Overview

This book is the story of how I survived the shock of living in the ""real"" world while at the same time holding onto the wonders I experienced in my childhood. It is also a history of my discoveries during over forty years of striving to balance logical, rational mental health concepts with intuition and common sense. During my journey I was constantly exploring new concepts in the psychotherapeutic unknown, as people with ""mental health issues"" began to face fears associated with that. When my journey began, people were afraid of the stigma, but now they are permitting themselves to seek help. Over the years I formalized my credentials as a mental health professional - addiction counsellor, psychotherapist, Biomedical Communication Specialist, researcher, program developer, and eidetic art psychotherapist. Each chapter recounts a stage of my journey in applying what I was discovering to issues in mental health, the business community, and addiction treatment and counselling in America and Australia. The book reveals what I have learned in healing my own personal pains, and what questions I ponder on my spiritual journey as I move toward old age. Shadowing my personal account is the story of the evolution of the counselling profession. My discoveries were like the letters in my childhood alphabet, each one linking with another to form concepts, finally giving a voice to a better comprehension of human behaviour. In the book you will find substantiated models and therapeutic tools such as ""The Survivors Checklist,"" ""Nine Elements of Communication,"" ""Four Steps in Changing,"" and ""Human Developmental Basics."" In case prospective readers may be wondering, this book is not another enlightenment story trying to sell God. Nor is it another disclosure of a child of an alcoholic. That is not to deny the importance of both of them to me in my personal journey, for they are seeds at the core of my being. They fuelled my striving to find answers to questions why people do what they do in trying to get their needs met. Permission to finally disclose my journey came from three important events: (1) my personal interrogative interview with Dr. Karl Menninger in 1982, at the conclusion of which he said to me, ""This needs to be used in hospitals""; (2) my elder son's admonishing me, ""I'm tired of you saying you don't have the right to write because you don't have a PhD!""; and (3) the time I travelled around the United States in a semi-truck with my husband Vic, during which I wrote an early draft of this book while sitting in the passenger seat.

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Reviews

This book made me laugh. It made me cry. It made me think. -Rachel Berrisford, BSc (Hons), MBChB, MRcPsych (United Kingdom) I have worked in the disability arena for over 20 years concentrating on the young with extreme, challenging behaviors. Fifteen years ago I read a paper by Shirley Deane/Midyett on her amplified Survivor's Checklist. I refer to it constantly, even teaching the principals to my clients - particularly to one young woman with multiple diagnoses of autism, PTSD, transient psychosis, and pervasive development delay. When she lost control, I took a few moments to narrow her needs and establish a foundation to work with. This had resounding results, enabling a dramatic and positive behavior change. And with repetition, she learned how to use the Survivor's Checklist herself. -Tina Marie Fiedler (Perth, Western Australia) Shirley Deane has an astute grasp for psycho-dynamics and an outstanding ability to integrate dynamics, mental image, and brain function. Shirley is unusually perceptive and creative. -Frank Holmes Chesky, MD (Kansas) The Survivor's Checklist, re-parenting through developing a healthy adult, and looking at developmental stages of growth have been very beneficial to me in creating a foundation for clients for on-going recovery while stabilizing sobriety. I have implemented and used Shirley' tools in my work as a chemical dependency counselor since 1988, with outstanding results. -Carla Jean Harper, ADC III, NCAC II, LCDC (Texas) We see in others what we see in ourselves. I saw in Shirley what I wanted to see in myself. I was fresh out of graduate school, working as a master's-level therapist, and Shirley agreed to be my mentor. Reframing Survival: A Survivor's Checklist changed my life and my ability to be an effective therapist. The Survivor's Checklist is invaluable in emergency services. I am able to assess a client's situation by asking a few simple questions to identify what needs are not being met, and evaluating the client's willingness to change to get those needs met. The truths I gleaned from Shirley's writings have become more and more relevant over the 20 years I have worked as a therapist. They are simple truths, but oh so powerful. Feelings are not good or bad; they are our body's way of pointing to needs that are not being met or that we are afraid are not going to be met. Today I am willing to assess any situation using the Survivor's Checklist and to take actions in meeting my basic survival needs. -Angela B. Catlett, MS, LPC (Muskogee, Oklahoma) While helping prepare this book for publication, I unexpectedly became beneficiary of its teachings. I had fallen into a debilitating habit that I happened to raise in a conversation with my son on a long road trip we were sharing the driving of. Because I had been telling him about Shirley's book, I spontaneously said that I thought I would ask Shirley & Vic for advice for how to overcome the habit. Because it was several days before we finished the road trip and I returned home, I didn't get around to writing the Midyetts for about a week, by which time I had overcome the habit myself! All from just working on the book, and not even reading it straight through! -Morris Dean, Writer & Editor (North Carolina)

Author Information

SHIRLEY DEANE/MIDYETT is a citizen of both Australia and the United States, speaks with a Texas-American accent, and descends from Welsh and Cherokee Indian heritage. She has been a mental health professional for over 45 years in both Australia and America. She has been a counselor and psychotherapist in early-episode psychosis programs, and with severely mentally ill clients in community mental health and drug rehabilitation centers. She has conducted many training workshops and presented at numerous state, national, and international conferences. Shirley holds a degree in psychology, one of the first Post Baccalaureate Honors Certificates in Biomedical Communications from the University of Texas, and a post-graduate certification in Myofunctional Therapy. An eidetic neuro-psychotherapist combining art and behavioral psychology, she trained with the Eidetic Research and Marketing Analysis Centre in Toronto, Canada. Experienced in both in-patient and out-patient settings, she was on staff with five community mental health centers in America and became supervising manager in three of them. She is a certified addiction specialist and served on staff with two rehabilitation in-patient units, working with men and women on probation and parole. Shirley has worked in Australia since 1986, in both staff and senior-management positions in the mental health field. She served on a team conducting a pilot drug-and-other-addictions program for a major not-for-profit community treatment center, and on a team developing an early-intervention episode psychosis program, and then managed the team that introduced and expanded the pilot program to another region within Western Australia. In addition to counseling, training, program development, and consulting, Shirley worked as a mediation officer with the Australian Department of Justice. Shirley is experienced in working with people in crisis, including providing support in the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. Semi-retired from 2010 until 2014, she traveled the Grey Nomad Caravan trail around Australia, continuing during that time to expand her painting portfolio and gathering insight into the challenges facing seniors coping with retirement and aging issues. In 2015, she returned to Western Australia and volunteered her services to not-for-profit community service organizations, conducting strategic-planning workshops. Actively retired, Shirley continues to maintain her interest in the multitude of changes impacting society, particularly mental fatigue and stress in corporations and the mental-health community. She has accepted several challenges conducting intensive team-building workshops focusing on human communication, reinforcing mental fitness, and addressing stress addictions. In 2016, Shirley became associated with Louise Rabbone of ""The People Catalyst."" She developed and conducted two intensive team-building training programs. One of these week-long intensives was with an Aboriginal community in the outback of Western Australia. She says she is semi-retired. NOT! Victor Midyett learned about the importance of saying what you mean and meaning what you say at his mother's side in India while she and Vic's father faced the many cultural challenges of being missionaries, she a city girl from Brooklyn, New York, and he a farm boy from Tennessee. He grew up having to adjust to the challenges of being understood when attending ?12 different public schools, boarding schools, and correspondence school courses ?in five different? countries, language structures, and? educational systems. Learning how to translate and communicate precisely (and hopefully quickly) meant he could more or less adapt and survive in whatever country and culture he lived in. As an adult in Australia, he began working in the sales profession, where he was often forced to make use of what he had learned about identifying the difference between what a person said he wanted and what he actually wanted. After Vic married Shirley - or Jake, as he calls her - he was faced with another challenge, of learning to help her translate what she was saying in ""American"" into ""Australian."" His ""Missionary Kid"" stories of growing up in India have been published on the weblog Moristotle & Co., and many of his childhood memories were recounted in a book about his father, JT: ANOTHER MIGHTY MIDYETT, by his cousin Randy Somers. Learning to help himself and others to be honest and straightforward, both verbally and in writing, has given Vic great satisfaction in life. His favorite quote is an example of how he strives to live his life, with others and within himself: ""Truth does not alter according to our willingness to accept it."" Editor-in-chief of Moristotle & Co., a weblog with an international staff filing reports, stories, and provocations from around the world. Art, poetry, nature, photos. Writer and editor since mother's teat, in old age manages a weblog beat, sometimes opines in rhyming lines, and chooses words to set in measured feet. Testimonial: ""His editing is impeccable. If I were to die between sending a manuscript and his publication of the edited version, I would bless it from above."" -Roger Owens

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