October 2023

Music Monday w/Michael - A Cold Wind Blows "So many feel so alone all across this land. Can you tell me why you can't lend a hand?" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6R924Hv5hY Lyrics posted in the content section below the video @ You Tube

An abundance of research over decades has demonstrated the importance of relationships on the developing brain. Studies have shown that humans are biologically designed for relationships and now there are more recent research findings on the significance of timing. Babies are born with a primary need to have someone care for and provide for them. A newborn is completely dependent on at least one relationship with another person. Through having someone lovingly and consistently respond to...

There is one question that all helping professionals should be able to answer.... What is your scope of practice? Your scope of practice are your professionabl boundaries that highlight the skills, services & responses that are within your competency as an individual professional. One of the most important components of trauma-informed care is setting professional boundaries. Professional boundaries are an expression of your capacity. Your capacity being your ability to receive, contain...

Sharpen offers a variety of services to improve mental health outcomes and decrease heath disparities for both organizations and communities. The benefits of the Sharpen system include participant increase in: 1. mental health awareness and literacy through our award-winning, evidence based mental health trainings 2. access to evidence-based healthy coping toolkits 3. engagement in the discussion around mental health 4. connection to validated mental health screenings 5. trauma-informed...

Small reading nooks provide a great example of human scale for children at the Smithfield Elementary School. Source: HKS INC. By Erin Peavey, Psychology Today, September 23, 2023 Childhood can be hard even in the best of times. Children are inherently at a power disadvantage, still learning how to manage their emotions, and at the will of adults for food, shelter, and emotional regulation . Frustration, failure, and conflict are unavoidable, but not necessarily bad for children in the long...

From Trauma-informed Design Society, Photo: from article, Trauma-informed Design Society, October 5, 2023 (retrieved) What is Trauma-informed Design? Our physical environment can impact our emotions and behaviors, both negatively and positively. They have the ability to increase or reduce our stress. The spaces in which we live and receive services can communicate safety and promote supportive relationships, or they can symbolize lack of dignity and agency, encouraging re-traumatization.

Cool pastel hues encourage calm mental and physical states at Spacesmith’s Genovese Family Life Center for SCO Family of Services in Queens, New York. (Eric Laignel) By Ámbar Margarida, The Architect's Newspaper, October 4, 2023 Imagine you’re sitting in a waiting room. It’s hot, and your knees are tight to those of the people sitting across from you. You can feel the cramped space closing in. It’s uncomfortable, so you look to the walls: They’re empty and painted a drab beige, with the...

By Laura Gallant, Photo: from article, Healthy Outcomes from Positive Experiences (HOPE), April 20, 2023 Earth Day is this Saturday, and the HOPE National Resource Center wants to share ideas of actions that help protect the well-being of our planet, and the future of all children. When we promote practices that heal the Earth, we are celebrating all the amazing things this planet provides for us to create positive childhood experiences (PCEs), and happy, healthy children. This is at the...

By Frida Berrigan, Illustration: from article, Waging Nonviolence, August 23, 2022 Nothing like some light summer reading! My beach reading stack was less whodunits and guilty pleasures and more of a Climate Change 101 survey course. But in this summer of widespread drought, heatwaves melting roads , super storm events, a deadlocked international climate meeting, the protracted political saga of the senator in Big Coal’s back pocket, and lots of other top-of-the-fold climate catastrophe...

October is National Domestic Violence Awareness and Prevention Month. Carey Watson, MD, is the medical director of Kaiser Permanente’s Family Violence Prevention Program. Click here to register.

By Alexis Grant-Panting, Illustration: Brett Ryder, Health Affairs, October 2023 In December 2020, at the height of my fear and uncertainty during the COVID-19 pandemic, I learned that I was pregnant with my second child. Previously, I had joked with my husband’s maternal grandmother, Nana, about not wanting to have a baby in Texas as a Black woman. Now the joke didn’t seem funny anymore. My pregnancy, which should have been an empowering journey, was characterized by fear. I feared being...

Michael Douglas and Glenn Close star in the 1987 film, Fatal Attraction. The underlying stereotype of the scorned woman seen in popular media is very much alive in the U.S. family court system. By Amy Polacko, Ms., October 3, 2023 “You play fair with me, I’ll play fair with you.” This is what Alex Forrest, famously played by Glenn Close, tells Dan Gallagher in the 1980s thriller Fatal Attraction. But most viewers come to think she’s anything but fair—going off the deep end after Dan has an...