Tagged With "lack of beds"
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A Haven From Trauma’s Cruel Grip [NYTimes.com]
San Francisco — The sun was preternaturally bright the day Clare Senchyna’s 26 year-old son Camilo, her only child, was shot and killed in a random act of violence in San Francisco. On that morning two years ago, Ms. Senchyna drew the orange curtains in her bedroom, pulled up her blankets and stayed in bed for much of the next several months. It seemed to her an appropriate response to the end of the world. Her son, an emergency medical technician, had been out celebrating the completion of...
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A ‘hidden crisis’: Local leaders [Eureka, CA] call for collaboration to combat child poverty, trauma [Times-Standard.com]
A packed town hall meeting in Eureka on Thursday night called for greater collaboration by state and local agencies to address an issue that contributes to many challenges Humboldt County faces today — childhood poverty and trauma. North Coast state Sen. Mike McGuire (D-Healdsburg), who hosted the meeting, said that despite California being the sixth largest economy in the world, childhood poverty rates have actually increased since the Great Recession began in 2007. In this way, he called...
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Avoiding The ER: Paramedics Link Patients To Local Mental Health Treatment [CA Healthline and USA Today]
For Kelly Kjelstrom, plugging the gaps in mental health care can mean something as simple as a late-night taco and a friendly chat with a patient. Kjelstrom, 45, is a community paramedic in Modesto, California. Part of his job is to help psychiatric patients avoid the emergency room, where they can get “boarded” for days, until they are released or a bed opens up at an inpatient facility. When a 911 call involves a potential mental health crisis, specially trained paramedics like Kjelstrom...
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Analysis: Lack of Beds Keeps Homeless on the Streets Longer [thesungazette.com]
By Reggie Ellis, The Sun-Gazette, February 5, 2020 Visalia has the highest percentage of homeless people with highest need in the entire country. The Sun-Gazette reported last week that Tulare and Kings County, where most of the homeless population lives in Visalia, had the highest percentage nationwide of unsheltered, chronically homeless people, according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s 2018 Annual Homeless Assessment Report to Congress. Nearly one-third of the...
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At Cal State, student homelessness has been hidden until now [LATimes.com]
Racing from her last class of the day at Cal State Long Beach, Shellv Candler had about an hour to get to Wilmington. Her mother was trying to save her a bed at the Doors of Hope Women’s Shelter, but curfew was 6:45 sharp. The college student’s commute by bus and train was stressful. But she and her mother had been through worse. The foreclosure of the family home. Evictions. Relatives who could give them shelter for only so long. Some nights, with nowhere to go, they’d ridden the bus until...
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Six children are dead. Could these needless deaths have been prevented? [LATimes.com]
A woman accused of stabbing her three young daughters is on trial in Compton on murder charges. Carol Coronado's husband testified that she'd been "acting weird" before allegedly killing the girls and then stabbing herself May 20, 2014, in the...
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Santa Barbara County supervisors relinquish $38.9 million grant for treatment facility [LompocRecord.com]
The Santa Barbara County Board of Supervisors split Tuesday on a decision to relinquish a $38.9 million state grant for a transition complex that was recently cut from plans for a North County jail. The 3-2 decision effectively kills a last-minute proposal from Sheriff Bill Brown, who sought reconsideration of the grant to alternatively fund the 228-bed treatment facility, which would have been staffed by the county’s Alcohol, Drug, and Mental Health Services department. The board...
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The California Pregnancy-Associated Mortality Review [ CMQCC, CDPH, MCAH, PHI]
New reports, recently released: The California Pregnancy-Associated Mortality Review (CA-PAMR) is a statewide, in-depth examination of deaths while pregnant or within one year after end of pregnancy, which aims to identify the cause and timing of death, factors that contributed to the death, and improvement opportunities in maternity care and support, with the ultimate goal to reduce preventable deaths and associated health disparities. CA-PAMR is a collaborative effort between the Maternal,...
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Uninsured Native Americans Often Lack Needed Prenatal Care [ocregister.com]
By Yesenia Amaro and Deepa Bharath, Center for Health Journalism News Collaborative, October 4, 2019 For almost two years, Sylvia Valenzuela relied on the federal Indian Health Service system to get the primary care she needed. But when she had to see an OB-GYN for her prenatal care, she was on her own. What followed, she said, was a nightmare in which she struggled to obtain and keep Medi-Cal coverage, leaving her uninsured for a critical stretch of her pregnancy. Valenzuela says she would...
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Depressed Teen's Struggle To Find Mental Health Care In Rural California [NPR.org]
There's a hot pink suitcase on the floor of Shariah Vroman-Nagy's bedroom. The 18-year-old is packing for a trip to Disneyland, one of several she takes with her family every year. "Let's see, I need a hairbrush," she says, moving past the collection of Mickey Mouse ears on her dresser and glancing at the inspirational quotes from Marilyn Monroe on the wall. The lyrics to a song called " Smile " hang in a frame over her bed. "My mom made me that when I was struggling," says Vroman-Nagy,...
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Dozens of stakeholders representing thousands of practitioners send public comments on Calif. ACEs-screening plan
Update: We posted this story on Tuesday evening and received a response from the Department of Health Care Services Wednesday that clarifies additional information. DHCS information Officer Katharine Weir said that subject to budget approval by the legislature and the governor: The reimbursement rate will be $29. Federally Qualified Health Centers will also be reimbursed for screening pediatric patients for trauma through Prop 56 funds and federal matching funds. In response to a question...
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From One Survivor to Another, Helping Survivors of Human Trafficking Escape and Stay Safe [sandiegotribune.com]
By Lisa Deaderick, The San Diego Tribune, December 22, 2019 Marjorie Saylor remembers a woman who was looking for help leaving her trafficker. The woman was pregnant and waiting for a bed at a shelter to open up, but she had to wait on the street, alone and in the cold. Her trafficker found her and took her with him. “I never heard from her again. She only had a week left to go before her bed opened up, but the two weeks she toughed it out waiting on the street kept her in harm’s reach,”...
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Gateways to new lives (sfchronicle.com)
The idea was to create a new “low-barrier” shelter model that would let homeless people come in with their partners, pets and belongings, stay 24/7, and get unusually intensive counseling help for housing, drugs, mental illness or whatever else they needed to get stable. It was risky — running such a shelter costs twice as much, at about $100 a bed per night, as a normal emergency shelter, and no one knew how effective the extra attention would be. According to figures from the city...
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Learning Community Recording Available: Building Family, Agency, and Community Resilience: Rural Policies to Improve Housing Affordability and Accessibility
The third Sierra Learning Community for the 2019-20 fiscal year focused upon Building Family, Agency, and Community Resilience: Rural Policies to Improve Housing Affordability and Accessibility. The power point and other materials distributed to attendees are attached to this post. View the recording by clicking here: 2.13.20 Sierra Learning Community ANNOUNCEMENTS Make sure to visit the Strategies2.0 YouTube Channel to access recordings of all the Strategies2.0 sponsored webinars and...
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New Navigation Center for Transitional Age Youth Approved [patch.com]
From Patch, February 26, 2020 On Tuesday, February 25, the Board of Supervisors approved the lease for a new 75-bed Navigation Center at 888 Post Street. Mayor London N. Breed and Supervisor Aaron Peskin sponsored the legislation to create the Navigation Center to serve Transitional Age Youth (ages 18-24) experiencing homelessness. 888 Post Street will become the City's first Navigation Center for young people ages 18-24. The Navigation Center model provides low-barrier shelter so young...
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Oakland Minister Stripping Away Church’s Knowledge-Gap On Mental Health [KaiserHealthNews.org]
For Rev. Donna Allen’s congregation in West Oakland, the New Revelation Community Church is a place to share with other African-Americans and to find support when facing life’s small and big crises. And for Allen, one of the most important messages is that their community has too often ignored the scourge of mental illness. “They’ll describe being very depressed, like ‘I don’t want to go on. I don’t want to get out of bed, I don’t want to live...
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October is Safe Sleep Awareness Month
The leading cause of death for infants age 1 month to 1 year is Sudden Unexpected Infant Death (SUIDs). This includes sleep related deaths and SIDS. Here are some facts you can share to make sure the parents you know have the information and resources that can help them make the best parenting decisions when it comes to safe sleep: Babies should always sleep on their backs Babies should be in their own crib, not an adult bed, couch, or car seat Babies should not sleep with others Use firm...
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Personal stories from witnesses, U.S. representatives provided an emotional wallop to House Oversight and Reform Committee hearing on childhood trauma
Room erupts in applause for the grandmother of witness William Kellibrew during July 11 House Oversight and Reform Committee hearing. The power of personal stories from witnesses and committee members fueled the July 11 hearing on childhood trauma in the House Oversight and Reform Committee* throughout the nearly four hours of often emotional and searing testimony and member questions and statements (Click here for 3:47 hour video). The hearing was organized into a two panels—testimony from...
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Positive Childhood Experiences offset ACEs: Q & A with Dr. Robert Sege about HOPE
Tufts University medical professor Dr. Robert Sege directs the Center for Community-Engaged Medicine and is nationally known for his research on effective health systems approaches that address social determinants of health. He is also the principal investigator for the HOPE framework (Healthy Outcomes from Positive Experiences).The HOPE framework is based on research that shows how positive childhood experiences can mitigate the effects of adverse childhood experiences. Sege and colleagues...
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Promoting a Community Approach for Mental Well-Being in Our Littlest Citizens [chronicleofsocialchange.org]
By Andrea L. Lowe, The Chronicle of Social Change, June 10, 2019. Several years ago , my sister and I watched my 2-year-old nephew’s behavior change dramatically. He started wetting the bed, throwing temper tantrums and getting frustrated so quickly. In any other child, it might have been normal “terrible twos,” but in him we knew something was definitely wrong. At the time, my sister and her husband were getting divorced. Ultimately, we found out that my nephew thought it was his fault,...
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CYW releases "Children Can Thrive: A Vision for California's Response to ACEs"
The Center for Youth Wellness released a new report “Children Can Thrive: A Vision for California’s Response to ACEs”. This report is a follow up to the November 2014 Children Can Thrive Summit. Based on the ideas shared by participants at the Children Can Thrive summit, the report sets forth the beginnings of a multi-sector, multi-strategy approach to respond effectively to the impacts of ACEs in California. The report is attached to...
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California’s homelessness crisis moves to the country (sfchronicle.com)
California housing costs are spiraling so high that they are pushing the state’s homelessness crisis into places it’s never been before — sparsely populated rural counties. Statewide, The Chronicle’s examination shows, homelessness rose by 15 percent from 2015 to this year. In heavily populated centers such as Los Angeles and the Bay Area, where tent cities have long been part of the landscape, even double-digit increases like that might not suggest that something has fundamentally changed.
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Helping Children in Emergencies: Keep Your Child’s Developmental Stage and Temperament in Mind
By Karissa Luckett, RN, BSN, MSW Common reactions to stress will fade over time for most children. Let’s be honest: Your exploring, tactile toddler won’t suddenly start keeping their hands to themselves. Your continually forgetful preschooler won’t suddenly start hand-washing properly just because you’ve told them it’s important. Depending on their ages, stages and temperaments, some children will require more reassurance or more time to shift than others. This situation is unique, and so is...
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How Parents and Teachers Can Calm Kids' Getty Fire Anxiety [latimes.com]
By Sonali Kohli and Nina Agrawal, Los Angeles Times, October 29, 2019 During this Santa Ana wind season, 12-year-old Nicholas Ladesich tends to go to bed worrying about what might burn overnight. He often has dreams of waking up in his old house that burned down in the Woolsey fire last year. But he awakens instead in the living room of the one-bedroom guest house he shares with his brother and parents. He demands that his mom turn on the news to monitor possible fires while his 15-year-old...
Comment
Re: ACEs Champion Dana Kwitnicki — An ACEs Tale of Two Counties
The first sentence in paragraph 10, "If the ACEs screen is not part of a routine visit, they might be undiagnosed for years," suggests the critical importance of a comprehensive medical history, gathered routinely . Ordinarily this is avoided because it is so time consuming, hence costly, and mostly does not seem to relate to the symptom bringing patients in. In my former Department of Preventive Medicine at Kaiser Permanente in San Diego, we circumvented this by having patients fill out our...
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How Colleges Are Supporting Students Leaving Abusive Relationships [calhealthreport.org]
By Claudia Boyd-Barrett, California Health Report, July 27, 2020 Ana Blanco looked up from her hospital bed at the police officer. Her legs were bandaged, and stung with pain. She tried to focus on what he was saying. Did she want to file a restraining order against her husband? Blanco had just told the officer how, on the way home from her college psychology class, her husband had ordered her out of the truck and then begun driving away as she tried to remove her school bag. She had been...
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Healthcare providers learn skills to prevent burnout, build resilience
It’s an enormous understatement to say that healthcare workers today are suffering. Every day, you hear interviews with nurses, physicians, social workers, and others in healthcare saying they’re pushed to the breaking point and beyond. But, by using skills taught in the Community Resiliency Mode l (CRM), even people under severe stress can weather the onslaught, do their work, and get along with colleagues. CRM is an evidence-based training program that’s being used by millions of people in...
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The Long-Lasting Mental Health Effects of Wildfires [outsideonline.com]
By Jane C. Hu, Outside Online, December 3, 2020 When Aimee Gray woke up on a Sunday morning in October 2017, she decided she was finally going to get a new pair of shoes. She’d worn holes in her favorite Skechers, so when she and her husband headed into town for groceries, she stopped in the shoe store and treated herself to two new pairs. As they drove back to the home they rented on Bennett Ridge Road, in the hills southeast of Santa Rosa, California, her husband remarked on the strange,...
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New Understanding Childhood Trauma Resource for Parents/Caregivers
Please see our new pamphlet for parents/caregivers about childhood trauma (now in eight languages), and share with friends, family and colleagues. Although designed for Massachusetts residents, the resource page can be adapted for other locations. Thank you for your help and any distribution ideas. https://www.frcma.org/about/tr...sources-and-training https://myemail.constantcontact.com/NEW-Understanding-Childhood-Trauma-Resource.html?soid=1135101415145&aid=t6mWQvwx2sA
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The Voices Of Youth Locked In San Francisco's Soon-To-Be-Shuttered Juvenile Hall
By Taylor Walker, WitnessLA, February 22, 2021 On Tuesday, June 4, 2019, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors voted in favor of legislation to shutter the local juvenile hall by December 2021. The ordinance, which SF supes authored in partnership with the Young Women’s Freedom Center (YWFC), made SF the first major urban jurisdiction to choose to abolish juvenile incarceration. The city-county’s lone 150-bed youth lockup is already so close to empty — on August 15, 2020, there were 13...
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How Trauma Affects the Body: Reflections from Dr. Eric Ball [acesaware.org]
By Eric H. Ball, ACEs Aware, March 15, 2021 Our four-year-old Cavalier King Charles Spaniel, Everly, was recently killed. Everly was an amazing dog and a true member of our family. She was well-trained and worked as a therapy dog at our local church. She especially liked the days when she would visit homeless or foster children. Everly slept in the same bed as our 12-year-old daughter. She was a great “big sister” to our 4-month-old puppy, who came to us just six weeks before Everly died.
Member
Brett Sumner
Blog Post
Drained
I can agree with that when it comes to life and especially to life with cancer. But I keep wondering what is hardship anyway? What’s hard? What’s easy? It’s so subjective and varies by person and circumstance. What I do know is I was uncomfortable and unprepared for my PleurX surgery procedure even though it was done at my request. A PleurX is a type of chest tube that can be used at home, allowing me to drain the malignant fluid that keeps accumulating in my right lung due to...
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ACEs Self-Care Resources From AAP-CA3
The American Academy of Pediatrics, California Chapter 3 has developed a visual resource adapted from the ACEs Aware Self-Care tool . The handout is print-ready and available in English , Spanish , Amharic , Arabic , Chinese , Farsi and Vietnamese .
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California Counties Develop Local Plans as State Youth Prisons Close [imprintnews.org]
By Jeremy Loudenback, The Imprint, July 22, 2021 Once the nation’s most vast youth prison system, California’s Division of Juvenile Justice stopped admissions this month — with the state’s highest level offenders headed for starkly different settings. Instead of a cell block monitored by guards, Los Angeles County young people will soon be moved to detention camps, where formerly incarcerated men will mentor them alongside local probation officers. El Dorado, Fresno and Sonoma counties are...
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California to spend $5.8 billion of state and federal funds to create 42,000 dwellings for unhoused people [marketwatch.com]
By Associated Press, MarketWatch, August 5, 2021 When homeless outreach workers first visited her encampment under a Los Angeles highway overpass last fall, Veronica Perez was skeptical of their offer of not just a bed, but a furnished apartment complete with meals, counseling and the promise of some stability in her life. “They said they had housing for me, but it just didn’t seem real,” Perez said. “When you’re homeless, you become leery and you don’t trust people.” Perez, 57, had been...
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Op-Ed: As a doctor in a COVID unit, I'm running out of compassion for the unvaccinated. Get the shot [latimes.com]
By Anita Sircar, Los Angeles Times, August 17, 2021 My patient sat at the edge of his bed gasping for air while he tried to tell me his story, pausing to catch his breath after each word. The plastic tubes delivering oxygen through his nose hardly seemed adequate to stop his chest from heaving. He looked exhausted. He had tested positive for the coronavirus 10 days ago. He was under 50, mildly hypertensive but otherwise in good health. Eight days earlier he started coughing and having severe...
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Hospitals in California’s Central Valley Flooded with COVID-19 Patients [chcf.org]
By Heather Tirado Gilligan , Healthcare Foundation, September 14, 2021 A surge of serious COVID-19 cases fueled by the delta variant has swamped hospitals in California’s Central Valley. The region’s health care system is so overwhelmed that Fresno County’s interim health officer implored county residents at a press conference to do more to control transmission. “ Please wear a mask ,” Rais Vohra, MD, pleaded as he waved a black disposable mask. “If you want to know how you can make sure...
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Peer-led organization offers San Francisco's unhoused food, work, dignity and more
He is sprawled out on the sidewalk, motionless, flushed cheeks framed by high cheekbones. He’s slender, probably in his mid-20s, his straight, coal black hair pulled back, and his orange t-shirt twisted up over his stomach. “He’s OD’ing on fentanyl!” shouts a guy holding a skateboard.
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Peer-led organization offers San Francisco's unhoused food, work, dignity and more
He is sprawled out on the sidewalk, motionless, flushed cheeks framed by high cheekbones. He’s slender, probably in his mid-20s, his straight, coal black hair pulled back, and his orange t-shirt twisted up over his stomach. “He’s OD’ing on fentanyl!” shouts a guy holding a skateboard.
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New California Law Eases Aid-in-Dying Process [californiahealthline.org]
By Bernard J. Wolfson, Photo: E+/Getty Images, California Healthline, December 2, 2021 During her three-year battle with breast cancer, my wife, Leslie, graciously endured multiple rounds of horrifically toxic treatment to eke out more time with our two young children. But after 18 cancer-free months, the disease returned with a vengeance in June 2003. It fractured her bones and invaded her spinal canal, bathing her brain in malignancy. During the final six months, as she lay on her home...
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Living a Heart-Centered Life
As we step into the holiday season, let’s commit to each other to do it wholeheartedly. What does this mean? Often our minds are off and running and it’s only when we bring ourselves back to the present moment that we experience life as it’s really happening. This is when we realize that what is important is right in front of us! This is the point when our minds and our hearts connect. When we live from a heart-centered place it fosters equanimity and peace within that extends outward,...
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It’s long past time to tone down the behavior at school board meetings [edsource.org]
By Arun K. Ramanathan, Photo: Theresa Harrington/EdSource, EdSource, March 7, 2022 O ver the past twenty-five years, I’ve attended and watched a lot of school board meetings. I know that this is not normal behavior. Once, during a getaway to a fancy resort in Ojai, my wife returned from the spa to find me lying on the bed raptly watching the Ojai Unified School Board meeting. “You have a sickness,” she said, and I didn’t argue with her. People think school board meetings are dull affairs...
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How to protect your children and your communities from summer heat
In order to create resilient and thriving communities, we must address the threat that climate change and temperature increases cause. The global climate emergency continues to generate individual, community, and societal distress and traumas that compound historical traumas. This is a follow up to my last article, Heat as an ACE & what rising temperatures mean for us . Here, I have tried to compile a list of resources and ideas with varying levels of cost and complexity that anyone can...
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Keys to Calming Anxiety from Adverse Childhood Experiences
Anxiety rooted in the hidden wounds from childhood need not be a lifelong sentence. A combination of effective strategies offer hope and help to alleviate anxious conditions, including excessive worry and panic attacks, that originate in childhood.
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Does Worry (Tied to ACEs) Keep You Up at Night?
Worry rooted in adverse childhood experiences can rob you of energy and joy, and cause a variety of anxiety symptoms. This post explains the ACEs/worry connection and the principles for managing worry.
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Vital Self-Care for Adverse Childhood Experiences Recovery
Often overlooked, intelligent self-care is vital during and after the recovery process. Tending to important needs optimizes mood, mental health, and the ability to handle everyday stress. These keys say, "I matter," and sustain you in your recovery journey.