Louise Godbold, co-executive director of Echo Parenting & Education in Los Angeles, Calif., is a frequent contributor to ACEs Connection.
Q: When did you learn about ACEs, and how did that change your work (or life)?
A: Echo Parenting & Education (where I am the Co-Executive Director) first learned about ACEs from Gabriella Grant of the California Center of Excellence for Trauma-Informed Care. She trained us on the ACE Study and the effects of trauma on the brain. At her recommendation, I read Trauma and Recovery by Judith Herman and by then I was fully-fledged trauma nut. This information made sense of so many things in my life and the lives of those around me.
Professionally the information had an impact too. Our nonviolent parenting philosophy contends that most traditional parenting practices are harmful to the development of the child. Now I had scientific evidence that common practices (such as the humiliation of children that happens routinely in homes and classrooms) caused trauma. This fueled our work at Echo, where we teach a child raising practice that honors the dignity and life force of the child and eschew practices that focus on compliance rather than connection. We also sought ways to become trauma-informed in our service delivery as well as in our staff interactions and agency policies. This culminated in a project with the domestic violence shelters where we offer trauma-informed nonviolent parenting classes: Together, we came up with a set of Trauma Informed Nonviolent Standards of Care with the help of Gabby Grant and Margaret Hobart from the Washington State Coalition Against Domestic Violence. The standards are going through another review in 2014 since many people have now become interested in the project and want to add their own expertise (such as gender inclusiveness), but the draft version is available on our website.
Moving forward, we are hoping to partner with the California Endowment to bring our trauma-informed educator training to scale, working with the faculty of one school to help us refine our trainings. We also provide trauma-informed nonviolent child raising trainings to mental health professionals and domestic violence shelter workers. For the last few years, our two-day Changing the Paradigm conference has focused on developmental trauma – “Where trauma meets attachment.” Two years ago, we featured Dr. V. Felitti of the ACE Study. This year we had Dr. Janina Fisher as our keynote speaker. Next year we are hoping to feature a big name in trauma – watch this space!
Q: What does resilience to early childhood adversity mean to you?
A: We believe (and research has proven) that resilience and healing comes through a safe, stable relationship with a nurturing caregiver. Failing a loving, responsive parent, some people are able to find that relationship with a teacher, mentor or other person outside the home, but it’s not ideal. Caregivers are ‘brain sculptors’ – from an early age they are setting the foundation for someone’s emotional health for their entire life, and as the ACEs Study shows, also their physical health and functioning in society. Although we can find our own healing and overcome ACEs (and there are many stories of courageous people who have done this), it makes sense to target primary caregivers to eliminate the forms of abuse that constitute ACEs, to create a secure attachment that helps us withstand the slings and arrows life throws at us, and most of all, so when it is our turn to parent, we are not creating the very same damage to our children because we slip by default into the only form of parenting we’ve ever known. We can celebrate the great leaders who have overcome ACEs as a way to instill hope, we can find interventions for those whose parents have failed them, but to ignore parents when we talk about creating resilience is nonsensical.
Q: How would you like to see trauma-informed practices shape your field?
A: The other way around. I would like to see nonviolent parenting shape the trauma field. Nonviolent child raising brings some essential frames that I believe will provide a stronger foundation for our trauma work.
Firstly, we have to reexamine our parenting practices. At Echo we believe anything that hurts the mind or body of a child is violence and potentially traumatizing. When we examine traditional parenting methods, we find that they are based on gaining compliance through punishment and reward, which is manipulative at best, violent and traumatizing at worse. It certainly doesn’t build healthy socio-emotional skills. Think about it. If you don’t like your partner’s behavior, do you take away his or her TV privileges? If that is so crazy for an adult, why is it any less crazy for a child? So let’s throw out star-charts and stickers and consequences and time out and work on creating human beings who can communicate their feelings and needs and have respect for the feelings and needs of others. We do this through relationship, not programming. Yet all the ‘evidence based’ parenting programs I have seen out there (including those for traumatized kids) falls back on the punishment and reward paradigm – probably because most people are not aware there is an alternative.
Secondly, we have to understand that we ourselves were inculcated with a worldview that is all about rewarding good behavior and punishing bad behavior. We are aghast when traumatized youth are being expelled from school, locked up or medicated (or should be) but we fail to realize that these outcomes are a reflection of the core beliefs that have formed our society and its institutions – and, dare I say it, permeate our thinking so completely that we ourselves do not recognize the contradictions between our trauma-informed ideals and the paradigm we still operate from. How do we achieve a paradigm shift? It takes reflection about our own childhoods (our ‘coherent narrative’ as Daniel Siegel calls it) and a realignment of our basic beliefs. Much the same as trauma-informed care has taught us to look beneath ‘problem’ behaviors to find the trauma history, at Echo we believe that there is no ‘bad’ behavior only unmet basic human needs. I love what Bessel van der Kolk says about anger management programs: The skills work until you get angry. Likewise, our trauma-informed practices will evaporate the moment we get triggered unless we can retrain our brain and catch ourselves when we are tempted to operate from a place of fear.
Q: If you encounter or deal with trauma often in your work, what coping skills do you rely on to stay happy and healthy?
A: I practice yoga as a means to regulate and gain perspective. I have almost reached the point where I leave my phone at home and don’t worry that my co-director is trying to call me. Almost. I also try to clear my mind of work at the weekend. Doesn’t work very well, but when I do have a weekend without needing to be at one of our events or classes, I try to plan an outing, something special. Running an agency leaves me with very little time, so I often write ACEs Connection blogs during the weekend too – but that I consider therapeutic!
Having a co-director is a huge stress reliever! When things get tough, if nothing else we can laugh at the sheer insanity of it all. It also means there is a built-in partner who is anxious to hear every thought and reflection you have about work – long after your friends and family become tired of the subject!
Q: How do you hope to contribute to and gain from ACEs Connection?
I am constantly educated and stimulated by the articles in the daily round-up (brilliant new feature!) and by the blogs of other members. I share the links with staff, other professionals and even on my Facebook page. (Actually, apart from pictures of my beau, my Facebook page looks just like ACEs Connection!)
ACEs Connection has also provided me with a place to communicate with the ‘converted’ – people who see the same potential for this information to transform everything, from service delivery to understanding our friends, so that the world is a more compassionate, happy and healthy place. Since I process things through writing, having a place to blog where I can get immediate feedback is exhilarating!
Lastly, the networking aspect of ACEs Connection is already paying dividends for Echo. James Encinas contacted me after reading an article I wrote on ACES Too High and he is now cycling cross-country on a sponsored ride and donating the proceeds to us. Through Jane Stevens, we became connected to the California Endowment and their education and trauma initiative. We look forward to getting the word out about nonviolent parenting, especially since it is very hard to get our information out in the same way as some of these well-funded ‘evidence-based’ parenting programs.
Even as we work toward becoming evidence based (since that has become a prerequisite for many funders and consumers), we also question what is meant when the evidence declares a program 'effective'. A lot of parents tell us they use spanking or consequences or time out 'because it works'. Actually, it usually only works in the short-term or until the parent is out of sight. Long term, does it strengthen the relationship between parent and child? Does it promote open, honest communication? Does a child internalize the value being taught, or fear, anger and self-loathing? These are the standards we think are important when evaluating a program’s effectiveness and in comparing ourselves to other parenting approaches.
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