When she was 12, Gabby Falzone and her family became homeless in New York. At 15, she ran away. She moved between squats and stints with her family, but said she suffered too much abuse from them to stay for long. At 17, she moved to Boston, where she said she survived by exchanging sex for rent. At 19, she got into a friend’s car and drove to San Francisco. Within a month, she said, she was shooting heroin. “I kept thinking that if I escaped where I had just been, it would get better, not really understanding that that’s not how you get away from trauma,” she said.

Now she stands before some 50 people in a dimly-lit room, sketching out the hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal axis on a small rolling whiteboard. The audience members watch intently from rows of worn chairs, and some carefully copy her drawing on their own paper.

Falzone is giving a talk entitled “Enduring Oppression: Chronic Childhood Trauma,” hosted by the Community Democracy Project, an Oakland organization that promotes community learning and direct democracy. The makeshift lecture hall is actually the ballroom of Omni Oakland Commons, a collaborative work and social space run by several Bay Area collectives.

[For more of this story, written by Margaret Katcher, go to https://oaklandnorth.net/2016/...the-study-of-trauma/]