Recovery

July 15, 2018

Safety

As you know, unless you’re visiting my blog for the first time, I’m a nurse in a remote corner of north-east Arnhem Land. I work in an Indigenous community and live at the edge of another, half an hour away. Recently some young kids broke into the nurses house next door. They took a small blue-tooth speaker and some food. The Aboriginal Medical Service I work for quickly responded by installing security screens on the windows and doors on both our houses. Nurses safety is a priority.

When I started working in remote Australia the Cape York community of Aurukun was my first job and home for two years. It was often in the Queensland media for riots or some other violent infringement. Family and friends used to ask me if I felt safe working there. I always replied that I would feel safer walking down the main street of Aurukun in the middle of the night than my home town of Maryborough because the locals fought among themselves, long standing family feuds that had nothing to do with me.

Safety can be an illusion though. Last Monday morning I woke to a Facebook message from a friend, only it wasn’t really her. Her account had been hacked. The message was about her winning a lottery and my name being on the list. “She” directed me to accept a friend request from a “Ruth Edward” who was the Facebook manager of “360 National Lottery”. But I had to pay an administration fee to collect my winnings. An old scam dressed up in a new guise and yes I fell for it. I was so certain that the first message was from my friend I didn’t even think to pick up the phone to call her and check. I lost $15,000, my savings for a new car. I hadn’t heard of this scam and the only place on the internet I found anything about it was WA ScamNet, a government consumer affairs site that has since been very helpful.

Safety is multi-faceted. Physical safety that needs to be guarded by screens, fences and commonsense. Emotional and mental health safety which needs protective behaviours from high conflict or manipulative people. And Cyber-safety from fraud and identity theft with the resultant violation left with victims of this crime. Is safety from Cyber-crime a priority of the Australian government? In Western Australia alone 18 cases of this Facebook scam have been reported since April this year and over a $100,000 lost to it. The 360 National Lottery website is still on the internet.

So while remote area nurses continue to appeal to state governments and health agencies for safer housing and work safe policies, domestic violence organisations promote having a safety plan and therapists and writers suggest learning behaviours to protect ourselves from high-conflict people close to us. I suggest that Cyber-safety also become a priority  by learning all we can about it and spreading the word.

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July 8, 2018

Difficult People

I’ve just finished reading this book by Bill Eddy, president of the High Conflict Institute. He is a family law specialist and a clinical social worker. He’s seen his fair share of difficult people. But you don’t have to be a specialist to have encountered people at work, socially or in our private lives who disrupt things and cause us problems.

Before I took up my first position as a nurse in a remote area clinic I attended a workshop in Brisbane called, “Dealing with Difficult people in the Workplace.” I met the manager of the clinic I was soon to fly to there. In what I later understood , she said in her straightforward and abbreviated style, “I’m here because I’ve got a difficult person in the clinic. She’ll be in charge when you arrive, just avoid her!” There’s a vast number of books advising how to leave, avoid or manage high-conflict people in our lives. If it were as simple as “just avoiding them” we’d all have peaceful lives.

Bill Eddy notes that, “…you can’t identify an HCP (high conflict personality) by their profession or by how much other people trust them. In fact, highly admired leaders and members of the helping professions (teachers, physicians, therapists, nurses etc), may be slightly more likely to have personality disorders than people in other lines of work, because of an attraction to the intimate relationships and authority positions in these professions.” Interesting thought. I’ve certainly come across disruptive people working in hospitals and clinics among vulnerable patients and kind-hearted staff.

I recommend this book for at least becoming more aware of, spotting warning signs and managing relationships and stressful interactions with difficult people, wherever we might find them. And for recognising when we ourselves might be that person.

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October 9, 2016

Fragments

Do you enjoy fragments? I do. A glimpse of a strangers face, a remembered line of an old song, a whispered conversation on a bus, a delicious aroma teasing from someone else’s house, the middle of a movie you haven’t got time to watch till the end, a dream that vanishes on waking, a phrase you just have to copy down…

They arouse my curiosity and imagination more than any completed experience.

Australian writer Elizabeth Jolley, wrote fragments  on scraps of paper for years before she was first published in her fifties. She was too busy raising a family and working at an assortment of jobs to have enough time to write at length and at leisure. I was one of her many correspondents whom she  encouraged to write short notes about the weather, landscape, overheard conversations, because I too had a full life with little time. She was quoted in 1986 as saying: “If anybody had asked to see a work in progress it would have been lots of bits of paper with scribbles on.”

A fragment is defined as “an isolated or incomplete part”. But, although incomplete, it is at the same time complete in itself because it contains the potential of what it may become…a story, poem, song, healing memory, nourishing meal, something understood, a puzzle solved.

Fragments allow mystery into our lives and curiosity leads us on….

April 4, 2016

Beauty

Losses and griefs of all kinds fade a sense of beauty out of our lives. We  forget what we once appreciated and held dear, even what we love and who we are. During the past two weeks remote area nurses in Australia have grieved the murder of one of our colleagues. After the first few days of shocked incomprehension someone on our Facebook site encouraged us to post photos of things that captured our reasons for doing the hard work that we do. The beauty in those shared photos was varied, individual and ultimately uplifting…some were of landscapes and adventures, others were of new-born babies and healthy mothers.Many of us will always see beauty in the shape of a Royal Flying Doctor plane coming in to land after a long night of waiting. Beauty is as unique as a snowflake, it’s to be cherished and nurtured in our lives wherever we find it and however we define it.

I’ve had my share of losses and difficulties since I began this blog site. I had a desire to share my experiences and insights from my remote area life, but beauty quietly disappeared for a while and all I could see and sense around me was a dull, drab landscape. The gentle energy of beauty hid in the shadows from me…until the past few weeks, for all kinds of reasons, and none in particular…colours are appearing again and curiosity beckons me forward. Life is interesting and I’ve picked up my camera and wandered outside.