Blog

Now is the best time to get the lowest registration price for the 2nd Annual Creating Trauma-Sensitive Schools Conference , hosted by the Attachment & Trauma Network, Slated for February 17-19, 2019 at the Washington Hilton, this conference includes 75 workshops from experts in trauma-informed education across the country and around the world. Early bird pricing of $395 ends at midnight Friday, November 30. Here's the registration link. Those needing to use purchase orders can contact...

A 5000 piece puzzle that was thrown up in the air and scattered amongst the fall leaves. That is how I imagined my life looked liked 6+ years ago. I was struggling with flashbacks, body memories, brain fog, panic attacks, insomnia and dissociation. My trauma history was coming crashing in on me and impacting EVERY area of my life. I no longer could pull myself up, dusting myself off and with head down barreling though life. I had to face my past and put together the pieces of that puzzle one...

In early November 2018, the AAP announced its first spanking recommendation in 2 decades. The updated policy statement strengthened its earlier call to ban corporal punishment and says spanking as a form of discipline harms children physically and mentally, in how they perform in school and interact with other children. ------ Robbyn Peters Bennett, a licensed professional counselor and early childhood trauma specialist in Portland, OR, founded a group called StopSpanking.org in 2012. She...

We have been banging the drum at Echo for some time now about trauma and how it gets stored in our bodies. We uphold the work of people like Dr. Peter Levine, Dr. Bessel van der Kolk and other researchers who have concluded that talk therapy alone is not enough to release and overwrite the disruptive patterns trauma creates in our bodies. At our 2019 conference , Trauma Recovery: Community Evidenced Practices (March 18 & 19) you will be able to explore for yourself a variety of new and...

ACEs, Adversity's Impact Tackling trauma with your kids: "Being able to talk about it is important" Cracked Up Racism kills: What community-lead interventions can do about it Help for trauma in childhood 'fragmented' Punishment: What is it good for? Spanking in developing countries does more harm than god, study suggests Parenting to Prevent ACEs An understudies for of child abuse and 'intimate terrorism:' Parental alienation Childhood trauma: 'Hundreds of babies born addicted to drugs'...

For trauma surgeon Joseph Sakran, gun violence is a very personal issue. He has treated hundreds of gun wound victims, comforted anxious loved ones and told mothers and fathers that their children would not be coming home. But Sakran's empathy for his patients and their families extends beyond the hospital. Sakran knows the pain of gun violence because he is a survivor of it; when he was 17, he took a bullet to the throat after a high school football game. Maybe that's why he felt the need...

Foster parents are the primary intervention in the lives of abused and neglected children. In order for children placed into foster care to receive the safety and stability they need to heal and thrive, available and willing high-quality families are needed. In California, finding enough caregivers for the state’s foster children is a key plank of the state’s current child welfare initiative, the Continuum of Care Reform ( CCR ). That reform effort is driven by a need to place more of these...

California’s deadliest wildfire, the Camp Fire, is now fully contained, but its death toll has climbed to 88, and more than 200 people are still missing. How are the people still searching for loved ones, and the thousands of residents displaced from their homes, coping in the disaster's aftermath? Amna Nawaz talks to William Brangham, reporting from Gridley, California. [For more on this story by PBS News Hour, go to...

After years of drug addiction and homelessness, Kenny Sawyer found himself staring at a job application at Hypertherm , a New Hampshire company that makes industrial cutting tools. He was sober at last. He really wanted this job. But the application asked whether he had been convicted of any felonies. Sawyer hadn’t. But he decided later that the company would want to know he had been jailed for misdemeanor assault after a fight over a crack purchase years earlier. He called to volunteer that...

Neighborhood violence has been associated with adverse health effects on youth, including sleep loss, asthma and metabolic syndrome. Yet some youth living in high-crime neighborhoods manage to avoid these effects. A new Northwestern University study aims to answer a resilience puzzle: Why does a second-hand or indirect experience of neighborhood violence affect some youth, but not others? "Little is known about the brain networks that are involved in shaping these different outcomes, a...

Less than a mile south of the U.S.-Mexico border, in Sasabe, Mexico, a Guatemalan man named Giovanni (whose first name is used to protect his undocumented status) propped up his feet while an EMT applied antibiotic ointment to his feet in the shade of a cottonwood. Giovanni left his home country because of a catastrophic drought and was attempting to unite with his brothers who were already in Dallas. After trying to cross the border into the Arizona desert, his feet were ravaged:...

At age 40, Joe Burton was not a mindful leader. He was the COO of an $2 billion company, working 12-hour days and weekends and making more than half a million dollars a year. But his body was paying the price: He was suffering from insomnia, asthma, and eight years of chronic back pain that was so bad it sometimes brought him to tears. “I was frustrated, angry, competitive, and hurting,” Burton writes in his 2018 book Creating Mindful Leaders: How to Power Down, Power Up, and Power Forward .