Content Warnings: This post discusses trauma including police violence, mental illness, abuse, and sexual assault.
This piece was originally published through What We Could Become.
I felt like I had my career planned at 15, and it wasn’t supposed to focus on trauma. It was supposed to focus on understanding and preventing violence and trauma. I aspired to and worked towards being a university professor specializing in research around how children with a cold and callous interpersonal style (feel free to go down the internet rabbit holes of research on youth with callous-unemotional traits) experience the world, their peers, and (quite often) the juvenile justice system. Over the course of nine years studying and working towards those goals, the impacts of trauma were always there.
Unfortunately, trauma has become a larger part of our common language due to our shared experiences of watching the police murder Black people simply for existing in their homes, for driving, for being. It feels more important now than ever before to try to understand trauma on the larger social scale and at the individual level. If everyone is collectively suffering the trauma of witnessing the police murder Black people while also watching that same community suffer from the systemic impact of racism in our environment, homes, and health care systems during a pandemic that is causing Black deaths at disproportionate rates, everyone needs to understand how trauma impacts us mentally and physically.
Fortunately, anyone can delve deeper into understanding trauma through Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Educator presentations or training.
Definition Tangent: ACEs were originally defined as ten potential experiences before the age of 18: people living in your home with substance use problems, mental illness, having a mother who experienced physical abuse, living with someone who had been in jail, parental separation or divorce, emotional and physical neglect, and emotional, physical, or sexual abuse. However, science and culture’s understanding of ACEs have expanded well beyond those ten original ACEs to include experiences of racism, homo-antagonism, bullying, and more.
The beauty of this system is that the state of Louisiana (where I work in public health and am also an ACE educator) provides an opportunity for people who want to learn the science of trauma and ACEs to be able to learn and then share this knowledge with their communities. Individuals go through three in-person or virtual days of learning about the Adverse Childhood Experiences study, the historical trauma of Louisiana through the lives of the colonized and enslaved, the science of trauma, and how to strengthen our collective buffers against trauma. It also teaches how to convey this information to others.
That last piece is crucial. It would be cruel to teach people what trauma does to our brains, bodies, and minds, only to leave them reeling and overwhelmed. ACE Educators learn the evidence around cultivating resilience individually and collectively. I won’t spoil the findings of the study, but I will share the components of life that are necessary to help buffer the impacts of trauma.
- Understanding, cultivating, and affirming our individual capabilities (e.g., having a positive view of oneself, self-efficacy, and self-regulation)
- Having attachments and relationships with caring and competent people who help us learn how to move through the world
- A strong community (cultural or spiritual).
Everyone can learn about ACEs through attending presentations or becoming an ACE educator.
As I learn more about direct action and mutual aid, I have a deeper appreciation for the ACE educator program and the experiences it provides both to people attending presentations and to the individuals who volunteer their time to cultivate conversations and presentations in their communities. There is no expectation of payment with mutual aid — ACE educators (legally because ACE Interface has copyrights) cannot be paid for presentations and are encouraged to share this information freely in their communities, calling to mind the abolitionist ideas of radical education (e.g., it builds power, and is community and participation based). The hope with each presentation is that expectations shift; that people become more willing and able to meet others where they are emotionally; and to have compassion, if not empathy, for others.
As I write this on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day of 2021, my current freedom dream is both big and small. I see the practice of ACE education as mutual aid for collective change so that those of us who have experienced trauma — whether at the individual or societal level — are met with kindness first. I dream that all of our children know they are worthy, capable, and loved by their elders and their community. I dream that we will have resources to share in our collective grief over this pandemic that is not over yet. I dream that we will have the necessary resources to fertilize our physical and cultural environments so that we can reshape our city, state, country, and world to be what we want it to be.
be love, y’all
LCT
Louisiana’s ACE Educator Program: Learn where to see an ACE program and how to become an ACE Educator
This piece was originally published through What We Could Become.
Comments (0)