January 2018

Sometimes my patients tell me they feel hopeless. They know they repeat self-destructive behaviors. They know they should break away from unhealthy relationships. They are aware of their critical self-talk and the ways they keep themselves small. When my patients lose hope, I hold it for them. Although change takes work, my conviction that the brain and mind heal is unwavering. Everyone knows that the body heals itself. You fall and scrape your knee. Then, if you take care of your wound...

From an evolutionary perspective, babies attach to their parents for survival. A baby who is securely attached, experiences her parent as a safe haven and secure base. When a baby experiences stress, pain or other negative emotions, she will seek the support of a parent and will allow herself to be soothed. Moreover, a baby who is securely attached will feel free to observe and explore an environment in the vicinity of a parent. 'There are strong differences in the quality of attachment...

In the late 1990s the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development conducted an experiment on economic mobility by tracking thousands of public housing tenants and residents of low-income neighborhoods to see how they fared when moved to other neighborhoods, particularly those with less poverty. Called the Moving To Opportunity project , it tracked nearly 4,600 families, making it one of the largest-scale experiments of its kind—unless you count that other enormous moving-to-opportunity...

Trauma Awareness & Resilience Mini-Seminar Training Series

Trauma Awareness & Resilience Institute for Youth Workers

Marisa Luse is pictured above, on the right. Marisa Luse was accustomed to juggling multiple roles: as the mother of a three-year-old son, a parent ambassador for the Boston Children’s Museum and a board member for the Boston Association for Childbirth Education. She was used to helping youth and families access and achieve their goals: a healthy family, a school-ready child. But when leaders of a Community Organizing for Family Issues (COFI) training asked Luse to name priorities for her...

This is Part Four of the State of the States 2018 series. As President Donald Trump and Republican leaders in Congress set out to impose tougher restrictions on welfare, their conservative allies across the country are trying to help them accomplish their mission, state by state. Republican governors and state legislators are moving ahead with proposals that would make it harder for people to get and keep welfare benefits and restrict what benefits they get. Measures already have been...

The Trump administration has prioritized reducing immigration by any and all possible means, a pursuit that literally brought the government to a standstill this weekend. While the nation tries to decipher the mixed messages coming from the White House and Congress scrambles to develop a reform agenda that will garner bipartisan support, it's easy to survey our national conversation about immigration and see only anger, dysfunction, and a fundamental disagreement about what it means to be an...

On top of America’s long-running political divide between red and blue states, and its widening economic divide between the rich and the poor, there is a troubling gap between its geographic winners and losers. The United States is growing spatially more unequal, in ways that are ripping the country apart and threaten to undermine prosperity for all of us. New data released earlier this week by Mark Muro and Jacob Whiton of the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program get to the...

I identify as an activist, and I am tired. Not yet ready to move on to some dreamscape. Hoping to be re-energized. But very, very tired. Part of the reason I’ve reached this level of exhaustion is that I seem to be living what life would look like if ‘painted into a corner,’ met ‘put in a box’ in a car wreck, leaving the two a tangled idiomatic mess. Yes, this ‘painted box’ in which so many activists of so many kinds seem to find themselves stuck is all the harder to escape for its...

IF THE GOAL OF REENTRY programming is to empower people returning from incarceration to make the most of their lives, then the system is failing women. While so many wise women have warned against our relying solely on men, the correctional settings that I’ve visited appear either not to have those aunties among their leadership, or not to have taken the message to heart. As a result, they make reentry harder for women who are not in relationships with men, or who desire relationships with...

At the headquarters of Covenant House Washington in Southeast D.C., a nonprofit serving youth experiencing homelessness, ten twin-sized black canvas cots fill a white-tiled alcove on the main floor. The space serves as an emergency shelter for homeless young people, which Covenant House calls “The Sanctuary.” In keeping with its name, the walls are a deep, soothing blue. Five of the cots are for women and five for men, which is far short of the demand. The room is empty now, in...