Majors: Social Work and Psychology double major

Minors: Counseling and Scripture Engagement double minor

Fun Fact: I love plants! :)

Major: Youth Min and OVC double major

Fun Fact: I can play the harmonica

Majors: OVC and Psychology

Fun Fact: I do flips

Major: OVC

Minor: Photography

Fun Fact: I love Oreos but they cannot be double stuffed

Major: OVC

Fun Fact: I Juggle

Major: OVC

Fun Fact: I love pickleball.

Grief is...

• a placeholder for all painful emotional states

• a painful emotional state and the loss of relational connection

• a result of all unpaired ruptures

Every loss we experience is a loss of relational connection

• Genesis 2:18, "The Lord God said, it is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him."

Grief drives us to connection, which is how God utilizes grief

• It is a pervasive problem. It results from exposure to an incident or series of events that are emotionally disturbing or life-threatening with lasting adverse effects on the individual's functioning and mental, physical, social, emotional, or spiritual well-being.

  
  

WHY it is important to understand:

• There are behavioral health concerns that can present challenges in relationships, careers, and other aspects of life, it is important to understand the nature and impact of trauma and to explore healing.

  
  

HOW is this relevant to the church:

• Recognizing trauma is the first step toward building a church environment that fosters healing and understanding. One of the core principles of trauma-informed care from a clinical perspective is the creation of safe spaces where individuals feel accepted, understood, and valued.

Lament is...

• a framework to process grief

• God invites us and calls us to grief

• leads to connection and a renewed hope

Grief, and processing our emotions, help teach us to cast everything to God.

Angela: How does trauma change our perception of safety?

Hannah: Is aid that we put into projects and orphanages causing an increase in orphaned children? If so how can we create sustainable habits to help keep the kids with their families?

Noah: How can churches be better at detecting when children are suffering from trauma?

Ava: What ways would you help an adult who has faced many ACEs cope compared to the ways you would help a child cope?

Andrew: What systems can churches implement to prevent trauma within the church?

What is trauma?. Apple Podcasts. (2018, March 9). https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/what-is-trauma/id1358020151?i=1000405807798

Fletcher, T. (2022, December 30). Understanding Trauma. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HCa-dTuwOBM

Homepage. World Impact. (2024, July 1). https://www.worldimpact.org/

“Let’s Talk About Trauma - A Wound That Never Fully Heals .” YouTube, YouTube, 30 Aug. 2018, www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXAcD7TzhYU.

Trauma Healing Institute, traumahealinginstitute.org/. Accessed 9 Oct. 2024.

Border, M. B. (2023). Girls’ education international nonprofit. Mercy Beyond Borders. https://www.mercybeyondborders.org/?gad_source=1&gclid=Cj0KCQjwsJO4BhDoARIsADDv4vCpfeBIIvoDzYx-y7167QMjrg3UsvKvwulGOn8cIlBfjAb1Qtq1ljkaAr3kEALw_wcB

CAFO Trends Notes

Synopsis:

• This podcast was heavily about what trauma is, and what can cause someone to be overwhelmed. They utilized the analogy of how we have an internal cup that represents our levels of being overwhelmed. Further, if our cup is overflowing it presents that our cup is too overwhelmed, and if it is not full then we aren't overwhelmed. Additionally, the podcast mentioned the importance of going to therapy because as humans we're always developing, and trauma shapes us, but it never gets the last word. Also, the podcast emphasized the importance of our nervous system because it responds to things that you don't even know are happening to your environment (externally and internally). In summary, this podcast looked into the lens of defining trauma, and the ways it can affect someone mentally, physically, and spiritually.

5 Key Things I Learned:

• The symptoms of trauma have to be bad enough to where it is disrupting a person's life, for them to qualify to have experienced trauma.

• Big T trauma (PTSD, DSM 5 language, diagnosis) and Little t trauma (anything depending on what someone may be experiencing): this is a comparison piece of how someone is managing their experiences.

• Ask the question, "What is overwhelming to you?" Disregard your past, just what is stressful right now then you can unfold the layers.

• Trauma is whenever something comes into our space that is too much too soon (ex: a car accident), too much for too long (ex: a relationship that has aggressive tendencies), or too little for too long.

• Everyone deserves help because it is not bad.

The Preface (pgs. 13-15) discusses how we cannot have a one-size-fits-all approach to poverty alleviation, which relates to how we approach someone who has experienced trauma.

• For example: when you are helping an under-resourced community, you tend to ask questions about the person/family's physical health, mental health, education, etc. Regarding trauma, there is a similar process, which is called: "Trauma Informed Care", which acknowledges the need to understand someone's life experiences to deliver effective care and has the potential to improve patient engagement, treatment adherence, health outcomes, and provider and staff wellness.

• providing comfort and understanding

• offering strength and support

• utilizing hardships to help us grow

Relationship with self

• diminishes your understanding of who you are

• distort a sense of safety

• causes feelings of helplessness

Relationship with others

• difficulty communicating

• withdrawal from others

• assumptions that people are against them

Relationship with creation

• disrupt someone's creativity

• can utilize music for coping

• can cause issues with going out, and experiencing the world

The global averages for adverse childhood experiences are estimated based on data mostly from North America, but also from some other studies throughout the world.

Out of 208 subjects:

22% of people have experienced just one ACE

13% experienced two ACEs

9% experienced three ACEs

16% had experienced 4 or more ACEs

People who have experienced 4 or more ACEs

Research shows that ACEs as directly related to future substance abuse, mental health, physical health, and abuse toward others. It also shows a direct correlation to “loss of economic opportunity and productivity…, legal and judicial costs associated with criminal offenses, as well as substantial lifetime medical costs associated with management to chronic disease and disability.”(PMC)

Full study:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10503911/

(majority of the interesting data is on Table 1)

-       Strengthen economic supports to families

o   Strengthening household financial security

o   Family-friendly work policies

-       Promote social norms that protect against violence and adversity

o   Public education campaigns

o   Legislative approaches to reduce corporal punishment

o   Bystander approaches

o   Men and boys as allies in prevention

-       Ensure a strong start for children

o   Early childhood home visitation

o   High-quality childcare

o   Preschool enrichment with family engagement

-       Teach skills

o   Social-emotional learning

o   Safe dating and healthy relationship skill programs

o   Parenting skills and family relationship approaches

-       Connect youth to caring adults and activities

o   Mentoring programs

o   After-school programs

-       Intervene to lessen immediate and long-term harms

o   Enhanced primary care

o   Victim-centered services

o   Treatment to lessen the harms of ACEs

o   Treatment to prevent problem behavior and future involvement in violence

o   Family-centered treatment for substance use disorders

Preventing ACEs is important because they contribute not only to short-term consequences, but can create long-term problems as well (refer to ACE stats)

Adverse Childhood Experiences Prevention Resource for Action:

https://www.cdc.gov/violence-prevention/media/pdf/resources-for-action/ACEs-Prevention-Resource_508.pdf

“ACEs are preventable. Creating and sustaining safe, stable, nurturing relationships and environments for all children and families can prevent ACEs and help all children reach their full potential.”(CDC)

Potential strategies to prevent ACEs from happening:

Encouragement to families to implement practices into their own households.

Working with parents within the church to help prevent ACEs from happening.

Accountability with church leaders and parents

The four “R’s” for trauma-informed approach

-Realize: Realize how frequent and damaging trauma can be

-Recognize: the signs and the symptoms that might be caused by trauma

-Respond: implement trauma-informed knowledge into policies

-Resist it happening again: Don’t harm them again

Using these ideas; as a church, we can learn to adjust our approach to creating policies and talking to children in Sunday schools, youth groups, or just within the service.

-       Training youth leaders in trauma informed care seems like a good first step

-       Hosting trainings for any church members

-       Implementing accountability for leaders in the church

https://ncsacw.acf.hhs.gov/userfiles/files/SAMHSA_Trauma.pdf

https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/childabuseandneglect/aces/fastfact.html

This also looked like a cool tool for churches:

https://www.spiritualfirstaid.org

This organization provides churches and individuals with the training necessary for spiritual, emotional, and trauma-informed care.

https://www.spiritualfirstaid.org/on-demand-SFA-Certificate-Course

Angela: Wounded Spirits Ministry

Wounded Spirits Ministries is an organization that works with those who have suffered from PTSD because of traumatic experiences. The ministry does a 13-week program to help people heal and learn healthy coping mechanisms. Wounded Spirits work with those who have been in the army as well as regular citizens. They help people find healing through Christ.

Noah: Ministry: Evangelical Counsel for Abuse Prevention

"At ECAP we’re engaging our mission to support Christian ministries in child protection and abuse prevention through awareness, accreditation, and resources."

https://ecap.net/

Aubrey: Ministry: Paws & Think

"Paws & Think works closely with the Indiana Crisis Assistance Response Team (I-CART) and the National Organization for Victim Assistance (NOVA) for volunteer training, support, and coordination that enables us to immediately dispatch our specially trained Paws to Comfort teams to locations following crises and traumatic events to help in the grieving and healing process."

https://www.pawsandthink.org/programs/therapy-dog-programs/paws-to-comfort/

Ava: Ministry: The Trauma Healing Institute

"We provide ministry tools that help people around the world heal from the pain of trauma, grief, and loss. We support individuals, churches, and other organizations with resources they can use to help people heal in their own communities."

https://traumahealinginstitute.org

Hannah: Ministry: UNICEF

"UNICEF works in over 190 countries and territories to save children's lives, to defend their rights, and to help them fulfil their potential from early childhood through adolescence."

https://www.unicef.org/

Speaker: Cristal Martinez Acosta

Synopsis:

This podcast focuses on what trauma is and how it affects us. Cristal says trauma can be an event and/or a response such as a natural disaster or something like a circumstance, such as childhood abuse. It can also be one event or a series of events that overwhelms our mental state, psychical state, and spiritual state. Cristal talks about how people can react to the same event in very different ways. Some might be scared to re-try something after they have had a traumatic experience with it while others seem to have more easily overcome it. She speaks about and defines complex trauma and chronic stress and how that affects a person.  She says these two are also subjective and just depend on the person. Another topic she covers is how trauma can create flashbacks, nightmares, avoidance, and even reimagining of their trauma experience.

5 key points learned:

·      trauma is subjective.

·      Counselors should not get to dictate what trauma is to an individual.

·      Complex trauma is trauma across multiple developmental stages.

·      Chronic stress is subjective.

·      There more ACES a person has, the more risk there is for diseases later in life.

This podcast discusses what trauma really is. It discusses some key characteristics of trauma and uses many analogies and examples to help us better understand it. It also talks about different types of trauma and how humans react to it differently. They also talk about more sensitive people and observation can be more easily affected by trauma. Another thing is about the negative impacts of having a victim mentality. Trauma often has to do with dealing with fear.

5 Key Things I Learned:

Trauma has to do with fear, intensity, and duration of something overwhelming

Trauma is not always like a stab it is often more like many paper cuts

Trauma can be seen as a seemingly overwhelming experience that has to do with fear and trying to manage it in an unhealthy way

Trauma is often thought of as a big overwhelming experience but usually, it is just a state of mind that is a result of unhealthy conditioning

Understanding when we are in a victim mentality is very important to moving on and fighting trauma

How to Break Cycles, Heal from Trauma, and Restore Your Faith

Synopsis:

Kobe Campbell, talks about her book "Why Am I Like This?" This book described the interconnection of trauma and faith. She talks about her personal journey of struggling with depression and anxiety even though she was a christian, and how she was able to heal through therapy and a deeper understanding of the love of Christ. Kobe talks about creating safe spaces for people to share without judgment. She hopes to help break cycles of trauma and find restoration through Christ.

Key Points:

1. Trauma is a past wound and it affects how we live in the present and future

2. We need to create safe spaces for sharing

3. A lack of compassion can be a barrier to their healing

4. Faith and trauma are interconnected

5. Leaders have to show their healing themselves and be a model of vulnerability

Let's Talk About Trauma – A Wound That Never Fully Heals | Matilde Antunes | TEDxYouth@CAISL (youtube.com)

Synopsis:

Everyone has different traumatic events they've been through and trauma from those. Even watching our loved ones go through hard times and watching them not know how to control their emotions when were young has big impacts on our identity. Trauma has an effect on the body in so many different ways. ACEs have many effects on people's behaviors, their brains, emotional states, and who they are. If we don't share our stories with others mental illness will remain.

5 key points I learned:

• Having family issues or an environment that is hard can have big impacts on the children.

• Talking openly about trauma or passed problems that we've had can help people overcome mental illness.

• Mental health problems do not make you a crazy person we all struggle with it at some point.

• High intense stress can change your brain and the way you think.

• You are never alone in your struggles.

Synopsis:

Tim fletcher talks in "Understanding trauma" about the basics of what is trauma and the responses as why some people act. He dives deeper into how we can help in midst of others experiencing trauma, and what might be triggers of trauma. He continues to speak on how trauma affects the brain and how to grow from trauma, we need to encounter healing.

Key Points:

1. Your response to trauma can be turned on from 1-100 in just seconds making it very hard to help your response.

2. The tools you used as a child to keep you safe now make adult life super hard/unmanageable

3. The wounds from our trauma affects how we think about ourselves, our relationships, and how we see the world.

4. Until we face our trauma, it will always be a growth barrier in our life

5. Trauma is about loss of connection to ourselves, our family, and around the world.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HCa-dTuwOBM

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1FDoPSUjNHolzyXoepkum5hrjdmoPsNIo