#project patch

[patchgaming]

We're super happy to announce our brand new website! You can find plenty of information on there, and it's a great resource to show people if you want someone to know what Patch has to offer! Come check us out over at https://www.patchgaming.org/

[sdanders]

Love and Respect in the Family with Dr. Emerson Eggerichs [Podcast]

Love and Respect in the Family with Dr. Emerson Eggerichs [Podcast]

Thanks to Project Patch for this excellent podcast by Dr. Emerson Eggerichs. Project Patch is an organization dedicated to serving families and troubled youth.

http://content.blubrry.com/todaysfamilyexperience/Love_and_Repect_with_Dr_Emerson_Eggerichs_Podcast_.mp3

  Please see Project Patch’s podcast page for highlights from the podcast with Dr. Eggerichs.

  Related Posts

Parenting Children…

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[sdanders]

Parenting Children With Special Needs (free podcast)

Parenting Children With Special Needs (free podcast)

Parenting children is tough, but parenting children with special needs is quite another ballgame. In fact, some studies reveal that marriages that involve a special needs child have a 80-90% divorce rate.*

As a parent of a child with special needs, I was interviewed by Chuck Hagele, executive director of Project Patch. Project Patch is an organization dedicated to serving families and troubled…

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[sdanders]

Blended Families Podcast

I was recently interviewed about blended families by Chuck Hagele, executive director of Project Patch. Project Patch is an organization dedicated to serving families and troubled youth.

The podcast is below. Enjoy!

  http://content.blubrry.com/todaysfamilyexperience/Blended_Families_with_Shawn_Anderson.mp3

  You can also hear the podcast on itunes.

I also work with blended families at the Nort…

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[uforchange]

The Patch Project: @100in1dayTO by Keisha

Had a lot of fun with PATCH last Saturday as part of 100 in 1 Day Toronto!! I've painted murals before but only on cupboards and indoor walls, and only with acrylic paint. Having the chance to learn how to use aerosol spray paint and contribute to some beautiful public art was a great experience, and a wonderful chance to meet some new people, creative and passionate about what they do. Can't wait to be involved with more PATCH stuff! :)

By Keisha 

[sdanders]

Project Patch Featured on Dr. Phil

I do contract work with Project Patch, a treatment facility for at-risk youth. The organization was recently featured on the Dr. Phil show. Project Patch is providing Danielle, an at-risk teen, a full scholarship to their treatment program. Go to the 30.30 mark to see Dr. Phil mention Project Patch. Thanks Project Patch!

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[empironic-blog]

Martyr Crux

Comforting the part of me that doesn’t want to live in this universe, that has unfolded dark possibility and would rather not take the chance. Accepting that the voice of conscience never left, that I just learned to ignore it. Returning to the place in time where the spirit leaves body, the short circuit that reroutes the world around itself. I remember when my emotions couldn’t find me. I remember when I was sure everyone could see me better than I could see myself. The hardest part of this whole thing is admitting that I did it to myself, that I allowed my mind to be taken. If that idea had been presented to me by an outside source I would have snapped. When telling people about the cult I used to claim that nobody could have survived unbroken, that no mind was impermeable. I would lay out the paths to submission and the ever increasing consequences for rebellion and claim that losing your mind was better than losing your speech, your space, your food, your time. This is the program. Accept it. Run it. Be our machine. We can fix you. Those who would rather die than be controlled once seemed so foolish to me, before I knew I was worth fighting for. One of my peers was a stonewaller. For hours everyone in our tiny world would sit in a circle and tell him how it would be easier to submit, how we had his best interests in mind and how everything would be easier if he went along with the program. He would just smirk. They told him that God wanted him to obey, and he said his business with God was none of theirs. They informed him he wouldn’t be allowed to speak and he said he didn’t care much for talking to them anyway. They fed him gruel and rotten vegetables and he made the face of a fed beast. They made him dig holes and fill them back in again every day for weeks and he thought only of the strength he was gaining and what he would do with it once free. His strength was his. His silence was his. They could throw his body to the ground and crush it with linebackers and gouge his jaw with bony thumbs and he would only cackle. Numb, he claimed. Too old for this shit. Beyond their law, beyond this world. Now I did not see his nobility until much later. To me in those moments he was a highly irrational individual, insane even. He would not could not contain the independent drive I had come to see as the source of my problems. He did not attempt to restrain his impulses, those deadly ghosts I was struggling to cage and extinguish. Within their firegrid of invasive law his invincible will appeared shamefully self destructive. Why wouldn’t you tell us that change comes from within? Were you ignorant or did you just really need something to sell? There was a time when the highest value I could see in myself was the ability to accept, to endure. I would brag about my brutal vaccinations against pain and disgust. I cut off my choice, my ability to enjoy. They tried to change me from the outside in, squash my body in a mold while the same old fear festered. Maybe the definition of health is being okay with yourself and your world. They set me at war with myself and my world. Have you ever looked in a mirror, taken off your glasses, and found yourself to be an oozing corpse? Have you ever lifted the skin off love and found raw mechanical power? Have you ever amputated your personality? Your sexuality? Have you ever believed yourself an agent of evil, deserving only control or death? This violence brings you down to its level. It snags up from binary hell, pierces all the pretty shells we dance around in and holds your face to the grinding light of absolute. You will stop existing. Your path has brought you here. There is no escape from the present. You are your body, and it can be controlled and degraded. This is what a man can be, this is the violence he can deliver in good conscience, this is what he can believe he deserves. Find comfort in domination. The moment when you snap. When thought whooshes out the airlock and there is only sound and light and motion. Come my beast, taste the color of the pain. Roar sob thrash maul quiver blast smash stall. My lungs in hummingbird hyperdrive, beating my skull against the wall. wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong burn burn burn burn burn burn burn burn burn. The linebackers descend, a coffin of giant hands revokes my right to destroy myself. Held. Revoked. The three hundred pound man who a week before had covered my hands in shit and hydrochloric acid beams down firm conviction with his bright blue eyes, his curly bleached mullet dangling greasy strands. What scares me most is that I could see there wasn’t any part of me he was afraid of. I was a boy to him, as ordered and defined and expected as a deer or a truck or a wife. No part of me was sacred, I was knowable and in need of management and correction. Three hundred and fifty pushups had been assigned my scrawny fourteen year old form by the scruffy seventeen year old whose parents beat him every week of his life and who was eager to implement his structures of domination. I had earned the ire of the authorities and been given a consequence that let anyone give me fifty pushups for talking in a funny voice, playing dumb, or seeking attention, and fifty more if I argued. A war on my personality from all sides. Me and this boy had been arranging the salad bar when a miscommunication prompted him to give me fifty pushups. I pleaded my innocence and pointed out his clear cruelty and the punishment quickly escalated. This boy was my roommate. The linebackers waited for me to breathe normally before enforcing his edict. I didn’t stop crying as I heaved out justice. To understand the nature of power. To be completely inert in the face of injustice. To live in a sealed bubble of violence and repression. To have your needs and rights be the most dangerous things in your life. To identify with your oppressors. To accept the violent love, to live in the mind of another. God didn’t stop it. God didn’t stop it. God smiled. To go to a place where health is to ritually cut off little bits of yourself. To believe it is the only good place, that all other modes of life deserve death. To return to the land of the living as a prophet of the scarred. To know that you are not James Bond strapped to that table. You are you, and you are weak. You will crack under torture, other men may have the luxury of giving themselves the benefit of the doubt but you are a confirmed bitch. And it could happen again, who wouldn’t torture you under the right circumstances? Tired faces on the bus, I can see their potential for cruelty. And people trust this mob they call a government, they let the war criminals walk free. Excuse my harsh angles, I’m digesting something nasty. Imagine my surprise when I woke up to find the whole world in a cult. I really thought I had escaped. I used to think of getting over something as getting to a place where it’s no longer real. Where past betrayal could be laughed off as a hypothetical, made as unreal as the future by the expansion of time and space. But my feelings will only be more desperately destructive if they know they’re going to die soon. I have to be present. I have to let my past be present with itself. I have to conceive of future chapters without dark pages from the past slipping themselves in. This is my story. My circumstance is mine, it always has been. These feels are real, I must give them a home. I will not destroy myself out of spite. This strength is mine.