Suicide Hotline lessons, Relationships, and some small catchups

Sadly little in the way of pictures as my comments in the last one suggested, but I've been busy this week and I've been busy with a lot of things this week. I'll try and work on readability with my next more major one.

Annoyingly, I made a mistake with last week, as they went off schedule a little and did the last module on the same day, leaving me a bit confused with things as they went this time. Fortunantly, I fairly heavily studied at least the parts of information we would have got, on the subject of loss and grief. Pretty simple, the main lesson being to understand different people value things and not to find 'minor' losses as minor to other people. Being the greenie and misanthrope I am, that's not a hard concept.

This week, the topic was relationships. Basically looking at patterns for people in crisis and how effects can ripple and the amount of work relationships have with other things. That is to say, death of immediate family can adversely affect relationships with friends or more distant family. A large focus that came with that was the concept of reframing, most Americans should be familar with framing with certain events in the last decade, rephrasing something that would be negative to sound positive. A surge in the war as opposed to an escalation being the obvious example. This is a minor extension of this, basically trying to nail in stratergies for how to turn what a caller's said is a problem and find positives within it.

Tying to it, another large focus of the later half of the day was determining meaning and feeling, a bit of a trick to get around caller evasiveness, and trying to phrase questions to figure out more detail of their circumstances, then narrow it down to the immediate things that need to be addressed. This I've not been doing well with, apparently it was most stressed last week. But it's a solid area to improve on.

Yet again, the session was accompanied by not one but two people that work the hotline regularly. Again talk of the actual hotline work, this time a lot of it was spent on the more sexual based calls the hotline tends to get. As horrific as it must be to most people, was wonderful to me. It actually really does sound like an appealing job. Very varied and interesting. That may say more negatively about me then it does how good a job is, but it's important to get work you want.

On the subject of work that's wanted. Due to the continued stuff with my unemployment, I've finally finished sorting things out with Open University Australia, a distance education service that blows my local university out of the water, and actually has crazy things like minors I want to do, and come the end of the next month, I'll be trying them for a period of time to see if it's a viable option for me. This would be amazing as I'll actually be able to at least start on my psychology education while keeping enough free time for the hotline's practice. While the course will be considered full time, keeping me out of trouble. Had I taken that damn awful job, I'd of never had the time to even sort this out, let alone discover it, make sure it'll work with circumstances and how it does compared to local choices and such.

Of course, study from home is hard, distractions are going to be a lethal threat and something I need to work on intensely. I've had poor luck in the past with this.