Intimate partner violence leaves long-term effects. Survivors often struggle with issues of safety, self-esteem, and trusting their own ability to make healthy decisions and enter future relationships. This revolutionary treatment method uses art therapy to guide individuals through a journey of self-exploration, helping them to re-discover their confidence and grow beyond their experiences. Each sector of the Empowerment Wheel is supported by a creative project designed to help individuals examine their experience of red flags, boundaries, locus of control, relationship authenticity, self-talk, and integrated self. With this method, clients will learn to recognise the echoes of relationship abuse and begin to rebuild their self-esteem and individual sense of empowerment. Grounded in the authors' extensive experience in the field of trauma and recovery, the Empowerment Wheel provides a measured, client-directed way to guide survivors of intimate partner violence through the healing process to build a healthy, empowered future.

Focusing on the term empowerment this book examines the various meanings given to the concept of empowerment and the many ways power can be expressed - in personal relationships and in wider social interactions.

Nothing destroys trust like sexual betrayal. Beyond broken vows, a woman who discovers that the man she loves has been viewing pornography or having an affair must deal with devastating blows to her self-image and self-worth. She must grapple with the fact that the man she thought she knew has lied and deceived her. She may even bear the brunt of shame and judgment when the people around her find out. Drawing from her experience both as a marriage and family therapist and a woman who personally experienced the devastation of sexual betrayal, Dr. Sheri Keffer walks women impacted by betrayal through the pain and toward recovery. She explains how the trauma of betrayal affects our minds, bodies, spirits, and sexuality. She offers practical tools for dealing with emotional triggers and helps women understand the realities of sexual addiction. And she shows women how to practice self-care, develop healthy boundaries, protect themselves from abuse or manipulation, and find freedom from the burden of shame and guilt.

Explore the role the bicycle played in the women's liberation movement.

Why would most people endure unwanted or unsatisfying touch, rather than speak up for their own boundaries and desires? It's a question with a myriad of answers - and one that Dr. Betty Martin has explored in her 40+ years as a hands-on practitioner, first as a chiropractor and later as a Somatic Sex Educator, Certified Surrogate Partner and Sacred Intimate. In her client sessions, she noticed a pattern wherein many clients would "allow" or go along with discomfort or unease rather than speak up for what they wanted or didn't want. Betty discovered there was a major component missing for people -- the confidence that we have a choice about what is happening to us. In her framework, "The Wheel of Consent(R)" Betty traces the fundamental roots of consent back to our childhood conditioning. As children, we are taught that to be "good" we must ignore our body's discomfort and be compliant: to finish our food even if we're full, to go to bed - even if we're not tired, to let relatives hug and kiss us even if we don't want to. We learn that our feelings don't matter more than what is happening, and that we don't have a choice but to go along, whether or not we want it. As adults, this conditioning remains with us until we have an opportunity to unlearn it, which is why consent violations are often only called out after the violation has occurred - because we have not been taught or empowered to notice our boundaries, much less value or express our internal signals as the unwanted action is happening. In this book, Betty guides the reader through the Wheel of Consent framework, and shares practices to help us recover the ability to notice what we want and set clear boundaries. While the practices are based on exchanges of touch, they can also be learned without touch. In these practices, we discover that the Art of Giving includes knowing our own limits so we can be more generous within those limits, and not give beyond our capacity - a common problem which creates feelings of resentment or martyrdom. We also discover that the Art of Receiving invites us to notice and ask for what we really want, and not just what we think we are supposed to want. This knowledge, and its embodied practice, is foundational for creating clear agreements and bringing more satisfaction into relationships. While much of consent education focuses on noticing what we don't want, or prevention of violation, Betty has developed a "pleasure-forward" approach to teaching consent. By first accessing and awakening (sometimes re-awakening) our bodies' relationship to pleasure and what we want, we can practice noticing and verbalizing what we don't want. Such an approach provides a more holistic frame in which to unlearn the childhood conditioning that taught us to be silent and compliant, and in which individuals can learn to ask for what they want and state what they don't, in a more empowered way. The implications of this approach to consent education extends beyond touch and intimate relationships. When we forget how to notice what we really want, we lose our inner compass. When we continue to go along with things we don't feel are right, we lose our ability to speak up against injustice. This has a profound effect on society. We allow all manner of inequality, corruption, theft of natural resources and our planet's future health - because "going along with it" feels normal. The Wheel of Consent offers a deeply nuanced way to practice consent as an agreement that brings integrity, responsibility, and empowerment into human interaction, starting with touch and relationships, and further expanding our understanding of consent to social issues of equality and justice.

For more than 150 years, empowering practices have been used by social workers in their work with families, but the techniques of today differ significantly from those of the pioneers or even from those of a few years ago. Today's practitioners recognize that empowering others is impossible; social workers can, however, assist others as they empower themselves. This book integrates time-honored approaches with today's more modest goals, mindful of what empowerment can and cannot do. Synthesizing several theoretical supports—the strengths perspective, system theory, theories of family well-being, and theories of coping—the author responds to the question "What works?" with today's families in need. Practice illustrations are provided throughout to bring concepts to life and, more important, to present families describing their own experiences with achieving empowerment.

Cheryl Sanders here sharpens the agenda of black liberation by offering both a fresh reading of historical black religion and a distinctive approach to Christian ethics. Arguing that the experience of oppression has been the catalyst for black moral life and thought, Sanders traces several paths or approaches that African American Christians have taken in moving from victimization to moral agency: testimony, protest, uplift, cooperation, achievement, remoralization, and ministry. Informative and engaging, earnest and constructive, Sanders's book envisions a new way of empowering people to take responsibility for their moral and spiritual development.