June 2016

Part One There are many adults with low ACE scores who parent children with high ACE scores. They are some of the best parents I know. They are often feisty and fierce advocates who tirelessly seek out support, strategies and solutions to make the lives of their children easier and better. The ones I admire most have helped me be a better person, a better parent and expedited my personal recovery as well. Without calling it such, they provide a trauma-informed love. Here are 12 lessons I've...

People sometimes feel bad for adoptive parents. They think maybe our kids say, "You're not my real parents" on a daily basis and that we go to bed crying each night because we can't have kids of our "own." Do they think we had to "settle" for adoption or fostering? Do they worry we feel less than as parents? We don't. It's true that some of us have fertility issues. And maybe have grief about that. It's true that our children may love us and their birth parents, foster family members. It's...

"Whiteness Project is an interactive investigation into how Americans who identify as white, or partially white, understand and experience their race. Whiteness Project is conducting interviews with people from all walks of life and localities in which they are asked about their relationship to, and their understanding of, their own whiteness. Each video interview is paired with a statistic that provides a greater societal context and offers an opportunity for self-reflection by the audience...

I do a lot of training and consulting in the area of trauma. I have a list of all the SAMHSA approved trauma screenings for adults and children and all the work from the NCTSN as well in terms of trauma screenings. Most of these screen for PTSD events or symptoms (especially in the adult arena). I am not a believer in using the ACE short version as a "screening tool" (i.e. just asking if any of those 10 events have happened with a client during a intake process). I like the NEAR approach in...

Households in the U.S. are having a hard time making ends meet. Even as Americans continue to recover from the hammer that hit them in the late 2000s, they face severe and rising rents and jobs that are geographically concentrated in just a handful of metro centers. A new poll conducted by Ipsos on behalf of Enterprise Community Partners finds that 21 percent of respondents had to cut back their spending to make their rent or mortgage, or that they were unable to pay their rent or mortgage...

Stress gets a lot of negative press, and for good reason. Chronic stress is linked to a host of health and emotional problems. Yet stress comes in a variety of forms. Despite what the news headlines say, some types of stress are actually good for you. Consider the acute stress events of exercise and learning to ride a bike. Done properly, these events invoke a desired adaptation in mind and body. In fact, research shows that moderate levels of short-term stress stimulate genesis of new brain...

On a recent sunny afternoon, a 6-year-old boy picked his way through a scrap heap on Governors Island. It contained old doors, shredded lawn chairs, a decrepit exercise bike and a bundle of metal crutches. At the center were a pile of tires and a few dozen planks, balanced precariously against a spiral column, like pickup sticks. As the boy, Zayne Cowie, climbed up the pile of tires, he passed an old car seat, a painted canvas. When he reached the highest tire, he ducked between two planks...

On May 18th, the Alaska Resilience Initiative, First Alaskans Institute's Alaska Native Policy Center, and the Native Village of Chickaloon hosted a gathering of Alaska Native and Native American people from across the state to discuss ACCCEs (adverse childhood, cultural, and community experiences) and resilience.

Last year, Decker Ngongang realized he needed to find a good therapist to help him with a lot of little stresses that were piling up. “I grew up in a single-parent household,” he said. “A lot of the things I wanted to talk about were just childhood-related, but also the stress of being a black man in America.” He figured it would be similar to getting someone to take a look at a knee injury. Ngongang has good insurance through his work as a consultant for NGOs in Washington. So he opened up...

The agitated mom had three kids in foster care and she wanted them back. But she didn’t understand how to parent. She’d never worked. She had a short fuse. She was slow and didn’t seem to learn from experience. Dr. Carl Bell studied the young woman. Flat cheeks. Thin upper lip. Folds at the corner of her eyes. It hit him like a thunderbolt: She had subtle features of fetal alcohol syndrome. Bell had seen thousands of patients like this over the past 40 years and been baffled by their...

Massachusetts tops this year’s list of healthiest places for older adults, according to the 2016 America’s Health Rankings Senior Report . The Bay State jumped to the top perch from sixth place in 2015 thanks to it’s high overall health status, high percentage of diabetes management and low hip fracture rate. Smoking decreased 20 percent since last year, which moves Massachusetts up 20 places in the ranking of that specific measure. Physical inactivity decreased 12 percent – people are...

The tragic stories of Ashley Smith, Edward Snowshoe and other inmates who have died in Canadian correctional facilities have rightly made headlines. Less well known are the premature deaths of hundreds of Canadians every year from preventable causes after they are released from jails and prisons. Canadians might be surprised to learn that many health and social services widely available in the community are not available in most Canadian correctional facilities. We are missing a critical...