IMPACT Boston blog

IMPACT Intern Martiza A. Shares her Experience of Learning IMPACT while living in a shelter for women and children

I am so grateful that I had the opportunity to take part in the IMPACT classes at the shelter. Truthfully, when the shelter first told us we would be required to participate in classes for the next five weeks, I was upset.  I remember thinking that it was going to be a big waste of time.  I tried talking my case-worker into allowing me to skip these classes.  I had just had a baby.  He was only about 2 months old.  I didn’t feel too comfortable allowing some stranger to watch him while I took part in these classes.  But, she told me to at least try it and if I absolutely hated it she would not make me continue.

That next week was the first class.  The instructor was a woman named Ana.  Once she started explaining the class plan for the next five sessions, I remember getting excited and wondering to myself if I would be able to do these new moves.  I decided that this was easy enough and I was going to do my best to hit as hard as I could and use this experience as a way to release some of the stress I was going through.  Being a woman in shelter and having just had another baby, I had a lot of stress in my life. 

At first they taught us to use our voice and be assertive.  This was difficult for me, which was totally unexpected.   Being a survivor of trauma and sexual abuse, I had mostly blocked out a lot of my feelings.  But once the instructor started playing the part of an attacker and began shouting some obscene remarks at me, I was floored.  I found myself at a complete loss of words.  All the fear and emotions came rushing back at me.  Ana talked me through it and I could hear the support from the other women in the class.  I decided that I was not going to let this get me down.  I overcame my fear and shouted back at him.  I told him what I wanted.  It took a couple of tries.  At first I had to sit down and watch some of the other women take their turns first, but I did it.  From that point on, I was excited and couldn’t wait for them to come back the following week.

I got a lot out of that experience and am really proud of myself.  It was very hard and I did not expect for my emotions to turn on me like that especially over a class.  Ana explained to me that it was a normal reaction and that I could get through it.  And I did.

Now I am an intern at IMPACT and will be assisting at other shelter classes.  I am glad that I did stay and I have made some good friendships with some of the other women in my class.   I feel that all women should have the opportunity to take an IMPACT class. 

Creating Heroic Role Models For Young Girls

Author and Journalist Resa Nelson on How IMPACT helped give her characters confidence

Award-Winning Science Fiction/Fantasy Novelist Resa Nelson is a veteran IMPACT graduate. Her most recent book The Dragonslayer's Sword was published this year. As a writer, she has worked to create powerful and self-confident characters and explains how her experience of learning to protect herself helped her develop confidence in her writing and her life.

I’m a Boston-area novelist and a longtime IMPACT graduate, going back to the days when it was first known as Model Mugging.  I took my first course when a security guard at work repeatedly harassed me – and after I completed that course, he never bothered me again.  At the time, I was beginning to sell short fiction, but I had one serious problem.  Before IMPACT, I had a victim mentality, always thinking things like “poor me” and “if only…”

A fellow writer once told me that the fictional characters you create can only be as psychologically healthy as you are, which makes sense to me.  Before IMPACT, my characters were like me:  weak and passive.  But IMPACT transformed me.  It helped me understand that I’m in charge of my own life.  It made me more willing to take risks.  Instead of sitting back and waiting for things to go my way, I learned how to take charge and take action.

Until I became strong and heroic in my own life, none of the characters I created could be strong or heroic, because I needed to learn and experience how someone with those traits thinks and believes and acts.

But having that range of experience – from victim to fighter – means I’m able to write novels about characters undergoing that same transformation.  For example, my first novel is about a female blacksmith.  When she’s a girl, she believes she’s a monster because her skin is covered in scars as the result of being chewed up and spit out by a dragon.  She grows up to become a blacksmith and loves her work – but then her world falls apart and she must find the courage not only to survive but to rise up and become a hero.  She sometimes finds herself in situations where she must defend herself.  Even though she doesn’t have the exact skills taught in IMPACT courses, she’s resourceful, creative, and mindful of the decisions she makes when she fights.

Readers often tell me how much they love my characters.  Every time I write a new novel, my characters are a reflection of many things I learned from my IMPACT training, from understanding my own worth to setting boundaries to fighting back when necessary.  My mission as a novelist is to keep writing books that feature strong, heroic women.