Hi, Randy, This is very powerful. What strikes me is your depth of realization about your interior process as you re-live past feelings of worthlessness in the present. And that uber awareness in and of itself seems to be a major step in the healing process. But mindfulness can also be painful -- but I think it is a necessary step to healing. Kind of like ripping off a bandage, to clean it out, so a wound can heal. One of the fallout factors of ACEs is the way in which we can struggle in...

Hi Janie, It sounds like you have used your personal tragic experience in a creative and generous way. I love the idea of putting resources out there for kids who may be in the midst of their own ACEs. I have only begun my journey, as I am still absorbing all the information in "Childhood Disrupted". I knew about the psychological consequences of my own ACEs, but it never occurred to me that my sudden onset of health problems as I turned fifty this year could have any relationship to my...

Need 45 Trauma-Informed Practitioners or Clinicians For Study on Using a Brain Regulation Headband-Bellabee Designed To Help Trauma Survivors Regulate Their Brains. All trauma informed practitioners who are suffering with or who work with adults or children suffering with C-PTSD, PTSD, Developmental Trauma, Depression, Anxiety, ADHD & Sleep Disorders are welcome to apply to be considered for this study. The deadline to request and submit your application is: March 20, 2020 As a trauma...

A 7-page fact sheet describing Parent-Child Care (PC-CARE) is now available. A dyadic psychotherapeutic intervention for enhancing the caregiver-child relationship and making behavior management more effective, PC-CARE combines teaching and coaching on how trauma exposure affects children’s mental health. Caregivers can be biological parents, relative caregivers, resource parents, grandparents, nannies, or anyone caring for a child. While caregivers play with the child, therapists coach...

Elisabeth Corey writes so honestly on her Beating Trauma blog . I'm a huge fan of her writing and advocacy work. This piece, in particular, is amazing. She writes about adult relationships and how they have been impacted deeply and consistently by ACEs in childhood. We know what we have lived. Unlearning and learning new and different things takes time and work. And it helps, that parents like Elisabeth share as they learn. We all benefit from that sharing. Many of us are learning how to...

Dr. Suzanne Frank has known about the impact of childhood adversity on young lives for decades. She’s seen the fallout in the faces of young people huddled in beds at a children’s shelter where she worked years ago. She’s seen it as the regional child abuse services and champion for the Permanente Medical Group. And she’s seen it in hospital examination rooms where, as a member of the Santa Clara County’s Sexual Assault Response Team, she’s been called in to examine shell-shocked children...

While @Donna Jackson Nakazawa is usually too busy writing books, training, and research to blog, she does share gems, nuggets, and information every once in a while on Twitter or Facebook which demand to be turned into blogs. With her permission to post, here's a recent, consolidated Tweet thread version of her writing. It's in response to another thread by Jennifer Brea (which can be found here) where she details about what we can expect from her upcoming book, The Angel and the...

I devoted half of my book, Childhood Disrupted , to science-based interventions on how individuals can heal from the effects of ACEs. Here are some of the basics. H ere are some really important healing steps we can all take – which the science shows can help reverse the changes to our brains and DNA that might have occurred, growing up with ACES Writing to heal. Research shows individuals who write about emotional upheavals and stressful experiences for 20 minutes each day, over a period of...

A new program for parents and infants, thanks to generous support from Mill Town Capital , is coming to Pittsfield, Massachusetts. The Hello It’s Me Project shines a spotlight on these tender new relationships, investing resources around the birth of a baby with the long-term goal of building a healthy community from the bottom up. When world-renowned child development researcher Dr. Ed Tronick spoke in the spring of 2018 for an audience of a wide variety of practitioners in Berkshire County...

Dear Kate, I hope this note reaches you. Thanks for this info. I have a friend who is a midwife, and a few other people I’m going to share this with. I’m write to see if you know of ACEP, Association for Comprehensive Energy Psychology, of which I’m a member. They are also talking about relationship of early trauma and quality of life. Perhaps you’d like to reach out to them, if you are not connected already. https://www.energypsych.org/default.aspx <...

Please join us for our new series entitled: Trauma-Informed Criminal Justice. This monthly virtual Zoom series will feature conversations facilitated by Dr. Porter Jennings-McGarity, PhD/LCSW, PACEs Connection’s criminal justice consultant, with special guests to discuss the need for trauma-informed criminal justice system reform. Using a PACEs-science lens, this series will examine the relationship between trauma and the criminal justice system, what needs changing, and strategies being...

[Editor's note: Dr. Harise Stein at Stanford University edits a web site — abuseresearch.info — that focuses on the effects of abuse, and includes research articles on PACEs. Every month, she posts the summaries of the abstracts and links to research articles that address only ACEs, PCEs and PACEs. Thank you, Harise!! — Rafael Maravilla] Domestic Violence – Effects on Children Makris G, Eleftheriades A, Pervanidou P. Early Life Stress, Hormones, and Neurodevelopmental Disorders. Horm Res...

I'm thrilled to announce that my book, Healing Emotional Eating for Trauma Survivors: Trauma-Informed Practices to Nurture a Peaceful Relationship with Your Emotions, Body, and Food is available. I'm honored that PACES member Donna Jackson Nakazawa, award-winning science journalist and author of seven books, wrote the foreword. Healing Emotional Eating for Trauma Survivors is the culmination of my nearly 40-year career as a clinical social worker and holistic psychotherapist specializing in...

The brain doesn’t fully develop until about the age of 25. This fact is sometimes quite surprising and eye opening to most adults. It can also be somewhat overwhelming for new parents and professionals who are interacting with babies and young children every day, to contemplate. It is essential to realize however, that the greatest time of development occurs in the years prior to kindergarten. And even more critical to understand is that by age three 85 percent of the core structures of the...

Christina Bethell, Ph.D, MBA, MPH, founder of the Child and Adolescent Health Measurement Initiative (CAHMI), principal author of the groundbreaking study on positive childhood experiences, and creator of the free Well Visit Planner, among other innovations. Two internationally-respected leaders and innovators in complementary aspects of early relational health and childhood and maternal health equity recently launched a partnership they believe will benefit everyone from newborn babies and...

Emotion has an enormous impact on imprinting memory in our brains. I had an experience when I was 6 years old that included emotion and I have the memory of it all of these many years later. It was a 6 year old birthday sleepover party. There were 7 girls invited that lived near each other and played together most days. A girl new to the neighborhood was invited only due to the requirement of the birthday girl’s mother. I was also invited. I lived a block away but did play with these girls...

This splinter story is an APOE metaphor, a term I have coined as "adverse pre-onset experiences" aka APOEs. This builds on the term for our knowledge that ACEs (adverse childhood experiences) influence risk for chronic illness. This is about how chronic illness starts for many of us within weeks or months of a stressful or traumatic event. And how we think, very normally, that this particular event is the cause...