Moving Towards Forgiveness: A Workshop for Healthcare Providers Encountering Trauma
In March 2015, a group of healthcare professionals that work with clients who have experienced trauma took part in a Spin a Yarn, Weave a Life workshop entitled Moving Toward Forgiveness. The fabric shown here was created with paper bearing written and drawn responses to a prompt about the Boston Marathon bomber, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. At the time of the workshop, reports about his trial were rampant in the news media, reactivating memories of a traumatic community event. The image below has been mapped so the original words and images that participants created on paper, now transformed as woven fabric, can be experienced.
Roll your cursor over the fabric surface or tap your touchscreen to activate link targets next to corresponding identification tags and view the expressive content embedded in this community-generated weaving. Pop-up images may be expanded in a new window.
Weaving photo: Laura Beth Reese
Moving Toward Forgiveness was supported by Violence Transformed 2015 with funding provided by The Arnold P. Gold Foundation, an organization advancing humanistic medicine.
The Reaches of Trauma: Multidisciplinary Perspectives from the Field for Healthcare Providers
Spin a Yarn, Weave a Life worked with healthcare providers of the Cambridge Health Alliance Victims of Violence program to design a workshop for professionals and trainees at a one-day conference in October 2013. We presented the group with a “collaborative loom” stretched with paper yarns made by participants at the June 2013 Cambridge River Festival. Written reflections by local trauma-informed professional trainees were interwoven, through a collective process, with River Festival Community yarns as part of a hands-on activity.
(click image to view slide show)