May 2018

Among the homes, schools, daycare centers, and churches of Los Angeles' Wilmington neighborhood, hundreds of pumpjacks extract oil, their dinosaur-like heads bobbing up and down. A predominately working-class and Latino immigrant community of 58,000, Wilmington sits atop the third-largest oil field in the continental United States. Five oil refineries release steam from nearly 200-foot stacks, their pipes and tanks clanging and hissing. Many of Wilmington's residents work in the oil industry...

What happens when you don’t blame kids for bad behavior? An elementary school in Columbus, Ohio is trying to find out. Katherine Reynolds Lewis writes: The Ohio-based photographer Maddie McGarvey spent a couple days at Ohio Ave recently meeting and spending time with the students, teachers, and administration trying to shift teachers’ perspective on trauma and their relationships with children. “How are [the children] going to learn a positive way of dealing with conflict if we’re not the...

For Public Health and Health Professions Research Day at the University of Florida, I connected with Peace4Tarpon (P4T) to look into some of the data they had been collecting since since early 2016. I did this as part of my final internship for the Master of Public Health program. In surveys that Peace4Tarpon had been distributing through meetings and outreach, they had been collecting demographic information and ACEs data. ACEs have also been measured on a national scale through the 2010...

The University of Florida has fostered a strong relationship with Peace4Tarpon, through the College of Public Health and Health Professions, for a few years now. Recently, the conversations between the two were focused on how they could partner to take the aims and methods of the trauma-informed initiative beyond Tarpon Springs and into a more accessible, formal format. This sparked the idea to create a course available to learners who can take the information and spread the culture of...

This month, Utah’s free-range parenting law goes into effect. The bill amends the definition of parental neglect regarding children. In Utah it is now okay for parents to let their kids play in the park alone or walk to and from school by themselves. There have been instances in the past where parents have faced legal trouble for letting their children have this independence. The first thing I thought when reading about this policy is that it doesn’t address the bigger problem and could...

Finally it begins; the talk of the struggle in Napa County has transitioned to the walk (or the march) , and thanks to Ashley Ochoa and Jenny Waken, voices of Napa County residents are being heard! I was so excited to be a part of this march, to see the lit up and excited faces of so many who came together with the same passion for change, and the same drive to fight (safely) for a difference that's long over-due! The challenge of having a dual diagnosis can be a detrimental reality ending...

If I had diagrammed my family when my children were young, well most any age really, had I been really honest I’d have made myself smaller than anyone else. What I learned through my own ACA/codependency recovery, was that if I kept doing that, I was not in fact serving my children nor myself nor my husband. Trauma has the effect of shrinking us, we get hurt and we withdraw, we get scared and we shut down, we become emotionally constricted, we’re less present and less spontaneous. Recovery...

“I love you,” I say to my daughter. “Of course you do,” she says, I’m awesome.” She was twelve. The mother in me smiled. The girl I was shook her head inside and wondered h ow would it have been to feel both loved and lovable while a child? I do not know. I will never know. It does not matter how wonderful my present. It does not matter who I will become. I can’t change the past. The past is a country I never want my daughter to travel near or in. I am an exile, from my past, my child self.

For more of this article by German Lopez , please click here .

The hospital where I was recently treated for a blood clot, showing the facade as it was when I was a four-year old child being treated for burns _____________________________________________________ For over a decade I was a family therapist. Before that, an educator. In the past 20 years have dedicated myself to writing curriculum and designing trainings for Lakeside Global Institute primarily around the subject of trauma. I was honored when Bruce Perry invited me to be a fellow with the...

It's been two decades since the groundbreaking ACEs Study and we now face epidemic rates of childhood trauma and maltreatment. Everything we have done has led us to a very distressing status quo with millions of families in peril. We have have an excellent opportunity to do things differently. We can look at family systems and then expand our vision to include community systems of care and safety. We can ensure that every child and parent has access to behavioral health care, parent...

Thanks to the national spotlight from this 60 Minutes segment , the trauma informed care movement has gained critical momentum. Like many human services and other trauma informed agencies, SaintA is being asked, “So, what’s next?” while simultaneously continuing to work on the “Right now.” We all know the statistics: Right now, nearly three-fourths (67%) of Americans have had at least one Adverse Childhood Experience (ACE). Right now, about 25% have three or more ACEs. * And, right now, we...