Healers, Helpers and Guides: Stormy Times – The True Gift

Every event in our life serves a purpose and provides us with an opportunity to learn and grow. Sometimes, when we don’t yet understand this, we blame others and move away from the lesson, rather than walk through the pain with an open heart.

In her book, Healers, Helpers and Guides: Stormy Times – The True Gift, Bertie looks back at the experiences in her life, the adversities, that actually prepared her for her purpose and mission.

As she shares her inner journey with an enormous depth of understanding of those events as illusions, based on her perceptions at the time, her reality transforms and her perspective shifts. With this awakening the true gift emerges, as she finds that she no longer needs to remain stuck in her history.

A new sense of freedom and lightness comes forth, that is filled with love and gratitude for those people, places and events, that brought her to this present moment. So familiar to many of us, this is a healing concept that mankind struggles with daily, as each of us sort out those events that appear to be beyond explanation hoping that someday we will can see the True Gift in our Stormy Times.

What readers are saying about:

Healers, Helpers and Guides: Stormy Times – The True Gift

In Stormy Times: The True Gift, Bertie challenges the reader to embrace life’s adversities as opportunities to learn and grow. She shares her own inner journey along with strategies for transforming reality by changing one’s perceptions of it. Your Stormy Times – is a True Gift to us! Vicki Phillips, author of Personal Development, a Curriculum for At-risk Youth, Empowering Discipline and Turning Them Around

So many things in life we know and understand yet we have had to revisit them from time to time with a new perspective in order to define and assimilate these awakenings, own them and then move on to a higher plain. Stormy Times: The True Gift exemplifies this shift and reminds us to seek that new level of thinking within ourselves. Shirley Brackett, Family Living Teacher Author, Become a More Positive Person

You have taken some of the most challenging issues of our time, synthesized and discussed them as if you and the reader were talking as friends, sitting together in the same room and having a conversation. Thank you, Bertie, for sharing this powerful journey so as to guide us as we follow our own. Dr. Pat Goff, Ed.D., Associate Professor of Health, Psychology and Wellness, Department of Diagnosis Palmer College of Chiropractic

I like this book very much. I took a great deal of the wisdom to heart and I learned from it. Those understandings I should have had years ago while teaching and raising a daughter. A great deal of thought and experience is evident. Your books surely help many people. Margaret Wallace, Librarian

From reading your autobiographical sketches, it is obvious you have learned to cherish those stormy times as true gifts. Nice reworking of “old stuff” into the present moment. Jyude A. Allbright, author Soul Steps; Power Stepping to Recovery

This book contains so many important concepts delivered with words from the heart. Thank you. Rod Garreton, Ph.D., Illinois Resource Center

The depth of Bertie’s perception and understanding of such a challenging topic changes lives as she brings so many answers to life’s questions within reach. This book is timeless. Marlene Joan Perok, Vocalist, Reflections of Memorable Songs Composer and Musician

Bertie’s eagerness to shake the Healing Tree of Knowledge led her down an incredible journey of self-discovery. Her books offer healing lessons with life-changing guidance. Kathleen Rusin Acker, Editor, Heart and Soul Connections Author, Love Takes Time

Healers, Helpers and Guides: Stormy Times – The True Gift

Table of Contents

Introduction
1. Setting the stage for Change:

• Everything Serves a Purpose
• Traditional and Restructured Systems

2. Self-Esteem: Why Bother?

• Indicators of Low Self-Esteem
• Traits of High Self-Esteem
• Lopsided Perceptions and Choices to Grow

3. Feeling and Other Illusions:

Stretching Beyond Our Comfort Zone

• Activity 1 – Ground Rules for Group Sharing
• Activity 2 – Experiencing Our Feelings
• Activity 3 – Prioritizing Perceptions
• Activity 4 – Planning Board
• Activity 5 – Choosing Discussion Topics
• Activity 6 – “Setting the Table” for Discussion
• Activity 7 – Follow-up Exercise
• Conflict! Conflict! Conflict!
• Activity 8 – Strategies for the Resolution of Conflict

We Just Didn’t Know It Was Our Path in Life

4. Life’s Challenges: Preparing to Take Action

Bill of Rights for Children of Divorced Parents

• Activity 9 – Issues Affecting Our Lives
• Activity 10 – Defining Moments in Our Life
• Activity 11 – A Letter of Gratitude

Believe You Can and You Will

5. Co-dependency: It’s All in Our Perception

• Activity 12 – Co-dependency: Choices and Beliefs
• Activity 13 – Shifting a Perspective
• Activity 14 – Empowering Self Worth: A Personal Inventory
• Activity 15 – Your Letter of Recommendation

6. The Bridge Connecting Self-Esteem, Chemical Dependency and Healing

• What Qualifies the Problem Drinker?
• Forms of Denial
• As a Young Person, Do You Need Alateen?

7. The Family System: A Balancing Act

In Which House Do You Live?

The Family Mobile: Behaviors and Perceptions

• Scapegoat

Perspectives: Neutralizing the Charges

• Liability or Asset
• Mascot
• Ants in My Pants
• Hero

The University Wouldn’t Take Him

• Lost Child
• Will She (He) Ever Stop Yelling?
• Activity 16 – Your Family System

8. Chemical Kids – Toxic Kids

• Kids in Pain Are Difficult to Teach
• Signs of a Problem – Chemical Kids
• Common Personality Changes
• Why Do You Force Me to Talk To A Chemical
• When All I Want Is Your Heart
• Behaviors Often Influenced by Chemical Dependency
• Outwitted

9. Problem Ownership, Boundaries and the Co- dependent Enabler

Activity 17 – Problem Identification

• Problem Solving Methods
• Boundaries, Limits and Consequences

Whose Job Is It?
Activity 18 – Boundaries and Limits

• Issues of Anger and Control

Activity 19 – Control Issues Identified

• Do You Empower or Enable?
• Where Do We Go From Here?

10. Strategies That Build Resiliency

Activity 20 -The Twenty-Four Hour Challenge

Strategies That Build Resiliency

1.  Choose not to be a victim
2.  Identify the problem and understand who owns it
3. Separate from the problem and do not own it unless you are part of the problem
4. Acknowledge that you are powerless over another’s choice of behavior
5. Change your reaction to their behavior
6. Clearly define the boundaries for their choices
7. Be consistent with reasonable and achievable consequences for any violation of these boundaries
8. Embrace with love that which we cannot control.
9. Take as much time to care of yourself as you have so generously given to others
10. Practice, practice and practice taking care of yourself so that others can no longer push your buttons

To Embrace That Which We Wish To Run From Takes Love

11. Gratitude or Forgiveness: Which Path Do You Choose?

• Types of Abuse
• A Shifting Perspective
• Just For Today – I Have a Choice

12. Parenting Through the Eyes of the Child

• Parents as Partners in the Learning Process
• Creating A Consistent Plan of Action
• Building Healthy Relationships with Your Child
• Ten Commandments of Good Listening
• Please Listen To Me
• What Adolescents Need
• The Group Experience: A Chance to Sort Things Out
• Parenting Group Meeting
• Follow-up Parenting Workshops
• Things to Remember

13. Parenting Our Parents: A Family Affair

• Sisters, Brothers and Other Relatives
• We No Longer Danced Her Dance
• Heaven’s Gift

14. The Healing That Took A Lifetime

• The Estate: A Peaceful Settlement

 

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