OH Cards NA

OH Cards Institute – Winter Update

Grace Kerina — Wed, 27 Feb 2013 11:47:20 +0000

The OH Cards Institute (OHCI) collects and disseminates worldwide resources about OH Cards, including scholarly and published works (such as journal articles, books, videos, and material in other languages) and context-based personal stories.

Because information published on the OHCI website is likely to be of interest to OH North America readers, we’ll periodically post an update about new material on the OHCI website.

December – February Articles on OHCI

OH for Psychosomatic Disorders – A translation of a Russian article about the application of associative cards in counseling and psychotherapy for patients with psychosomatic disorders, by a practicing psychoanalytic therapist.

OH Cards in Early Trauma Social Work – Sharla Erbe’s thoughts on using OH Cards in situations where non-verbal children and adults who are experiencing emotional flooding in the limbic system of the brain or brain stem and can’t access language to process their traumatic experiences.

Card Story 3 – What is your response to this card from the HABITAT deck?

ECCO House in Valparaiso, Chile – Mural reproductions of five of John David Ellis’s art pieces from his OH Cards deck colourfully adorn the outside of an apartment house.

Therapeutic Cards in a Model for Treating Anxiety Disorders and PTSD – An abstract of an article suggesting a protocol for PTSD and anxiety disorder treatment based on empowerment through fantastic reality.

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To see articles published on OHCI prior to August, visit the OHCI Updates page.

You can subscribe to receive OHCI updates as new articles are posted, via email or RSS.

OH Cards Institute – Fall Update

Grace Kerina — Thu, 06 Dec 2012 11:21:52 +0000

Because information published on the OHCI website is likely to be of interest to OH North America readers, we’ll periodically post an update about new material on the OHCI website.

August – November Articles on OHCI

Every Child’s Life is Worth a Story – An article by Felicia Carroll about engaging in a storytelling process which allows children to create a cohesive narrative that supports healthy integration and productive development.

Card Story 2 – What is your response to this card from the COPE deck? An opportunity to share with others what this particular card evokes for you.

Forward to Strawberries Beyond My Window – In his forward for the book Strawberries Beyond My Window, OH Cards publisher Moritz Egetmeyer writes about the historical trajectory of his involvement with the OH Cards genre.

Take a Game to Your Subconscious – An article by María Campos presenting the expert opinion of Andrés Alvarez about using OH Cards as a gateway to the subconscious that allows us to understand our feelings in a positive way. The original Spanish article is available, along with an English translation.

The Game of Inner Vision An article by Janine Moore giving an introduction to the OH Cards, with a focus on their history and their use in various settings, including casual social settings.

OH: The “Inner Adventure” with Metaphoric Cards of Association – In Christine Gatineau’s article, she introduced associative OH Cards and their process of bypassing the mind to allow advancement into the depths of the psyche.

Using the Cards in a Court-Mandaded Program for Substance Abuse Recovery – Joan Stockbridge uses the COPE deck to help women in a substance abuse recovery home. Most of the women have engaged in long-term, serious criminal activity. Each of them also has children who are monitored by Child Protective Services, and they face losing custody if they don’t make significant changes in their lives.

Moritz Egetmeyer Interview on Gestalt TV – Moritz Egetmeyer, OH Cards publisher and workshop leader, was interviewed at the Riga Gestalt Institute in Latvia, while there to give an OH Cards workshop.

Cancer Psychology – News Report 1 – This short Russian news report (with an English transcription) about the practice of cancer psychology mentions the use of metaphoric cards as one of the techniques for helping cancer patients adopt a positive stance.

Cancer Psychology – News Report 2 – This short Russian news report (with an English transcription) about the practice of cancer psychology mentions the use of metaphoric cards as one of the techniques for helping cancer patients describe their feelings.

OH in Clinical Therapy Work – Diane Kukulis uses OH Cards in clinical therapy to help further processes in families that might stall just short of getting at core feelings. The use of images helps to slow down and deepen a process that may be vulnerable to being trivialized or glossed over because of habitualized family patterns.

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To see articles published on OHCI prior to August, visit the OHCI Updates page.

You can subscribe to receive OHCI updates as new articles are posted, via email or RSS.

OH Cards Institute – July Update

Grace Kerina — Wed, 15 Aug 2012 08:57:05 +0000

The OH Cards Institute (OHCI) collects and disseminates resources about OH Cards. Though there is some overlap of content between the OHCI and the OH North America websites, OHCI tends to focus on scholarly and published works (including videos, books, and material in other languages) and OH North America tends to focus on OH Card stories.

Because information published on the OHCI website may be of interest to OH North America readers, we’ll occasionally post an update of new material on the OHCI website.

July’s OHCI Articles

The Pencil Sharpener – The Pencil Sharpener is a guide (in Swedish) to storytelling and creative writing which includes demonstrations of how OH Card decks can be used to teach those topics.

That Perception Thing – Dawn Brown’s book offers opportunities for shifting perceptions from the fear of pain to an acceptance of growth — using stories, metaphors, and OH Cards.

Metaphoric Cards – An Effective Tool in Therapy – Metaphoric cards open a window into a person’s inner world. OH Cards, as metaphoric projection tools, trigger our fantasy.

Crisis in the Kindergarten – A report published by the Alliance for Childhood, about the benefits of restoring childhood play in schools.

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To see articles published on OHCI prior to July, visit the OHCI Updates page.

You can subscribe to receive OHCI updates as new articles are posted, via email or RSS.

OH Cards Institute – June Update

Grace Kerina — Wed, 04 Jul 2012 10:26:36 +0000

The purpose of the non-profit OH Cards Institute is to share the growing body of information about ways OH Cards are used. The OH Cards Institute (OHCI) collects, assesses, organizes, and disseminates resources about OH Cards, cataloguing information into three main areas: Methods, Studies, and Context.

While there is and will be some overlap of content between the OHCI and OH North America websites, OHCI tends to focus on scholarly and published works — including videos, books, and material in other languages — and OH North America tends to focus on OH Card stories.

Because information published on the OHCI website may be of interest to OH North America readers, we’ll occasionally post an update here of new material on the OHCI website.

You can subscribe to receive OHCI updates as new articles are posted (once a week), via email or RSS.

June’s OHCI Articles

Creative Therapies – A description of Kim Atkinson and Catherine Well’s book, Creative Therapies, with an excerpt of the book’s content regarding OH Cards.

Healing Trauma with Metaphoric Cards – Survivors of disasters can fall into a vortex of helpless despair – or climb a healing spiral using a variety of resources. One effective tool to aid recovery is the deck of COPE cards.

Can We Play? – An article by psychologist David Elkin about the importance of play for children and the disappearance of play from children’s lives.

Techniques of Group Facilitation – In his book about group facilitation techniques, psychologist Pedro Bolgeri Escorza presents an OH Cards exercise for groups.

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To see articles published on OHCI prior to June, visit the OHCI Updates page.

You can subscribe to receive OHCI updates as new articles are posted, via email or RSS.

OH Cards Workshop in California

Grace Kerina — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 10:17:55 +0000

OH Cards publisher and workshop leader Moritz Egetmeyer will make a rare appearance in North America this spring, leading a one-day workshop in Madera, California, on June 2. Moritz has done workshops successfully for many years in more than 25 countries.

Participants of the workshop will become aquainted in a hands-on manner with all the current decks of cards of the OH series and their specific purposes. You can anticipate getting in touch with your own stream of creativity and processing skills, and accessing intuition and communication skills through the use of OH Cards. Various systems of use and their underlying ideas are explored. These uses of the cards increase awareness of self and others, and develop the ability to positively influence private and professional situations.

The OH Cards are designed to increase intuition, imagination, insight and inner vision. People around the world use them to reclaim their sense of self and their place in the universe. The goal of the workshop is that participants will be able to transfer the aquired experiential knowledge to their own professional and private lives.

The workshop fee is $120 (includes coffee/tea, but no meals or accommodation). The number of participants is limited and advance registration is required.

To register for the workshop
or to find out more, write to info@OH-Cards.com.

More About the Workshop Leader

Moritz Egetmeyer has a BA degree from Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, an MA from Antioch University’s Cold Mountain Institue, and trained as a psychotherapist. He grew up in Germany’s Black Forest and went to Vancouver, Canada, to study humanistic psychology. It was there that he first met the OH cards and became fascinated with the possibilities OH presented as a tool for authentic self-discovery. In 1984, Moritz began to publish the original OH Cards deck, establishing a company to distribute the cards worldwide and add other decks. Feedback from card-users all over the world continues to confirm their value.

The popularity of the OH Cards genre has grown organically from a small seed into a large community spanning many countries, cultures, languages, and professions. In workshops around the world, Moritz trains professionals from the social and therapeutic professions to use the OH Cards in their work.

OH Cards Workshops Around the World

Moritz is based in Germany, so although North American workshops are rare, there are other opportunities for attending a workshop if you want to travel or are already planning to travel, particularly to Europe (you’d need to know the language the workshop is given in). Upcoming OH Cards workshops are listed in the right sidebar on the OH International website.

Announcing the OH Cards Institute

Grace Kerina — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 10:19:12 +0000

A special website about OH Cards — OH Cards Institute (OHCI) — has been launched.

The popularity of the OH Cards genre has grown organically from a small seed into a large community spanning many countries, cultures, languages, and professions.

Over decades of creating and distributing OH, the desire has developed to be of service to the OH community by sharing the growing body of information about ways the cards are used.

The OH Cards Institute is non-profit. Its mission is to collect, assess, organize, and disseminate resources generated by OH Card users worldwide, with a focus on quality and scope. You’ll find scholarly articles, magazine articles, videos, and more, organized around the three main themes of Methods, Studies, and Context.

To explore OHCI’s growing resources, visit the website at www.oh-cards-institute.org.

Introducing a New Deck: TANDOO

Grace Kerina — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 12:26:53 +0000

Conversations, meetings, musings, painting sessions, and reviews have come to an end and we’re pleased to announce a new deck in the OH genre: TANDOO.

TANDOO’s 99 picture cards and 44 action sign cards are all about couple relationships, prompting ideas and communication about being together on the journey.

The concepts and imagery of the cards were created by a group who have worked together before, on the COPE deck. Psychologist Ofra Ayalon and artisit Marina Lukyanova, with input from OH publisher Moritz Egetmeyer, combined their extensive expertise to create TANDOO.

You can read more on the TANDOO page.

Synchronicity

Grace Kerina — Wed, 12 Jan 2011 21:19:11 +0000

Sooner or later those who involve themselves with the associative cards are sure to make the surprising discovery that cards drawn sight unseen can actually seem to reflect the life situation of the player who drew them, and this with an unexpected accuracy – with such an accuracy, in fact, that one involuntarily finds oneself asking whether something besides chance could possibly be at play.

This observation, made repeatedly, has in some circles led to the associative cards being ascribed an almost magical force, as if the cards themselves have the ability attributed to oracles of being able to reveal the questioner’s innermost self.

Are such parallels between card sets and actual life situations mere coincidence, or are other mechanisms at work which we do not understand?

Excerpted from the book Strawberries Beyond My Window: Games of Association for Opening the Door to Creativity and Communication, by Waltraud Kirschke.

ECCO Helps Children Through Trauma

Grace Kerina — Tue, 09 Nov 2010 18:57:44 +0000

As an educational counsellor and bibliotherapist, I work with children in the elementary school as well as in a teachers’ training college, preparing the students for their therapeutic and educational work with children.

Last year, we Israelis lived through one of the most traumatic periods of our existence. There were many terrorist acts in the country, suicidal bombings that cost the lives of innocent citizens…. Children were also involved: many were badly wounded or maimed, some lost their lives. Others lost their parents, leaving them orphaned. Moreover, many parents of young children who were not directly affected by the bombings became over-protective toward them, transmitting their fears and anxieties onto them. Many of these children could not concentrate on their studies, were restless, and regressed in behaviour. Scenes of acting out were common during this period. To top this, our prime minister, Mr. Rabin, was assassinated by a fellow Jew. This was the last straw. It was even more traumatic for the children, as he was, on the one had, a father figure, while on the other hand, some of the pupils had heard political utterings against him in ther homes. This led to their feeling rather guilty.

As can be very well imagined, it was almost impossible to treat these children. We tried many and various methods. Many of them were almost catatonic, depressed, and would not cooperate. On the spur of the moment, I took out the ECCO cards. I laid them out on the table, face up, and told the children to choose one that reminded them of recent events. Unbelievably, these cards were the only key to their bottled up fears, frustrations, and traumas. Somehow, these cards seemed to enable them to project their feelings onto the abstract forms. My next step was to ask them to find, in the very same cards, some silver lining, something that gave them hope for the future. Each and every child was able to do so.

This gave me a bright idea: I invited their parents for a session, working in the same way with them. I explained that I wanted them to know what their children had undergone. They were to imagine which card their own child had chosen and what he or she had said. Naturally, they also projected their own feelings onto these cards, and after a deep discussion, they were mentally free to help their children.

It goes without saying that my students at the teachers’ training college learned to do the same with their pupils. The ECCO cards are a wonderful help, at all times, in working with children.

Adina F., PhD
Israel

Excerpted from the book Strawberries Beyond My Window: Games of Association for Opening the Door to Creativity and Communication, by Waltraud Kirschke.

A Grammar Lesson with OH Cards

Grace Kerina — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 23:02:16 +0000

In the 6th grade grammar lesson we were discussing word order in sentences in terms of subject and predicate, how the subject is always a “naming word” of which one asks, “Who or what is doing something?” and the predicate is always a “doing word.” The children were asked to formulate simple sentences and to name the subject and predicate in them. A game with SAGA images and the OH [original deck] word cards stimulated an “OH!” experience for all of them.

Each child drew one SAGA picture and one OH word card bearing a verb (I had sorted the cards in advance). The picture card was to be the subject and the word card the predicate. Each child constructed the shortest possible sentence with his card set — for example, “The raven takes” — and in doing so playfully and intuitively grasped the concepts of subject and predicate.

Edith S. ~ Teacher
Germany

Excerpted from the book Strawberries Beyond My Window: Games of Association for Opening the Door to Creativity and Communication, by Waltraud Kirschke.