communication

Reacting or responding?

23 November 2022
Vera Marbach
No comments
Close up of brain networks that can help us respond instead of reactingDo you find yourself reacting rather than responding under stress? We will explore our stressors and how to regulate the effect they have on our autonomic nervous systems. Yes, it is possible! This will help us to respond intentionally and creatively rather than reacting automatically to a stressful situation. We will have access to more areas in our brains even when we find ourselves in stressful situations.
There will be an opportunity to practice the regulating exercises so that they are available to you when you need them…

This is one of the sessions in our new offering “Pick ‘n Mix stress management”. More details here. We would like to put the power back into your hands and give you agency to tailor-make a stress management package that really works for you. Every Wednesday in October from 19:30 – 20:45 we will be facilitating a different topic online. You decide what you  need and when and whether you would like another session. You give yourself time to apply your learnings, implement change and control the amount of new information you are exposed to. Every month our offering will change slightly. Do check in regularly to see what’s been adjusted. We may also try out a different day of the week.

Email contact@tt-tt.co.za to book your place by 18:00 on 22 November.

Am I listening?

16 June 2021
Vera Marbach
4 Comments
Categories: Blog

During the question time after a talk I gave about relationships, a number of questions focussed on older people’s relationships with the younger generation.

“I want the best for her, a future with a degree, a good job…she can wait with the partying for later.”

“The world is not a safe place. When he is out at late, I worry whether he is still okay.”

“I thought we were on the same page, but the next day she was out all night again…”

Older people’s motives are often love and concern, they do have the youth’s best interests at heart. But as I listened to what people were sharing, I also became aware that they were focussing on what they had said and not on what they had heard the younger individuals say…

Read More

DISCONNEC T   

26 April 2021
Vera Marbach
No comments
Categories: Blog, Poems

On Freedom Day it seems appropriate to look back on where we have come from, to celebrate the progress we have made, but also to reflect on why we as a country haven’t progressed further than we have…why we sometimes seem stuck. My husband, Thorsten, wrote this poem in 2019, and was willing to share it with a larger audience:

disconnec-t (poem) – with intro & link

Read More

Parenting with grace

1 March 2021
Vera Marbach
No comments

We want to get our relationships right, particularly our family relationships.  We put in our best efforts as parents.  But we may end up tired, discouraged, and feeling like failures.  Why?  A primary cause is when we set out to control & change others, applying subtle pressure, making rules (mostly unwritten) and attempting to modify their attitudes & responses.  The natural result is exhaustion, depression or a sense of wanting to bail out.

One step towards more healthy relationships is to allow grace to replace manipulation & legislation.  Join Vera Marbach as she describes the difference between grace-filled relationships and curse-filled relationships, where “curse” is an acronym for … – you’ll need to attend the online talk to find out.

There will be opportunity for discussion and interaction.

Cost: R50

Book your place with vera@tt-tt.co.za

Becoming the victim of a mother’s optimism

27 February 2021
Vera Marbach
No comments
Categories: Blog

Most of the time, I would call myself an optimist. I can’t seem to help myself – I see potential in other people, including my children. I believe in their ability to bounce back when faced with challenges, to find those inner resources to get up and try again, even when it is tough.

But sometimes, I voice this belief too quickly. They do not feel heard and argue the case for their perceived “victimhood”. In my efforts to encourage them to rediscover their agency and act positively in their circumstances, I may inadvertently contribute to the opposite. They feel they are also victims of my deaf ears.

Read More

Our first Diversity Dialogue online!

31 August 2020
Vera Marbach
No comments
Categories: Blog, Diversity Dialogue

A reason to celebrate – on Saturday 22 August we facilitated our first online Diversity Dialogue! We appreciate everyone who brought their time and energy into that space, especially those who felt some trepidation at doing something new technologically! Our topic was “Sensitizing the Church to Gender Based Violence”. We would like to share some highlights…

It was apparent during the dialogue, that there are many churches where the teaching seems to be more about rules and gender roles than about Jesus’ love for sinners. In many churches, women do not feel they are seen for who they are because they feel they have to fit into a small and rigid role and cannot be authentically themselves. There was a sense of mourning and lament for the loss of their potential skills and talents that could have contributed to life together but were not enjoyed by the community.

In both community life and Bible teaching, we need to develop an equal focus on the perpetrator and the victim. Bible teaching should be about the real people described in the Bible, with their faults and sins. The heroes of the faith should not be “sugar-coated”. In our practical lives, we can accept all broken people including those who are aggressive or alcoholics, and deal with their hurt. We can work with men who are in pain, allowing them space to heal before their pain leads to violence.

Read More

Missing your smile…

29 July 2020
Vera Marbach
2 Comments
Categories: Blog

When last did you see a smile on someone’s “exposed” face? I have found myself looking forward to whatsapp video calls where I can see peoples’ unmasked faces…and that got me thinking about smiles, facial expressions, how much communication happens non-verbally and what effect masks will have on our communication now and in the future. So I thought I would write something upbeat about finding alternative opportunities for communicating and smiling more with our eyes. A quick look at the internet and my blogpost would be done. That was Monday – I have emerged almost 3 days later with more questions than answers. I did not realise that the science of the smile is so complicated!

Apparently there are between 19 and 50 different smiles meaning different things. The consensus seems to be that 6 of them are positive. The rest happen when we are experiencing pain, discomfort, misery, anger, contempt, embarrassment, confusion, surprise and horror. (Some of the experiments that demonstrated this are horrific!) We also tend to smile when we are lost and when we are lying. There really seems to be a smile for every occasion! So, how do we actually understand what a smile means?

Read More

Grumpy on Social Media?

8 May 2020
Vera Marbach
No comments
Categories: Blog

As I browse through some conversations on social media, I am noticing that there seem to be a lot of grumpy people out there, taking things personally, and attacking each other at the slightest provocation. I am going to assume that most of us who are active on social media are part of the group of workers who are not able to return to work under level 4 rules, and are therefore still spatial distancing at home, and isolated from most of the people we usually socialise with.

Three stages of reaction to prolonged isolation have been identified, as “a first stage of heightened anxiety, a second stage of settling down to routine marked by depression, and a third stage of anticipation marked by emotional outbursts, aggressiveness, and rowdy behaviour.” 1

At this stage many of us are experiencing powerful emotions like anxiety, frustration, impatience and fear around what the future holds for us. It is easy to become caught in an ever tightening spiral of increasing tension, and this makes it so much easier to bite off somebody else’s virtual head. Anger feels so much more powerful than depression and fear. There may even be an element of addiction to it. Long-term, where are these angry outbursts going to take us? Do we really want to go there?

I think we need to give ourselves and each other a good measure of grace as we honestly ask ourselves some hard questions:

Read More

The freedom to look beyond the screen

27 April 2020
Vera Marbach
No comments
Categories: Blog

Today we celebrate Freedom Day without the opportunity to attend a large gathering of like-minded people, without the feeling of celebrating our progress from the past together in physical presence, without the heated discussions grappling with the strong hold that the past still seems to have on us. Instead, there are live-streamed events, and perhaps we will have the possibility of an online interaction which touches on some of these topics…

Lately, I have been part of a few online conversations, where it was obvious that people are misunderstanding each other. The reasons are complex. How does the isolation of physical distancing influence the mix? In South Africa we have a history of living in our own bubbles with little awareness of what other’s reality looks like. In lock-down, with minimal exposure to others, we look through the screen of our opaque bubble and see that we are facing the same storm out there, feel that we are burdened with the same loss of freedom. Yes, we are slightly aware that there are differences in people’s experiences, but we’re all in this together, aren’t we? Let’s have a closer look.

Read More

Dialogues virtual and face-to-face

21 January 2020
Vera Marbach
2 Comments
Categories: Blog

I have tried a few times to get involved in uncomfortable discussions online or in whatsapp groups, sometimes with people I know personally, sometimes with people I have not met face-to-face. I confess that it has generally not gone very well. Even in the groups where I have known the majority of people, I have been misunderstood and have misunderstood others. The conversation has landed us in unfamiliar territory, where the expectation we have of “being known” by others, of sharing a common history of face-to-face contact, has been hollowed out. We feel unfamiliar, even to ourselves, strangers communicating with other strangers.

As a result, I tend to “listen” online more than I “speak”. Lately I have noticed some unwelcome changes in myself as I “listen”.

Read More
css.php
Next
Our nervous system and resilience

   What is the connection between our nervous system and resilience? How does our nervous system react when we are…
Copied!