacy does not exist and soft emotions are dangerous, or at least regretted, the women of mixed races and ages began to feel free–free to find an inner life, and to express their basic longings and the dichotomies of prison life. In a place where touch was forbidden, they held each other, "pouring liquid, warm, golden, sweet love into the bones."

The culmination of their four years together was an original theatre piece based on on their free-form poetry, lamentations, and fluid movements. "Now that I have the art and the singing, I can get to a place of peace. I am on a journey home, home to myself." (75% of incarcerated women are in prison for nonviolent crimes; 80% have at least two dependent children.

Marjorie Holiman knows a great deal about violence. She has experienced it, treated it, and she nearly pushed a man through a second-story window in a fit of personal violence. She likens the therapist to a smelter who must maneuver the crucible back and forth carefully, forming and creating, without becoming mesmerized by the power and danger in the hot liquid of the drama of others’ lives.

In attempting to keep another person from harm, she knowingly takes the risk of losing his or her trust, and sometimes does. She has learned that not everyone who experiences violence will profit from therapy, and bearing witness to violence implies an acknowledgement of her own capacity to do harm or to be a target.

Throughout her book, Holiman guides the therapist, outlining tasks which the client must perform, discussing frequently made mistakes, addressing topics such as self-mutilation, satanic cult abuse, violated boundaries, and potential abandonment by the therapist.

In the final chapter, she states that this has really been a book about love, about the ability to reach out to another person, about the willingness to accept help, about the reciprocity that creates connection.

Even when bearing the hatred and spite of a client she has kept alive, she continues to believe that the emotional power of violence can be counteracted with equally intense passions to live and love. "I want, more than anything else, for violence between human beings to stop and for the love of both self and others to overcome the desire to lash out." A practical book; good reading for any kind of therapist.

Jerry Johnston is a missionary who serves troubled teens. He has spoken to more than 4,000,000 students in nearly 3,000 public schools across the continent. In Who’s Listening? he urges parents to make the effort to hear the cries for help that their own sons and daughters are making.

America’s youth have a death wish that is staggering. Every 78 seconds a teenager commits suicide, every 90 seconds, one succeeds. Johnson reports that teens tell him that their parents don’t care, that they don’t have time for them, that they never listen. "My 3.83 GPA means as much to him as the crap on the bottom of his shoe." (Adam) "I hate my parents. All they ever do is nag and gripe at me." (Summer)

Teenagers say they are frightened; they hear their parents arguing and worry that their family is about to disintegrate. They are sad about what is going on at home and write things like "Both my mom and dad have to work so hard. I wish they weren’t so tired all the time," or, "We used to do a lot together." They are lonely; no one is there when they come home from school needing to talk about something that happened during their day.

Our teens face a tremendous amount of pressure and temptation. They are involved in violence, drugs, satanism, and much more. According to Johnston, it is important that parents know what kind of battlefield our teens walk through every day. Many teens who would never think of hurting anyone are carrying knives to school for self-defense, or are joining gangs for protection. Johnston’s advice: get involved; show your love, talk openly and frankly about sex, love, abortion, disease; recognize and address warning signs; seek professional help when needed; be a teen’s best role model; and most of all, don’t lecture, listen.

LYNN VAUGHN is a psychotherapist who has specialized in working with families with young children and teens for 19 years.

AHP PERSPECTIVE Feb/Mar 2001 Table of Contents

AHP Perspective Editorial Guidelines Advertising Information