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Recovering From Trauma And The Lure Of Abusive Relationships

Here, my friends, is a symbol in perseverance, resilience, determination and healing. This is my forever sign of hope.

A recent study found that “individuals who engage more frequently in interpersonal touch enjoy better physical and psychological health and improved relationships.” This is helpful for understanding just how important physical contact is with regards to human interaction. By beginning to establish the effects of touch on individuals going though conflict, these researchers have laid the foundation for a further discussion of how physical contact affects individuals who have experienced...

Receiving hugs may buffer against deleterious changes in mood associated with interpersonal conflict, according to a study published October 3rd in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Michael Murphy of Carnegie Mellon University, along with co-authors Denise Janicki-Deverts and Sheldon Cohen. Individuals who engage more frequently in interpersonal touch enjoy better physical and psychological health and improved relationships. Theorists have proposed that interpersonal touch benefits...

Inside an immigration detention center in the desert outside Los Angeles, guards threw detainees into solitary confinement without hearings, routinely forced them into shackles, and cut off visits with family. Doctors signed off on medical assessments that never happened. Detainees were allowed to hang knotted sheets inside their cells, despite the facility’s extensive history of suicide attempts. And an extraction-happy dentist refused to fill cavities while suggesting detainees floss with...

Amid increasingly dire news about the earth and the environment, there were two legal victories over the past week in various Indigenous nations’ efforts to halt threats to their lands. Yesterday (October 1), the Supreme Court of the United States declined to hear an appeal filed by the uranium industry. The case was intended to overturn an Obama-era 20-year ban on new uranium mining near the Grand Canyon. By refusing to hear the case, SCOTUS effectively declared that the ban, in place since...

Stuff happens. Another car suddenly swerves into your lane on the freeway. You misplace your keys and wallet two minutes before you need to catch your bus to work. You shred the wrong client file at the office. These mini-disasters create quite a startle in your nervous system—a rush of adrenaline that helps ready your body for “fight or flight,” our natural defense against perceived danger. But if your body is hit with adrenaline for every little thing that goes wrong in life, it can tax...

What is race? Even as it defines much of U.S. life and society, the answer to that question is not straightforward, particularly when it comes to health. In public health and sociology, there’s been a strong focus on understanding race as a social construct, particularly in the U.S. In biomedicine and genetics, it has often been used as a proxy for ancestry. Others understand it as the grey area between those two, a socially derived concept that is intrinsically linked with biology. The list...

Last year, the Scaling Solutions Toward Shifting systems initiative—led by Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors and a Steering Committee of which the Skoll Foundation is a member—reflected on what more funders could do to better meet the moral imperative posed by global threats. Following deep discussion with funders, practitioners, and experts, the initiative released a report that directed funders’ attention toward their own norms and practices. It synthesized the ways in which funders could...

“People have a lot more compassion for children than they do for grown women.” This is what Rachel Wisniewski had in mind when she began photographing people victimized by sexual misconduct. Inspired by the Harvey Weinstein rape allegations that exploded into the national consciousness a year ago, Wisniewski, who is 24 years old and based in Philadelphia, documented survivors outside of the high-profile Hollywood cases. For Wisniewski, #MeToo was an opportunity to document the millions of...

Many blog readers know that my niece Carly is a survivor of the Parkland shootings at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. You may know that my father also survived a mass murder, and like Carly, hid in a closet until the police arrived. Almost 70 years separated the two tragedies. Our guest blogger this week is my sister Merri, Carly's mom. Merri shares her first-hand account of what happened the afternoon of February 14, 2018, when Carly sent this text, “Mom don’t freak out but we are on...

Organized hate groups span all geographic areas of the United States, from White nationalists in Washington state to neo-Nazis in Alabama to radical traditionalist Catholics in New Hampshire. While persecution of classes of people happens everywhere, the drivers that push people to join hate groups are unique to specific places. In this way, hatred can be a study in geography as much as anything else. A new model tracking organized hate groups upends a long-held, simplistic view of the...