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How Storytelling Builds Attachment & The Science Behind It

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How Storytelling Builds Attachment & The Science Behind It

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There is a lot of research available on the subject of storytelling today. It helps people focus, remember information, develop empathy, and navigate difficult life events. It's also a lot of fun.

These subjects are so well studied that a quick Google search will bring up hundreds of articles, both for the lay person and the academic. In fact, there are so many good books, factoids, and articles out on storytelling now that it's easy to get lost in all the good news.

We say "lost," because what's interesting is that almost all of this research is focused on the impact of the story on the listener. In other words, it neglects the relationship between the storyteller and the listener, and particularly the relationship that forms after multiple tellings.

As parents and teachers who use storytelling daily, we believe this is an error. We have experienced the storytelling relationship so frequently that we recognize it, not the narrative, at the heart of good storytelling. It is through the intimacy and trust of that relationship that the real value (not just the words) is passed from human to human, parent to child. It's also why every parent and caregiver is uniquely poised to become a masterful storyteller - because nobody knows your child better than you.

What scientists have pieced together over the last seventy years is that storytelling is a principle component of how we think, speak, and make meaning of our lives. It mediates our social structures and extends deep into our human ancestry. And it's as alive today as ever. But to fill in the gap in the science of storytelling, we need to look elsewhere - at one of the principle theories of human development: attachment theory.

The main principle of attachment theory is that a healthy attachment to one or more parental figures in a child's early years helps a child to form healthy relationships later in life. Since relationships are vital to social creatures like you and I, this leads to all sorts of desirable outcomes, like academic and career success, mental health, and positive self-esteem.

On the other hand, children who lack healthy attachment in childhood tend to form poor relationships as adults and therefore struggle with school, career, and a variety of behavior disorders ranging from anxiety to anger to avoidance.

Psychology Today reports that 40% of U.S. children lack a healthy attachment with their parents and are therefore likely to struggle forming healthy relationships as adults. That's four out of ten people. However, it's important not to equate attachment with love. It's quite possible, and even likely, for a mother and father to love their child yet not have adequate attachment.

So, what builds attachment? Here are six ground rules from Dr. Holly Ruhl, writing in Motherly -

1. Recognizing and responding to a child's cues for attention

2. Following a child's interests

3. Being in sync with a child

4. Remaining positive

5. Varying a child's activities

6. Giving emotional support

If you have ever heard a child say, "Tell me a story," you may have thought she merely wanted a good story. But if we grasp that relationship is at the crux of storytelling, we begin to see that this is a child's way of asking for attention. This corresponds directly with rule 1 for building attachment. Recognizing this cue as what it is - a bid for your attention - can help a lot of parents let go of the stress of coming up with a good story. It's you she wants, not the story.

In our book and in our blog, we refer constantly to the concept of the storytelling loop - you take one or two elements from a child's life, tell an imaginative story about it, and end up with a new perspective on those real things. This correlates with ground rules 2 and 3. Engaging in the storytelling relationship is not so much about telling a story offhand. It begins with paying attention to your child's environment and then incorporating something recognizable into your stories. This makes a child feel seen.

Remaining positive (ground rule 4) is essential to any children's story. We might include some conflicts and drama, especially as a child ages, but a good story should have a positive outcome and leave a child with a good feeling. This helps build a child's sense of safety and resolve, and connects that good feeling with you. It's one of the principle features of storytelling. By allowing a child to encounter a difficult situation in a story, then providing resolution, he has a chance to practice for real life.

If we have followed a child's interests and responded to their cues for attention (rules 1 and 2), a good story often leads to play. If you have ever encountered a bored child, it's often because there is not enough diversity in his activities. Storytelling can be a great way not just to connect, but to stimulate a child's interest in new and diverse activities (rule 5). Check out this article for more on how storytelling leads to productive solo play.

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How Storytelling Builds Attachment & The Science Behind It - How to Tell Stories to Children

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One of the essential messages we share at How to Tell Stories to Children is that storytelling is better understood through the lens of relationship than narrative. Anyone who has told stories to their children (including grandparents, teachers, caregivers, etc.) will recognize that at the end of

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Can be used when tackling difficult topics.

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For Adults & Teachers

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"Trauma-informed care" is a movement. Service providers are talking about it. Researchers are studying it. Theorists are writing about it. Academics are teaching it. Practitioners are implementing it.

What is trauma informed care? SAMHSA (2014) seeks to answer this question by providing a list of trauma-informed principles. These include:

Safety

Trustworthiness and transparency

Peer support

Collaboration and mutuality

Empowerment, voice, and choice

Understanding culture, history, and gender

Many other theorists and practitioners have developed their own sets of guidelines. As you think about what it means to provide trauma informed care to clients receiving support from your system, keep these ideas in mind.
1. There is no formula for trauma-informed care.
Many individuals and organizations are looking for a list of prescribed steps to implement in an effort to become trauma informed. In reality, there is no single, formulaic approach that an organization can take in providing trauma-informed care. While there are principles that can guide organizations in their efforts, there is too much variability to adopt a "one size fits all" approach. When seeking to identify ways to implement trauma informed care, it is essential to consider:

What is the mission and vision of your organization?

What traumas have clients and staff experienced?

What strengths do clients and staff have?

How can you honor the thoughts and feelings of clients and staff as you co-create a trauma informed environment?

How can trauma-informed principles be uniquely applied to your work setting?

2. Trauma informed care requires that we renounce an "us versus them" approach and acknowledge that we are all in this together.
Some individuals and organizations take an "us versus them" approach. People are divided into categories-those who are traumatized and those who are not. Service providers see themselves as being superior to the trauma survivors that they are servicing. The reality is that most of us-service providers and clients alike-have experienced trauma. Trauma experts and researchers suggest that the large majority of individuals and communities have experienced trauma. Trauma is no respecter of persons. It does not care about a person's age, gender, culture, education, or socioeconomic status. This means that all of us are in this together. This realization inevitably transforms our practice. It also levels the playing field. Providers are no longer a step above the clients who are being serviced; they are co-creators and collaborators in the development of a trauma-informed environment that benefits both clients and providers. As you work toward adopting this approach, reflect on the following questions:

What steps would you need to take in order to move from an "us versus them" mentality to a "we are all in this together" approach?

To what extent are you collaborating with the trauma survivors you are working with?

How are power dynamics impacting your ability to provide trauma informed care?

3. Going to one trauma training does not make an individual or an organization trauma-informed.
It is essential for us to educate ourselves on the impact of trauma. It is equally important for us to build our repertoire of skills to support trauma survivors as they process their experiences and become more expressive and integrated. But please remember that this learning does not happen in a single training. Trauma has a multi-layered impact on individuals and communities. Mastering theoretical knowledge about trauma and effectively implementing principles of trauma informed care is equally complex. While your education about trauma may begin with a single training, it is important for you to pursue additional opportunities. Books, articles, supervision, trainings, and certificate programs are important. But daily practice applying information to real life interactions with trauma survivors is of paramount importance. As you educate yourself about trauma, think about the following questions:

How does the theoretical information you learned apply to the clients you work with?

How can you use the knowledge you have in your actual work with clients?

Are there any gaps in your ability to apply theoretical information to your daily interactions with clients?

What do you need to learn more about?

4. Trauma informed care is just as much about the staff as it is about the clients.
Many organizations seeking to provide trauma informed care are well-equipped to therapeutically support clients. But some of these same organizations fall short when it comes to creating safe, supportive environments for staff members. Many staff enter the workplace with preexisting traumas. As they navigate the triggers and emotions resulting from their own traumas, they simultaneously provide support to clients. To further complicate matters, many staff members are expected to "grin and bear" toxic work conditions even as vicarious trauma and burnout drain them of the energy necessary for them to successfully perform their work duties. As you seek to implement trauma informed practices, remember that these practices are just as important for staff as they are for clients. Staff who are overwhelmed and psychologically exhausted will undoubtedly have difficulty embodying trauma-informed principles in their work with clients. Consider the following:

How does trauma affect staff members at your organization?

How have you been impacted by the traumas you have been exposed to in the workplace?

What can you and your coworkers do to create trauma-informed conditions for staff?

What self-care strategies can you implement as you navigate stressful work conditions?

5. Being trauma informed does not necessarily mean that you have to directly talk to clients about the traumas they have been through.
Trauma survivors have experienced terror, shame, and betrayal. These experiences are painful. Some people process their pain by talking about it. Others process it non-verbally. And many suppress it. It is important to remember that not every trauma survivor is ready to talk about their pain. Being trauma-informed does not mean that we must pressure clients into telling their stories. It means that we provide them with a safe environment, support them as they express their emotions and experiences, assist them in coming to a deeper understanding of themselves and the world around them, and provide them with opportunities for restoration and repair. Sometimes this entails direct dialogue about the trauma. Sometimes it involves helping clients tell their stories. Other times, it requires us to step back and support our clients as they work toward other self-directed goals. Consider the following:

How do your clients process their pain?

How can you support your clients without pressuring them to tell their trauma story?

What strategies can you use with clients who are not willing or able to tell their story?

6. Being trauma informed does not mean that we have to be perfect.
Adopting a trauma-informed approach brings with it a certain level of responsibility. After all, we are working with vulnerable people. Sometimes in our journey to becoming trauma informed, we pressure ourselves with unrealistic expectations. We erroneously believe that if we only have enough training, supervision, or experience, we can perfectly implement all of the principles of trauma-informed care. While it is important for us to provide services in a responsible manner, we must also have realistic expectations for ourselves. None of us will ever achieve perfection in our journey to providing trauma informed care. Some days we will be tired. Some days we won't make the best decisions. Some days we will disappoint our coworkers and our clients. Despite these "failures," we must always remember that part of being trauma-informed is understanding that there are opportunities for repair. That even when we are not perfect, we can still be effective.

What messages do you tell yourself when you don't perfectly implement principles of trauma-informed care?

How can you give yourself the same opportunities for repair that you give to your clients?

What realistic expectations can you set for yourself in your journey to becoming trauma-informed?

Additional Resources

Bloom, Sandra (2013). Creating sanctuary. New York: Routledge, 131-194.

Briere, J. & Scott, C. (2006) Principles of trauma therapy: a guide to symptoms, evaluation, and treatment.Thousand Oaks: Sage.

Courtois, Christine. (2014). It's not you, it's what happened to you. Washington D.C: Telemachus, 74-94.

Herman, J. (2015). Trauma and recovery: the aftermath of violence- from domestic abuse to political terror. New York: Basic Books, 155-213.

Winnicott, D.W. (1939-1970). Deprivation and delinquency. London and New York: Lavistock.

Winnicott, D. (2005). Playing and reality. London: Routledge.

*Graffiti artwork by Leon Rainbow

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"Trauma-informed care" is a movement. Service providers are talking about it. Researchers are studying it. Theorists are writing about it. Academics are teaching it. Practitioners are implementing it. What is trauma informed care? SAMHSA (2014) seeks to answer this question by providing a list of trauma-informed principles.

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https://thebestbrainpossible.com/epigenetics-trauma-brain-reversed-mental-health/

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The Difference Between Art Therapy and Art As Therapy

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The Difference Between Art Therapy and Art As Therapy

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Art making is a universal activity that we can do for novelty, exploration, relaxation, and creative expression. It can also be used as a method of psychotherapy where the art activity forms part of a treatment session.

Art as therapy has benefits that are purely driven by the act of creative expression while engaging in a relaxing activity. This is similar to watching a movie, taking a walk or reading a book. The act itself is therapeutic in that it transports us away from our daily stresses. During the activity, we may inadvertently experience emotional expression, understanding of ourselves, and moments of personal insight into problems, however, these outcomes are usually an unexpected by-product of the activity. In many cases, although, we experience these outcomes, we don't know what to do with them once they surface.

Art therapy has the same benefits, however, as the art activity is made in session with a therapist, you are able to be guided on how to process these unexpected emotions and insights. An art therapist can help facilitate the process of identifying and processing difficult emotions that arise from an art making activity. An art therapist can also provide art directives that can help explore difficulties we are experiencing. Examples of these art directives can be seen in our previous case studies:

This is a general overview of how art therapy differs from art as therapy, however, for a more in-depth understanding, you can read our blog post What Happens in an Art Therapy Session.

There are many differences between art as therapy and art therapy, however, the crucial difference is the therapist who is able to develop a therapeutic alliance with the client.

The American Art Therapy Association defines art therapy as below:

"Through integrative methods, art therapy engages the mind, body, and spirit in ways that are distinct from verbal articulation alone. Kinesthetic, sensory, perceptual, and symbolic opportunities invite alternative modes of receptive and expressive communication, which can circumvent the limitations of language. Visual and symbolic expression gives voice to experience and empowers individual, communal, and societal transformation."

The AATA further explains the purpose of the art therapist as:

"Honoring individuals' values and beliefs, art therapists work with people who are challenged with medical and mental health problems, as well as individuals seeking emotional, creative, and spiritual growth."

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Understanding Art Therapy vs Art As Therapy (FREE DOWNLOAD)

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Art as therapy has benefits that are purely driven from the act of creative expression while engaging in a relaxing activity. This is similar to watching a movie, taking a walk or reading a book. The act itself is therapeutic in that it transports us away from our daily stresses.

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Today we will be exploring how art therapy is affective at helping with processing trauma whether you have unresolved trauma or a diagnosis of PTSD. Art making and art therapy allow people to express themselves in new ways and find new meaning and possibility in the healing process. Check out these 4 ways that art therapy helps with trauma:

1. ART THERAPY ALLOWS A PERSON TO EVOKE POSITIVE EMOTIONS

The process of creating art is very enjoyable because we are doing something that is new and pleasurable. Our brains enjoy and seek new situations because it creates novelty. When we experience a novel act, our brains store a new positive memory into our memory center which is in the hippocampus and the amygdala. The hippocampus stores our memories and the amygdala helps with emotional stimuli and strengthens our long term memories.

Trauma survivors can have difficulty with accessing positive emotions. So art therapy aids in giving a dose of dopamine since you are doing something new and novel. Dopamine is the key to the reward center of the brain so then the person feels good and is able to find solutions to the problem or task at hand. When a person is able to create art work in a art therapy session and express themselves, it is a pleasurable activity; also they get to externalize their internal experience and gain a different perspective.
"Art is the lie that enables us to realize the truth." ~ Pablo Picasso
2. ART THERAPY HELPS EXTERNALIZE EMOTIONS

Trauma survivors generally have a hard time with their emotions, either being in avoidance of them or are being overwhelmed by them. When working with an art therapist, art can provide a place of containment for a challenging situation, place or memory. Then after exploring the piece, you can leave it at the therapist's office so that you no long have to carry it with you in your mind. It lightens the load; it lessens the power of the memory and makes it more manageable. Each time we make something that haunts us outside of us we have opportunities to have a new experience. Through the process of externalization a person get to see that it is actually not a part of us, just something that we rent space to and interact with inside of our mind.

"To practice any art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow. So do it." ~ Kurt Vonnegut

3. ART THERAPY HELPS LEARN ABOUT TRAUMA SYMPTOMS

Having PTSD, or PTS, or unresolved symptoms of trauma can be unpleasant and people may avoid interacting or experiencing them. But, in order to heal from a traumatic event, the way that the body and mind is holding the trauma must be explored, so that it can be expressed, released and externalized. This process allows the body to let go of the event that is frozen or trapped in the body. By focusing on the internal experience of the body, an individual can learn about when they are triggered and what the symptoms are that their body is having. With my clients we frequently will externalize their body sensations with line, shape, color, and form into a empty body image, to help clients understand their experience. By learning about their symptoms and normalizing them, they can have a different experience with them.

Here are some common symptoms of trauma survivors:

Episodes or re-experiencing the event (including flashbacks)

Sleep disturbance and nightmares

Easily startled (being very jumpy)

Avoiding things, places, people or conversations that remind them of the event

Emotional numbing or shutting down

Irritability/Anger

Memory problems/amnesia

Anxiety/panic

Loss of interest in things they used to enjoy

Guilt about being a survivor of an event

Depression with or without suicidal thoughts

"Art and love are the same thing: It's the process of seeing yourself in things that are not you." ~ Chuck Klosterman

4. ART THERAPY PROVIDES AN ALTERNATIVE FORM OF EXPRESSION SUITED FOR THOSE SUFFERING FROM PTSD

Since trauma can be difficult and uncomfortable to talk about, the use of art work can be a way of a person expressing themselves non verbally. The therapist and client can talk about the use of color, line, shape, and form and how each of the objects interact with one another. When talking about art work, it is less threatening than focusing on self. The person can project onto the art and access the unconscious part of the brain to gain insight into their symptoms or whatever problem they maybe having. The use of coloring is also very helpful and effective for helping a person, regulate the body, slow down the breathing and calm the parasympathetic system (the fight, flight, or freeze response).

"I make art when I can't gather the words to say." ~ Nikki Rowe

How have you used art to express yourself? Comment below!

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Today we will be exploring how art therapy is affective at helping with processing trauma whether you have unresolved trauma or a diagnosis of PTSD. Art making and art therapy allow people to express themselves in new ways and find new meaning and possibility in the healing process.

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Childhood trauma leads to lifelong chronic illness — so why isn’t the medical community helping patients?

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Childhood trauma leads to lifelong chronic illness — so why isn’t the medical community helping patients?

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When I was twelve, I was coming home from swimming at my neighbor's dock when I saw an ambulance's flashing lights in our driveway. I still remember the asphalt burning my feet as I stood, paralyzed, and watched the paramedics take away my father. It was as if I knew those flashing lights were a harbinger that my childhood was over.

At the hospital, a surgeon performed "minor" elective bowel surgery on my young dad. The surgeon made an error, and instead of my father coming home to the "welcome home" banners we'd painted, he died.

The medical care system failed my father miserably. Then the medical care system began to fail me.

At fourteen, I started fainting. The doctors implied I was trying to garner attention. In college I began having full seizures. I kept them to myself, fearful of seeming a modern Camille. I'd awaken on the floor drenched in sweat, with strangers standing quizzically over me. Then, I had a seizure in front of my aunt, a nurse, and forty-eight hours later awoke in the hospital with a pacemaker in my chest.

In my early forties I developed Guillain Barre Syndrome, a neurological autoimmune disorder that causes paralysis from the neck down. I found myself in Johns Hopkins Hospital, on the exact anniversary of my father's death, in the same hospital wing where he had died, unable to move. I was a few days shy of turning forty-two, the very age at which my dad had passed away.

I recovered, only to relapse, falling paralyzed again. Many of my children's early memories revolve around my bed, where we played board games and read books.

It wasn't until I was fifty-one-years old that a physician sat me down and asked me the most important question of my life - one that would lead me to better health than I'd had for decades: "Were there any childhood traumas or stressors that might have contributed to the extreme level of inflammation you're experiencing as an adult?"

My physician explained that ongoing adversity in childhood leads to a chronic state of "fight, flight or freeze." Researchers at Yale had recently shown that when inflammatory stress hormones flood a child's body and brain, they alter the genes that oversee our stress reactivity, re-setting the stress response to "high" for life. This increases the risk of inflammation, which manifests later in cancer, heart disease, and autoimmune diseases like mine.

As a science reporter I was shocked to discover that research linking childhood stress to adult illness began in 1996 with the Kaiser Permanente-CDC Adverse Childhood Experiences Study (ACE Study). Since then, over 1500 peer-reviewed studies have replicated these findings.

The research was stunning. Two-thirds of Americans report experiencing Adverse Childhood Experiences. These include obvious sexual and physical abuse, but also stressors that many consider to be normal - growing up with divorced parents, living with a depressed or alcoholic mom or dad, having a parent who belittled or humiliated you - or simply not feeling as if your family had your back. People who'd experienced four such categories of childhood adversity were twice as likely to be diagnosed with cancer and depression as adults.

One statistic struck home with me: women who'd faced three types of childhood adversity had a sixty percent greater risk of being hospitalized with an autoimmune disease as an adult. Similar links existed between childhood stressors and adult heart disease, diabetes, migraines and irritable bowel disease. Suffering six categories of early life stress shortened one's lifespan by twenty years.

However, one study of 125,000 patients showed that when physicians acknowledged and discussed patients' childhood trauma openly, patients enjoyed a thirty-five percent reduction in doctor visits. Validating patient suffering invites patients to address it at last.

Yet, despite twenty years of research linking childhood stress to adult disease, the majority of the medical community acts as if these findings don't exist.

This August, students will begin training in medical schools across the country. They will be expected to emerge with deep-rooted knowledge about how to help patients heal. But shockingly, only a few medical schools teach students about how childhood suffering influences adult disease. The majority of medical schools leave this science out. Perhaps they fear teaching it will open the door to bringing psychiatry into the exam room.

But shouldn't physicians consider the whole patient - body and mind - so that they can suggest behavioral health tools that will alleviate both the root causes and the symptoms of disease? When physicians help patients come to the profound revelation that childhood adversity plays a role in the chronic illnesses they face now, they help them to heal physically and emotionally at last.

All disease is multifactorial. Past trauma is one of those factors. I can't help but think of how my own story might have been different if the medical community had been trauma-aware. What if, after my father's sudden death, the emotional cost of such a traumatic loss had been validated, and our medical system had offered therapeutic interventions?

It's been two decades since the research linking childhood adversity to adult illness began. But think of how much money we might have saved in our health care system since then if we considered the role that past trauma plays in one's current medical condition, instead of waiting a lifetime for it to show up in devastating and difficult to treat diseases that ruin lives for a second time.

According to the CDC, the annual health care cost of adult patients who have a history of early trauma is $124 billion a year. Validating patients' past trauma isn't only beneficial for their well being, it translates into fewer tests, procedures, and health care dollars spent.

Statistics tell us that two-thirds of Americans reading these words, including physicians, will recognize that experiences in their childhood still trail after them today, like small ghosts. Fortunately, medical science now recognizes many proven interventions for recovering from trauma, even decades after events have occurred.

We are long overdue for a national awareness campaign - similar to public health initiatives on how seat belts save lives, smoking causes cancer, and hand washing prevents flu - to educate physicians and families on how childhood trauma begets adult illness. Only then can we help those who feel paralyzed by their pasts to achieve the healthy lives they deserve.

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This article first appeared in the Huffington Post. Donna Jackson Nakazawa is the author of Childhood Disrupted: How Your Biography Becomes Your Biology and How you Can Heal. You can follow her on Twitter at @DonnaJackNak, or on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/donnajacksonnakazawaauthor.

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Childhood trauma leads to lifelong chronic illness - so why isn't the medical community helping patients?

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When I was twelve, I was coming home from swimming at my neighbor's dock when I saw an ambulance's flashing lights in our driveway. I still remember the asphalt burning my feet as I stood, paralyzed, and watched the paramedics take away my father. It was as if I knew those flashing lights were a...

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Secondary Traumatic Stress for Educators

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Secondary Traumatic Stress for Educators

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Secondary Traumatic Stress for Educators: Understanding and Mitigating the Effects

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Teaching kids who have experienced trauma can be stressful to educators. Acknowledging that teachers might be experiencing secondary traumatic stress is a step in the right direction to help teachers feel that they are not working alone.

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The Science of How Our Minds and Our Bodies Converge in the Healing of Trauma

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The Science of How Our Minds and Our Bodies Converge in the Healing of Trauma

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"A purely disembodied human emotion is a nonentity," William James asserted in his revolutionary 1884 theory of how our bodies affect our feelings. Two generations later, Rilke wrote in a beautiful letter of advice to a young woman: "I am not one of those who neglect the body in order to make of it a sacrificial offering for the soul, since my soul would thoroughly dislike being served in such a fashion." And yet in the century since, we've made little progress on making sense - much less making use - of the inextricable dialogue between the physical body and the psychoemotional interior landscape we shorthand as "soul."

Nowhere is this relationship more essential yet more endangered than in our healing from trauma, and no one has provided a more illuminating, sympathetic, and constructive approach to such healing than Boston-based Dutch psychiatrist and pioneering PTSD researcher Bessel van der Kolk. In The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (public library), he explores "the extreme disconnection from the body that so many people with histories of trauma and neglect experience" and the most fertile paths to recovery by drawing on his own work and a wealth of other research in three main areas of study: neuroscience, which deals with how mental processes function within the brain; developmental psychopathology, concerned with how painful experiences impact the development of mind and brain; and interpersonal neurobiology, which examines how our own behavior affects the psychoemotional and neurobiological states of those close to us.

Trauma, Van der Kolk notes, affects not only those who have suffered it but also those who surround them and, especially, those who love them. He writes:

One does not have be a combat soldier, or visit a refugee camp in Syria or the Congo to encounter trauma. Trauma happens to us, our friends, our families, and our neighbors. Research by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has shown that one in five Americans was sexually molested as a child; one in four was beaten by a parent to the point of a mark being left on their body; and one in three couples engages in physical violence. A quarter of us grew up with alcoholic relatives, and one out of eight witnessed their mother being beaten or hit.

It takes tremendous energy to keep functioning while carrying the memory of terror, and the shame of utter weakness and vulnerability.

In trauma survivors, Van der Kolk notes, the parts of the brain that have evolved to monitor for danger remain overactivated and even the slightest sign of danger, real or misperceived, can trigger an acute stress response accompanied by intense unpleasant emotions and overwhelming sensations. Such posttraumatic reactions make it difficult for survivors to connect with other people, since closeness often triggers the sense of danger. And yet the very thing we come to most dread after experiencing trauma - close contact with other people - is also the thing we most need in order to regain psychoemotional solidity and begin healing. Van der Kolk writes:

Being able to feel safe with other people is probably the single most important aspect of mental health; safe connections are fundamental to meaningful and satisfying lives.

This, he points out, is why we've evolved a refined mechanism for detecting danger - we're incredibly attuned to even the subtlest emotional shifts in those around us and, even if we don't always heed these intuitive readings, we can read another person's friendliness or hostility on the basis of such imperceptible cues as brow tension, lip curvature, and body angles. But one of the most pernicious effects of trauma is that it disrupts this ability to accurately read others, rendering the trauma survivor either less able to detect danger or more likely to misperceive danger where there is none.

Paradoxically, what normalizes and repairs our ability to read danger and safety correctly is human connection. Van der Kolk writes:

Social support is not the same as merely being in the presence of others. The critical issue is reciprocity: being truly heard and seen by the people around us, feeling that we are held in someone else's mind and heart. For our physiology to calm down, heal, and grow we need a visceral feeling of safety. No doctor can write a prescription for friendship and love: These are complex and hard-earned capacities. You don't need a history of trauma to feel self-conscious and even panicked at a party with strangers - but trauma can turn the whole world into a gathering of aliens.

Beginning to adequately address trauma requires a cultural shift away from the disease model on which twentieth-century psychology and psychiatry were built. (That model has seeded a number of cultural deformities, affecting everything from our longtime denial of the robust relationship between stress and physical illness to the way we make sense of our romantic failures.) Trauma and its psychological consequences, Van der Kolk argues, is not a mental disease but an adaptation. He writes:

The brain-disease model overlooks four fundamental truths: (1) our capacity to destroy one another is matched by our capacity to heal one another. Restoring relationships and community is central to restoring well-being; (2) language gives us the power to change ourselves and others by communicating our experiences, helping us to define what we know, and finding a common sense of meaning; (3) we have the ability to regulate our own physiology, including some of the so-called involuntary functions of the body and brain, through such basic activities as breathing, moving, and touching; and (4) we can change social conditions to create environments in which children and adults can feel safe and where they can thrive.

When we ignore these quintessential dimensions of humanity, we deprive people of ways to heal from trauma and restore their autonomy. Being a patient, rather than a participant in one's healing process, separates suffering people from their community and alienates them from an inner sense of self.

The most essential aspect of healing, Van der Kolk asserts, is learning to fully inhabit that inner sense of self in all of its dimensions - not only emotional and psychological, but bodily - which are inseparable from one another. He explains:

The natural state of mammals is to be somewhat on guard. However, in order to feel emotionally close to another human being, our defensive system must temporarily shut down. In order to play, mate, and nurture our young, the brain needs to turn off its natural vigilance.

Many traumatized individuals are too hypervigilant to enjoy the ordinary pleasures that life has to offer, while others are too numb to absorb new experiences - or to be alert to signs of real danger.

Many people feel safe as long as they can limit their social contact to superficial conversations, but actual physical contact can trigger intense reactions. However ... achieving any sort of deep intimacy - a close embrace, sleeping with a mate, and sex - requires allowing oneself to experience immobilization without fear. It is especially challenging for traumatized people to discern when they are actually safe and to be able to activate their defenses when they are in danger. This requires having experiences that can restore the sense of physical safety.

One place where our culture fails, Van der Kolk argues, is in integrating this physical aspect with the psychoemotional infrastructure of experience - a failure spanning from our clinical methods of treating trauma to our education system. (More than half a century ago, Aldous Huxley wrote beautifully about the need for an integrated mind-body system of education.) Education, Van der Kolk notes, tends to engage the cognitive capacities of the mind rather than the bodily-emotional engagement system, which makes for an ultimately incomplete model of human experience. In a sobering passage that should be etched onto the wall of every Department of Education the world over, he writes:

Despite the well-documented effects of anger, fear, and anxiety on the ability to reason, many programs continue to ignore the need to engage the safety system of the brain before trying to promote new ways of thinking. The last things that should be cut from school schedules are chorus, physical education, recess, and anything else involving movement, play, and joyful engagement. When children are oppositional, defensive, numbed out, or enraged, it's also important to recognize that such "bad behavior" may repeat action patterns that were established to survive serious threats, even if they are intensely upsetting or off-putting.

With an eye to heartening counterpoints like a karate program for rape survivors and a theater program in Boston's inner-city schools, he considers the reasons and the urgency for engaging the body in healing:

The body keeps the score: If the memory of trauma is encoded in the viscera, in heartbreaking and gut-wrenching emotions, in autoimmune disorders and skeletal/muscular problems, and if mind/brain/visceral communication is the royal road to emotion regulation, this demands a radical shift in our therapeutic assumptions.

Drawing on his work with patients who have survived a variety of traumatic experiences - from plane crashes to rape to torture - Van der Kolk considers the great challenge of those of us living with trauma:

When our senses become muffled, we no longer feel fully alive.

In response to the trauma itself, and in coping with the dread that persisted long afterward, these patients had learned to shut down the brain areas that transmit the visceral feelings and emotions that accompany and define terror. Yet in everyday life, those same brain areas are responsible for registering the entire range of emotions and sensations that form the foundation of our self-awareness, our sense of who we are. What we witnessed here was a tragic adaptation: In an effort to shut off terrifying sensations, they also deadened their capacity to feel fully alive.

While this dissociation from the body is an adaptive response to trauma, the troublesome day-to-day anguish comes from the retriggering of this remembered response by stimuli that don't remotely warrant it. Van der Kolk examines the interior machinery at play:

The elementary self system in the brain stem and limbic system is massively activated when people are faced with the threat of annihilation, which results in an overwhelming sense of fear and terror accompanied by intense physiological arousal. To people who are reliving a trauma, nothing makes sense; they are trapped in a life-or-death situation, a state of paralyzing fear or blind rage. Mind and body are constantly aroused, as if they are in imminent danger. They startle in response to the slightest noises and are frustrated by small irritations. Their sleep is chronically disturbed, and food often loses its sensual pleasures. This in turn can trigger desperate attempts to shut those feelings down by freezing and dissociation.

In a passage that calls to mind philosopher Martha Nussbaum's excellent subsequent writings on the nuanced relationship between agency and victimhood, Van der Kolk adds:

Agency starts with what scientists call interoception, our awareness of our subtle sensory, body-based feelings: the greater that awareness, the greater our potential to control our lives. Knowing what we feel is the first step to knowing why we feel that way. If we are aware of the constant changes in our inner and outer environment, we can mobilize to manage them.

But one of the most pernicious effects of trauma, Van der Kolk notes, is that it disrupts our ability to know what we feel - that is, to trust our gut feelings - and this mistrust makes us misperceive threat where there is none. This, in turn, creates an antagonistic relationship with our own bodies. He explains:

If you have a comfortable connection with your inner sensations - if you can trust them to give you accurate information - you will feel in charge of your body, your feelings, and your self.

However, traumatized people chronically feel unsafe inside their bodies: The past is alive in the form of gnawing interior discomfort. Their bodies are constantly bombarded by visceral warning signs, and, in an attempt to control these processes, they often become expert at ignoring their gut feelings and in numbing awareness of what is played out inside. They learn to hide from their selves.

The more people try to push away and ignore internal warning signs, the more likely they are to take over and leave them bewildered, confused, and ashamed. People who cannot comfortably notice what is going on inside become vulnerable to respond to any sensory shift either by shutting down or by going into a panic - they develop a fear of fear itself.

The experience of fear derives from primitive responses to threat where escape is thwarted in some way. People's lives will be held hostage to fear until that visceral experience changes... Self-regulation depends on having a friendly relationship with your body. Without it you have to rely on external regulation - from medication, drugs like alcohol, constant reassurance, or compulsive compliance with the wishes of others.

In its extreme, this lack of internal regulation leads to retraumatizing experiences:

Because traumatized people often have trouble sensing what is going on in their bodies, they lack a nuanced response to frustration. They either react to stress by becoming "spaced out" or with excessive anger. Whatever their response, they often can't tell what is upsetting them. This failure to be in touch with their bodies contributes to their well-documented lack of self-protection and high rates of revictimization and also to their remarkable difficulties feeling pleasure, sensuality, and having a sense of meaning.

One step further down on the ladder to self-oblivion is depersonalization - losing your sense of yourself.

What, then, can we do to regain agency in our very selves? Pointing to decades of research with trauma survivors, Van der Kolk argues that it begins with befriending our bodies and their sensory interiority:

Trauma victims cannot recover until they become familiar with and befriend the sensations in their bodies. Being frightened means that you live in a body that is always on guard. Angry people live in angry bodies. The bodies of child-abuse victims are tense and defensive until they find a way to relax and feel safe. In order to change, people need to become aware of their sensations and the way that their bodies interact with the world around them. Physical self-awareness is the first step in releasing the tyranny of the past.

In a sentiment that calls to mind Schopenhauer's porcupine dilemma, Van der Kolk writes:

The most natural way for human beings to calm themselves when they are upset is by clinging to another person. This means that patients who have been physically or sexually violated face a dilemma: They desperately crave touch while simultaneously being terrified of body contact. The mind needs to be reeducated to feel physical sensations, and the body needs to be helped to tolerate and enjoy the comforts of touch. Individuals who lack emotional awareness are able, with practice, to connect their physical sensations to psychological events. Then they can slowly reconnect with themselves.

How we respond to trauma, Van der Kolk asserts, is to a large extent conditioned by our formative relationships with our caretakers, whose task is to help us establish a secure base. Essential to this is the notion of attunement between parent and child, mediated by the body - those subtlest of physical interactions in which the caretaker mirrors and meets the baby's needs, making the infant feel attended to and understood.

Attunement is the foundation of secure attachment, which is in turn the scaffolding of psychoemotional health later in life. Van der Kolk writes:

A secure attachment combined with the cultivation of competency builds an internal locus of control, the key factor in healthy coping throughout life. Securely attached children learn what makes them feel good; they discover what makes them (and others) feel bad, and they acquire a sense of agency: that their actions can change how they feel and how others respond. Securely attached kids learn the difference between situations they can control and situations where they need help. They learn that they can play an active role when faced with difficult situations. In contrast, children with histories of abuse and neglect learn that their terror, pleading, and crying do not register with their caregiver. Nothing they can do or say stops the beating or brings attention and help. In effect they're being conditioned to give up when they face challenges later in life.

With an eye to the immensely influential work of psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, who pioneered the study of attachment and the notion that attunement between mother and infant lays the foundation for the child's sense of self later in life, Van der Kolk summarizes these foundational findings:

If a mother cannot meet her baby's impulses and needs, "the baby learns to become the mother's idea of what the baby is." Having to discount its inner sensations, and trying to adjust to its caregiver's needs, means the child perceives that "something is wrong" with the way it is. Children who lack physical attunement are vulnerable to shutting down the direct feedback from their bodies, the seat of pleasure, purpose, and direction.

The need for attachment never lessens. Most human beings simply cannot tolerate being disengaged from others for any length of time. People who cannot connect through work, friendships, or family usually find other ways of bonding, as through illnesses, lawsuits, or family feuds. Anything is preferable to that godforsaken sense of irrelevance and alienation.

Although we can't prevent most traumatic experiences from happening, having a solid formative foundation can make healing much easier. But what are those of us unblessed with secure attachment to do? Pointing to his mindfulness-based work with trauma survivors, Van der Kolk offers an assuring direction:

Nobody can "treat" a war, or abuse, rape, molestation, or any other horrendous event, for that matter; what has happened cannot be undone. But what can be dealt with are the imprints of the trauma on body, mind, and soul: the crushing sensations in your chest that you may label as anxiety or depression; the fear of losing control; always being on alert for danger or rejection; the self-loathing; the nightmares and flashbacks; the fog that keeps you from staying on task and from engaging fully in what you are doing; being unable to fully open your heart to another human being.

The crucial point is that trauma robs us of what Van der Kolk terms "self-leadership" - the sense of having agency over ourselves and being in charge of our own experience. The path to recovery is therefore paved with the active rebuilding of that sense. He writes:

The challenge of recovery is to reestablish ownership of your body and your mind - of your self. This means feeling free to know what you know and to feel what you feel without becoming overwhelmed, enraged, ashamed, or collapsed. For most people this involves (1) finding a way to become calm and focused, (2) learning to maintain that calm in response to images, thoughts, sounds, or physical sensations that remind you of the past, (3) finding a way to be fully alive in the present and engaged with the people around you, (4) not having to keep secrets from yourself, including secrets about the ways that you have managed to survive.

One of the paradoxical necessities of the recovery process is the need to revisit the trauma without becoming so overwhelmed by sensations as to be retraumatized. The way to accomplish this, Van der Kolk argues, is by learning to be present with these overwhelming emotions and their sensorial counterparts in the body. He writes:

Traumatized people live with seemingly unbearable sensations: They feel heartbroken and suffer from intolerable sensations in the pit of their stomach or tightness in their chest. Yet avoiding feeling these sensations in our bodies increases our vulnerability to being overwhelmed by them.

Traumatized people are often afraid of feeling. It is not so much the perpetrators (who, hopefully, are no longer around to hurt them) but their own physical sensations that now are the enemy. Apprehension about being hijacked by uncomfortable sensations keeps the body frozen and the mind shut. Even though the trauma is a thing of the past, the emotional brain keeps generating sensations that make the sufferer feel scared and helpless. It's not surprising that so many trauma survivors are compulsive eaters and drinkers, fear making love, and avoid many social activities: Their sensory world is largely off limits.

Another paradox of healing is that although contact and connection are often terrifying to the traumatized, social support and a sense of community are the foundation upon which a health relationship with our own feelings and sensations is built. Half a century after Dorothy Day's memorable assertion that "we have all known the long loneliness and we have learned that the only solution is love and that love comes with community," Van der Kolk writes:

All of us, but especially children, need ... confidence that others will know, affirm, and cherish us. Without that we can't develop a sense of agency that will enable us to assert: "This is what I believe in; this is what I stand for; this is what I will devote myself to." As long as we feel safely held in the hearts and minds of the people who love us, we will climb mountains and cross deserts and stay up all night to finish projects. Children and adults will do anything for people they trust and whose opinion they value. But if we feel abandoned, worthless, or invisible, nothing seems to matter. Fear destroys curiosity and playfulness. In order to have a healthy society we must raise children who can safely play and learn. There can be no growth without curiosity and no adaptability without being able to explore, through trial and error, who you are and what matters to you.

The pathways, both practical and psychological, to doing that is what Van der Kolk goes on to explore in the remainder of the revelatory, redemptive, and immensely helpful The Body Keeps the Score. Complement it with Walt Whitman on healing the body and the spirit, pioneering immunologist Esther Sternberg on the science of how our emotions affect our susceptibility to burnout and disease, artist Marina Abramovic on turning trauma into raw material for art, then treat yourself to Van der Kolk's magnificent On Being conversation with Krista Tippett:

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The Science of How Our Minds and Our Bodies Converge in the Healing of Trauma - Brain Pickings - Pocket

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"A purely disembodied human emotion is a nonentity," William James asserted in his revolutionary 1884 theory of how our bodies affect our feelings. Two generations later, Rilke wrote in a beautiful letter of advice to a young woman: "I am not one of those who neglect the body in order to make of it a sacrificial offering for the soul, since my soul would thoroughly dislike being served in such a fashion."

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Indigenous Trauma

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Denmark is one of the happiest countries in the world. This is according to the UN's World Happiness Report, an important survey that since 2012 classifies the happiness of 155 countries in the world, and that for seven years has placed Denmark among the top three happiest countries on a global level. The fact that teaching empathy has been mandatory since 1993 in schools in Denmark is a factor that contributes to the happiness of the country.
Empathy helps build relationships, prevent bullying and succeed at work. It promotes the growth of leaders, entrepreneurs and managers. "Empathic teenagers" tend to be more successful because they are more oriented towards the goals compared to their more narcissistic peers.
In Danish schools an hour a week is dedicated to the " Klassens tid", an empathy lesson for students aged 6 to 16 years. It is a fundamental part of the Danish curriculum. The hour of empathy is as important as the time spent, for example, on English or mathematics. During the Klassens tid students discuss their problems, either related to school or not, and the whole class, together with the teacher, tries to find a solution based on real listening and understanding. If there are no problems to discuss, children are simply spent the time together relaxing and enjoying hygge, a word (and also a verb and an adjective), which cannot be translated literally, since it is a phenomenon closely related to Danish culture. Hygge could be defined as "intentionally created intimacy". In a country where it gets dark very early in the year, it rains, it's gray, hygge means bringing light, warmth and friendship, creating a shared, welcoming and intimate atmosphere. It is a fundamental concept for the Danish sense of well-being. And it's also becoming a global phenomenon: Amazon sells more than 900 books on hygge, and Instagram has more than 3 million posts with the hashtag #hygge.

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Empathy? In Denmark they're learning it in school

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In one of the happiest countries in the world, the compulsory teaching of empathy within the school system contributes to the happiness of the country.

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The How and Why of Trauma-Informed Teaching

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The How and Why of Trauma-Informed Teaching

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Working with trauma-affected students is a difficult balancing act.

We acknowledge the harmful impacts of the past, and hold out hope for a future of healing. We create a safe environment for students to share their lives, yet maintain professional boundaries. We provide our caring and our help to others, but have to pay attention to our own well-being, too. We work in our classrooms but depend on the support of our community.

These were the clear takeaways for teachers who participated in Edutopia's recent Twitter chat on the topic of trauma and social and emotional learning (SEL). Two parallel ideas emerged in the back and forth. First, as teachers we need to focus on the individual student and the strong, one-to-one relationships that support our trauma-affected kids. And second, creating these bonds requires a broader cultural adjustment and reprioritization, where the whole community works together to cultivate a space in which students, educators, and staff members thrive.

What about classrooms without a lot of trauma? It's risky to assume that our students haven't experienced trauma-according to a seminal study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, childhood trauma is far more pervasive than previously believed and is often invisible. And chat participants asserted that trauma-informed and SEL practices benefit all children, building critical skills like self-awareness, self-regulation, empathy, and an openness to teamwork and cooperation. Adopt a "universal approach," suggested the nonprofit Zero to Three, and "assume all children are trauma-affected and need social and emotional learning instruction and support."

An emerging body of research backs that stance. A 2017 metastudy of over 97,000 K-12 students, for example, found that SEL practices boost academic success, decrease disruptive behavior, and reduce emotional distress in the long term.

So how do we balance the individual focus with a community commitment to trauma-informed SEL? Luckily, our Twitter chat participants had some great advice to share.

Know Your Students

To support students who have experienced trauma, start by flipping the traditional classroom paradigm: Relationships have to come before content, insisted dozens of educators.

It's a simple enough rule, but it runs against the grain and needs to be constantly reinforced: "If you're not addressing the trauma, and the students are distracted, checked out, and falling increasingly behind, even the best curriculum won't matter," explained Wendy Clark, reflecting on the order of events that drive real learning. If that point wasn't a settled matter by the end of the thread, Bill Waychunas cut straight to the heart of the issue by inverting the original proposition entirely: "Better question," he wrote, turning Edutopia's opening salvo around: "How do you teach academics WITHOUT having SEL embedded throughout your teaching and classroom?"

Excellent question. Wish we'd thought of it.

Still, if teachers agreed that one-to-one relationships were the critical building blocks of good SEL-and good trauma-informed practice-how can that effort be scaled to 20 or 30 unique students, each of whom experiences trauma differently? The good news is that it's not all on the individual teacher; system-wide supports are required to distribute the work and create a broader culture of belonging and mutual support (more on that below). Within that context, though, all educators need to row in the same direction: The trick, according to Mathew Portell, principal of the trauma-informed school Fall-Hamilton Elementary in Nashville, is to never lose sight of the individual student: "Trauma affects children in so many different ways. Some kids are reactive while others are reserved. It is key to know the students' stories in order to know how to support them."

With so much pain in the classroom, educators should be mindful that traumatic life experiences can sometimes emerge as behaviors that we might otherwise label as challenging. "Trauma can manifest in so many behaviors! Hypervigilance can masquerade as hyperactivity," offered Sarah MacLaughlin, recasting a child's nervous disposition as a possible response to a difficult home environment. "Fear can look like aggression: flight, freeze, or fight."

And it's not just very young children whose behavior may mask an underlying challenge. Math teacher Kareem Farah sees a connection between anger and trauma in his high school kids: "Students in poverty have been conditioned to suppress their pain. It often manifests as anger. It is critical to recognize that frustrated students are often those that have experienced the highest levels of trauma and need the most loving attention."

That's not easy.

The Whole School Model

So relationship-building in the classroom is essential-the one-to-one with students is indispensable-but the impact of the work is amplified and reinforced only when it occurs within the broader contexts of the school and community.

Many teachers in the chat highlighted the need for a consistent, team-based approach. As Carmen Zeisler put it, "Being trauma-informed is not a checklist, but a mindset change. It is critical that everyone in the building is working towards being trauma-informed." Other educators agreed, adding that administration and school board support is needed to sustain these changes.

Teachers recommended ways to develop staff buy-in: Sarah Giddings shared that colleagues at her school meet in small groups to stay accountable to one another, and that extends to support staff like computer technicians. Lindsey Mattingly's school, Valor Collegiate in Nashville, engages all staff in restorative circles so teachers get firsthand experience of the social and emotional skills required of students in that model-with powerful results: "When teachers fully understand trauma and its manifestations, the mindset will shift from one more thing to do to THE thing we must do."

Understandably, there's bound to be pushback. Acknowledging that there is sometimes skepticism about broad, new programs is helpful-teachers and administrators won't all jump onboard enthusiastically. Several educators recommended connecting trauma-informed practices to the existing compassion and empathy among teachers: "You show them what they are already doing. Then they realize they are already partly there," says English teacher Alison Killy. And Joe LaCasse agreed that the foundations of trauma-informed practices were already embedded in many classrooms, and it was really a matter of emphasis: "Deep down, all teachers care about kids. So, this really gets at the core of being a teacher. It's not just something 'extra.'"

What About Me?

Well exactly. What about you?

The teaching profession is intellectually and emotionally challenging. Many educators in the chat recognized that the social and emotional work has to start with themselves. Educators who see the value of a practice in their own lives are more likely to be passionate advocates, and the learning ecosystem is only truly healthy when all members of the community are thriving. In other words, helping teachers feel emotionally grounded and supported is helping students, too. "Don't forget that teachers have SEL needs! Concentrate on teacher well-being and empower them to address their own needs," suggested the organization Move This World. In a school culture that focuses on wellness for all, teachers can practice and then model positive social and emotional skills for their students more authentically.

Social and emotional support for teachers also helps buffer the effects of secondary traumatic stress and vicarious trauma-when teachers experience symptoms similar to post-traumatic stress disorder because of the stress of bearing witness to others' trauma. Supportive peer connections are an important part of that prevention: "Don't let teachers with struggling students feel alone," recommended Rosa Derricott. "It should be a school-wide approach where everyone's supporting each other."

In the end, of course, we can't rely on our schools alone to address systemic issues of poverty, violence, or drug addiction. The net of responsibility must be cast more widely. "A trauma-informed approach to social emotional learning requires partnership between counselors, teachers, parents, and other trusted adults to help guide students through short and long-term challenge," suggested the chat participant Mom of All Capes. Not to put too fine a point on it, but perhaps it was user Belinda Talonia who said it all most succinctly: "SEL belongs to all of us."

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The How and Why of Trauma-Informed Teaching

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Working with trauma-affected students is a difficult balancing act. We acknowledge the harmful impacts of the past, and hold out hope for a future of healing. We create a safe environment for students to share their lives, yet maintain professional boundaries.

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"It is evident that TRAUMA is inherently political. Politicians and government bureaucrats, especially arms of the state, are central players in the magnification of trauma, including denying the impact of the critical incident, and minimising its severity and impacts... the first step to healing comes from your trauma being validated through acknowledgement. If this doesn’t happen trauma develops whole new dimensions and becomes magnified. Trauma becomes systemically generated when governmental bodies and societal structures fail to show they care."

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IndigenousX Showcasing & Celebrating Indigenous Diversity

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Well because there is increasing evidence and recognition of the impacts of race-based trauma. Bryant-Davis and Ocampo (2005) amongst many others, noted similar courses of mental illness between victims of violent crime and victims of racism. In Australia, racism explains 30% of depression and over 50% of chronic stress experienced by Aboriginal people and Paradies (2016) has shown that racism reduces Aboriginal life expectancy more than SMOKING does - yes you heard that right!

Just as trauma frequently becomes a central organising principle in the psychological structure of the individual, trauma has become a central organising principle in the psychological structure of whole communities. This is known as 'repetition compulsion' and, means that those individuals who have had a previous traumatic event are at increased risk for future trauma experiences. Suicide 'clusters' being an obvious and common consequence of trauma repetition compulsion.

Racism leads to negative identity formation and poor self-concept which is then passed onto future generations. Stunningly, racism has been shown to impact in-utero, - soberingly demonstrated by infant birth weight being reduced by an average of 600 grams since the NT intervention which repealed the human rights of Aboriginal people. From a suicide prevention perspective, this manifests as a sense of hopelessness and helplessness which has consistently been implicated in suicide risk. When the origin of this lies in racial identity it becomes inherently 'untreatable' as a core risk factor. It is unchallengeable as a core driver when a suicidal individual develops thought processes based upon a belief that they don't matter. When those within the 'system' and broader community show no visible sign of caring this cognition then becomes increasingly engrained through daily reinforcement.

The best I can do as a clinician is to assist my clients to develop healthy and robust cultural identity and develop the skills and resilience to manage racist events. This is a constant challenge due to the compounded nature of racism, with the average Aboriginal person having 70 discrete experiences of racism annually and 75% of us regularly experiencing racism.

Epigenetics tells us that racism impacts on Aboriginal people in the same way as a traumatic event.

The fact that most of our suicides are so impulsive makes absolute sense from a trauma perspective.

Let me end with how I started:

Trauma is inherently political.

When those who are mandated to care fail to respond your trauma becomes magnified.

We ultimately look to our leadership for guidance in what resonates in the conscience of our nation.

The silence of our political leaders has served to magnify the trauma of these families and in effect has become systemically perpetuated by them.

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Well because there is increasing evidence and recognition of the impacts of race-based trauma. Bryant-Davis and Ocampo (2005) amongst many others, noted similar courses of mental illness between victims of violent crime and victims of racism.

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Often, when someone survives a traumatic incident - such as a sexual assault, police brutality, a hate crime, or a school shooting - the trauma stays with them, even though the danger is gone.

If trauma is left untreated, it can impact your physical health. In other words, if you've survived a traumatic incident, ignoring mental health treatment can negatively impact your body.

If you have endured at least one instance of trauma before your 18th birthday, you're not alone. The rates of childhood trauma are high. According to a 2012 report by the National Center for Mental Health Promotion and Youth Violence Prevention, more than 60% of children in the United States were exposed to at least one type of violence that year. Additionally, 26% of all U.S. children will experience or witness a traumatic incident before turning 4 years old.

Likewise, children 6 years old and younger can experience post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), which might include re-experiencing distress through flashbacks and nightmares; avoidance of people, places, and activities related to a traumatic incident; emotional numbness; and increased arousal through feeling jumpy or being easily irritated, according to the Anxiety and Depression Association of America.

"Because of what's happened to you, because of what you've experienced, your body may be making more stress hormones than the average person," Nadine Burke Harris, pediatrician and director of the Center for Youth Wellness, told Teen Vogue.

A previous traumatic incident can haunt your body later in life in different ways due to abnormally high rates of stress. Teen Vogue spoke with Burke Harris, who also wrote The Deepest Well: Healing the Long-Term Effects of Childhood Adversity, about how previous traumatic incidents can impact long-term physical health.

She explained that typically we associate sleeping problems, anxiety, and depression with teens who endure trauma, but she stressed that some teens who've experienced trauma "don't have any of these symptoms at all."

"Sometimes [teens will] have abdominal pain, like stomach ache, or headache, or they'll be getting sick really frequently," she said. "That's also something to watch out for. It can be a sign that your body is internalizing the stress - it's literally getting under your skin and getting [you] sick."

Oftentimes teenagers - just like adults - can take out their stress on themselves through destructive behaviors such as " drinking, or smoking, or cutting, or other ways of hurting themselves." But fortunately, since teenagers are coming into their own, they have the opportunity to make decisions for themselves, which can mean being proactive toward their own caregiving.

"The cool thing about teens is that it's really a time where even if you've grown up with a crappy situation, it's a time when you really start to be able to choose your own destiny and to do things to support yourself," she said. "It really starts with valuing yourself and doing that self-care. Teenagers tend to doubt themselves, but that's one of the most important things."

In The Deepest Well, Burke Harris emphasized the importance of managing sleep, exercise, nutrition, mindfulness, mental health, and relationships in those with a history of trauma. By taking a proactive approach to all six, teens can better cope with their past trauma.

"Doing things like downloading the Headspace app on your phone and doing that meditation once or twice a day to help you be able to regulate your system better, and to help you be able to notice when your stress response is overactive," she said. "If you're into sports, joining a team and doing that regular exercise, all of those things are really healing."

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Trauma's Not Just in Your Head. It Can Make You Physically Sick

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Often, when someone survives a traumatic incident - such as a sexual assault, police brutality, a hate crime, or a school shooting - the trauma stays with them, even though the danger is gone. If trauma is left untreated, it can impact your physical health.

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Trauma-Sensitive Schools: Learning Communities Transforming Children's Lives, K–5

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Trauma-Sensitive Schools: Learning Communities Transforming Children's Lives, K–5

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To Purchase

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Trauma-Sensitive Schools: Learning Communities Transforming Children's Lives, K-5

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Author: Susan E. Craig Brand: Teachers College Pr Features: Teachers College Pr ISBN: 0807757454 Number Of Pages: 160 Publisher: Teachers College Press Details: Growing evidence supports the important relationship between trauma and academic failure. Along with the failure of "zero tolerance" policies to resolve issues

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How to Support Someone Who Has Experienced Trauma

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How to Support Someone Who Has Experienced Trauma

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What would we do if we could see every psychological wound ever inflicted as a physical bruise?

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What would we do if we could see every psychological wound ever inflicted as a physical bruise? We would see a lot of black and blue people walking around! We might also be more careful of each other, understanding the degree of suffering we each have endured.

One of the hardest things when you are in a relationship is that there is no trauma map to refer to and even as we get to know someone's history and the things that activate past trauma, we are often bewildered or downright indignant when trauma rears its head and our loved ones lash out, retreat, get emotional for no understandable reason, or unfairly blame us for all kinds of wrongdoing.

How do you negotiate these and other manifestations of trauma? We have put together a infographic based on relationship lessons learned by trauma survivors and those who love them.

1. Predictability: Everyone loves surprises! Not. Trauma survivors often prefer predictability because that feels safer.

2. Space: Allow time for the survivor to calm down and take perspective. Remember that we trauma survivors often have difficulty regulating our emotions and take longer to calm down. Maybe support self-soothing, for example suggesting you both go for a walk, maybe stay well clear! If the survivor is caught up in the fight/flight response you may be mistaken for the enemy.

3. Perspective: Be aware when 'the past is intruding into the present.' Don't take responsibility for what is not yours... gently. You can own any insensitivity or lack of consideration that has provoked the reaction and yet separate it from whatever past trauma is fueling what would otherwise appear to be a disproportionate response. Remember there is no such thing as 'over-reacting' - the reaction is in direct proportion to the pain experienced in the past rather than in response to what's happening now.

4. Rid 'over-reacting,' 'over-sensitive,' 'over'-anything from your vocabulary.

5. Language: Don't refer to 'your upbringing, your problem, issues, behavior.' This sounds like judgment or at the very least like the trauma survivor is somehow broken or the problem. Call it for what it is - trauma.

6. Be kind, loving, patient... But empathetically set limits - you have needs too! It's okay to talk about when the survivor's reactions hurt you too. "I love you and I understand how scared/angry/sad you are... and it's not okay to hurt me." Whatever our trauma history, we must all learn to be accountable when we hurt others.

7. Reciprocity: Most of us had parents who lacked skills in listening, empathy, tolerating uncomfortable feelings, empowerment... Give what you also need to receive [because that's the best way of making sure you get it back. Make sure that you are getting these things somewhere in your life. If the survivor is your friend or romantic partner, be sure that there is a two-way street. However much you love someone who has experienced trauma, it is unhealthy if you become a savior, therapist, or martyr.

8. Control and choice. Big trigger when a survivor is denied these. Confer, collaborate cooperate. Unilateral moves even when benevolent will not be appreciated! Trauma is about getting hurt when you had no power or control over the situation, and it is immensely activating when the trauma survivor experiences that powerlessness again. If you want one way to ensure one of the fight/flight/freeze/collapse survival responses, taking away control is the way to do it!

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How to Support Someone Who Has Experienced Trauma - Echo

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What would we do if we could see every psychological wound ever inflicted as a physical bruise? We would see a lot of black and blue people walking around! We might also be more careful of each other, understanding the degree of suffering we each have endured.

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We tend to think of trauma as the result of a frightening and upsetting event. But many children experience trauma through ongoing exposure, throughout their early development, to abuse, neglect, homelessness, domestic violence or violence in their communities. And it's clear that chronic trauma can cause serious problems with learning and behavior.

Trauma is particularly challenging for educators to address because kids often don't express the distress they're feeling in a way that's easily recognizable - and they may mask their pain with behavior that's aggressive or off-putting. As Nancy Rappaport, a child and adolescent psychiatrist who focuses on mental health issues in schools, puts it, "They are masters at making sure you do not see them bleed."

Identifying the symptoms of trauma in the children can help educators understand these confusing behaviors. And it can help avoid misdiagnosis, as these symptoms can mimic other problems, including ADHD and other behavior disorders.

In brief, the obstacles to learning experienced by these children include:

Trouble forming relationships with teachers

Poor self-regulation

Negative thinking

Hypervigilance

Executive function challenges

Trauma and trouble forming bonds

Children who have been neglected or abused have problems forming relationships with teachers, a necessary first step in a successful classroom experience. They've learned to be wary of adults, even those who appear to be reliable, since they've been ignored or betrayed by those they have depended on.

"These kids don't have the context to ask for help, notes Dr. Rappaport, a school consultant and associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. "They don't have a model for an adult recognizing their needs and giving them what they need."

Many of these children haven't been able to develop secure attachments to the adults in their lives, adds Jamie Howard, a clinical psychologist and head of the Trauma and Resilience Center at the Child Mind Institute. They need help to let other adults into their lives. "Kids who've never developed that early template that you can trust people, that you are lovable and that people will take care of you," Dr. Howard explains, "need support to form that kind of relationship."

One of the challenges in giving that support is that when kids misbehave, our schools often use disciplinary systems that involve withdrawing attention and support, rather than addressing their problems. Schools have very little patience for kids who provoke and push away adults who try to help them.

Instead of suspending children, Dr. Rappaport argues, schools need to work with them on changing their behavior. When a student is acting up in class, she explains, teachers need to recognize the powerful feelings they are expressing, if inappropriately.

Rather than jumping right into the behavior plan - deducting points or withdrawing privileges or suspending - Dr. Rappaport stresses the importance of acknowledging the emotion and trying to identify it. "I can see that you are REALLY angry that Andrew took the marker you wanted!" she suggests. "If you're wrong about what the student is upset about, he's likely to correct you."

Acknowledging and naming an emotion helps children move towards expressing it in a more appropriate way. Communicating that you "get" him is the necessary first step, she explains, to helping a child learn to express himself in ways that don't alienate and drive away people who can help him.

Poor self-regulation

Traumatized children often have trouble managing strong emotions. As babies and toddlers, children learn to calm and soothe themselves by being calmed and soothed by the adults in their lives, Dr. Howard notes. If they haven't had that experience, because of neglect, "that lack of a soothing, secure attachment system contributes to their chronic dysregulation."

In the classroom, teachers need to support and coach these children in ways to calm themselves and manage their emotions. "We need to be partners in managing their behavior," Dr. Rappaport explains. "Co-regulation comes before self-regulation. We need to help them get the control they need to change the channel when they're upset." They need coaching and practice at de-escalating when they feel overwhelmed, she adds.

Related: What's ADHD (and What's Not) in the Classroom

Negative thinking

Another challenge to traumatized kids is that they develop the belief that they're bad, and what's happened to them is their fault. This leads to the expectation that people are not going to like them or treat them well. As Dr. Howard puts it, "I'm a bad kid. Why would I do well in school? Bad kids don't do well in school."

Traumatized kids also tend to develop what Dr. Howard calls a "hostile attribution bias" - the idea that everyone is out to get them. "So if a teacher says, 'Sit down in your seat," they hear it as, 'SIT DOWN IN YOUR SEAT!'" she explains. "They hear it as exaggerated and angry and unfair. So they'll act out really quickly with irritability."

As Dr. Rappaport puts it: "They see negative where we see neutral." To counter this negative thinking, these students a narrative about themselves that helps them understand that they're not "bad kids." And learning to recognize their negative paterns of thought, like black and white thinking, is a step towards being able to change those patterns.

Dr. Rappaport notes that children from abusive homes are sometimes unable to participate in classroom activities because they are paralyzed by fear of making a mistake, and that can make them appear to be oppositional. "A mistake that might seem trivial to us becomes magnified," she explains, "if their experience has been that minor mistakes incurred adult anger or punishment."

They need not only support to have incremental successes they can build on in the classroom, but help to see that in this setting, making a mistake is considered a necessary part of learning.

Hypervigilance

One of the classic symptoms of trauma is hyper-vigilance, which means being overly alert to danger. "It's physiological hyper-arousal," explains Dr. Howard. "These kids are jumpy, they have an exaggerated startle response. They can have some big, out-of-control seeming behaviors, because their fight or flight response has gone off."

This can look like hyperactivity, she adds, leading kids who have been traumatized to be misdiagnosed with ADHD. Being chronically agitated can lead to difficulty with sleeping and chronic irritability.

In workshops, Dr. Rappaport coaches teachers on how to help kids to settle down when something in the classroom triggers an emotional outburst. When a child is escalating, the key, she says, is to "match their affect, but in a controlled way."

The goal is to connect to their big feeling. "If you can connect with what they're trying to tell you, they may settle. It can work even if you just make a guess - you don't have to be right, they can correct you."

Executive function challenges

Chronic trauma affects children's memory, their ability to pay attention, plan, think things through, and other executive functions. Kids who have ADHD as well as trauma may be especially impaired in these skills.

Difficulty planning impacts not only completing tasks in school, but a child's ability to plan his behavior, rather than acting impulsively, and deciding on the best way to communicate his needs and feelings.

One of the things that tends to upset kids who've been traumatized is difficulty predicting the future - not knowing what is coming is unsettling for children and creates anxiety. These kids can benefit, Dr. Rappaport notes, from repeated dry runs of what's coming up and what they should expect.

Another executive function that may be weak is the ability to self-narrate - to mentally talk themselves through what they need to do as they are carrying out a task. It's a skill young children learn from listening to their parents talk to them when they are babies, and, she notes, if they haven't had the experience they may need help developing the skill.

Focus on positive attention

In addition to connecting with kids who've been traumatized, and helping them build missing skills, Dr. Rappaport emphasizes the importance of giving them as much positive attention as possible.

Kids who have experienced chronic neglect tend to be better at getting attention by provoking the adults they depend on than by complying with expectations. "Negative attention is fast, predictable and efficient," she notes. "We need to make positive attention as fast, predictable and efficient."

But she adds that positive attention includes not only praising them for desired behavior but expressing warmth and kindness that aren't necessarily earned.

Surprising kids with "random acts of kindness" can help wean them from habits of acting out to get attention. "When a kid is acting out and sucking the oxygen out of a classroom," she notes, "some teachers have found it works to set their phones to buzz every 5 minutes to give the kid positive attention."

Dr. Rappaport offers tools for understanding ahd managing disruptive behavior in the classroom in her book, The Behavior Code: A Practical Guide to Understanding and Teaching the Most Challenging Students, written with behavioral analyst Jessica Minahan.

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How Trauma Affects Kids in School | Child Mind Institute

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We tend to think of trauma as the result of a frightening and upsetting event. But many children experience trauma through ongoing exposure, throughout their early development, to abuse, neglect, homelessness, domestic violence or violence in their communities. And it's clear that chronic trauma can cause serious problems with learning and behavior.

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How Native American children benefit from trauma-informed schools

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How Native American children benefit from trauma-informed schools

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All children can benefit from this.

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At a Montana school, a fifth-grader threatened to strike his teacher with a chair. In many schools, the child would be suspended, expelled, or arrested, leading to missed school, further alienation, and possibly a criminal record. But that's not what happens here.

But this student is in one of Montana's 10 Wraparound program schools. So instead, the student and his teacher at this school that serves mostly Native American kids, met with Stephanie Iron Shooter, director of the Montana Office of Public Instruction's SAMHSA grant for trauma-informed care, to look for alternative solutions. "[The student] was able to tell the teacher that there were times when he felt he was going to get really angry and throw something," says Iron Shooter. "He said that at those times, 'I just want to go sit in a corner for a minute, then I'll come back to the group.'" The teacher, with a new understanding of why the child acted out, was willing to accommodate his strategy for regaining self-control, and the student returned to class.

This meeting was part of an approach developed by the National Council for Behavioral Health, SAMHSA's National Center for Trauma-Informed Care and Alternatives to Seclusion and Restraint, and other organizations to address the psychological and educational consequences of trauma.

Schools like these are using trauma-sensitive practices to address children's mental health, behavioral, and academic issues. The goal is to create schools where adults - from the principal to the lunch room personnel - consistently respond to children with empathy and compassion.

According to the National Association of School Psychologists, trauma-sensitive schools create safety - physical, social, and emotional - for students who may have experienced trauma. In a trauma-sensitive school, as defined by the NASP, all school personnel are trained to recognize and respond to the impacts of trauma. Discipline is a positive and productive process. The schools have access to mental health professionals and a wide range of services. And they recognize that helping traumatized children thrive is a community-wide challenge and responsibility. The village, in this case, extends well beyond the building and playground.

Vulnerable populations - in particular, kids exposed to poverty and other adverse childhood experiences - especially need this kind of care, according to Iron Shooter, though it benefits all students.

The effects of childhood trauma

According to research on adverse childhood experiences, childhood trauma affects health and well-being later in life. In the 1998 study on the topic, ACEs were defined as "psychological, physical, or sexual abuse; violence against mother; or living with household members who were substance abusers, mentally ill or suicidal, or ever imprisoned." Children who experienced four or more ACEs had increased risks for alcoholism, drug abuse, depression, and suicide, as well as increased rates of smoking, sexually transmitted diseases, and severe obesity.

Since that study, other causes of childhood trauma have been identified by researchers at SAMHSA, Centers for Disease Control, and the National Institute for Mental Health, among others. These include war, natural disasters, poverty, divorce, separation of children from their families, terrorism, living in a violent neighborhood, racial discrimination - and historical trauma, where the physiological effects of trauma have been passed from generation to generation, first recognized among Holocaust survivors and since recognized in Native American and other communities of color.

Native American children are particularly vulnerable to trauma. According to Jacqueline Pata, executive director of the National Congress of American Indians, they are 2.5 times more likely to experience trauma. They are also subject to historical trauma resulting from genocide and the boarding school experience of their parents and grandparents, she says. Historical trauma is implicated in high rates of suicide, homicide, violence, child abuse, and alcoholism in Native American communities, according to the Indian Health Service.

In addition to affecting health, childhood trauma also affects learning ability. "We know that trauma is widespread, and we know that it impacts how people learn. It changes the chemistry of the brain. It changes the structure of the brain in young children, even children up to the age of 18," says Karen Johnson, director of the National Council for Behavioral Health.

Bessel van der Kolk, a neuroscientist with the Trauma Center at Justice Resource Institute and former professor of psychiatry at Boston University School of Medicine, describes three mental processes affected by childhood trauma. These include the ability to focus and filter out irrelevant information, regulate emotions, and form healthy relationships. Children coming to school with these challenges have trouble learning.

"Science tells us that children with brains affected [by trauma] are often in survival mode in schools," Johnson says. "Instead of being able to learn, process and respond, they feel unsafe and often default to a survival mode, which interrupts any kind of learning that can happen in a school. We need to understand this dynamic and how to create safe, nurturing environments in which children who have been impacted by trauma can learn."

Trauma-informed schools give kids whose life experiences have impaired their ability to learn a second chance, she says.

Developing trauma-sensitive practices

The trauma-informed initiative in Montana Public Schools began back in 2009, when the state's Office of Public Instruction received a U.S. Department of Education grant to assist the neediest schools in the state, Iron Shooter explains. OPI chose the five lowest-performing schools and set about improving them in the area of mental health, among others. A grant for a statewide Wraparound program came in 2011. Montana's program is based on the National Wraparound Initiative model.

Most of the schools involved in the Montana program are small and rural, and at this point most of the students are Native American, she says.

Another school offering trauma-sensitive care for its students is Wasilla Middle School in Alaska, where 12 percent of students self-identify as Alaska Native or American Indian. Over 50 percent of the students in the school qualify for free and reduced lunches. Wendy Degraffenried, a school nurse, is the team lead for the district's trauma-informed care program.

Becoming a trauma-informed school was a multistep, community-wide process that began with training, she explains. Personnel from the regional Mat-su Health Foundation were the first to be trained by the National Council for Behavioral Health. They brought what they learned back to five Alaska schools, including Wasilla Middle School, to develop trauma-informed services and trainings for schools. The program is funded by the Health Foundation, the community, and a grant from SAMHSA.

Degraffenried says it's an effort to reduce disruptive behavior, increase attendance, and improve the high school graduation rate.

"Instead of identifying students who have experienced trauma," Degraffenried says, "we act as if all students have experienced trauma. ... All teachers are trained in how to respond to behaviors by asking questions such as, 'I wonder what happened to them,' versus 'Why are they acting this way?'"

It was the death of Freddie Gray in police custody in 2015 that sent the Baltimore City Public Schools scrambling for strategies to help students cope with trauma. Jim Padden is the director of related services for BCPS, the office responsible for keeping special needs kids in the regular classroom whenever possible. He says that schools were closed for the day, and when they reopened, the district and mental health partners, including the University of Maryland and Johns Hopkins, had put between one and five mental health clinicians into all of the approximately 200 schools.

After a week and a half, it was clear that having mental health clinicians in the schools was helpful, he says, so BCPS looked for ways to have those people and other resources available to students every day. Baltimore received over $2 million from a U.S. Department of Education Promoting Student Resilience grant to fund the program.

Padden says the program has created an environment where children who might otherwise be removed from the classroom - or the school - are better integrated into the school community. Instead of dealing with behavioral issues with discipline, he says, they try to make the student feel connected by asking, "'Hey, what's going on? You haven't been able to be on time for the last four days. Is everything OK? Is there anything I can do to help you?'"

Next steps

Two main barriers stand in the way of putting trauma-sensitive programs in all schools. The first is funding. There is no one source for funding many of the resources - educational, psychological, physical, and social - that go into creating an effective program. And the schools that most need trauma-sensitive practices - the schools that serve vulnerable populations - are often the schools with the least amount of financial resources to draw from.

Though Native American children are particularly vulnerable to trauma, the schools they attend have some of the least adequate financial resources. The federal government, for example, has produced reports showing that Bureau of Indian Education schools, which are responsible for educating 41,000 children, use only about half of their funding for instruction - the rest goes to trying to maintain dilapidated buildings and other costs, such as buses, needed to educate children in remote settings. And many schools on reservations, because they are on federal land, do not receive support from property taxes, but must rely largely on federal impact aid, which has not been fully funded since 1969, according to the testimony of Brent Gish, executive director of the National Indian Impacted Schools Association before the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs.

This could change. In a landmark ruling last March, a federal district court allowed to go forward with a case brought by Havasupai parents and several civil rights organizations that alleges, in part, that the personal and historical trauma suffered by Native American children are adequate reasons for requiring the Bureau of Indian Affairs to provide special education services.

The second barrier, Degraffenried says, is that these programs must be initiated by someone in the community, be it a health care entity, a school board, a principal, or even a single teacher. "First there's got to be buy-in, whether it's an individual teacher or an administrator, or a school district," she says. And that can be difficult when the program deals with kids who are traditionally viewed as being disruptive in class, she says.

Still, awareness of children's mental health needs is increasing. In a recent study put out by the National Association of Elementary School Principals, for the first time children's emotional problems topped the list of concerns expressed by principals. If the plaintiffs prevail in the Havasupai lawsuit, trauma-sensitive care could become the law in schools that serve Native American children. In the meantime, on-the-ground educators and staff like Degraffenried and Padden are taking initiative to fill the gap.

Tanya H. Lee wrote this article for YES! Magazine. Tanya is a freelance journalist with more than 20 years' experience writing about issues of concern to the Native American community.

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How Native American children benefit from trauma-informed schools - NationofChange

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At a Montana school, a fifth-grader threatened to strike his teacher with a chair. In many schools, the child would be suspended, expelled, or arrested, leading to missed school, further alienation, and possibly a criminal record. But that's not what happens here. But this student is in one of Montana's 10 Wraparound program schools.

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From time to time, one of you will send me this message: Why did you post a link to THAT article on ACEs Connection? What does it have to do with ACEs science, trauma-informed or resilience-building practices?

So, I thought I'd riff on this a bit, especially since the ACEs movement seems to be growing to reach another level of development. We'll soon be 25,000 strong on this social network! Although we still need to educate people about ACEs science, there's a lot of foundational work being done now in organizations, systems and communities that's producing amazing results, which will spread and multiply, and benefit children and families in the long run.

How we define ACEs: We have always considered the 10 adverse childhood experiences in the CDC-Kaiser Permanente ACE Study as the 10 that proved the concept (concept detailed below). The 10 are, as many of you already know: physical, verbal and sexual abuse; physical and emotional neglect; a family member who's alcoholic or addicted to other drugs, who's incarcerated, who's depressed or has other mental illness; witnessing a mother being abused; experiencing parental divorce or separation.

But there are many, many others. Other types of ACEs listed in other ACE surveys - including the Philadelphia Urban ACE Study and the World Health Organization, and being measured by scientists such as Dr. Martin Teicher - include racism, bullying, involvement with the foster care system, witnessing violence outside the home, living in an unsafe neighborhood, losing a family member to deportation, living in a war zone, being a refugee, witnessing a sibling being abused, witnessing a caregiver being abused, not having enough food, being homeless, moving often, experiencing a serious life-altering accident or serious chronic illness, etc. In other words, an ACE is anything that traumatizes a child and sets off that harmful cascade of toxic stress hormones, and where there is no relief or assistance from a caregiver to recover. RYSE has included representation of some of these by adding two layers to the ACE pyramid (the main image in this blog post). And Wendy Ellis includes some of these in the "Pair of ACEs" tree, below.

The concept (since proven by the rest of ACEs science): There is a link between childhood adversity and adult onset of chronic physical/mental illness, violence, and being a victim of violence; ACEs are extraordinarily common (2/3 of the Kaiser population had at least one); the higher the score, the riskier the consequences (e.g., with four ACEs, the risk of alcoholism increases seven-fold); ACEs contribute to most of our major chronic health, mental health, economic health and social health issues; and it doesn't matter what the types of ACEs are: An ACE score of 4 that includes divorce, physical abuse, an incarcerated family member and a depressed family member has the same statistical health consequences as an ACE score of 4 that includes living with an alcoholic, verbal abuse, emotional neglect and physical neglect.

How we define ACEs science: This includes the ACE Study and other ACE surveys; the neurobiology of toxic stress, particularly on children's developing brains, but also on adults' brains (if an adult is experiencing toxic stress, it's likely that's passed on to any children in the family); the short- and long-term health consequences; the epigenetic consequences, which includes historical trauma handed down through generations (African-Americans through the effects of slavery and the American Indian nations through genocide and losing homelands), as well as how the social environment can turn genes on and off; and the good news that resilience research shows that people, organizations, systems and communities can heal.

ACEs, by definition, occur during childhood. But that doesn't mean we stop looking at the effects of trauma at age 18. Without intervention and healing, people who are traumatized as children carry that trauma into adulthood....and pass it on to their children. We have created our organizations, systems and communities that deal with the effects of that trauma - whether it's unhealthy, criminal or unwanted behavior - in the only way we knew how before we learned about ACEs science: by blaming, shaming and/or punishing (or throwing oceans of information at people). In other words, re-traumatizing people who have been traumatized. Add the United States' structural racism to that, and we can see that our organizations and systems are embedded in layers of trauma.

So that means, for us to solve our most intractable problems, every organization, every system in all sectors, every community, every nation, has to integrate practices based on ACEs science.

Hence, we link to six to 12 articles and essays a day about housing, green space and nature, juvenile justice, welfare policy, refugee policy, data mining and analytics, homelessness and education. Some of these articles address solutions, such as these from social services and business. And some look at problems, such as this one from the prison system and policy regarding federal resources for children. There isn't one organization or system in any sector that cannot benefit from integrating practices based on ACEs science. Not one.

One reason we post links to articles about problems in organizations and systems that obviously need an infusion of ACEs science is to show how far we are from a tipping point, and as inspiration for those of you who work in the type of organization or system featured, or in the community where the organization is located to keep up the good work of educating people about ACEs science!

Because integrating practices based on ACEs science can make remarkable changes: Here's what happened in Cowlitz County, WA, when they integrated the Self-Healing Community Model:

Births to teen mothers went down 62% and infant mortality went down 43%;

Youth suicide and suicide attempts went down 98%;

Youth arrests for violent crime dropped 53%;

High school dropout rates decreased by 47%.

If you want more examples of how different sectors are integrating practices based on ACEs science, go to ACEs Science 101.

Some of those blog posts listed were written by our journalists or ACEs Connection members who write essays or articles. We invite you to do one or both.

If you post an article written by someone else, whether it's a news article or essay, be sure to use the headline of the article as it appears in the publication as well as the publication's name in the title. Copy two to four paragraphs of the article and then link to the rest of it. Due to copyright issues, we cannot replicate the entire article. Like this.

If you want to post an article or essay that you've written, y ou can post twice a week, but not more than that, to give as many people as possible to get the attention their posts deserve. If you want to use a post from your personal blog, and you want it to be included in the Daily Digest or the Weekly Roundup, be sure to include the entire post, not just a few graphs and a link. You can provide a link to your blog at the end of your post.

Some of our best posts come from ACEs Connection members; I so value your participation in this social network. You're the heart and soul of this movement, a movement whose wings are growing and beginning to help us to leap into the air and soar.

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Why did they post THAT on ACEs Connection???

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From time to time, one of you will send me this message: Why did you post a link to THAT article on ACEs Connection? What does it have to do with ACEs science, trauma-informed or resilience-building practices? So, I thought I'd riff on this a bit, especially since the ACEs movement seems to be growing to reach another level of development.

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Childhood trauma leaves scars that are genetic, not just emotional, study affirms

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Childhood trauma leaves scars that are genetic, not just emotional, study affirms

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Neglect, abuse, violence and trauma endured early in life can ripple directly into a child's molecular structure and distort their DNA, according to a new study this week from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

The genetic changes leave them biologically more vulnerable in later life to psychiatric afflictions like depression, anxiety, mood disorders and high-risk behavior like drug abuse, the researchers found.

"We may be seeing the mechanism via which childhood stress can cause social or behavioral problems," said Leslie Seltzer, a UW-Madison researcher and one of the study's lead authors.

The study amounts to the latest validation to emerge in the last 10 years that childhood trauma often acts as the root cause of mental illness, addiction, alcoholism, incarceration, homelessness and even suicide. In Milwaukee, which hosts a crippling epidemic of childhood trauma, the drumbeat of new research has prompted the creation of a new collaborative effort to address the city's widespread trauma and its aftereffects.

The group, called "Scaling Wellness in Milwaukee" or SWIM, held its latest meeting Wednesday. Because trauma has emerged as the unifying factor behind a wide spectrum of social and economic ills, which typically are treated in isolation, the SWIM collaboration has attracted an equally wide spectrum of members: social agencies, therapists, university researchers, behavioral health clinics, community activists and even criminal justice.

The SWIM objective is to tackle the trauma epidemic under a "collective impact" strategy that cuts over all the segmented disciplines and silos. "There are a lot of great things happening, but they still remain siloed," said Marquette University President Mike Lovell, who launched the SWIM initiative earlier this year with his wife, Amy, a mental health activist.

The researchers in Madison wanted to study the impact of childhood stress on genetic chemistry. Seltzer said the biological impact of trauma can put markers on specific genes that act as an on-off switch, which in turn determine whether the natural function of those specific genes are activated or repressed.

Those markers, which scientists call epi-genetic modification, affect emotional regulation or depressive disorders. "We know that early life stress and the development of psychiatric disorders are related," Seltzer said. "We want to know how one leads to the other.

"Our analysis identified differences in genes that help regulate mood and attachment," Seltzer said.

Seltzer and her collaborators worked with a group of 22 girls, ages 9 to 12, who were carefully selected for the study. Eleven of them had lived through violent or tragic life experiences at an early age, including homelessness, abuse, separation from parents and lack of security. Another 11 girls of the same age were selected because they had relatively tranquil childhoods.

Using saliva samples - common in all sorts of DNA test kits - the researchers were able to study their genes as well as their genetic markers. Their work, supported by a grant from the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation, was published Tuesday.

One finding was that the epi-genetic markers can embed themselves for years, suggesting that they could affect a person their entire lives, said UW-Madison neurosurgery professor Reid Alisch, who oversaw the genetic lab work for the study.

"What some people in the field weren't sure about is whether molecular changes that occur during a stressful period very early in life are stable," he said. "What we're finding is that after 10 years or so there are still markers, like fossils in our genome, telling us there was a trauma here. And that trauma may make this individual more susceptible to a second trauma or, even worse, a behavioral change, later in life."

The Madison study also could lead the way to create new diagnostic tools, Alisch said.
One side-effect of childhood trauma is that victims sometimes cannot recall with accuracy what happened to them.

Genetic tests, however, are less subjective and can help make a reliable diagnosis, Alisch said, adding: "This can help us treat the individual."

Genomics is a new science and the study likely will lead to further research. "We've also flagged a lot of genes whose jobs still aren't clear," Alisch said. "Now we know that they may deserve more study for playing a part in stress-related psychiatric disorders."

'A psychological connection'

The notion that neuroscience and genetics lies at the heart of the nation's economic and social debate is new, driven by data collected in the last 10 years. "A Time to Heal," a series of articles last year by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, documented how widespread trauma worsens the ongoing social crisis in a city that for decades has defined the national extremes of poverty, unemployment, incarceration, infant mortality and broken homes.

At Wednesday's SWIM meeting in Milwaukee, participants said they've seen enough trauma science to know they need to take action. They also concur that the sheer enormity of the trauma in Milwaukee overwhelms individual agencies and activists, meaning the city has no choice but to collaborate.

"We can no longer say we don't know what to do," said Susan Gadacz, chief executive of the Outreach Community Health Centers. Gadacz's group, formerly called Health Care for the Homeless, serves all patients whether they are insured or not.

SWIM has been meeting monthly since January, looking for strategies to align agencies and activists who never previously worked together.

In a new development, the American Heart Association joined Wednesday's meeting, adding another organization that many might not associate with psychological trauma, at least not at first glance. "There's definitely a psychological connection that's hard and fast," because those with mental illness often cannot care for their physical or cardiovascular health, said Oby Nwabuzor, a health strategies official at the Milwaukee chapter of the Heart Association.

"At the Heart Association, we also are moving to a collective impact model," in an effort to improve public health, Nwabuzor said. SWIM was a natural outlet.

The Heart Association, with decades of experience in policy advocacy in Washington and Madison, will help launch a new policy advocacy arm of SWIM, Lovell said.

The idea makes sense because political decisions affect how trauma activists can treat Milwaukee's high-risk population. In a brainstorming session on policy Wednesday, SWIM participants cataloged areas where political coordination is vital to make headway.

Notably, government mental health reimbursements are 20% below conventional medicine payments, which makes it difficult to provide services, said Jon Lehrmann, chair of psychiatry and behavioral medicine at the Medical College of Wisconsin. "I struggle to hire psychiatrists," Lehrman said.

"If we want to move the needle, we will need policy coordination," Lovell told the gathering. "That's why the American Heart Association joined - they are good at policy."

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Childhood trauma leaves scars that are genetic, not just emotional, study affirms

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Neglect, abuse, violence and trauma endured early in life can ripple directly into a child's molecular structure and distort their DNA, according to a new study this week from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The genetic changes leave them biologically more vulnerable in later life to psychiatric afflictions like depression, anxiety, mood disorders and high-risk behavior like drug abuse, the researchers found.

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How to Cope with Triggered Trauma Memories

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How to Cope with Triggered Trauma Memories

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New York Post

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To manage the stress of trauma, schools are teaching students how to relax - The Washington Post.pdf

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Researcher proposes study on how residential school trauma may have affected genes

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Researcher proposes study on how residential school trauma may have affected genes

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"The trauma of residential school is most commonly seen as psychological in nature but a First Nations researcher is wondering if the experiences of survivors had lasting effects on their genes."

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The trauma of residential school is most commonly seen as psychological in nature but a First Nations researcher is wondering if the experiences of survivors had lasting effects on their genes.

Amy Bombay, an assistant professor at Dalhousie University's Department of Psychiatry and the School of Nursing who's from Rainy River First Nation in Ontario, wants to study the role epigenetics play in intergenerational trauma in Indigenous communities.

Epigenetics is the study of mechanisms that switch genes on and off, affecting how genes are expressed in an organism but not changing the underlying DNA code itself. Various circumstances, for example traumatic experiences, throughout life can make genes become dormant or active. This can alter someone's physiology.

"In the context of the Holocaust, researchers have looked at the children of those who were affected by the Holocaust [and it was] shown that there are actually physiological pathways that are involved in the transmission of trauma across generations," she said.

"And so that can look like changes in the stress system that modulate stress responses."

Alex Thomas of Snuneymuxw First Nation in B.C. is a medical student at McMaster University's Waterloo Regional Campus in Ontario. Bombay supervised Thomas while they gathered data on intergenerational trauma.

Thomas said he has seen the effects of residential schools first hand. He said it's not uncommon to hear statements like, "it's not our generation's problem," and "they should just get over it."

"[The research] allowed me to open up to the idea that there may be other factors influencing some of the adversities my family has faced over the years," he said.

"Some of these factors I wouldn't have otherwise considered."

Over the course of the research, Thomas said he found the evidence was "fairly clear" that experiences at residential schools are having effects on several generations. He said if there was gene research, it might be possible to determine where the symptoms of intergenerational trauma begin physiologically.

Changes in stress response

Neuroscientist Hymie Anisman, formerly Bombay's PhD supervisor and collaborator, said some genes are important for a person to deal with stressful events in their life. Once epigenetic changes occur, it is possible for the gene to be silenced, and that person would have more difficulty coping with stressors.

As the after-effects of residential schools continued, the epigenetic changes may have become more firmly entrenched, he said.

Research into the possible epigenetic effects of residential schools is "for sure" worth starting, he said.

"I mean if you don't do it, you'll never know," Anisman said.

Bombay is working with the Thunderbird Partnership Foundation, a national Indigenous mental health and addictions organization, in approaching the preliminary stages of the research.

Bombay hopes to have a grant approved to begin consulting with Indigenous communities and create an informed and culturally sensitive approach to her study.

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Researcher proposes study on how residential school trauma may have affected genes | CBC News

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The trauma of residential school is most commonly seen as psychological in nature but a First Nations researcher is wondering if the experiences of survivors had lasting effects on their genes. Amy Bombay, an assistant professor at Dalhousie University's Department of Psychiatry and the School of Nursing who's from Rainy River First Nation in Ontario, wants to study the role epigenetics play in intergenerational trauma in Indigenous communities.

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Understanding Historical Trauma and Native Americans

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Understanding Historical Trauma and Native Americans

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“First is confronting the historical trauma. Second is understanding the trauma. Third is releasing the pain of historical trauma. Fourth is transcending the trauma.”

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But many, many years ago, the Native way of life was disrupted and destroyed by European settlers. Native Americans were driven from their lands, forbidden to speak their languages or express their cultures. Diseases like smallpox and tuberculosis were introduced. In the Great Plains, herds of bison were hunted to near-extinction. Native men, women, and children were killed. Tribe was intentionally pitted against tribe, and the lack of Native unity made it easier for the settlers to take the lands.

Then Native children were taken from their families and placed in far away boarding schools. In these schools, they faced abuse of every kind. They were taught the white man's ways, they were taught to speak only English, and they were taught to stifle their Native culture.

Worst of all, they were taught to be ashamed of being Native.
How historical trauma gets passed down
It's no secret that many Native communities are facing serious difficulties. Poverty, violence, poor health, suicide, unemployment, addiction, and hopelessness are widespread.

In part, these difficulties are symptoms of unresolved historical trauma. The concept of historical trauma attempts to convey "how the effects of collective injuries such as genocide and discrimination can linger for generations."

Dr. Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart is a Hunkpapa, Oglala Lakota and a professor at the University of New Mexico. She is the first person to develop the theory of historical unresolved grief and she describes historical trauma as "the cumulative emotional and psychological wounding over one's lifetime and from generation to generation following loss of lives, land and vital aspects of culture."
Brave Heart and other researchers' work on historical trauma suggests that even though these traumas happened long ago in history, they are lived out and experienced again and again in each subsequent generation.
In one study conducted in 2004, a group of researchers surveyed adult Native Americans who had children and developed something called the Historical Loss Scale.

These participants were generations removed from many of the historical traumas that had been inflicted on the Native American people. However, 36% had daily thoughts about the loss of traditional language in their community and 34% experienced daily thoughts about the loss of culture. Additionally, 24% reported feeling angry regarding historical losses, and 49% provided they had disturbing thoughts related to these losses. Almost half (46%) of the participants had daily thoughts about alcohol dependency and its impact on their community. Further, 22% of the respondents indicated they felt discomfort with White people, and 35% were distrustful of the intentions of the dominant White culture due to the historical losses the Native American people had suffered. (Whitbeck et al., 2004)

As the results from this study suggest, daily thoughts about loss, stress, grief, discrimination, and cultural displacement are part of the lives of many Native Americans. Generations of Native Americans live under the shadow of history, and this causes enormous stress on the body and mind.
Healing from history
Why do we still talk about this old history? Does it do us any good to dwell on the past?

Are Native Americans just supposed to "move on"?

It is important to talk about it not so that we can be angry or so that we can become a people of victims-although both of these responses are legitimate in the face of the horrors Native people have experienced.

We talk about this history because we need to understand how this history of genocide and trauma is impacting Native communities today. Understanding this history allows us to see our grandparents and parents in the wounds that we carry.

When we grow in awareness of our behavior patterns, our family relationships, our mental attitudes and where they have come from, we have the chance to change and to help others change.

Dr. Brave Heart talks about the process of moving forward from historical grief: "First is confronting the historical trauma. Second is understanding the trauma. Third is releasing the pain of historical trauma. Fourth is transcending the trauma."

Today, when we choose to confront our hurt, to become aware of our patterns, to release the pain of our hurts, and to choose a better future for our children, we can rise up and transcend the cycles of trauma.
Native Hope is proud to stand alongside many brave Native individuals and communities who are confronting history, sharing their stories, and experiencing hope and healing. Subscribe to our blog to stay updated on stories of hope from Native communities.

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Understanding Historical Trauma and Native Americans

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Daily thoughts about loss, stress, grief, discrimination, and cultural displacement are part of the lives of many Native Americans. Generations of Native Americans live under the shadow of historical trauma, and this causes enormous stress on the body and mind.

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Loss of safety: The world becomes a place where anything can happen.

Loss of danger cues: How do you know what is dangerous when someone you trust hurts you and this is then your 'normal?'

Loss of trust: This is especially true if the abuser is a family member or a close family friend.

Shame: Huge, overwhelming, debilitating shame. As a child, even getting an exercise wrong at school can trigger the shame. The child may grow into an adult who cannot bear to be in the wrong because it is such a trigger.

Loss of intimacy: For survivors of sexual abuse, sexual relationships can either become something to avoid or are entered into for approval (since the child learns that sex is a way to get the attention they crave) and the person may be labeled 'promiscuous.'

Dissociation: Often, to cope with what is happening to the body during the abuse, the child will dissociate (disconnect the consciousness from what is happening). Later, this becomes a coping strategy that is used whenever the survivor feels overwhelmed.

Loss of physical connection to body: Survivors of sexual and physical abuse often have a hard time being in their body. As Bessel van der Kolk says in The Body Keeps the Score, at some level they consider that their body let them down and so turn the volume down on physical sensations. For example, survivors may go for a long time before they realize they need to use the bathroom. This disconnection from the body makes some therapies known to aid trauma recovery, such as yoga, harder for these survivors. Trauma-informed yoga avoids some of the potential triggers and helps participants get back in touch with their bodies. Echo's Trauma-Informed Yoga training is in November. Click here for more information.

Loss of sense of self: One of the roles of the primary caregiver is to help us discover our identity by reflecting who we are back at us. If the abuser was a parent or caregiver, then that sense of self is not well developed and can leave us feeling phony or fake.

Loss of self-worth: Trauma survivors, especially survivors of sexual abuse, can swing between feeling special, with grandiose beliefs about themselves, and feeling dirty and 'bad.' Trauma survivors are special - they have a PhD in survival - but this self-aggrandizement is an elaborate defense against the unbearable feeling of being an outcast and unworthy of love.

Re-enactment: Recreating the childhood dynamic expecting the same result but hoping for a different one, such as anticipating and even provoking your partner's 'betrayal' but wanting badly for it to be different this time, and thus resolve your childhood dilemma. This strategy is doomed to failure because the need is in the past and cannot be resolved. Also, you are setting up the other person because you are always waiting for the other shoe to drop and will interpret anything as confirmation that you have been betrayed once more.

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The Impact of Trauma - Echo Parenting & Education

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We have talked a lot about how childhood trauma impacts emotional regulation and can leave us oscillating between anger and numbness (hyper- and hypo-arousal). But what are the other symptoms of trauma? In our newest infographic, we look at some of the other ways childhood trauma can leave its mark.

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Why We Need Trauma-Sensitive Schools - Book 1 pdf

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Why We Need Trauma-Sensitive Schools - Book 1 pdf

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https://traumasensitiveschools.org/why/

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Why We Need Trauma-Sensitive Schools Book 2 PDF

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Why We Need Trauma-Sensitive Schools Book 2 PDF

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https://traumasensitiveschools.org/why/

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Creating and Advocating for Trauma Sensitive Schools

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10 Things About Childhood Trauma Every Teacher Wants to Know

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10 Things About Childhood Trauma Every Teacher Wants to Know

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http://www.weareteachers.com/blogs/post/2016/02/24/10-things-about-childhood-trauma-every-teacher-needs-to-know

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Trauma Therapy: Trauma Survivors have Symptoms Instead of Memories

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Trauma Therapy: Trauma Survivors have Symptoms Instead of Memories

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http://blog.bayareamh.com/trauma-survivors-have-symptoms-instead-of-memories

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How People Learn to Become Resilient - The New Yorker

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Trauma Recovery Model.comHelp for damaged children & young people…

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Trauma Recovery Model.comHelp for damaged children & young people…

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http://www.traumarecoverymodel.com/?p=215

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New Ways Of Treating Trauma: Try Some Yoga

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New Ways Of Treating Trauma: Try Some Yoga

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http://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2015/01/12/treating-trauma-yoga

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A Quote on Colonization & Trauma Author Unknown

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A Quote on Colonization & Trauma Author Unknown

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Colonization's base word in Latin means "to inhabit." Colonization was and is the act of control by taking the land, resources, way of life, etc. Colonization equals trauma. And trauma impacts our brains which then impact the way we think. A resulting impact has been chronic negativity. We can never fully decolonize, however, we can minimize the power of colonization be re-indigenizing our thoughts which means thinking like our ancestors did. The proof is in our language, songs, dance, ceremony and way of life, that shows our ancestors were positive thinkers. Positive thinkers are positive doers. If you are a chronic negative person, that simply means you have some healing work to do to turn that around. There is power in positivity.

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Breathwork for Clearing Trauma from the Body

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Breathwork for Clearing Trauma from the Body

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http://upliftconnect.com/breathwork-for-clearing-trauma/

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How do we heal trauma suffered by native communities?

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How do we heal trauma suffered by native communities?

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http://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/how-do-we-heal-trauma-suffered-by-native-communities/article29612969/

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7 Ways to Calm a Young Brain in TraumaHow can we help elementary students who have been scarred by tragedy become more receptive to learning?

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7 Ways to Calm a Young Brain in TraumaHow can we help elementary students who have been scarred by tragedy become more receptive to learning?

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https://www.edutopia.org/article/7-ways-calm-young-brain-trauma-lori-desautels?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=socialflow

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Trauma May Be Woven Into DNA of Native Americans

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Trauma May Be Woven Into DNA of Native Americans

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http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2015/05/28/trauma-may-be-woven-dna-native-americans-160508

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Schools That Separate the Child From the Trauma

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Schools That Separate the Child From the Trauma

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https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/11/13/separating-the-child-from-the-trauma/?_r=0?register=facebook

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Dr. Gabor Mate: Psychoneuroendocrinology, Healing Childhood Trauma | Ep. 90

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Dr. Gabor Mate: Psychoneuroendocrinology, Healing Childhood Trauma | Ep. 90

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http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/aaron-alexander/align-podcast/e/dr-gabor-mate-psychoneuroendocrinology-healing-childhood-trauma-48378889

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Parenting a Child Who Has Experienced Trauma

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Parenting a Child Who Has Experienced Trauma

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https://www.childwelfare.gov/pubs/factsheets/child-trauma/

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ATTCH Trauma Integration Training & Certification Training Program

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ATTCH Trauma Integration Training & Certification Training Program

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http://www.attachment-and-trauma-treatment-centre-for-healing.com/trauma-certification.html

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Trauma and the Brain: An Introduction for professionals working with teens

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Trauma and the Brain: An Introduction for professionals working with teens

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Trauma can be defined as a deeply distressing response to a real or perceived threat to one's life. Trauma can result from events including, but not limited to, getting physically or sexually assaulted, sudden death of family members or close friends, being emotionally abused or neglected throughout one's childhood, the result of a catastrophic environmental event like an earthquake or hurricane, and can even result from generations of oppression on a family or community. Trauma is traditionally popularized as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), a severe adaptation to threat characterized by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) as having re-experiencing symptoms (e.g., flashbacks, nightmares, daydreams of the traumatic event), avoidance symptoms (e.g., avoiding the physical place where the event occurred, avoiding/suppressing thoughts related to the event, etc.), and arousal symptoms (e.g., hyper or hypo-vigilance; i.e., rapid increase/decrease of the individual's physical "alarm" system such as heart rate and other autonomic nervous system functions). This definition however, can be limited and does not take into account the many nuances of subjective experience and behavioral expression. For example, a young child who's mother neglected him and in turn developed an insecure ambivalent attachment style may develop a worldview that's very cold and harsh relationally; a young woman living in a community plagued by violence and drugs, but who's never been assaulted physically herself can still develop hyperarousal in response to constantly hearing gunshots. These are just a couple scenarios in which trauma can occur and fall outside the exact criteria of PTSD.
Check out the new Trauma-Informed Care for Professionals Working with Youth Online Course
Most educators, therapists, and other youth workers know inherently that every young person doesn't fit in a predefined diagnostic box. We know our students and clients have varied experiences that have impacted their lives in many ways, which can manifest in our classrooms and therapy offices diversely. What's often missing is a basic understanding of how trauma impacts the brain and how such function, in turn, affects behavior. Knowledge of the traumatized brain can drastically improve how we engage our young people in order to practice a trauma-informed approach.

An Introduction to Trauma and the Brain

First, a quick primer on the brain. There is the hindbrain or reptilian brain, which includes the brainstem and cerebellum. This controls all the essential functions we don't need to think about such as breathing, using the bathroom when we're infants, etc. Next is the mid-brain. This includes the limbic system and often gets pegged as the "emotional" brain. Finally is the forebrain, which includes the neocortex and is responsible for our higher order functions like language, abstract reasoning and of course executive function. The major structures of the brain involved in processing trauma are the thalamus, the amygdala, the hypothalamus, and the hippocampus.
Thalamus
The thalamus sits atop of the brain stem and is responsible for processing external stimuli. Sounds, images, any of the senses are first sent through the Thalamus, or as I like to call it the "gatekeeper." The thalamus is like a gatekeeper or bouncer at a club. They are the first to receive all the action; everything that wants to "get in."
Amygdala
The amygdalae are two almond shaped parts of the brain in the limbic system that picks up where the thalamus left of. Whereas the thalamus processes initial sensory information, the amygdala interprets it. Bessel Van der Kolk calls the amygdala the "smoke detector" because it can be akin to a smoke detector sensing smoke or fire. This "alarm" system alerts us (swiftly and unconsciously) of whether an external stimulus is a threat.
Hippocampus
The hippocampus is also part of the limbic system and is associated with memory. When the amygdala is triggered into an alarm state (i.e., a threat is perceived and the smoke detector goes off) it also relies on past memory/experience (e.g., a past threatening experience that is again happening currently).
Hypothalamus
When the amygdala and hippocampus work in tandem to declare threat, the hypothalamus quickly sends a message down the brain stem. This activates autonomic nervous system functions like increased or decreased heart palpitations, sweating, etc. and sends the body into fight, flight, or freeze states.
Prefrontal Cortex
The prefrontal cortex is mentioned here only because in normal processing, if the amygdala perceives no threat it quickly establishes connection via the anterior cingulate with the prefrontal cortex. This enables language, abstract thought, executive function, etc. However, when the smoke alarm is triggered and a message is sent via the hypothalamus to the hindbrain, all connection with the prefrontal cortex ceases. That means all normal executive functions and normal modes of thinking/perspective-taking are offline. Overtime, this of course leads to a number of issues for individuals including decreased self-regulatory abilities and a constant state hyper or hypo-vigilance (depending on the individuals adaptation of the trauma) with a decreased ability to manage such states. A common example referenced in the literature is a person encountering a snake in the woods and being startled (sensory information taken in by the thalamus), and threatened (via the amygdala). In the future, they may be walking around the corner of their home and become just as startled, and perceive just as much threat by seeing a coiled up hose and mistake it for a snake (that's the hippocampus working in tandem with the amygdala).

With the youth we work with, this shows up in many ways. One of the most common situations I hear of involve youth who mistakenly perceive another person's facial expression as a threat when it may not be. I once had a young man tell me:

"Sometimes when I see a person across the street, it makes me clutch my gun because you never know what they're about to do. But now when I think about it's like, 'what if that's someone that knows me and my family and just recognizes me from family pictures.' I'm about to shoot someone for no reason and who wasn't even trying to rob me or hurt me."

This type of trauma adaptation also happens in interactions between students and teachers, with teachers unintentionally triggering students' trauma. Sometimes a youth will be not that engaged in class, or sometimes will be very disruptive (the manifestation of the trauma behaviorally). In turn, teacher will try to manage the classroom by telling the youth to be quiet. It oftentimes comes across negatively with a harsh tone and in front of the rest of the class. They give multiple directives and wonder why the youth isn't complying. One time a youth told me a teacher simply "talking at" him in class set him off. He couldn't even listen to the actual words coming out of the teacher's mouth. All he was aware of was the anger consuming him. His amygdala (in tandem with the hippocampus) was setting of his alarm system given that he'd been emotionally and physically abused as a child. His trauma manifests behaviorally by an aggressive outburst, cusses out the teacher, and storms out of the classroom. The youth then gets labeled as a "trouble-maker" when in fact his trauma was triggered by an unskillful approach to classroom management.

Trauma manifests in many ways in the classroom, therapy room, and other youth work settings. What's most important is that professionals have an understanding of how trauma affects the brain and how sometimes youths' behaviors really are a result of triggered trauma and not simply a "decision" to defy you as the adult. With deeper understanding and integration with present-moment practice, teachers, therapists, and other youth workers can be compassionate and use their understanding as a mechanism to build relationships, safety, and trust with the traumatized youth. The key is for us adults to not function from a place of ego, needing to be right, or authoritative assertion, but rather a compassionate, understanding, and relationship-based perspective. Such a relating style illustrates a trauma-informed approach.

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Trauma and the Brain: An Introduction for professionals working with teens - Center for Adolescent Studies

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Trauma can be defined as a deeply distressing response to a real or perceived threat to one's life. Trauma can result from events including, but not limited to, getting physically or sexually assaulted, sudden death of family members or close friends, being emotionally abused or neglected throughout one's childhood, the result of a catastrophic environmental event like an earthquake or ...

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https://indiancountrymedianetwork.com/culture/health-wellness/historical-trauma-and-me-the-daughter-of-a-mother-murdered-by-a-serial-killer/

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A serial killer murdered my mother on February 27, 2003, yet I don't see myself as a victim.

When I was thirteen years old, my mother was murdered. This kind of introduction can come across like it's ripped from the headlines or like it's the title of a Hollywood script. In fact, local media did cover this story, and The New York Times wrote about it too, but the media got the facts wrong. She wasn't a saint, but she also didn't fit their description. My mother wasn't a prostitute.

A serial killer murdered my mother on February 27, 2003, yet I don't see myself as a victim. I choose not to allow what happened define me because I am more than what has happened to me and my family. I believe my mother would agree.

I was a high school freshman in math class when the news came. Up until the point of being sent to the front office I was just like everyone else. I was a typical girl on the rez who lived with my grandparents. I attended school, and life was predictable. I'm White Mountain Apache.

Born in Phoenix, Arizona, and primarily raised by my maternal grandparents, I had a stable, humble upbringing. I spent summers riding horses, swimming in rivers, chasing flying grasshoppers and building clubhouses with all my cousin brothers and cousin sisters. The other part of my life was spent living with my mother off rez. When I was with her, we traveled often and didn't stay at any one place long enough for me to remember the names of my classmates. Most places we stayed at were homeless shelters for battered women and children. I can remember at least five different shelters, although there were probably more.

We traveled by car or Greyhound bus for miles and miles, mostly at night. I imagined us in a spaceship traveling to a distant planet to visit aliens. Other times I remember holding maps and pretending we were going on a treasure hunt, X marks the spot. It never occurred to me that this was not the norm. Our constant moving is what I referred to as a 'nomadic' lifestyle, and I didn't know it was dysfunctional. Because she died during my childhood, I focused on the manner in which she lived and how she parented.

My mother was an incredible person-a beautiful, smart, vivacious, strong, funny, engaging, attractive woman. But she was not a great parent to me. The two are not mutually exclusive. She excelled at sports, especially basketball. She was tribal royalty, and served in the Army in the 1990s. She was awarded medals in rifle and hand grenade expertise. She was a modern-day true Apache warrior. She just wasn't the ideal mother I feel I deserved as a child. At least speaking for myself. She gave birth to three other children after me. I will not speak for them.

I respect my mother. I love her. I am strong because I am my mother's daughter. But my mother was my first child. I was the parent raising my parent. Some of my first memories are helping my drunk, strung-out mother get into bed. Reminding her to pay the bills so our lights don't get shut off again. I remember having the feeling I later learned was "anxiety," because I didn't want school to end. I didn't want to deal with my mom's drug and alcohol problems. Even so, let me be clear here: Just because someone chooses to live their life an unhealthy way, it doesn't give anyone the right to exploit them and disregard that life. Every life has value.

Over time, I realized my unstable childhood was far from the norm. It took time for me to work through the traumatic childhood I experienced. I mean, how do you explain this kind of upbringing on a date or when meeting new friends? It's not easy. I usually leave it at, "It's complicated." With time and compassion and love from my grandparents, I saw the positive qualities of my mother. She taught me survival skills and street smarts. She taught me how to be assertive and direct, how to look people in the eye and stand among giants with absolute confidence and self-assurance. She warned me of the dangers of addiction, the bucket-of-crabs-syndrome, and other negative features of life on the rez. These lessons helped me overcome many of the challenges trauma children face.

Again let me reiterate, it took time and even some therapy to work through all of this. As an adult I learned healthier ways to express myself and process trauma. I developed and established safe boundaries. Childhood trauma can be devastatingly challenging to overcome. It's an ongoing process. Before this publication I only shared this information with people I trusted. Well, now this information is available for the world to see, and that's okay. I am at a place in my life where I'm comfortable enough to share my story. I want to share my story because I feel like it speaks to many similarities in other narratives of Native girls or Native children experiencing the loss of a murdered Native mother. As a daughter of a murdered Native woman and an educated researcher I felt a responsibility to address the larger issue at hand. The problem is the failure of the U.S. and Canadian governments to act on the issue of an alarming rate of missing and murdered Indigenous women in the U.S. and Canada. It's an epidemic.

According to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, there are more than 1,200 missing and murdered Indigenous First Nations women.

My story is my own, and I own my truths. I share my narrative because even though it's been 12 years since my mother passed, I still experience loss. There is the physical loss and then there's a spiritual loss, which I directly relate to historical trauma. Research by Native scholars like Dr. Maria Brave Heart refer to historical trauma as the cumulative effects experienced by Indigenous Peoples as a result of the colonial invasion and targeted genocidal practices to erase an entire race off the face of the Earth. Dr. Brave Heart spoke at Columbia University. She described historical trauma like a deck of cards; every card stacked on the deck is another trauma, and most Natives experiencing historical trauma feel the impact of the entire deck. My mother's murder is intimately connected to the historical trauma all Native peoples face. She was a Native woman, a person of color, and poor. She experienced many of the symptoms of historical trauma and had her own methods of self-medicating as a way to deal with the effects of this trauma. My mother used drugs and alcohol and constantly moving around the country as a way to numb, avoid, or escape her historical trauma. The primary symptoms of historical trauma for her included being a product of U.S. enforced policy, foster care and being the daughter of a family deeply affected by Indian boarding schools. Most of my family experienced the effects of historical trauma, particularly with Indian boarding schools. My mother's mother, my grandmother, went away to a government funded job-training program off the reservation. This government-funded program was designed to literally separate and disconnect Natives from their culture. My grandmother later taught at the Indian boarding school on my reservation. As a child, my maternal grandfather ran away from the Indian boarding school because he was told to cut his long Apache hair. He hasn't cut it to this day. My mother's siblings also attended Indian boarding schools. I went to reservation public schools, a Bureau of Indian Affairs government reservation school, and after my mother's death I was sent to Chemawa Indian Boarding School in Salem, Oregon. This is important to know: all Indian boarding schools have an intended purpose.

The Indian boarding school experience, aka the boarding school era, was a cruel, systematic and racist government policy targeted at disrupting the Native family. Its very creation was designed to disconnect Natives from their culture. General Richard Henry Pratt established the first boarding school in Carlisle, Pennsylvania and based it on the military system. It was a horrific time for Native children and families. The ideology of the Indian boarding school era was to "Kill the Indian, Save the Man." " Kill the Indian, Save the Man" is the title of a study I later published examining the cumulative effects of historical trauma. The forced removal of Native children, ages three and older, ripped from their homes and sent thousands of miles away to school to be forcibly assimilated into the dominant white culture. According to the logic of the U.S. government's Department of Defense, this practice was more cost efficient than using bullets. During the 1880s there were alarming rates of early death related to unsanitary conditions, exposure to diseases their immune systems had never encountered, and psychological and physical assaults including child abuse, rape, and molestation. The U.S. government's tactics and practices of dealing with Native people was later heavily studied and admired by Germany's Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler. The Nazi dictator references the U.S. practices as a source of inspiration in his horrific plan during the Jewish Holocaust. In America most schoolchildren learn about the Jewish Holocaust. There is no mention of the Native Holocaust. The U.S. is quick to pass judgment toward other countries, but we fail to look in the review mirror at our recent history. This country was built on the backs of slaves and on stolen Native land.

The concept behind Indian boarding schools is connected to patriarchy. Historically Native women have and continue to be at the bottom of the hierarchy. This issue of missing and murdered or sexually assaulted Native women is also connected to capitalism and neoliberalism. You can tell a lot about a society by the way they treat their women.

I am no expert but I have studied a trend found in individualistic societies functioning in colonial structural systems. Individuals tend to have more antisocial personality disorders, i.e. sociopaths, psychopaths and the subtype of those groups: serial killers. In my review of the research I have yet to find a serial killer in a collective society. My speculation is the interdependence and interconnectedness of a collective society protects or buffers individuals from developing a disorder known as antisocial personality disorder.

According to the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic Statistical Manual (or DSM 5), individuals with antisocial personality disorders lack empathy. When a person lacks empathy he/she does not have the ability to feel for others or connect to their pain. In a capitalistic society, I feel it's easier to develop such disorders, because people are so focused on their own profits that they can't connect to the suffering of people they are profiting from or oppressing. This leads to the corruption on Wall Street and in politics and in corporate America.

Our society, as it currently stands, lack accountability and compassion for one another. When we are deficient in a vital nutrient for our spiritual well being, i.e. compassion, we allow exploitation, particularly of women of color.

According to the United States Department of Justice (2014), Native women are 2.5 times more likely to be sexually assaulted within their lifetime compared to all other races. Speaking for myself, as a Native woman, I shouldn't have to live my life according to the probability of "being sexually assaulted today." I deserve to live a life free of targeted harm. I deserve protection in my own land and all over Turtle Island. I once heard a Native sister say, "For me it's not about if I'll be assaulted, but when." That's disturbing because the statistics speak for themselves. It gives me chills to think that statistically speaking as a Native woman, as a Native sister, I am more 2.5 times more likely to experience a sexual assault. I refuse to be a victim. I choose to be proactive rather than reactive to the actions of a perpetrator.

Speaking of perpetrators, research also shows that the majority of assaults on Native women are committed by non-Native men, usually white men. The serial killer who murdered my mother was a non-Native African American man. He is currently sitting on death row for strangulation murders. Even though my mother didn't know her murderer it's important to note that any act of violence, domestic, spiritual or otherwise, is wrong, and must be addressed.

Patriarchy is a system that allows men in power to dominate over women. Violence and sexual assault is about power and control. Growing up I witnessed domestic violence so often I normalized it, and it wasn't until I went to college that I learned domestic violence is not the norm. I feel like this is important to emphasize because it's a matter of knowing the difference between safety and feeling abused. It could be the difference between life and death for some women. We must become aware, educated, advocates, allies and activists about this issue. We become empowered when we speak up and speak out against this epidemic.

My mother's murder and her death is an experience I endured, and I will live with that experience my entire life. I simply choose to see it as something that affects me but doesn't define me. I am still here. I am still standing. I am strong because I am my mother's daughter. I am an Apache warrior. I am a Native American woman. I was raised in a matrilineal tribe. We are taught and raised that women are strong and must be respected. I also know that an educated Native woman is a threat to the mechanisms that make the system of patriarchy work. I choose to invest in my education for the next several generations.

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Historical Trauma and Me, the Daughter of a Mother Murdered by a Serial Killer - Indian Country Media Network

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A serial killer murdered my mother on February 27, 2003, yet I don't see myself as a victim. When I was thirteen years old, my mother was murdered. This kind of introduction can come across like it's ripped from the headlines or like it's the title of a Hollywood script.

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Native, Indigenous cultures and healing trauma

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Native, Indigenous cultures and healing trauma

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http://www.thetraumatherapistproject.com/podcast/native-indigenous-cultures-healing-trauma-eduardo-duran-phd/

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Friday July 21, 2017All in the family: Understanding and healing childhood trauma

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Friday July 21, 2017All in the family: Understanding and healing childhood trauma

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http://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/all-in-the-family-understanding-and-healing-childhood-trauma-1.3545271

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Childhood trauma leads to lifelong chronic illness.

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Childhood trauma leads to lifelong chronic illness.

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https://acestoohigh.com/2016/08/10/childhood-trauma-leads-to-lifelong-chronic-illness-so-why-isnt-the-medical-community-helping-patients/

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When Schools Meet Trauma with Understanding

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When Schools Meet Trauma with Understanding

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http://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2017/05/30/524554109/when-schools-meet-trauma-with-understanding-not-discipline

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Resilience is about how you recharge, not how you endure

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Resilience is about how you recharge, not how you endure

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https://hbr.org/2016/06/resilience-is-about-how-you-recharge-not-how-you-endure

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https://www.amazon.ca/Decolonizing-Trauma-Work-Indigenous-Strategies/dp/1552666581

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Gabor Matê will be in Edmonton Sept 14 & 15, 2017

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Gabor Matê will be in Edmonton Sept 14 & 15, 2017

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http://www.acesconnection.com/blog/dr-ross-greene-educated-and-kids-who-have-been-traumatized

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How do we heal trauma suffered by Native communities? BY GABOR MATE’

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How do we heal trauma suffered by Native communities? BY GABOR MATE’

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http://www.nativesunnews.today/news/2016-04-20/Voices_of_the_People/How_do_we_heal_trauma_suffered_by_Native_communiti.html