Blog

Back in the spring, I was in the middle of putting together a panel on community interventions for ACEs when the conference planning chair suggested adding Tara Shephard. We had an amazing panel that day, but Tara hit it out of the park. Her love and care for African-American girls in Arkansas and the adversities they face was apparent in every word she spoke that day. To give some background, Tara is an author, education and mental health advocate; an auditor for the American Correctional...

A few months ago, a school nurse who experienced a school shooting reached out to me to express her feeling of isolation and asked for support. She wanted to know if I knew of any other school nurses she could connect with who also lived through this nightmare. The nurse has asked to remain anonymous and I certainly respect her decision. Her email left me reeling, thinking of how I could support this very brave, but very wounded school nurse. Where is the support for school nurses who have...

An important discussion about use and misuse of mindfulness. From the apps on our phones to the magazines at our grocery stores, we're inundated with tips on using "mindfulness" to reduce stress. But San Francisco State professor Ronald Purser argues that the mindfulness advertised is more like "McMindfulness": well-packaged, individualized complacency that preserves the status quo. Instead of linking our unhappiness to larger social structures, we identify it as self-imposed -- and are told...

"Between the ages of twenty & forty we are engaged in the process of discovering who we are, which involves learning the difference between accidental limitations which it is our duty to outgrow and the necessary limitations of our nature beyond which we cannot trespass with impunity" ~W.H. Auden During my 20s, I definitely did a lot of the work aimed towards answering the question, "Who am I?" I remember it as a time of feeling completely confident one moment and then unsteady &...

#Independence Day #ACE Study Inner #Resilience & 2 books to recommend: 1. Alice Miller’s The Drama of the Gifted Child = Understand Your Self 2. Your Inner Voice = Self-Healing techniques that are clinically-proven Most people do neither & repeat the same mistakes for decades. Do most people know how to finish with unfinished emotional business? Rapes, ACE Scores, Traumas, deaths, divorce, breakup, PTSD. failures, catastrophes, problems from upbringing? In 1 week, I co-facilitated...

Wrestling Ghosts provides audiences a rare opportunity to bear witness to the healing process. At each and every screening we hear that seeing what healing looks like changes lives. And without fail we are asked “how can I show this movie?” and we weren’t satisfied with the answer we could give them. Our focus has been community and educational screenings, but not everyone can organize a screening and we are committed to reaching as wide an audience as possible!

By A. Hosack, P. Berman, & K. Hecht My mom told me good friends help. I can tell Tommy is scared. I know something that might help. Davy is sitting next to Tommy at the library. They had just heard a mom read a book about the 4th of July. To make the book more interesting, the new librarian had turned on a video that had fireworks in it. Davy’s mommy had warned him that fireworks could make very loud sudden noises. When the video came on, he jumped each time he heard the firework explode...

Building Resilience and Belonging through Trauma-Sensitive Yoga Starr believes, as its founder Floyd Starr did, that there is no such thing as a bad child. And, when you provide a safe environment, when you treat a child with dignity and respect, it changes a child’s heart. And that, in the end, is what changes a child’s life. It’s a powerful story that we have been helping children write for over 100 years at Starr Commonwealth. For all students on Starr’s campus, this approach is applied...

The Anna, Age Eight Institute for the Data-Driven Prevention of Childhood Trauma and Maltreatment launched July 1, 2019, part of Northern New Mexico College. We seek to serve as a catalyst for ensuring the health, safety, resilience and education of all our families, which is how we will measure the success of each community, city, county and across the state. We strive to create best practices models, provide critical resources and advocate for policies that result in ensuring the quality...

In an interview last year, after her book , The Deepest Well: Healing the Long-Term Effects of Childhood Adversity, was published, Burke Harris told NPR's Cory Turner, "We all need to be part of the solution. If we each take ... our little piece, it's nuts how far we'll be able to go, together as a society, in terms of solving this problem. California Gov. Gavin Newsom took Burke Harris up on her challenge, appointing her the first-ever surgeon general of California. Newsom cites the toxic...

By Peter Walker, The Guardian, June 29, 2019. Labour is to push for a national law to ensure that new policy decisions are gauged against people’s future health and wellbeing, with an ambitious idea modelled on similar schemes already in place in Wales and New Zealand . The proposed Future Generations Wellbeing Act for England, to be unveiled on Saturday by the shadow health secretary, Jonathan Ashworth, would mandate measures such as a “health equality audit” of all government decisions,...

By Brandon Stratford, Child Trends, June 26, 2019. According to 46-state data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the majority of schools in 15 states and the District of Columbia reported offering sex-ed curricula or supplementary materials that included information about HIV, sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), and pregnancy prevention relevant to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and questioning (LGBTQ) students in 2016 (the most recent year for which data are...