I've been seeing our membership grow in leaps and bounds recently and I just want to offer a personal welcome and thank you for joining us here.
We have been working to embed ACEs awareness in the Canadian psyche for many years. It's been a slow and often frustrating process. I still don't understand our collective resistance to considering this essential knowledge as relevant and meaningful to our context. However I am delighted to see more people from across the country and from various sectors now beginning to be interested and to connect with others who are trying to do something about it.
Please, share what you are doing in your region in this community. We need to know what's happening elsewhere and we need to know who's in our own regions that we could potentially collaborate with.
I'm in Nova Scotia and I'm very isolated. ACEs knowledge is guarded by the establishment here - especially by our local children's hospital. I have made multiple attempts to engage, mostly to no avail. I work independently, trying to get the word out as best I can. But without resources and willing collaboration, and significant levels of resistance, my local impact is limited. So I continue to wait for my province to get onboard.
In the meantime, I'm very active internationally. I started this community to connect with other Canadians. Thankfully Denise was my 1st adopter so I invited her to co-host this site with me. Thank you Denise for your valuable consistency in welcoming everyone as they sign up.
In the fall of 2019 I started the Twitter feed @ACEsCanada2020 I've received a huge level of interest and engagement there. If you're not already following me there, please do. I also use the same address on Facebook. Stay tuned for Instagram.
This month I started a company here Adverse Childhood Experiences #ACEs Canada Training & Consulting which I will start promoting locally in the near future. My previous efforts through my other business Interpersonal Insights Speaking, Counselling, Coaching weren't making the necessary connections for people. Hopefully this new, direct name will be more relatable.
There's definitely an increasing groundswell of people talking ACEs and Trauma around the world. I'm very pleased to see more and more people across Canada getting on board. I trust Nova Scotia will catch the wave sometime. We're actually leaders in many fields, but empowering and trusting the general public to determine their own destinies is not one of them. Colonialism is still very much alive and well and living in Nova Scotia, unfortunately. Connecting with independant thinkers to move the ACEs movement forward seems to be the only way forward as of yet. Although I continue to try to inspire collaboration with whomever is willing.
Just a reminder that if people wanted us to say nice things about them, they should have behaved better.
Thank Life for Denise, ACEs Connection, Twitter, and all the fabulous, passionate, caring, respectful ACEs Allies I have met across the world.
I know the power and benefit of this knowledge, personally and professionally. Keeping our heads in the sand just prolongs the agony of suffering. I'm interested in offering relief to people and ways forward that will prevent perpetuating ACEs for our present and future children. I'm about Raising our experience of our Humanity. I truly believe ACEs is the final piece to our age old puzzle of what's wrong with us. Why are we hell bent on destroying the planet and each other? Because we didn't get our needs met during our development and we don't know how to get them met in healthy ways now, and we've been living like this for generations.
I have a more idealistic view of how we can live as humans. I believe ACEs help us understand clearly what harms our children and although many would rather not talk about the negatives, I believe we must, in order to truly connect with the pain that will motivate us to finally make the changes we need to make to change our collective trajectory. Talking about what to do for decades has not worked. We need to see the whole picture, and I believe ACEs provides us with impersonal references to focus our conversations.
So thanks for being here.
Again, I ask, please, share what's happening re ACEs in your sphere of influence.
Let's make Canada an ACEs Aware Nation so we can get on with helping adults recover and meeting our children's global developmental needs.
In Solidarity,
Elizabeth Perry
Comments (0)