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Adapted from Born Anxious: The Lifelong Impact of Early Life Adversity—and How to Break the Cycle, by Daniel P. Keating. Published by St. Martin’s Press. Copyright © 2017 Daniel P. Keating. Reprinted with permission of the publisher, St. Martin’s Press. All rights reserved. By the late 1990s, our group at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research had identified robust connections between early adversity and lifelong anxiety and stress, leading to problems in social relationships and...

I want to be really clear here. Grit, resiliency training and mindsets have value. They help children and adults with high ACEs. Make no mistake about it, some help is vastly better than none. This is true even if we cannot prove it except by anecdotal and qualitative data at this point. Here is the point I am trying to make -- and this is where the new word "lasticity" comes in (developed and explained and examined in Breakaway Learners). Some of the concerns expressed here may have less to...

My name is Rebekah Couch and I am a former teen mother of five children, the youngest child being my only clean & sober pregnancy allowed to remain in my care. I am a survivor of multiple sexual assaults and was afflicted with untreated mental health issues as an adolescent. My destructive journey began with self-medicating and illegal activities in Jr. High and a daily cocaine addiction by the age of fifteen that eventually advanced to methamphetamine abuse. My addiction and criminal...

We can talk about grit, resilience and mindsets all we want. These approaches, while useful in a limited way, operate off a deficit model. There is something wrong in individuals that needs to be fixed -- repaired. And, there is a built in assumption that those who have high ACEs can return to the status quo ante -- they can bounce back. But, these are flawed arguments and here's why. Those with high ACEs are forever changed; they cannot bounce back. (There are neurological reasons among...

Like the thousands of miles of mountain roads I've driven on this 3-week trip to visit trauma-informed communities in the Pacific Northwest and Canada (I drove a total of 3,011 miles, to be exact!), the road to develop a trauma-informed community has loops, twists and turns. And as with any journey, there are bound to be wrong turns, dead ends, roadblocks, detours, and days when you just plain get lost. Thankfully, there are increasing numbers of tour guides and roadmaps to help...

The Educating Traumatized Children Summit had Ross Greene, Ph.D. as the keynote. He was interviewed by Julie Beem of the Attachment Trauma Network (ATN). Dr. Greene is the author of The Explosive Child and Lost at School, Lost & Found and Raising Human Beings . He's the originator of the Collaborative and Pro-Active Solutions (CPS) model . I’d heard his name from some of the teachers in my life, but I’d never heard him speak. I’ve summarized, paraphrased and quoted a few of the things he...

In trauma-informed care there is a large focus on strength-based skill building, and we are always trying to find new ways to do this and celebrate all the great things that these young people do each and every day. I want to bring your attention to a way we attempted to this using social media this week. The Volunteer Organization of CPRI (VOCPRI) , and the Child and Parent Resource Institute (CPRI) in London Ontario Canada, are in the midst of a social media and video campaign called...

As the adage goes, actions speak louder than words. I was reminded of this after being racially targeted during a business trip to Los Angeles this week.* The incident happened after returning my rental car and boarding the company’s shuttle service to the terminal. I was second in the line of more than 30 other customers who had been waiting for nearly a half hour for the shuttle to arrive. As is customary, the driver began to ask us of our terminal destinations, but when he got to me he...

Before the Alaska Resilience Initiative could push forward on any of its goals—to grow a sustainable statewide network; to educate all Alaskans on brain development, ACEs and resilience-building; and to support organizational, policy and practice change to address trauma—its leaders had to start by listening. Specifically, they had to listen to Alaska Native people. Alaska Native people comprise nearly one-fifth of the state’s population, but historically their voices have been largely...

The postcards said a lot more than “wish you were here.” Last spring, Boston’s Vital Village Community Engagement Network created postcards highlighting key data from a survey of parents in the Boston Medical Center pediatric waiting room. Parents were asked if they took part in neighborhood activities and if their actions made a difference in their neighborhoods; in both cases, the most common response was “sometimes.” But data collection didn’t end there; the aim, says Vital Village...

Ina May Gaskin is often referred to as the “mother of modern midwifery.” But when Gaskin was asked at an April 22 birth seminar in Forth Worth, Texas, about the effects of systemic racism on high infant and maternal mortality, her response left many in the Black birthing community questioning her competence. “Drug overdoses, cause number three—that’s a biggie—and I presume these are illegal drugs. Not prescription drugs, but those are also going to be a problem,” said Gaskin, who then...

I see a lot of books presuming to explain what’s wrong with the economy and what to do about it. Rarely do I come across one with the consistent new paradigm frame, historical depth, practical sensibility, systemic analysis, and readability of Doughnut Economics by Kate Raworth. Especially unique and valuable is her carefully reasoned, illustrated, and documented debunking of the fatally flawed theory behind economic policies that drive financial instability, environmental collapse, poverty,...