Drama
As a Community Drama student at the East London Theatre School, I have facilitated a Drama Group workshop every week at Talking Matters Wellbeing Centre, in Stamford Hill, beginning in October 2007 and continuing until March 2009 for 50 weeks during the academic terms. The workshops generally had between 4-8 women. The workshops were aimed at women from the Orthodox Jewish Community 25 years old plus with the aim of building confidence, helping the participants find a voice to express themselves and mainly to have a safe and private space to be free, expressive and to have fun. (One participant described the classes as “Play School for adults”.

There was always a lot of dialogue between the centre manager and myself, for pre class preparation and planning. Each workshop followed a similar template, the first 15 minutes were give to physical waking up of the body, with stretching and breathing exercises and the last part of the warm up was working with the voice and face. These were followed with a few short warm up games for imagination and to get everyone feeling comfortable and free. The sessions would have a central theme which would be the core of the workshop using role play, imagination and trust all to build their confidence, to help participants to be able to express their feelings in a comfortable and non-judgmental environment.

I used many different evaluation methods throughout the 50weeks including reflection and feedback particularly as the ladies needs were very specific, as some of them were very fragile and found it hard to be very expressive or creative. It required a great deal of sensitivity, helping them:

a. To get in touch with their emotions.

b. To stand in a public (very small but SAFE) setting and express themselves

c. Feel comfortable with themselves while engaged in activities together

We did one session in creative writing on the subject of “This Drama Group“ The effects on each other and in jointly writing a poem was amazing and the results sit proudly on the Talking Matters wall. It was a great reference point for me - the Ladies and the Talking Matters Wellbeing Centre.

Gabriella Barnes
Drama Group Facilitator

Haven Help Group
We began the group in October 2008 with a dozen women. However, 1 woman left very early on, feeling that she could not take exposure to her feelings or the group dynamics. This was true for 2 other women too, who felt they were too raw at this stage of their life, and preferred to pop in and out, as it suited them. This was discussed and it was decided that it would be unprofessional to allow this, within a closed therapy group. Furthermore, it would make it impossible to foster a sense of trust, bonding and safety within the group, if they were not to know who would help make up the group. We had agreed to close the group after 4 weeks of meeting, so that we could begin the process of creating a group spirit.

Initially, time management was a real issue, with the women coming systematically late. I shared feeling frustrated, and have managed to impart the importance of taking time for themselves, in spite of busy schedules. The importance of self-care was explained to the group and of taking time out for oneself, in order to be a better person/parent, as the case may be. I am pleased to report, that at the end of the year, ALL group members have greatly improved their time keeping skills! We collaboratively drew up a comprehensive programme to cover during the year. It was vital to get the women engaged in drawing up my brief, so that they could get a sense that they had a say in at least 1 area of their life. The client group was young Orthodox women, all under the age of 30, who had suffered terribly abusive marriages and had been able to get out of the detrimental relationship and file for divorce. Only one participant was still waiting for her religious divorce, though she had been separated for 3 years. Happily, in the course of the year, the divorce came through.

At the beginning of our work, and this lasted for quite a few months, the women would sit down and stay quiet, waiting for me to set the agenda for the evening’s meeting. I explained that seeing as this was their space, it would be much more beneficial for them to decide what to speak about. They lacked the confidence to do so as well as the ability to take ownership of their needs and have them addressed. Progressively, as their self worth increased, they learnt to be much more assertive and did in fact begin to present struggles and dilemmas they wanted to share and explore. The most exciting part for me as facilitator, was to see how 2 women who hardly ever participated for a long time, have grown so much, that they are now very vocal participants.

I think it is fair to say, that self-worth/esteem and assertiveness were the focal points of our work. These issues would present themselves over and over again, albeit in various circumstances, eg: work situations, family and ex husbands etc. The method of work was role-plays, small group work and brain-storming slots. The beauty was, that whereas at the onset, the women felt they were marginalized and isolated, one major outcome of the group was their bonding, thereby creating a strong support network for themselves. They have forged deep friendships and have been away as a group and offer each other telephone support. At the end of the year, these women, 1 of whom remarried recently, have emerged transformed, secure, more content individuals, better equipped to accept and face the challenges life throws at us and succeed.

Channah Flax
Therapy Group Facilitator

Portals Programme
The PP began on March 10th, 2008 with the hire of 2 part-time mental health outreach workers, one male worker and one female worker. Employing workers of both genders made possible the provision of culturally appropriate services to the OJC, whose culture and traditions demand single gender service provision. Additionally, both workers are from or familiar with the Orthodox Jewish community (OJC).

The purpose of the project is to raise mental health awareness and stress prevention in the OJC and work to promote wellbeing through provision of workshops and taster sessions on deep relaxation and stress busting in a variety of community voluntary settings. The focus of the PPP, following a brief orientation, was on the initial set up of the project and on prioritizing targets and goals. In the first six months the priority was determined to be on providing taster well-being workshops to community organizations, an outreach strategy was developed. This involved the following:

• Continuous creation and expansion of a database of community voluntary and statutory organizations and implementing contact

• Creating an outreach package – including introductory letters, leaflets and other promotional materials

• Determining the services to offer and how these are to be implemented

• Creating the appropriate forms and paperwork to record PPP activity

• Researching workshop materials - anger management, suicide, life skills, stress, etc

• Setting up initial meetings

• Provision of well managed workshops on stress prevention

• Evaluating and monitoring the workshops

• Planning for future programming

Portals Project provided workshops for ten community organizations and worked with 85 new people. In addition to the set up and implementation of an outreach strategy, workers were invited to attend various meetings with external bodies, including the Hackney Hate Crime forum and the Hearing Voices network (HVN) steering group. The second half of the year saw continued outreach and consolidation of service provision with schools and GP’s surgeries being the main focus of outreach as well as setting up of the Hearing Voices Group (HVG), which is a support group for voice hearers in the OJC and the Growing Group for men not in education, employment or training.

The Portals Pilot Project officially became the Portals Programme (PP) in March 2009 with the accolade of becoming a mainstream NHS funded programme. The Portals Programme has delivered consistently high levels of service on which we hope to further build in the coming year, in spite of staff changes. The programme began with a high level of energy and optimism. The hope and expectation based on initial activity and indicators show that the project will provide much needed services and that the Portals Programme will continue to be a thriving project.

Miriam Coleman, Outreach Coordinator
John Woodger, Outreach Worker

Registrations
As we are funded by the NHS, primarily to provide services for those with “mild to moderate” mental health issues, life at Talking Matters has become very interesting as increasingly clients are self referring and presenting with “moderate to severe” and “severe and treatment resistant” mental health issues. Plus there are a significant minority who are being referred by local schools, GPs, Community Mental Health Teams (CMHT) and various departments at the Homerton Hospital because

a) We provide effective, culturally specific counselling & therapy services

b) Our services are known and trusted both by the community and the statutory providers

c) Patients and GPs alike request our services.

What has made our life difficult in this year has been the return to South Africa by our very own Dr. Nadia Loewke-Kinn, the only Orthodox Jewish Psychiatrist in the North London Community and the Talking Matters consultant. Nadia is also an Acupuncturist, one of the country’s few Medical Homeopaths and a well read astronomer!. We are the sadder for losing her, especially as she was not only our “second opinion” but also a ray of sunshine, and her departure has left us in a position that on the one hand, we are seeing more serious cases being self referred from within the community, and on the other hand no longer having a consultant level psychiatrist “on call”.

Therefore, Talking Matters employed the very well respected and knowledgeable, retired Consultant Educational Psychologist, Dr Anne Ruth Cohn to assist us with the “more complex cases” (See report Page 13). It is well recorded that most often the client feels far more comfortable and less stressed when the professional is from the same culture, who understands implicitly where the client is coming from and who probably speaks the same languages.

CHOICES, men’s & family services
Most of our clients are serviced through the CHOICES Programme. Below are a few of the therapists’ short evaluations of their work and the clients’ progress.

Men’s Services To begin with, I want to celebrate two facts. The consistently high percentage of male clients (26 individuals over the year) using TMA’s services. A few years ago boys, bochurim and men coming forward to experience a whole range of therapies would have been a dream. Well done! Secondly, because TMA’s services are so well entrenched in the good books of most of our community, clients with deeper and more complex issues are coming forward. The team has worked remarkably well and achieved some great results, given the very limited number of sessions (12 per client) that our funding allows. Mercifully, a number of clients have been so enthusiastic and determined that where it proved necessary, they continued with their therapist in private practice.

A number of therapists from different fields are involved in the men’s work, so we offer a good range of therapeutic models to match the range of presenting issues. Clients have enjoyed everything from play therapy, to NLP, Gestalt, EFT and art therapy to more traditional counselling. The recent addition of the Talking Hands Project has provided a very necessary range of complementary healing skills, eg Reiki, Acupuncture and Shiatsu. This benefits the clients who attribute physical symptoms amongst their emotion based presenting issues, and those who for various reasons cannot engage with ease in a talking therapy.

The style and origin of the issues with which we work continues to be pretty much as before. The spin off of Holocaust, Stalinism and prolonged exile; and for some, the expectations of a deeply introspective, tightly integrated community that sets itself great spiritual goals and values academic and other achievements very highly. The latter works wonderfully for many, but when any of this is skewed by family breakdown or the knock on effects of persecution and genocide, then individuals can find themselves torn between ideals and a painful reality, between larger loyalties and their own needs.

The security and confidentiality of the therapeutic relationship allows people to reconsider their relationships with themselves, family, community and G-d, and to express secretly harboured emotions, such as anger, pain and bitterness, and from there to move beyond these into a state of healing and forgiveness.

Nota Kreiman
Head of Men’s Services

Family Services
As Head of Family Services at Talking Matters, the emphasis involves using the practice of Family Therapy within a Systemic Approach. This means that the focus is geared mainly towards a family relationship framework. My work tends to be mainly with young women who need to strengthen their marital relationship, and who need to empower themselves as separate individuals. Because of my therapeutic approach, I am able to take a broader view; that individual behaviour is better understood as occurring within the primary network of a family’s social system.

In our role as therapists, we attempt to contribute a new direction and expansion of work in helping these clients to re-author their lives. We enable them to shed old problems and saturated stories about themselves and facilitate them to open up the possibility of new, more empowering views of their ability to choose the lives they desire.

We carefully consider that each client is embedded within the community and religious affiliation that Talking Matters works within. As part of this system, individuals are tied to one another within their family structure by powerful emotional attachments and loyalties that may fluctuate in intensity – but seem to persist over the lifetime of their family system.

In our work we carefully take into consideration gender, cultural issues and differences as the genders within this community are very strictly delineated. My work with couples also involves a coordinated approach, where each client is given the opportunity to be seen by a separate counsellor of the same gender. This helps each spouse to feel safe to reveal their own feelings and open up the family encounter. This is a unique way of working and is seen to be effective within this community. We have a therapist’s meeting once a quarter to discuss all presenting issues, family work and progress.

I have in the past year worked with ten young single women and four couples; and feel that this has been working successfully, and would like to develop this service by an idea whereby the male and female therapists are both present in the session with the couple, using the therapists to model to the couple how to successfully communicate and think together. There seems to be a lack of experience of witnessing a functional couple working together e.g. problem – solving and relating. So we feel that this would be a dynamic and powerful approach.

Malka Taub
Head of Family Services

Between April '08 and April '09, I saw five Talking Matters clients - four men and one woman, all roughly between the ages of 20 to 40. Their combined issues ranged alphabetically from anxiety and anger management, assertiveness needs and depression, through to relationship problems, stress and substance misuse; any one client presented several of these overlapping issues. All the clients reported progress. As their therapist, I would say that despite the small sample, they fell into two familiar categories: those who entered into the therapeutic relationship with a clear idea of what they wanted and those who did not.

Those with clarity tended to be the most committed to the process, were regular attendees and made significant progress. This progress had little to do with cognitive ability or education - for example, a client with the poor education and social standing made huge leaps in both developing his self-awareness, and putting his new understandings into practice successfully. Those who engaged in the therapeutic relationship, (as opposed to treating me as a doctor who would diagnose and "cure" them with little effort on their part) reported significant improvements in their quality of life. This, of course, is true of therapy in general, and not only with this client group.

Conversely, clients with less clarity or focus - "being happier" isn't really a clear goal! - tended not to engage so well, missed sessions by acting out through forgetfulness, etc, and so made less progress. Fear of the counselling process was also a factor: one client, with most of the issues ticked at the assessment stage, arrived to declare that he was "much better already" and soon stopped attending. He might say that therapy worked for him; I would say that he experienced a flight in to health.

I am sure that the above reflects the ongoing need to educate the client group into the possibilities and limitations of counselling and therapy. Overall though, I believe that the clients I have seen left with increased understanding of their issues, interactions and dilemmas, and have now some more tools for living that they did not possess previously.

Mark Thomas, Gestalt Therapist

During the first year, I worked with 5 female adults. Issues presented by them ranged from multi aspect abuse including that experienced in the past to emotional abuse acted out by some of the client’s on their own children.

Lillie Naor
Head of Play & Art Therapy Services

Key:
Ab. Phys Physical abuse
Ab. Emo = Emotional abuse
Add = Addiction
Adol = Adolescents
Anger = Anger
Anx. Fears = Anxieties and Fears
Behav = Behavioural
Bereav = Bereavement Child = Children
Comm = Communication
Depr = Depression
Eat Dis = Eating Disorder
HV = Hearing Voices
Fam = Family
Infer = Infertility
Itim. Iss = Intimate Issues Marit = Marital
OCD = Obsessive Compulsive Disorder
Pers. Iss = Personality Issues
Phob = Phobias
Relat = Relationships
Sui. Thou = Suicidal Thoughts
Other = Other

Tots 2 teens

I have worked with 13 children and the issues presented by them ranged from feeling emotionally neglected, stealing, unresolved and unexpressed anger, social difficulties, phobias and fears, mild learning difficulties and extreme shyness. In most cases a noticeable improvement in the presenting issues could be observed and in some cases there was a significant change.

One of the frequent issues that are brought to therapy is that small children (mostly boys) have a fear of dying! (being eaten by or stamped on by animals with added issues of for example there being no help available, - neither parents nor police, leaving these children in their perception alone, and having to fend for themselves.) This raises a very interesting question of “How do such small children know about death, dying and hopelessness” given that they are not exposed to videos, DVDs, the cinema and computer games? One can possibly surmise that these are thoughts and feelings transferred from one generation to another, due to historical experiences in Eastern Europe.

Quite a few children feel that despite the fact that they know that “Mummy loves them”, being given cholocate doesn’t assuage their needs to be hugged much more by mummy. This relates immediately to 2nd generation parents and their own offspring. They had no role models to copy as their parents were either slaughtered in the Holocaust or so severely emotionally damaged by the collective trauma, that they are no longer able to relate to “normal” emotions and therefore have switched off entirely, bringing up entire generations on a psychological plane pretty much devoid of emotion.

In addition, I observed a new pattern of referral where the last few children referred to Art and Play therapy were referred by school professionals rather than parents.

Lillie Naor
Head of Play & Art Therapy Services

Level 2 Listening Skills Course
Talking Matters Association is an accredited training agency with the Counselling & Psychotherapy Central Awarding Body (CPCAB)and ran a Listening Skills Level 2 course in TMA’s training room known as The Learning Space, in Stamford Hill. The course ran for fifteen weeks, beginning on February 6th 2008 and ending on June 11th 2008.

Mrs Rebecca Aharon and Mrs Malka Taub were the Core Tutor and Assistant Tutor respectively. The course was attended by ten Orthodox Jewish women, eight of whom were from the local community and two from North West London community. It was quite a diverse group, particularly regarding the age range which was from twenty three years old to sixty two years old. Culturally the group was mainly Chasidic.

This course was very special. Fistly, it was the first such course in the Stamford Hill community and secondly, the Chasidic women acknowledged their need to deepen their listening skills for both their personal and their working lives and thirdly, the tutors both of whom are from the Orthodox community originally attended a similar course some years ago and went on to become not only qualified counsellors but also trainers/tutors.

The tutors enjoyed teaching the Group. It was a great learning experience both from the lesson planning aspect and the actual teaching. It was especially fascinating to be a part of the individual journey of the students and watching the Group evolve from ten separate entities to a whole unit.

There were as anticipated, some challenging moments as well as the humorous and serious. The women were certainly captivated by the material, demonstrated a thirst for knowledge and developed within themselves tremendously.

The course was a resounding success, it was the

• 1st in Stamford Hill for ladies

• Boasted a 100% pass rate and

• Quoting the external assessor “The level of work far exceeded the requirement”.

Rebecca Aharon
Head of Training Services

Cultural Awareness Training Seminars
One of the highlights of the year was running a 2 hour truncated Cultural Awareness Training Seminar in the Drama School with approximately 200 students on their end of year project of living in character as either religious, secular Jews, Arabs and/or soldiers in Israel. It was extremely successful.