Alison’s Blog
Vicarious trauma and creating sanctuary
June 10th, 2022 This past week, within a span of 24 hours... I learned that a colleague’s friend since college was murdered when she encountered an intruder stealing eggs on her property...talked with a teacher friend who showed me a video of her six-year student whose hands (with cuts [...]
Why Veterans Isolate/The Many Faces of Moral Injury
By Alison Perry A Vietnam era veteran weeps in my office repeatedly out of regret for sleeping with young girls forced into prostitution while stationed in Korea. An OEF/OIF era veteran sustains a lifelong back injury as a result of someone else’s poor judgement. He is then marginalized by [...]
Soldier’s Heart: Harvesting The Wisdom Of Suffering
"Steadfast love means solidarity in need enacted with transformative strength. What human persons need and human community need most is abiding, committed, passionate transformative solidarity." - Walter Brueggemann Richard Rohr speaks about “the authority of those who have suffered.” I have also heard it said that "the seed of [...]
My Vietnam “Brothers”
I started working at the Portland VA Medical Center in 2005, a year after my brother returned from flying Apaches during the invasion of Iraq. In 2005, not only was there a flood of veterans coming into the VA from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, but many Vietnam [...]
Remembering 9/11
Seventeen years ago, on October 11th 2001, I started graduate school with the intention of becoming a licensed mental health counselor and going into private practice. That evening I attended a new student orientation at Portland State University with about 150 counseling students. Exactly one month prior to the [...]