Many people have said that at the very heart of understanding adverse childhood experiences is that love is the cure and the prevention. Not just love manifested in the caring of one individual for another, whether that be parent to child, friend to friend, or spouse to spouse, but also the love manifested in social justice -- in changing systems -- and making sure that power is infused with love.
Martin Luther King described this combination of power, social justice and health best. In his “Where Do We Go From Here” speech in August 1967 in Atlanta, he said:
Now, we got to get this thing right. What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive. And that love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice. And justice at its best is love correcting everything that stands against love.
ACEsConnection -- i.e., all of you who comprise this network -- is fostering that shift in power as part of a social movement that removes meanness, neglect, shame, blame and punishment from our culture and replaces it with kindness, understanding, learning, compassion, and nurturing. In other words, love.
Once people learn about the consequences of ACEs, the effects of toxic stress and that trauma-informed practices and building resilience can create healthy individuals, families, communities and systems, they can never look at a homeless woman without seeing an abused little girl. They can never look at a young man in prison without wondering why the schools he attended did not intervene in his journey from the classroom to jail cell. They can never look at communities without wondering if they are implementing trauma-informed and resilience-building practices; and if they are not, they begin asking: “How can we start?”
So, would Martin Luther King, Jr., have embraced ACEs, trauma-informed and resilience-building practices? He absolutely did.
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