Blog

Here's an excerpt from my upcoming online course (launching June 1) "Healing Childhood PTSD." As many of you know I'm all about tools you can use to re-regulate and change self-defeating patterns and behaviors. Read more and watch the video here.

Nearly half of the nation’s youth report having experienced at least one traumatic event. The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration’s (SAMHSA) National Children’s Mental Health Awareness Day 2018 event in Washington, DC, will feature an interactive town hall on strategies to create an integrated health approach to support children, youth, and young adults who have experienced trauma. Awareness Day 2018: “Partnering for Health and Hope Following Trauma,” will take place on...

New research suggests there is a link between childhood adversity and creative experiences. According to a study published in Frontiers in Psychology ,performing artists who experienced more abuse, neglect or family dysfunction in childhood tend to have a more intense creative process. “We began this study approximately fifteen years ago. The notion that artists and performing artist suffered more pathology, including bipolar, disorder troubled us. No one seemed willing to also include the...

California is one step closer to becoming a trauma-informed state. ACR 235 authored by Assemblymember Joaquin Arambula of Fresno designates May 22nd, 2018 as Trauma-Informed Awareness Day to highlight the impact of trauma and the importance of prevention and community resilience through trauma-informed care. Additionally, May 22nd is Policymaker Education Day hosted by the California Campaign to Counter Childhood Adversity (4CA) where stakeholders from all across California come to...

Leona Godfrey was sitting down to dinner at a TGI Fridays in Orange, Connecticut, in December 2013 when she glanced at a television and saw her little brother’s name on the local news. Davon Eldemire had tried to rob a small grocery store, shooting and injuring the owner. “I was devastated,” Godfrey recalled. “What was he thinking? I couldn’t eat.” He was 20. She was 10 years older and had helped raise him, looking on in shame as he piled up an arrest record for drugs, larceny, and shooting...

In education, initiatives tend to roll down from above. A district buys a new curriculum, or gets funding for a new program, and principals receive their marching orders, which they in turn hand down to teachers below. That’s not the case at Ohio Avenue Elementary School in Columbus, Ohio. The 19th-century corniced brick building is perhaps an unlikely home for experimental methods of nurturing children’s developing brains. The surrounding streets are lined with abandoned buildings, pawn...

EUREKA, Calif. — The dirty needles can be found scattered among the pine and brush, littering the forest floor around Eureka, a town long celebrated as a gateway to the scenic Redwood Empire. They are the debris of a growing heroin scourge that is gripping the remote community in Northern California. While the state as a whole has one of the lowest overall opioid-related death rates in the country, a sharp rise in heroin use across the rural north in recent years has raised alarms. In...

Trigger warning: trauma, doctors, hospital, birth, sex It is very important to me to approach all of the work that I do from a trauma-informed perspective. Whether it is asking for consent before touching a student in yoga class, offering self-regulation skills to those I work with, or preparing clients for potential triggers*, I do my best to incorporate my on-going learning in the field of trauma into my professional practices. Recently, I began taking trauma classes for professionals...

It was the little red trauma-informed schoolhouse. Katherine Wickersham-Wade, the Nay’dini’aa Na’ Kayax (Chickaloon Village) clan grandmother who started the Ya Ne Dah Ah School , Alaska’s first Tribally operated school in 1992, might not have used that language. But she did envision a school that would wrap its students in Native ancestral traditions and Ahtna language, instill self-confidence and repair some of the damage inflicted by historical trauma—the disruptions to culture and...

Teachers across the country are pushing for better pay and increased school funding. They consistently make less than other college graduates with comparable experience — even though, for many teachers, working with students is more than a full-time job. There are long days in the classroom, clubs and activities, planning and grading, and the many after-school hours spent with students. Earlier this spring, we asked NPR Ed readers to send in stories of teachers going to great lengths to help...

CHICAGO — Gary Slutkin, an epidemiologist, has spent his life treating contagious diseases: cholera, tuberculosis, H.I.V. — and for the last 23 years, violence. Yes, violence. A disease is a condition with identifiable symptoms that causes sickness or death. That describes violence. And we know it spreads itself. There is overwhelming evidence that hurt people hurt other people. Children who grow up in poverty and misery do not commit violence — unless they experienced it. If they were...

I used to will chaos into my life. It was a gift of sorts. Mother said I was born to Thunder—which is an element of chaos and liberation in my culture. I have always believed that an electric chaos ran through my blood. "It's a gift to be born this way," my mother said, the first time I told her that I had a terrible dream of a large wheel spinning before me. It would not stop. "That is Thunder. This is a gift." She saw the world differently, and I by proxy. Her willful nature to name the...