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Healing the Heart Through the Creative Arts, Education & Advocacy Hope, Healing & Help for Trauma, Abuse & Mental Health “ Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars”. Kahlil Gibran Hi Folks, The latest edition of the Surviving Spirit Newsletter is posted at the website - http://newsletters.survivingspirit.com/index.php To sign up for an e-mail copy, please write to me @ mikeskinner@comcast.net or sign up @ Website via...

By Luisa Tam, South China Morning Post, October 27, 2019 Unresolved childhood issues that often lie dormant for years can suddenly come flooding back. Not only can this be painful for the individual, but it can hurt our relationships with other people, especially romantic ones. They say a difficult childhood can have many lifelong negative effects, such as the inability to form meaningful and long-lasting relationships, build trust, or intimacy with another person. We all desire love and...

By Carole H. Stipelman, Greg Stoddard, Kyle Bata, et al., JAMA Pediatrics, October 28, 2019 Firearms are a leading cause of death in US children, and the rate of suicide by firearms in people aged 10 to 19 years has increased since 2008.1 In the United States, 4.6 million children (approximately 7%) live in households with at least 1 gun that is stored loaded and unlocked.2 Safe storage of guns and ammunition may decrease the occurrence of self-inflicted or unintentional firearm injury to...

By John Fensterwald, EdSource, October 28, 2019 Tim Shriver, a leading figure for three decades in social and emotional learning, is optimistic about the burgeoning interest in the field. “This is the most opportune time I’ve seen for us as educators to make significant improvements in the quality of life for children and the quality of learning outcomes for all children,” he said in an interview with EdSource. Shriver is the chairman of the Special Olympics, which his mother, Eunice Kennedy...

By Sasha Khokha, KQED, October 25, 2019 Classical music plays, silk curtains blow in the wind and comfy couches offer a place to curl up with a book. There are wooden toys, colorful magnetic blocks, and crayons organized by color in glass jars. Children use light projectors to make patterns and shapes on the walls. It may sound like a high-end early childhood education center in California, but this is Tijuana. The students and their parents have fled violence in Central America, or other...

By Anna Maria Barry-Jester, California Healthline, October 28, 2019 Farm laborers in yellow safety vests walked through neatly arranged rows of grapes Friday, harvesting the last of the deep purple bundles that hung from the vines, even as the sky behind them was dark with soot. Over the hill just behind them, firetrucks and first responders raced back and forth from a California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection staging area, working to contain a wildfire raging through the rugged...

What is the purpose of having school without power? I work in a small school in a big state. The local school community had the power shut over the weekend as a preventive action for avoiding fires. This morning I was told that there would be school without power and to plan to provide services and teach children without power. My instinct was - this is not safe!

I couldn't be prouder of my home church, Headwaters Covenant Church in Helena, MT. Throughout the fall, we have been purposefully and carefully addressing subjects that the church often avoids. Among these topics are the family dysfunction that results from generational trauma, the prevalence of adversity in childhood within families in Montana, training in suicide awareness and prevention, and moral injury (especially among our veterans and service men and women). Just this last Sunday we...

Naturally, I would at times experience panic attack symptoms, and would almost always cry. Sometimes slow tears cascading down my cheeks. Other times full-on ugly crying, requiring a pause in the action.

By Jim Allen , Thu., Oct. 24, 2019 Think of it as a well-school checkup. On Tuesday morning at Bemiss Elementary School, educators and health professionals spoke enthusiastically about something called Resilience in School Environments, or RISE. A collaboration between Kaiser Permanente and the Spokane and West Valley school districts, the RISE program is expected to lift up teachers and administrators and give them tools to cope with all the challenges of the modern student. The challenges...

By Sandy Bauers, The Philadelphia Inquirer, October 23, 2019 In 1946, Life magazine published an exposé on mental hospitals, focusing on the Philadelphia State Hospital at Byberry. The title: “Bedlam 1946.” That dreadful facility, like so many others, eventually closed. A good thing? Not completely, according to Kenneth Paul Rosenberg, who maintains that people simply went from one horrific situation to another, from the grossly inadequate institutions to the dangerous streets. In neither...

By Monica Humphries, NationSwell, October 24, 2019 Debra Burke grew up in the middle of a 500-acre forest in Hardin County, Kentucky. With no electricity or running water, she drank milk that wasn’t pasteurized, cooked with water from a nearby spring and ate vegetables caked with dirt. So when she moved an hour north to Louisville, Kentucky, 23 years ago, it was a bit of a culture shock, she told NationSwell. [ Please click here to read more .]