A Career and Life Planning Guide for Women Survivors

Dr. Patricia A. Murphy is the author of Making the Connections: Women, Work & Abuse. She was awarded the John D. and Catherine T. MacAurthur Foundation's first Women's Health Policy Fellowship for Spring, 1994 at the University of Illi­nois Center for Research on Women in Gender in Chicago. During that time, she directed The Trauma Narratives and Americans with Disabilities Act Writing Project. This participatory action research project resulted in the monograph, The Edge of A Large Hole: Writings on the Request for Reasonable Accommodation under the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990. She is the founder and director of The Making the Connections Project, as an affiliate of the Union Institute Center for Women, Washington, DC The Project's purpose was to bring the vocational reha­bilitation analysis to the anti-abuse communities and traumatic abuse analysis to the rehabilitation communities. In July 1994, at the Reframing Women's Health Sum­mer Institute sponsored by the University of Illinois at Chicago Center for Research on Women and Gender, The Making the Connections Project was transformed into the Making the Connections Intercultural Network, an international advocacy orga­nization addressing the issues of women, work, disability, abuse, and violence. Dr. Murphy is the winner of the 1991 Most Innovative Rehabilitation Procedure Award given to her by the National Association of Rehabilitation Professionals in the Pri­vate Sector.

Section I: The Tools-Gathering the Words of Power 1. Introduction 2. Glossary 3. Naming the Trauma 4. Reclaiming My Innocent Body 5. Overcoming Verbal-Emotional Abuse Section II: The Process-Moving Through the Flower 6. Introduction 7. Making Your Work Visible 8. Analyzing, Respecting, and Celebrating Your Work 9. Understanding Your Vocational Impairment Section III: The Plan-Re-weaving Your Own Life and Work 10. Introduction 11. Making the Frame 12. Stretching the Self 13. Weaving a Life