(Left to right, Jessica Letarte, Elsa Higareda, Diana Ayala, Glenda Linares, David Gomez, and Ben Wright)
Here's a few of our conference team, hard at work. Behind them is our highly advanced workshop scheduling tool, otherwise known as a wall. We have so many wonderful speakers, it has become a mathematical puzzle just to figure out how to fit everyone in! The hardest part about our "Changing the Paradigm: Trauma and the Developing Child" conference will be the agony of choosing between all the equally unmissable workshops. If you sign up now, you can still get the early bird discount (ends Friday Feb 7). Sign up here! And if you register more than one person, each extra person is half price.
So now I wanted to tell you about my microbe analogy for trauma. One hundred and fifty years ago, doctors had no idea that they were spreading infection by not washing their hands between patients. In fact, a Hungarian doctor called Ignaz Semmelweis was the first to make the connection. He observed that women in the childbirth clinic attended by medical students were dying at an alarming rate, compared to the clinic that was run by midwives. The reason? The medical students were carrying infection from the cadavers they were dissecting and transferring it to the women. (I hope you are not eating dinner as you read this.)
Semmelweis was hailed as the 'savior of mothers' for his discovery. Until then, these so-called 'cadaverous particles' (Pasteur and his germ theory didn't come until later) had been an invisible and deadly presence. That now all seems so obvious to us, but I wonder in another one hundred and fifty years, will people be saying the same thing about trauma? "Of course, trauma is the root cause of all these physical, mental and social problems! How could they have not known? How could the authorities ignore that, institutions not plan around it, people not take precautions, and everyone not be educated about it?" See where I'm going with this?
Right now, we have a chance to educate the world about trauma and its effect on our lives. And it is 'our lives' we're talking about, not just our clients, or the people who are more obviously falling apart at the seams. The Adverse Childhood Experiences Study (ACES) revealed that two thirds of adults in the U.S. have experienced at least one childhood trauma, which also makes you much more likely to experience further trauma... Unless there is prevention, intervention and recovery, that is. Come to our conference and learn how nonviolent child raising and the trauma treatments we are showcasing can reverse the damage that has been going on undetected for centuries, so that in future generations we may be hailed as 'the saviors of children'.
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