July 2017

If you had asked me at the age of 7 what my meaning of home was, I probably would’ve answered with “I don’t know.” When I turned 7, I was taken from my father and placed into a foster home. I remember my social worker telling me that I was going to a sleepover for a few days. Even though I didn’t know this lady, I believed her. As the strange lady walked me out the front door, I saw tears in my father’s eyes. He told me to be brave and to always remember that he loved me and that no matter...

Studying for a college degree takes a lot of mental energy. Generally speaking, you will spend around three to four years of your life studying for a college degree, with some programs requiring that work is completed on an almost daily basis. For many students, the studying and revision alone can become very mentally taxing, not to mention any other commitments that they may have. Thanks to online learning, more and more students are returning to school whilst continuing to work full-time...

Two pretty remarkable developments show how the ACEs movement continues to gain momentum. As part of the Campaign for Counter Childhood Adversity (4CA), about 100 people from about 20 California counties visited the offices of more than 80 California state legislators — Democrat and Republican — to educate them about ACEs science, to talk with them about their interests can be informed by ACEs science, and pointed out the accomplishments that had been made in their own districts. Those 100...

While Senate Republicans battle over a national health bill that will determine access to care for millions of Americans, a Republican from Wisconsin is raising another health issue. In a resolution introduced July 14, Rep. Mike Gallagher, R-Green Bay, pushed for wider use of trauma-informed care, and called for a National Trauma Awareness Month. Trauma has been a major focus for Wisconsin's first lady, Tonette Walker. Her Fostering Futures initiative secured grant funding to get trauma...

Among the first things you notice when driving eastward into Baltimore are the blocks of decrepit row houses . The city claims that only 16,000 row houses in Baltimore are vacant . Skeptics say the real number is closer to 46,000, or 16 percent of the city’s housing stock. Baltimore certainly isn’t the only city experiencing a housing crisis: The U.S. as a whole can’t seem to keep up with the growing numbers of very low-income households. In response, a handful of cities, from Nashville to...

Last Saturday my family and I took the ferry to Governors Island, where we happened upon a gallery hosting an exhibit, “Escaping Time: Art From U.S. Prisons.” Pinned to the wall in an upstairs back room was a bouquet of roses, fashioned out of toilet paper and stained in a palette of tangy pastels. The artist, Jairo Pastoressa, had no access to art supplies during his time on Rikers Island, a woman there told me, so he used Kool-Aid for paint. She told Mr. Pastoressa’s story passionately. (I...

UPON THEIR RELEASE , formerly incarcerated men and women don’t just need jobs — they need to believe that they have something to offer employers. I know this firsthand as someone who taught career development in prison, and who spent a decade behind bars. I served 10 years, two months and seven days in the New York corrections system for my role in a violent robbery attempt. Arrested just two days before my 20th birthday, I came of age in prison. Ironically, it’s also where I began my career...

Scharlette Holdman, whose pioneering work with defense lawyers contributed to the decline of the death penalty nationwide, and whose clients included Ted Kaczynski, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, died Wednesday. She was 70. In the tight-knit world of defense lawyers who focus on the death penalty, Holdman was a revered figure, a non-lawyer responsible for the development of mitigating evidence, aimed at convincing jurors to spare the lives of men and women whose crimes, at...

A new study suggests that although we are inherently drawn to familiar groups of people, having dislike for unfamiliar groups appears to be a learned behavior. [For more of this story, written by Traci Pedersen, go to https://psychcentral.com/news/2017/07/16/dislike-for-unfamiliar-groups-of-people-may-be-learned/123273.html]

Decision-makingdoesn’t always come easy. For me, it took many years and a great deal of practice to feel comfortable and confident of the choices I’ve made and acted upon. In that time, through trial and error, some suggestions from productive friends, reading a lot and effective therapy to combat anxiety and depression , I’ve come up with the following list of 15 tips that work well for me. Maybe they’ll help you as well. [For more of this story, written by Suzanne Kane, go to ...

This is a question I asked myself for a long time. So many people could diagnose me. So many people could tell me what was wrong with me. But few could actually help me heal. Why? Because my healing wasn’t the task of these other people. It was my job. I had to take all the information I had gathered about recovering from child abuse and trauma and move that knowledge from my head to my heart. In other words, I had to do the tough, messy work of applying it to my own life. Today, I’m going...

It's time again for the Benchmarks Partnering for Excellence (PFE) Conference, and ACEs are on the agenda! The conference will be on August 17th & 18th in Statesville, North Carolina. There will be keynote speakers, two breakout sessions, and a screening of the film, Resilience . Two of the keynote speakers are Tonier Cain and Dawn O'Malley! I'll be speaking as well about how ACEs science fuels personal and social change. Topics to be covered in the break-out sessions are as follows:...