By Rebecca Bryan, DNP, NJ DCF Office of Resilience and
Christina Bethell, PhD, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
Rebecca: Late in my career at UrbanPromise Ministries, where I had been teaching about adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and translating this science into everyday practices, I participated in a project called The People’s Supper. It was an attempt, in 2017, to begin to address structural racism through a series of dinners, first segregated by race, for white people, Black and brown people, and ending with dinner for all people, structured with guidelines and question prompts. At the final dinner, I was sitting next to another staff person – she’s Black, I’m white - and we were talking about times when we were aware of race, when she said to me, “you know, when you first started talking about ACEs, it felt like you were telling us that our very lives were wrong.” Boom. It was never my intention to have the science of childhood adversity land as a judgment about her Camden community. But that was the impact, which was undeniably wrong. So, when I first read Dr. Shawn Ginwright’s article, The Future of Healing, and read of a young man telling him, “I’m more than my trauma,” it resonated, and continues to resonate.
Christina: That same year I released the Prioritizing Possibilities National Agenda to shift the ACEs-science conversation to strengths, healing, and Positive Childhood Experiences (PCEs) that were happening all around us and protecting children, families, and communities. Our 2019 studies on PCEs brought this further into view, and in 2021, the American Academy of Pediatrics formally shifted their policy statement related to childhood trauma moving from “toxic stress and trauma as the problem” to “relational health as the solution”. Relational health is the core of PCEs and so we enter this new era of healing and the possibility for flourishing amid adversity, while we keep addressing the array of social inequities related to ACEs.
It’s time to flip the script from focusing on the negative experiences in someone’s life to fostering the PCEs that promote child, youth, family, and community flourishing across the spectrum of adversity. Doing so means building on existing strengths and assets inherent in every individual and in every community, recognizing that individuals and communities that have adapted to trauma are inherently resilient. The shift to a Healing-Centered Engagement Model releases culture as a root cause of trauma, to instead celebrate the intrinsic resilience and the capacity to promote PCEs that ethnic history, racial and other social identities afford. This is particularly important for white, privileged communities to embrace, given their historical diminishment of non-white cultures.
This shift in models is evolutionary and is a call for organizations to address disparities in social determinants of health at the policy level, to reduce the toxically stressful burdens too many families bear, burdens that threaten relational health. For example, in New Jersey, organizations need clear policy changes to address the $300,000 wealth gap that exists**, where the median household wealth of white families is $322,500, compared with $17,700 for Black families and $26,100 for Latinx families. Using community voice as measurement, policy proposals must be weighed through the lens of toxic stress – will this policy increase or decrease the burden on families? It is change, at this level, that will open the door for many more families to thrive, instead of to survive, by having resources that support and sustain relational health.
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