Dennis, You CAN READ MY MIND! :) That's exactly what I plan on doing. I'm going to talk as much as I can to the ppl from Maryland who get TIC, get ACEs, and would/might join our Maryland ACES group! I'm sure I will have fun...but I go with a very strong agenda! Thanks for all you are doing, Dennis. Every bit of it helps!
Looks like no one has claimed to be going to the Baltimore Trauma Conference next week other than Brenda.
Wish I could attend but I have other obligations.
If I were able to attend, my aim would be to connect with or get contact data for as many Maryland resident attendees and presenters as possible to see if we can build a coalition aiming, to start with, include ACEs questions on the Maryland Behavioral Risk Factor Surveilance Survey. I wouldn't be surprised if we could locate a number of Johns Hopkins providers and researchers who would support this.
I did find out that the contact person for Maryland BRFSS, Helio Lopez, retired a few months ago and that the survey is now managed through Maryland Vital Statistics. I will pursue that to find out the "who what where why and when" about how questions get included.
And Brenda, it would be great if you can "collect" some folks interested in what we are trying to do and invite them to join Aces Connection!
Anyway, have fun and bring us some stories about your adventures. (No pressure :-) )
Jane StevensPublisher, ACEsTooHigh; founder, PACEs Connection
The media is as uneducated about ACEs and trauma as the rest of our professional, topical and geographic communities, hence their sensationalistic approach. And just as in all our communities, there are beginnings of change with a couple of organizations that are promoting solution-oriented journalism, and a few of us who are starting to educate other journalists about trauma-informed journalism.
All those emotions -- frustration, anger, etc. -- have roots in adverse childhood experiences and systems that are further traumatizing traumatized people. However, there really is a trauma-informed/resilience social movement underway, and all of the more than 1,400 members of ACEsConnection are part of it.
We definitely have a long way to go, but I believe that war, racism, sexism, etc. will eventually be made senseless by this movement, partly because the -isms just don't compute, and partly because the -isms are fueled by people who are angry about what happened to them in their childhoods, either at the hands of their parents, in their neighborhoods or in the systems (education, medicine, mental health, etc.) that served them, and they take out their frustrations on someone else.
It didn't come across in my posting, but I was being sarcastic when I asked if he'd been a victim. You don't suddenly wake up one day and say to yourself "Today I'm going to get my gun and go kill a whole bunch of innocent people." That just doesn't happen. There's ALWAYS a backstory and it's filled with pain, frustration, isolation, inattention, and anger. ALWAYS. But since the media would rather fill his story with sensationalism, people never really get to the heart of the problem: people with trauma are capable of horrible things, if no one pays attention to them, or they don't get help.
Dennis, Thanks for your comments. I'm NOT AT ALL surprised to hear what your neighbor, the military commander said. I completely agree with him. And he is spot on...we need to get out of the war business. War is a part of this problem. But the military-industrial complex is huge. I hope as a species we can stop it b/c we are on a big collision course with it if we don't. And all of us need to work on taking down the internal barriers each one of us has when it comes to the us-vs-them thinking. We are all one big human family AND we are also a part of the mammalian family and can learn a lot from other mammals. That's a side interest of mine.
Yes the hopeful signs occur in the vets getting helped w/ back-to-nature treatments, gardening like you said, and horse and dog therapy. Horses are especially amazing b/c they are prey animals and can SO tune into our emotional states and feed back to us the feelings we can't see or feel. I can't praise those therapies enough.
Thank you for your kind words about the site & resources. I so want to empower others to go out and help make the change that is so desperately needed in our country and the world. Thank you, Dennis, for having that spirit and being a part of our AC family! And if I can help w/ directing folks to or finding new resources for anyone, I'm always here to help.
Brenda, Yes, I believe Alexis was a victim. We cannot know all of his victimizations but being a black, male in this country IS one. Life for black males is really hard. He felt an injustice w/ not being paid enough on a job & how the govt was not treating him well as a vet. This article makes these statements. It states he was sick of this country (a warning sign, b/c he hated "the group," "his group"). The U.S. culture is filled w/ constant betrayals that most of us are acculturated to not see and to repress. It's a tricky thing to get our heads around; our culture blinds us to our own ills. I'm not making excuses for Alexis, only trying to understand the reasons why he snapped. We all have emotional containers we hold our emotional states in. Anger is not accepted in this culture, our culture trains us to minimize the expression of it so we keep it in our container. Betrayals are emotional wounds. He had too many, obviously. He tried to "do right", practicing Buddhism, etc. but as van der Kolk says you can't treat emotional wounds with the intellect; two diff parts of the brain. So hard to explain all this online. Hope I've shed a little light. :) Happy to continue the dialogue if anyone has more comments or questions.
Here are more resources on traumas that affected Alexis:
I agree on all counts you mentioned. Way back during the Vietnam war I worked for county mental health near Travis AirForce Base, "Gateway to the pacific." We didn't really have a good handle on PTSD yet, but I remember a young man who recently arrived "home" after a tour of duty as a helicopter gunner. He was one of those kids who enlisted rather than go to jail. He told me the only time he felt alive and doing anything worth while was when he was hanging out of his chopper spraying the enemy with his automatic rifle. "There is no place for me in this world except as a killer."
He had no debriefing or preparation to return to civilian life.
My neighbor here in metro DC is a Vietnam vet who is commander of the local veterans group. He is telling me we are collecting tons of kids with PTSD and brain damage. "They are all time bombs." "We have to get out of the war business."
On the other hand, in California a couple years ago we subscribed to a Community Supported Agriculture program run by a young vet who said learning how to grow food saved his life and his sanity. And Dylan Ratigan works with vets in Southern California.
I'm seeing all these points as part of an effort to observe and repair structural violence, mostly unintended consequences of a wornout world view where the current economic thinking treats all the negative consequences of its workings as "externalities." Or as the failings of individual character or genes. Laura Kerr's take on the "therapeutic society" fits here too,
So I'm interested in supporting a cultural shift from "I, Me Mine" to "We, Us, Ours."
Chris you and Jane have created a treasure house of tools and research to back it up. In Maryland we need to, as Brenda says, present it to the people with clout (and a heart).
Dennis, I *LOVE* the energy you bring to this group! Thank you for all the legwork you are doing to find connections and interested parties.
Chris, yeah, do you THINK that Alexis was ever a VICTIM in his life too? I'm not condoning his actions, of course, they are wrong. But I think we all need to take a step back and look at the actions that preceded his breakdown & violence. There's always a reason. And it didn't have to happen. #prevention
Dennis, Just read up on deceased shooter Alexis. Sounds like he had PTSD with a history of polyvictimizations. Was African American and a former acquaintance said he " frequently complained about being the victim of discrimination." Of course, since he was black! I love how all these people say "he was so nice." Most people w/ PTSD ARE nice. He was just holding too much in his container and snapped. The "evil" in this country/culture is the easy acceptance of guns, the repressed social norms of violence in our media/entertainment, the us vs them thinking (e.g. racism), and a fair dose of too few pro-social attachments w/ both kin and the "strangers" in our everyday lives. The village doesn't exist anymore and no one is raising our children as Dr. Gabor Mate has pointed out many times. Dr. Gary Slutkin views violence as a disease and treats it as such. If anyone wants info, let me know.
Why don't we see if we can get a little Think Tank group together starting with this Maryland ACEs group. Heather Larkin will support this. She has developed an ACEs response think tank in the NY capital area with representatives from various agencies there. And she has offered to help me get such a group going here.
We can brainstorm and identify our networks and tigure out what our goals might be and then do some project management. I will contact her and see whom she might suggest we contact. I also want to find out who is in charge of deciding which questions get into the BRFSS, starting with Harold Lopez at MD BRFSS.
Will get back to the group about progress.
I would also like to have some discussion about social and cultural factors perpetuating violence in our culture. Dr Orlowsky, chief of Med Star's Washington Hospital Center was speaking today, in raction to yet another mass killing, that there was something evil, something wrong that is generating all the violence and that we needed to work together to "get rid of it."
Dennis, I attended the same Webinar last week - got my mind spinning on all the wonderful things Maryland COULD do if they were clued into ACEs, money spent on traumatized lives (somehow it always comes down to the money, doesn't it?). Still, it makes perfect sense that money flowing into prevention SHOULD reap huge monetary gains later in life.
Chris, as usual, you are FILLED with wonderful arsenal for me :) -- I would LOVE to present to somebody who has clout in our state. And watch the lightbulb flip ON for a change!
Just checked online: Doesn't look like Maryland reports adverse experiences on thier BRFSS questionnaires. Its kind of surprising in that Maryland seems to be a fairly progressive state. But ACE reporting makes fiscal sense too.
I did attend the online confference event NCCANS last week:
Minnesota and Wisconsin are doing some pretty innovative work seriously taking on child abuse and neglect. You can get the slides and handouts accompanying the Making Connections Conference ( and see the webinar which will be available in their archives). They report recent data on the ACES data from their BRFSS.
Seems like a good policy start in Marlyland would be to see if we can get ACEs and maybe other questions ( like Wisconsin's suggested additional survey questions on poverty and neglect) added to the BRFSS
Dennis, I don't think Maryland included the ACE questions in their BRFSS; see this map. FYI, according to this page the contact is lopezh{at}dhmh.state.md.us.
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