There are many people who spread information about the science of Adverse Childhood Experiences or ACEs, as defined by (https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/acestudy/), and how it brings light to society’s darkest problems of relationship. When a child suffers trauma, the residual damage often shows up throughout life as the inability to engage in great relationships. Yet, having an ability to enjoy interaction with other humans is everyone’s goal.
How can something so simple be so complex?
In this noisy era of information overload, there is a tendency to view humans as machines. Do you see yourself as a machine? Do you believe that if you get the correct inputs and have the proper maintenance, you’ll function well with few breakdowns? Machines are simple and functional, but humans are complex and relational. Humans are not machines to be fixed; they are people who crave relationship with one another, who want to discover commonalities and create unity.
The ACE Study woke me up, allowed me to engage my own healing process, and taught me many ways to create quality relationships. On a cross-country ride at the age of 56, I used my bicycle as a tool to spread information about ACE science and to form relationships with others interested in waking to this new information.
During that bicycle trip, it was my good fortune to meet Father Jeff Puthoff, the founder of Hopeworks, a nonprofit organization in Camden, NJ, www.hopewrks.org. Hopeworks provides youth with resources, training, and the support required to allow good dreams to come true. Each person who comes through Hopeworks has the opportunity to thrive in their community.
At that time I met him, Father Jeff was also the director of Hopeworks, and he told me that running the program required sweat. He said, “Hope is sweat; it’s exercise.” The exercise he referred to is a practice known as trauma informed care, and it is the creation of safe spaces where hurt people can share their life stories with one another. A place to gain assistance in moving toward a goal, but also a place to commune with others, create community, create a supportive family, and gain greater understanding of one another.
Based on the ACE Study Father Jeff knew that people who have been hurt make reactive, unreflective choices, to painful situations that impede their growth. He understood that youth need encouragement to realize that they are good at survival. The choices they’ve made and continue to make because of the traumas they’ve suffered is what led to their survival. And, those same choices may also prevent them from achieving personal success and happiness.
To move from a world of hurt that taught a certain way of being, a person must be able to access another, better way of being. This can be accomplished with sweat, exercise, and the right tools.
The best “right tool” is when one is in relationships based on compassion, integrity, self-responsibility, respect, and, love without judgment. Buckminster Fuller, a great scientist and inventor said, “If you want to teach people a new way of thinking, don’t bother trying to teach them. Instead, give them a tool, the use of which will lead to new ways of thinking.
Brandon and Dan Rhoton hold a copy of Wheeling to Healing https://www.jamesencinas.com/
In December 2017, I visited Hopeworks again and was privilegmmed to spend time with Father Jeff’s successor, Dan Rhoton and Healing 10 Convener Kate Daugherty. Kate joined the staff of Hopeworks in August of 2016 and in addition to convening the Healing 10 monthly meetings and expanding the footprints of the Healing 10 she supervises the Youth Healing Team at Hopeworks. The Youth Healing Team is a group of hardworking and empathetic teens motivated to help change the trajectory of youth like themselves by helping others understand and operate using a trauma informed framework. Here is a link to a powerful article on the work of the Youth Healing Team – https://sjmagazine.net/novembe...6/firsthand-accounts
My conversation with Dan focused on the importance of providing individuals with tools. He shared that a lot of times people say if it wasn’t for this school, if it wasn’t for this non profit I wouldn’t be where I am today and from his perspective if a young person says that about Hopeworks, they have failed at their job. “If they say Hopeworks changed my life we are messaging it wrong because our job at Hopeworks is not to be the reason they succeed, our job is to be the thing that helps them get there.” He explained, “An electrician fixing a light on the ceiling doesn’t say, ‘The ladder made this repair possible!’ Of course, the ladder was required, but it was the electrician who did the job. The job of Hopeworks is to be the ladder that allows youth to see a solution, work on it, and then take credit for their accomplishment. Hopeworks meets youth where they are,” says Dan, “and gives them what they need to be successful.”
Hopeworks provides training in various fields that can launch youth into successful careers, but to Dan, something else is much more important. “Our training is fine, but the reason our young people are so successful is because they have strong emotional management skills, they understand their own patterns from their personal history that are rooted in trauma, they know how to manage those habits and responses, and, they know how to ask for help. They’ve made the positional shift to know that the world is a place where people want to help them and if they ask for assistance they will get it.”
Hopeworks bases its philosophy on five pillars that any social service organization, or person, may use as tools to create positive relationships:
1. Emotions are a human issue, not a clinical problem
One need not be a clinician to deal with emotions. Youth who come from environments where they experienced traumas are often sad, depressed, angry, or upset. The staff at Hopeworks doesn’t shy away from engaging with them. In contrast, some people may believe that in order to deal with negative emotions, one should have a degree or training in psychology or social work. Once a person is given safe space in which to find calm, a plan for safety and self-care can be created. Dan says, “We don’t try to fix them if they are furious, but once they’ve been taught how to create safety and take care in those difficult moments, they’re able to make good progress.
One of the ways that Hopeworks passes on these understandings is through our Youth Healing Team Internship that Kate Daugherty Supervises. The Youth Healing Team takes participants through a trauma informed training sessions some of their biggest clients are the Camden, NJ School District, staff at Camden Charter Schools Network, members of the Camden Coalition of Healthcare Providers, and staff at Rutgers University.
Points the Youth Healing Team training covers:
- Identify ACES and how it affects someone’s future
- What are ACES? Go through the ACES survey.
- Speak about the ACES pyramid
- Address ACES impact on prevalence of smoking, addiction, teen pregnancy.
- Help those they are training understand a person’s history before making assumptions
- They share and hold a discussion on the impact of organizational trauma and systems induced trauma on our communities and our young people.
- They share tools used at Hopeworks to help manage emotions and self regulate.
2. There is no “other” in the room.
Every intervention Hopeworks teaches young people is one that the staff uses themselves. Dan says, “We are just as human as they are. I also have an ACE score even though I am a staff member. We are a community of healing, not a bunch of staff members trying to fix young people.”
3. Practice includes failure; failure requires empathy.
It in practice that failure creates learning. “You don’t walk into a gym and do a hundred push ups,” Dan believes, because, “that’s not how the human body works. You get a hundred by doing ten, fifteen, then twenty. The body grows stronger through practice and repetition! And yet we forget this simple concept when dealing with youth. If they disappoint us, we implement a zero tolerance policy. Zero tolerance is a failed and trauma inducing policy.”
4. Provide value.
Job training programs that don’t have a job at the end of it are a sham. For any organization, or, in any interaction intended to assist a person to learn improved personal skills, there must be an exchange of value. Job training programs mean that a person is enabled to work at a job; self-improvement programs and even conversations about self improvement should feel complete and be useful.
5. Learn from mistakes.
A commitment to growing, learning, adapting, and evolving includes learning from mistakes and failures.
Dan’s hope and vision for Hopeworks is, “If Hopeworks is doing a good job it means that we’ll never work with future generations of any family. The tools we provide at Hopeworks guarantees that youth will know how to raise their own children in better ways. Hopeworks will never see their children, for they will not have suffered traumas nor lived with lack. We want to provide these tools to all the youth in Camden.
The desire in every human being to enjoy good relationships and do meaningful work is simple yet complex. To do both well takes time, tools, sweat, and vision. It requires commitment because it is not about fixing people. It’s about giving permission to engage healing, and to keep it going in patterns of grace and ease.
There is a program in France created by the Rev. Patrick Giros, a Catholic diocesan priest, with the goal of reinventing social work: Capfits la Liberation (Freedom to the Captives). His concept is simple, yet complex. Captifs staff and volunteers are taught to roam the Paris streets at night with “empty hands” as a way to assist homeless people. They don’t offer coffee or blankets; they offer “love in the form of relationship.”
Only when a genuine bond and trust with a homeless person develops (which could take days ,weeks, months, to years) do they propose specific interventions such as free housing to rehabilitation programs. Rev. Giros feels the most pressing need of both God and people is “relationship.” People who suffer lack, social isolation, and mental illness need the recovery of social trust before they can take charge of their lives. They need to come into loving relationship with “another.”
Healthy relationships, based on the art and practice of truly seeing the self as well as the other person, are important. Yet they’re often difficult to manifest for those who’ve suffered early traumas. The human desire for good relationships is a simple truth. The complex nature of each human is what makes relationship with others a challenge.
Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes remarked, "I would not give a fig for the simplicity on this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity." Holmes was interested in the simplicity that comes after searching and deep reflection.
Thomas Merton knew something about this kind of simplicity. He wrote, “We do not exist for ourselves alone, and it is only when we are fully convinced of this fact that we begin to love ourselves properly and thus also love others. What do I mean by loving ourselves properly? I mean, first of all, desiring to live, accepting life as a very great gift and a great good, not because of what it gives us, but because of what it enables us to give others.”
And that’s exactly why relationship matters.
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