Tagged With "Resilient Brain"
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The Books That Helped Me Transition from Trauma to Triumph: A Book Review Series - "Change Your Thoughts, Change Your Life"
Learning to find my gifts within my chaos has changed everything. Everything.
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The Healing Place Podcast - Louise Godbold: Echo
Louise Godbold is the Executive Director of Echo. Before joining Echo in 2010, she worked for over 15 years in the nonprofit field, both in nonprofit management and as a consultant. Louise is the developer and lead trainer for Echo’s curricula on trauma and resilience. She is a trauma survivor and #MeToo silence breaker.
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The Healing Place Podcast - Shenandoah Chefalo: Garbage Bag Suitcase
What a delightful conversation Teri Wellbrock engaged in with the passionate and compassionate Shenandoah Chefalo, author of "Garbage Bag Suitcase: A Memoir" and faculty member of The Center for Trauma Resilient Communities. They dove into the depths of: the healing work of Crossnore and The Center for Trauma Resilient Communities; growing up in the foster care system; trauma-brain; 3 proven resilience-building factors; compassion approaches; and why they dislike tomatoes!
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The implicit bias of, “Mental Illness” and “mentally ill”, a lexicon of hurt.
How can we heal from the implicit bias of “ Mental Illness ” and “ mentally ill ”? I hear these words and it sounds like fingernails scraping down the chalkboard. “ The stain of dehumanization colors the mind, body and spirit and it is not so easily washed away.” - Michael Skinner Recently I read a blog post at the ACEsConnection website, “Erasing My ACES” by Sirena Wheeler. It was posted on April, 19, 2020. It struck a chord with me, many in fact and it put me on a spiral down memory lane.
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The implicit bias of, “Mental Illness” and “mentally ill”, a lexicon of hurt.
How can we heal from the implicit bias of “ Mental Illness ” and “ mentally ill ”? I hear these words and it sounds like fingernails scraping down the chalkboard. “ The stain of dehumanization colors the mind, body and spirit and it is not so easily washed away.” - Michael Skinner Recently I read a blog post at the ACEsConnection website, “Erasing My ACES” by Sirena Wheeler. It was posted on April, 19, 2020. It struck a chord with me, many in fact and it put me on a spiral down memory lane.
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The New Science of Empathy and Empaths (drjudithorloff.com)
Empathy is when we reach our hearts out to others and put ourselves in their shoes. However, being an empath goes even farther. Like many of my patients and myself, empaths are people who’re high on the empathic spectrum and actually feel what is happening in others in their own bodies. As a result, empaths can have incredible compassion for people–but they often get exhausted from feeling “too much” unless they develop strategies to safeguard their sensitivities and develop healthy...
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The Relationship between Science and Spirituality (upliftconnect.com)
To connect the conceptual changes in science with the broader change of worldview and values in society, I had to go beyond physics and look for a broader conceptual framework. In doing so, I realized that our major social issues – health, education, human rights, social justice, political power, protection of the environment, the management of business enterprises, the economy, and so on – all have to do with living systems; with individual human beings, social systems, and ecosystems. In...
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The Surviving Spirit Newsletter December 2019
Hi Folks, The latest edition of the Surviving Spirit Newsletter is posted at the website - http://newsletters.survivingspirit.com/index.php http://newsletters.survivingspirit.com/pdfs/2019-12-The_Surviving_Spirit_Newsletter_December_2019.pdf To sign up for an e-mail copy, please write to me @ mikeskinner@comcast.net or sign up @ Website via Contact Us, Thanks! Michael. Contents List: 1] A neuroscientist's advice for combating stress this holiday season by Dr. Patrick K. Porter 2] Peer...
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The Surviving Spirit Newsletter December 2019
Hi Folks, The latest edition of the Surviving Spirit Newsletter is posted at the website - http://newsletters.survivingspirit.com/index.php http://newsletters.survivingspirit.com/pdfs/2019-12-The_Surviving_Spirit_Newsletter_December_2019.pdf To sign up for an e-mail copy, please write to me @ mikeskinner@comcast.net or sign up @ Website via Contact Us, Thanks! Michael. Contents List: 1] A neuroscientist's advice for combating stress this holiday season by Dr. Patrick K. Porter 2] Peer...
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The Surviving Spirit Newsletter January 2020
Hi Folks, The January edition of the Surviving Spirit Newsletter is posted at the website - http://newsletters.survivingspirit.com/index.php To sign up for an e-mail copy, please write to me @ mikeskinner@comcast.net or sign up @ Website via Contact Us, Thanks! Michael http://newsletters.survivingspirit.com/pdfs/2020-01-The_Surviving_Spirit_Newsletter_January_2020.pdf Contents List : 1] Just Being Outside Can Improve Your Psychological Health, and Maybe Your Physical Health Too by Zoë...
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This Is Your Brain on Nature [dirt.asla.org]
Neurosurgeon Edie Zusman , a real-life Doogie Howser who started medical school at 19 and has completed some 6,000 brain and spinal surgeries, said what landscape architects do saves far more lives than what she does. The early prevention of disease reduces the need for surgeries. Prevention is made possible by eating healthy foods and walking and getting exercise in green environments that lower stress and improve well-being. At the ASLA 2018 Annual Meeting , Zusman and a number of...
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To Heal CPTSD, Do You Need to Love Yourself?
One of the messages that’s been drilled into us by popular culture is that “you have to love yourself before you can love someone else.” This is something people tell you when you get your heart broken and you feel like you must be… no good! And for a lot of years, every time I heard this I felt like a different species than everyone else. Because there were times when I didn’t particularly love myself – and here and there when I was younger, times when I hated myself. But there was a never...
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To Help Heal Trauma, Talk Less, and Write More
For a lot of people with Childhood PTSD, talking about traumatic memories can make symptoms worse -- worse than if we were to do nothing at all. Yet talking about the past is the default mode of therapy for virtually everyone who is depressed, anxious or troubled about the past. It's true that talking can be crucial to emotional healing. But there is a lot of research that supports WRITING as a more effective way to communicate past trauma and relieve symptoms of Childhood PTSD. In this...
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Triggered by the Holidays? [attachmenttraumanetwork.org]
From the blog manager [of the Attachment & Trauma Network blog] Many of us raising children affected by early trauma and attachment disorders know holiday stress all too well. Even the most well-meaning relatives can inflict additional pain, sometimes because they simply do not understand, other times because they cannot help but judge. Our decisions, our families, our lives, may look very different from what they dreamed, hoped, or expected. Old hurts get triggered and we find ourselves...
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U of T expert: What the Oasis brothers can teach us about resilience [utoronto.ca]
Liam Gallagher is performing this week in Toronto, and as I prepare to take in the concert, it’s all coming back: the epic battles, still ongoing, between the infamous Liam and his brother Noel of the hugely popular ‘90s rock band, Oasis. Oasis topped the charts globally with hits that included Champagne Supernova and Wonderwall. I was a fan and still am – the band’s music stands the test of time, and the seemingly endless feuds between Noel and Liam continue to capture our attention. But 20...
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Vacancy: Self-Worth in the Mind of a Childhood Abuse Survivor
The feeling of having a healthy supply of self-worth is something I can only imagine might have been more readily available, natural and automatic if I was able to see that in myself as a child. As an adult survivor of childhood abuse, self-worth was not supplied in healthy doses while growing up.
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Victim to Victory: Memoir
I wrote Victim to Victory, healing generational abuse from my bloodline, during a seven-year journey of being very sick. I am not a writer. I am a healer. In those years of losing my ability to walk and having my family abandon me I turned inward, asking why and how do I get out of this straight jacket. I did everything imaginable, but the pain was chronic and my will was losing strength. In my darkest hours, I would hear a voice during my meditations. I had nothing to lose, so I followed...
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[WEBINAR] Starting & Growing Resilient Communities: How to Tell Your Community Story GRC 2.0 Celebrate
ACEs Connection presents, "Starting & Growing Resilient Communities: Online & In Real Life (IRL)", an interactive webinar training series focused on developing existing and potential online community managers and IRL ACEs champions. This series is dedicated to providing insight into creating sustainable and effective online & IRL ACEs initiatives. In this fifth session, we’ll talk about why it's so critical to tell your story far and wide. This incudes how to blog and share...
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Wellness and Resiliency Toolkit for Kids with Trauma
I'm excited to share a booklet created for youth in Oregon foster care at a Wellness camp this summer. Youth were provided with these quick, easy and effective (and evidence based) "Mindful Moments" exercises in their Wellness Toolkits and they were practiced throughout the day at camp so that they could be remembered in times of stress and dysregulation. The exercised are designed to quickly bring them back to a state of calm. The youth really enjoyed them, and found them easy and...
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What Awe Looks Like in the Brain (dailygood.org)
A new study sheds light on how our brains respond to awe-inspiring nature. What makes awe so transporting, overwhelming, even mystical at times? Researchers explored this question in a recent study published in the journal Human Brain Mapping by examining what the brain is doing when people have an awe experience. The University of Amsterdam’s Michiel van Elk and his colleagues used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to scan the brains of 32 participants ages 18 to 41 while they...
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What is Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (CPTSD)?
Most people have heard of post-traumatic stress disorder that afflicts many men and women returning from a war zone. It is characterized by flashbacks, unstable moods, and survivor’s remorse. However, many have never heard of a condition that often develops in childhood and changes the course of the child’s life forever, complex post-traumatic stress disorder (CPTSD). For a good definition of CPTSD, we turned to Beauty After Bruises, an organization that offers outreach focused on adult...
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When Things Get Out of Hand: Trauma and the Triune Brain [goodtherapy.org]
In recent decades, neuroscience and psychotherapy have joined forces in seeking to understand the biological bases of behavior. The brain is a complex organ, and as we study its function and adaptations we create a window of understanding into how our brains, bodies, and psyches respond to traumatic stimuli. Have you ever heard of the triune brain? This is a simplified, three-part model of the brain, as originally explained by Dr. Daniel Siegel , that helps us to understand the neurological...
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Why Focus on Resilience? 2019 BPT Conference Big Idea Session with Teri Barila
“There comes a point where we need to stop just pulling people out of the river. We need to go upstream and find out why they’re falling in” -Desmond Tutu. This quote captures the essence of why resilience matters. To Community Resilience Initiative, Resilience is not about “lifting yourself up by your bootstraps” or “bouncing back” from serious harm or injury. To us, Resilience is about self-discovery and self-awareness based on what the ACE Study, neurobiology, and epigenetics tell us...
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Why Focus on Resilience? 2019 BPT Conference Big Idea Session with Teri Barila
“There comes a point where we need to stop just pulling people out of the river. We need to go upstream and find out why they’re falling in” -Desmond Tutu. This quote captures the essence of why resilience matters. To Community Resilience Initiative, Resilience is not about “lifting yourself up by your bootstraps” or “bouncing back” from serious harm or injury. To us, Resilience is about self-discovery and self-awareness based on what the ACE Study, neurobiology, and epigenetics tell us...
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Why Silence is So Good For Your Brain (dailygood.org)
We live in a loud and distracting world, where silence is increasingly difficult to come by -- and that may be negatively affecting our health. In fact, a 2011 World Health Organization report called noise pollution a "modern plague," concluding that "there is overwhelming evidence that exposure to environmental noise has adverse effects on the health of the population." As our internal and external environments become louder and louder, more people are beginning to seek out silence, whether...
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5 Tips to Get You Through the Kavanaugh Investigation (No Matter What Are Your Politics)
Current events this week are extremely triggering and traumatic for many. Here are a few tips from a trauma psychotherapist.
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5 Ways to Heal the Traumatized Brain (Part 4) [blogs.psychcentral.com]
"Someone who has experienced trauma also has gifts to offer all of us- in their depth, in their knowledge of our universal vulnerability, and their experience of the power of compassion.”- Sharon Salzberg What a week. You’d have to be living under a rock if you haven’t at all tuned in to the tumultuous news cycle in the US. Those that are survivors of trauma (specifically sexual assault and other forms of abuse) are incredibly triggered, and those that provide psychotherapy for trauma...
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5 Ways to Heal the Traumatized Brain (Part 4) [blogs.psychcentral.com/]
“Someone who has experienced trauma also has gifts to offer all of us- in their depth, in their knowledge of our universal vulnerability, and their experience of the power of compassion.”- Sharon Salzberg What a week. You’d have to be living under a rock if you haven’t at all tuned in to the tumultuous news cycle in the US. Those that are survivors of trauma (specifically sexual assault and other forms of abuse) are incredibly triggered, and those that provide psychotherapy for trauma...
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75 Calm Down Strategies for Kids
I came across this webpage and wanted to share with my parent and caregiver small groups. My intern typed it up into a handout. Feel free to share.
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A Guide to Executive Function [developingchild.harvard.edu]
Executive function and self-regulation skills are like an air traffic control system in the brain—they help us manage information, make decisions, and plan ahead. We need these skills at every stage of life, and while no one is born with them, we are all born with the potential to develop them. But, how do we do that? The Center on the Developing Child created this Guide to Executive Function to walk you through everything you need to know about these skills and how to develop and practice...
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Are You Re-Traumatizing Yourself? 16 Things We Do That Can Set Us Back with Childhood PTSD
Part of the damage from abuse and neglect in childhood is what actually happened when we were kids. But a significant part of the problem today comes from what I call "Inside Traumas." These are self-defeating behaviors that are common to people who are frequently in a state of dysregulation. They start as an innocent attempt to feel calm and stable, but they can grow into significant traumas that cause real problems for us and others. If you'd like to learn about my online course, Healing...
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Benefits of Meditation
From many centuries ago, peoples are practicing meditation to control their minds, their thought and so on. By which they can make their mind to think positive and move ahead towards their goals in life. Peoples are struggling with the practice of meditation for physical, spiritual and emotional well being. But if we look from a scientific point of view, thus really meditation does anything the physical and mental conditions of an individual. Does meditation really works! After being some...
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Brain can be trained in compassion, study shows (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
A new study by researchers at the Center for Investigating Healthy Minds at the Waisman Center of the University of Wisconsin–Madison shows that adults can be trained to be more compassionate. The report, recently published online in the journal Psychological Science , is the first to investigate whether training adults in compassion can result in greater altruistic behavior and related changes in neural systems underlying compassion. “Our fundamental question was, ‘Can compassion be trained...
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Bullying alters brain structure, raises risk of mental health problems [medicalnewstoday.com]
According to the National Center for Education Statistics and Bureau of Justice Statistics, between one and three students in the United States report being bullied at school. In recent years, cyberbullying has become a widespread problem. Cyberbullying is any bullying performed via cell phones, social media, or the Internet in general. [For more on this story by Chiara Townley, go to https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/324089.php ]
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Calming Your Anxious Mind Through Rhythmic Movement
5 Rhythmic Movement Practices That Can Calm Our Anxious Mind
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Caught the Coronavirus Blues? Research Shows that Music Medicine is a Powerful Antidote (wakeup-world.com)
English acoustic-physics pioneer, John Stuart Reid, explains how Music Medicine can banish the blues (and fear) associated with the corona virus, while boosting our immune system to help vanquish any pathogen. The simple antidote for low spirits and fear, which Nature provided for us, is music. Not just any music, but music that calms us and brings us joy. Nature’s “music” for our ancient ancestors was provided in a variety of ways, such as psithurism (the sound of the wind in the trees and...
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Childhood PTSD and Avoidance: Learning to Be OK in Groups (Resilience Series)
It’s super common for those of us who grew up with abuse and neglect when we were small, to feel as adults that we are on the outside somehow. When we're in groups we feel as if we are only partly in it, and never really included . Or we start as a full participant but pull away over time. We un-include ourselves. But it feel like other people are keeping us out. The telltale sign that being on the outside could be a personal choice, even when it doesn’t feel like it, is that we’re almost...
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Children & Families COVID19 Resilience Brief 5: Music For Healing
Click on the pdf link for the full child-friendly article.
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Community Resiliency Model: An Innovative Approach to Addressing Burnout
Join the Illinois ACEs Response Collaborative for our next free webinar in our continuing series on best practices to prevent and mitigate the effects of provider burnout this Thursday, March 12th, at 10:00 am CDT. The second session of the IL ACEs Response Collaborative's series on burnout will discuss the Community Resiliency Model, developed by Elaine Miller-Karas of the Trauma Resource Institute, and explain how it prevents burnout in the workplace. The Community Resiliency Model creates...
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Controlled Breathing Calms Your Brain (wakeup-world.com)
The way you breathe — whether fast or slow, shallow or deep — is intricately tied to your body as a whole, sending messages that affect your mood , your stress levels and even your immune system. Yet, breathing is unique in that it’s both easily ignored (becoming a basic background of your life) and revered at the same time. In the latter case, it’s almost instinctual to advise someone to “take a deep breath” if they’re feeling anxious, stressed or fearful. While it’s long been known that...
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CPTSD and Procrastination: Healing the Feeling of Paralysis (Resilience Series)
Have you ever had the experience where you know you should do something -- like go to work on time, or get ready for an important meeting, or just brush your teeth before bed -- but you just couldn't do it? Everybody procrastinates sometimes, but for people who experienced abuse and neglect in childhood, procrastinating can morph into a kind of paralysis. I’ve had this happen; I’ve spent whole seasons in this place before. And it's so demoralizing when it’s happening to know that you’re here...
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CPTSD: How to Transform Fear, and Develop INNER STRENGTH
Now that the pandemic has us all in a crisis situation, we’re about to find out to find out who falls apart in a crisis, and who rises up to serve, lead and encourage others. The ones who shine are not always who we expected — have you noticed this? Here in California we’ve been sheltering in place for over two weeks now. Everywhere in the world, we’re trying to figure out how best to respond to the pandemic, how best to care for ourselves and the people we love. It’s a work in progress. For...
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Crafting Provides Cross-Body Therapy Which Helps Mental Health [blogs.psychcentral.com]
I recently had the opportunity to chat with Sharyn of Homespun Dreams about how she uses craft as therapy. She lives with both anxiety and chronic pain. She enjoys crochet, knitting, sewing, tatting, and other crafts, sometimes mixing them together in one project. She also happens to have a nursing degree so she understands the benefits of crafting from both a personal and professional perspective. It was through her that I learned about the idea of crafting as cross-body therapy. What is...
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CRI Course 1: Trauma-Informed Training Webcast!
CRI Course 1: Trauma-Informed Training Webcast! Date: February 26, 2019 Time: 8am - 3pm Pacific Time A dynamic six-hour WEBCAST course, Course 1 introduces CRI’s capacity-building framework for building resilience, KISS. Knowledge, Insight, Strategies and Structure describes our community’s learning and movement from theory to practice and how to implement evidence-based strategies into action. The training includes three groups of topics: the NEAR sciences , a cluster of emerging scientific...
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Cultivating Deliberate Resilience During the Coronavirus Disease 2019 Pandemic [jamanetwork.com]
By Abby R. Rosenberg, JAMA Pediatrics, April 14, 2020 Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is affecting our health care community in unprecedented ways. As a pediatric oncologist who studies resilience in the context of illness, I started thinking about what this pandemic means for our professional resilience a few weeks ago, when the first US patient with fatal COVID-19 died in my home city of Seattle, Washington. Promoting resilience among health care workers and organizations starts with...
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Defining Resilience Series: Step 5 - Healthy Habit Formation
Transforming our habits is a powerful tool we can utilize as we continue along our healing journey.
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Developing Super Powers: Using Resilience Strategies to Cope with Negative Experiences. Introducing CRI's Newest Book!
“I believe that everyone, especially a child, deserves to know how their brains are shaped by environment, to then understand their capacity for building proactive protective factors. We all deserve to be super heroes as we do the best we can to consciously live life well. ” - Teri Barila The superheroes we learn about in comics, movies, and TV shows swoop in to save the world with their incredible powers, to shield people from harm. But in our world, no matter how much we wish to protect...
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Donna Jackson Nakazawa on bringing down the stress-threat response
Cissy's note: Donna Jackson Nakazawa has graciously allowed me to cross-post some of her current and future Facebook page posts here in the Practicing Resilience for Self-Care and Healing community on ACEs Connection . Hello Friends. As a SciComm journalist with 30 years of reporting and 6 books under my belt, which focus on how our stress response governs our immune health, I’ve been thinking about what I have learned, and how I might help you quiet your body and mind during this # pandemic...
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Donna Jackson Nakazawa on dislodging the trauma headspace & making micro-changes
Cissy's note: Two more posts from Donna Jackson Nakazawa's Facebook page posts which she has graciously allowed to be shared here on ACEs Connection . For more, read Donna Jackson Nakazawa's new book, The Angel and the Assassin: The Tiny Brain Cell that Changed the Course of Medicine and follow her on Facebook , Twitter , and Instagram
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Donna Jackson Nakazawa: “The Angel And The Assassin” on WYPR www.wypr.org/ & Commentary
This episode of On the Record aired today on www.wypr.org It's a wonderful conversation with @Donna Jackson Nakazawa about the research in her new book, The Angel and the Assassin: The Tiny Brain Cell that Changed the Couse of Medicine. Here is the link to On the Record o n www.wypr.org