Blog

To ride a bicycle across the United States—Los Angeles to New Jersey—takes courage, a mission, and stamina. I did it twice. The first trip, during my mid-twenties, was done in hurt and fueled by anger. The second, at age 56, was done in the pursuit of healing self and others by collecting stories of other experiences of trauma and healing, dispensing information about human resilience, and sharing a deep belief in the power all people have to engage with and be enlightened by the process of...

Only a few spots remain for our training, From Trauma to Resilience: Fostering Hope Through Trauma-Informed Care, on Sept. 27, 2017. This full day, comprehensive training is designed to help you develop the unique skill-set needed to support individuals who have experienced adverse childhood experiences and traumatic events. What participants told us they learned: TIC is a philosophical shift and not a diagnosis for PTSD ACEs are prevalent across all economic levels Trauma manifests into...

California’s budding YIMBY movement is up for a real test. Under a new pilot program approved this week, Los Angeles County homeowners are being asked to literally open up their backyards to the homeless. The county’s board of supervisors gave the green light to the The Granny Flats Motion project on Tuesday, which would give homeowners up to $75,000 to build a backyard home—if they agree to rent it to a homeless family or individual. (For those who already have a unit to offer, the county...

There’s nothing like the giant oil companies to provide us all with lessons about power and prejudice. The climate crisis offers a lens to understand many of the inherent injustices on this planet: There’s an almost perfect inverse relationship between how much of the problem you caused and how much of the pain you’re feeling. Furthermore, it offers the best chance to actually right some of these wrongs: The economic rearrangement that must accompany any successful effort to fix the planet’s...

Because of its “extreme hostility toward Muslims,” the website Jihadwatch.org is considered an active hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League. The views of the site’s director, Robert Spencer, on Islam led the British Home Office to ban him from entering the country in 2013. But its designation as a hate site hasn’t stopped tech companies — including PayPal, Amazon and Newsmax — from maintaining partnerships with Jihad Watch that help to sustain it...

So, you feel you have done nothing wrong, yet your teen has created a story with you as the resident bad guy! Are your ears burning? It is very hard when one or both parents involve the child in their agendas and it can be so detrimental to the child’s emotional well-being and subsequent relationship with the alienated parent. It can make the estranged parent feel angry, hurt, stressed and pushed out. It can be a lonely frustrating place to find yourself. What can you do about it if you find...

“The self,” the poet Robert Penn Warren observed in his immensely insightful meditation on the trouble with “finding yourself,” “is a style of being, continually expanding in a vital process of definition, affirmation, revision, and growth, a process that is the image, we may say, of the life process of a healthy society itself.” Indeed, if the great humanistic philosopher and psychologist Erich Fromm was correct, as I believe he was, in asserting that self-love is the foundation of a sane...

Objectives. To examine changes in maternal–child health surrounding the April 2015 civil unrest in Baltimore, Maryland, following Freddie Gray’s death while in police custody. Methods. We conducted cross-sectional Children’s HealthWatch surveys January 2014 through December 2015 in pediatric emergency departments and primary care clinics on maternal–child health and June 2015 through October 2015 on daily and community routines. We used trend analysis and piecewise logistic regression to...

A doctor in Oregon has touched a nerve with a series of tweets revealing that some “white nationalists” have refused treatment from her because of her race. Esther Choo, an emergency physician and associate professor at Oregon Health & Science University in Portland, according to Refinery 29 , described on Sunday how she treats those patients with “compassion” because “the best thing I can do is make sure their hate finds no purchase here.” Her words resonated with other medical...

Advancing Parenting just received a small grant from First 5 Kern! The funds will be used to place the fifty parenting tips on 130 Golden Empire Transit buses and shuttles in Bakersfield. Yeah!!! These tips will be read 1000s of times by 1000s of people! Visit advancingparenting.org to read the fifty tips...and while you're at it order one for your private vehicle(s)! This is one kind of proactive, passive/public parenting education that will prevent adverse childhood experiences!

Elaine Waxman and Corianne Scally of the Urban Institute Research Hub have released a new study examining emerging interventions that integrate housing and health services for low-income people, focusing on interventions where health care organizations have taken a significant leadership role. The research pairs over 30 expert interviews with six in-depth case studies to paint a detailed picture of emerging strategies and their potential to be sustained, expanded, and replicated elsewhere.

Are you a mental health professional or caregiver? Would you like to know how to avoid burnout or compassion fatigue? Many of us know that we need to watch out for compassion fatigue (Figley, 1995) but are at a loss on how to do this. Compassion fatigue is “a state experienced by those helping people or animals in distress; it is an extreme state of tension and preoccupation with the suffering of those being helped to the degree that it can create a secondary traumatic stress for the...