Tagged With "student death"
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The Healing Place Podcast: Barbara Rubel, MA, BCETS, D.A.A.E.T.S. - How to Help Suicide Loss Survivors & the Traumatic Impact of Suicide
Barbara Rubel is a suicide loss survivor and leading thanatologist. Thanatology is the scientific study of death. As a thanatologist, Barbara Rubel specializes in suicide loss survivor grief and educating professionals about traumatic loss. The third updated and revised edition of her book, But I Didn’t Say Goodbye: Helping families after a suicide, just launched on Amazon.
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The House of Mourning (www.themoth.org)
Sometimes I free-write and riff when I first wake up. I let go of grammar, punctuation and sometimes even logic. I follow the words and the pen and see what happens. It doesn't have to be neat, artistic, poetic or amazing. It feels wonderful and is like splashing around in a pool in the mind. Today I was thinking about grief and ACEs and storyteller because I'd been listening to Kate Braestrup tell a story on Moth. Beautiful audio is what this is. I recommend listening. It's about grief,...
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The Many Faces of Grief
“…Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding…. And could you keep your heart in wonder at the daily miracles of your life, your pain would not seem less wondrous than your joy; much of your pain is self-chosen. It is the bitter potion by which the physician within you heals your sick self….” – From The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran There are many kinds of loss that we can encounter in life. However, losses surrounding addiction can be particularly confusing; they tend...
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Transcending Childhood Trauma [thefix.com]
"All healing is release from the past. It is enough to heal the past and make the future free. It is enough to let the present be accepted as it is." Course of Miracles Most addicts have survived some form of childhood trauma. In recovery, they must make an effort to heal the wounds of the past. They must also accept the fact that this is an inside job. Nothing outside of themselves is going to heal them. Therapy and support groups are supportive environments, but addicts have to do all the...
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Webinar: Cultivating Our Best Selves in Response to COVID-19 | Tuesday, March 17 at Noon PDT
How to use the skills of the Community Resiliency Model (CRM) for self and others to be the calm in the storm as we face the unknown. Free Webinar Tuesday, March 17 at Noon PDT Speakers: Elaine Miller-Karas, LCSW Linda Grabbe, PhD, FNP-BC, PMHNP-BC Zoom Webinar Registration Link: https://zoom.us/j/715837300 Additional ways to join are listed at the bottom of this post. About the webinar leaders: Elaine Miller-Karas is the Executive Director and co-founder of the Trauma Resource Institute and...
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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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What Will It Be Like When the Lockdown Lifts? [psychologytoday.com]
By Bryan E. Robinson, Psychology Today, April 15, 2020 Although we don’t know exactly when, at some point in the future self-isolation will end, and many of us will return to offices, restaurants, and houses of worship. But what will that look like? One thing for sure, we will never return to normal; we will return to “a new normal.” And each of us will have repair work to do as we re-enter the world of physical proximity to coworkers and reconnecting with friends, neighbors, and loved ones.
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When Hidden Grief Gets Triggered During COVID-19 Confinement
first published by The Meadows 4/15/20 Our sense of loss during the current COVID-19 crisis can trigger hidden emotions from when we experienced a sense of loss before. Whatever early losses you have had in your life — whether they be your own divorce, your parents, or both, or the abandonment of one parent, a childhood or parental illness or death, financial upheaval, constant moving around, or growing up with parental addiction or adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) — they are likely to...
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4 Ways to Get Through Any Life Change [psychologytoday.com]
Have you ever thought, “I should be happy and excited! I’m making a good change in my life – so why am I so stressed?” You’re probably stressed because almost any change, whether it's positive or negative, whether you wanted it or it was a surprise, can create stress . In fact, since 1967, when psychiatrists Thomas Holmes and Richard Rahe published findings from studying the medical records of over 5,000 medical patients, therapists have known that both unhappy and happy life transitions can...
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Cancer as a survivor
Many people use the phrase CPTSD to stand for PTSD from complex trauma. To me, C-PTSD means cancer and PTSD. I have cancer and I’m a trauma survivor. I’m a survivor with cancer but not yet a cancer survivor. Will I be a survivor squared?
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For California Firefighters, How 'Mindfulness' Can Ease the Deadly Stress of Their Jobs [sacbee.com]
By Cathie Anderson, The Sacramento Bee, November 12, 2019 About three and a half years ago, paramedic Susan Farren underwent major surgery for kidney cancer, and as she lay in the recovery room, one of her doctors told her that he had treated quite a few first responders with organ cancers. The comment stuck with her. “I went home and started researching it after getting out of the hospital,” Farren said, “and for the next year and a half, that’s what I did every single day. I researched...
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From Compassion Fatigue to Healing Centered Engagement: Turning Trauma Informed Values into Action
To pave the way for a truly strengths-based approach to full healing and recovery for both service users and burned out staff, we must educate them on (1) the central role of primal body responses to trauma (past and present), and (2) the early development of adaptive thoughts and behaviors in response to
traumatic experience.
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How To Breathe (Why Deep Breathing Will Change Your Life) [medium.com]
In the language of the Navajo Indians, the word “Nilch’l” translated into the English language simply means “wind, air or the sky”. Of course, no English translation will ever truly be able to express the depths of Navajo philosophy. For the Navajo, “Nilch’I” represents a god, the Supreme Creator, an infinite, boundless force that communicates between all elements of the natural world. It is the Holy Wind that brings movement, energy, sound and love to all things that have found life in this...
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In honour of my Dad, Remembrance Day 2019
War is most certainly Hell. It is also a source of #ACEs for the children of veterans. Here's a little insight into my story.
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My Story about Healing Moving from “What is wrong with me” to “What is happening – how can I take better care of myself?”
When I was a little girl, I had a lot of ear infections. Did anyone else experience that? Every summer in the middle of the fun of swimming in the pool, I would get an ear infection and one year I got one on my birthday. Obviously, I still remember it. It was a sad time. I always felt like I was missing out on things. And it became a pattern. I would go to the doctor and get lamb’s wool and drops put in my ear. It hurt a lot. I can still remember trying to get comfortable lying on the couch...
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Overcoming Past Trauma to Create a New Future [yogajournal.com]
Yoga teacher Tatiana Forero Puerta, author of Yoga for the Wounded Heart, shares what she’s learned about trauma, clearing emotional patterns, and finding a vision for the future. If at the age of 20 you would’ve asked me to imagine my life 15 years in the future, I wouldn’t have been able to give you an answer. I couldn’t see my life in those terms. When I looked into my future then, I simply saw a field of blackness; my potential was not just obfuscated—it was inaccessible. This is what...
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Pip had high #ACEs
I just finished reading Great Expectations for the second time. I could relate to it much easier this reading as I used an ACEs lens to understand Pip's experiences and challenges. Dickens knew in 1860 the effects of Adverse Childhood Experiences. It seems strange to see humanity hasn't really evolved emotionally and socially that much in 160 years. Hopefully the ACEs movement will help propel our consciousness raising.
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Reasons to be Positive and Optimistic
Positive thinking and optimism are words often thrown around when thinking about being happy and cheerful. But what do they really mean? Positive thinking means approaching life in a positive and productive way instead of focusing on the negatives. Meaning you’re hopeful for the best and don’t focus on the worst. Sounds good in theory, but how can you start to think positively? Here are seven reasons why positivity is so good for you, and some tips on how to remain positive everyday:...
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Settling In While Feeling Unsettled
How quickly the outside world has influenced our inner world and changed our thoughts, patterns, and triggers. Life is definitely coming in waves. We feel a sense of safety if we can be in a healthy home, fear and worry if we have to venture out for food, calm returns after we practice something that soothes and regulates us, and anxiety builds when we hear news and the impact the virus has on the whole world. We are beginning to expect and accept many unpredictable and unknown...
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Suffered Trauma? This Shaman Says You Should Make a Move [ozy.com]
When Ya’Acov Darling Khan was 22, he was struck by lightning. Dazed, but otherwise unharmed, he came to on the grass where he had been playing golf as a summer storm closed in. Later he would come to see this near-death experience as his summons to the sacred path of the shaman. After 30 years — and a grueling apprenticeship with indigenous healers in the Arctic and the Amazon, Darling Khan, along with his wife, Susannah, have built a global following for their School of Movement Medicine in...
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Re: Happiness Is an Activity [psychologytoday.com]
"Work activity can reduce anxiety." - I think this is why my late grandmother rarely sat down. And, yeah, there's no peace in sedentariness. Rest is essential, but inactivity equals death. Another reason to love standing desks .
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Re: The House of Mourning (www.themoth.org)
We don't trust children to be able to handle, with gentle, loving guidance and support, the toughest that life dishes out--such as, in the story in this podcast, a young friend's tragic death--nor do we trust adults to be able to do the same. Much more suffering results from that lack of trust, that handling with kid gloves, so to speak, than of facing and acknowledging what has happened. I suspect most ACEs/trauma survivors feel a lot of relief at finally being able to name what has...
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Re: My Story about Healing Moving from “What is wrong with me” to “What is happening – how can I take better care of myself?”
Jessie: I LOVE this post and relate to so much from the ear infections, to the anaphylaxis in college to we still don't know what, to the health challenges, divorce, and the cancer, and high ACEs, and to the HEALING! There is healing and high ACEs are a risk factor but not a death sentence. Also, a 50-year old baby doll is exactly how I feel and look right now. Anyhow, THANK YOU for sharing this and reminding me and others to focus in on the healing and the opportunities as well as honoring...
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Mental Health Awareness: When Suffering Is Not an Illness
When I was an adolescent and young adult, I struggled with depression. As I reflect back on that time, so much of what I was experiencing was deeply tied to coming to terms with my sexuality. Growing up in the 1980’s in a relatively conservative town, I was closeted (even to myself) until I was a young adult. The pain and fear of being different, of not belonging, of being judged or rejected for who I was more than my adolescent brain could wrap its conscious head around.
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David Treleaven: Trauma-Sensitive Mindfulness Podcasts
Comments from Gail: My colleague Alison Cebulla shared the work of David Treleaven and his work with trauma-sensitive mindfulness, including his new book Trauma-Sensitive Mindfulness . I love their mission: Making Mindfulness Safe and Effective for People Who've Experienced Trauma. I include an excerpt from a recent email from him and the group below: Our commitment inside of Trauma-Sensitive Mindfulness (TSM) is to provide you with resources that equip you—and by extension anyone you’re...
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The Neurobiology of Trauma: Somatic Strategies for Resilience
The Neurobiology of Trauma: Somatic Approaches to Resilience By Jennifer Walsh As we have all come to experience over the past several months, trauma is simply a component of the human condition. While it affects both individuals and communities in a variety of ways, we have all experienced difficult, stressful, or even traumatic events over the course of our lifetime. Although social workers have traditionally worked with these vulnerable populations, there are numerous professionals...
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Unbecoming an Armadillo: Recovering from Trauma with EMDR
Unbecoming an Armadillo By: Victoria F. Burns, PhD, LSW Victoriafrances49@gmail.com Instagram: @betesandbites “When you are traumatized, you are basically in a permanent defensive mode” — Gabor Mate I’m sitting across from Meg on her charcoal grey love seat. My forearms are resting on a velvety mustard-yellow throw cushion and I’m holding crescent shaped pulsers in each hand. Meg’s my psychologist; a rare gem who specializes in chronic illness and trauma. Every two weeks, we spend an hour...
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Rebecca Lewis Pankratz: Breaking Generational Poverty, Poverty Circles, & Poverty Programs
"A CEs Connection is the curator of incredible hope, healing and possibility. Parents are not the bad guys. Most of us are just kids with ACEs who grew up..." Rebecca Lewis-Pankratz Last Friday, @Rebecca Lewis-Pankratz joined our A Better Normal series to discuss poverty circles and programs. Rebecca is the Director of Learning Centers as Essdack, as well as a poverty consultant, and we met online, via Twitter (her handle is @pOVERty’s Edge. Rebecca is a brilliant speaker, gifted writer, and...
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200 hr yoga life skills & teacher training (**Donation based)
Skills and wisdom for creating the best possible experience of life. This program is designed to give you skills and understanding that you can use now AND that will continue to deepen and unfold over time. The curriculum is resilience-focused. What that means in a practical sense is that the starting place is of acknowledgment of the traumas potentially being held by yourself and your students. This allows for these amazing practices to be applied in a way that is most supportive of the...
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Back-to-School in a Pandemic? Questions, Concerns, and Discussion with School Nurse, Robin Cogan
Robin is a brilliant, passionate, and vocal school nurse with almost two decades of experience as a New Jersey school nurse in the Camden City School District. She is the Legislative Co-Chair for the New Jersey State School Nurses Association and she joined us last week for A Better Normal community discussion about back-to-school (or not) plans families are facing this school year. Robin serves as faculty in the School Nurse Certificate Program at Rutgers University-Camden School of Nursing...
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A Listening Curriculum: School Radically Re-imagined in the Time of COVID-19
Symbolic of our quick-fix culture, I was recently asked to do a five-minute radio interview addressing the challenge of remote learning without the peer group dynamics of a regular classroom. The time constraint motivated me to get to the core of the education crisis precipitated by the coronavirus pandemic. Decades of developmental science research reveal that our physical and emotional health- our very sense of self- emerges in moment-to-moment interactions in our social world. The...
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A Time for Change
The magnificent fall foliage displayed during the month of October reminds me of transition and forward momentum. Ideally, as humans, we grow and change along with the seasons to find meaning and purpose in life and flourish. Unfortunately, the progression of our lives isn't always smooth and people aren't always kind. There are essential life skills that we can learn, however, that can help us grow through struggle and choose love in our thoughtful responses. We have had varied reactions to...
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Research: Why Breathing Is So Effective at Reducing Stress [hbr.org]
By Emma Seppälä, Christina Bradley, and Michael R. Goldstein, Harvard Business Review, September 29, 2020 When U.S. Marine Corp Officer Jake D.’s vehicle drove over an explosive device in Afghanistan, he looked down to see his legs almost completely severed below the knee. At that moment, he remembered a breathing exercise he had learned in a book for young officers. Thanks to that exercise, he was able to stay calm enough to check on his men, give orders to call for help, tourniquet his own...
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COVID, ACES, and Radical Self-Care
COVID, ACES and Radical Self-Care Dr. LateshIa Woodley, LPC, NCC & Alexis Kelly, MPA COVID Thursday, March 13, 2020, I woke up thinking I love my life, I have the best job in the world, I get to wake up every day and strive to make a difference in the lives of students and families. Little did I know that a few hours later my life, the lives of my family, and the lives of the families that I serve would forever be changed due to the COVID pandemic. Prior to the pandemic, I was leading...
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Re: COVID, ACES, and Radical Self-Care
I am so sorry for your many losses. Your article and way of thinking is so much what we need to keep growing our awareness and understanding of the role of trauma -in the form of ACEs; in the role of racism; in the form of discrimination for other groups that include women; as well as the layers that come through epigenetics and more from multigenerational trauma (and historical trauma) as all potent contributors to the effects of Covid, premature death and so much more. And I appreciate how...
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Online Workshop Nov 30, Dec 7 & 14 - Reimagining Resilience - Using a Trauma Lens
For more information and to register - https://www.eventbrite.com/e/124637117975 Reimagining Resilience: Using a Trauma Lens helps adults build positive relationships with children who have experienced trauma. We will explore the impact of adverse experiences and the effect they have on developing brains and student behavior. The course gives teachers, parents, and other adults working closely with kids the skills they need to make sure that every child knows that they matter. An online...
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If you want to heal childhood trauma, you have to heal your body.
356 pounds?! Are you kidding me, Michael? What the fuck are you doing to yourself? Every morning I would wake up and watch the number on the scale tick up as I slowly allowed obesity to run wild and consume my body. Fat . I was always the chubby kid. I shopped in the boy's husky section at Walmart as a preteen. Husky for the unware is the polite nomenclature for fat kids. I spent summers running around with my shirt on. I ate entire boxes of gummy bears for dinner. I never ordered just one...
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Coping With Trauma: Workaholism
What is the difference between working hard and being a workaholic? Workaholism is glorified in our society and the term is often misused, making it difficult for people suffering from it to know they have a problem. Before childhood trauma research gained momentum in the 1980s and 1990s, there was no understanding of trauma and its consequences on a person’s life as adult, the link was not made between beating or neglecting a child and how it impacted the adult child’s mental health...
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Join us for Choose Love Awareness Month for Hope, Healing, and Connection
As we are all living under the mandate of social distancing we find almost everyone struggling with the ethos of our current stressful environment. As human beings, we were created to connect with one another. Our brains have mirror neurons that help us socialize and communicate by reading the expressions of others. The famous evolutionist Charles Darwin concluded that it would be those who were most ‘sympathetic’ to each other, in other words generous, altruistic, and compassionate, that...
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Resilience
This is a blog I posted a few years ago which I hope might be helpful to others, I have learned so much on my journey of healing childhood wounds and am so happy to see resources like this group available to help others. 15/11/2017 “If the only thing people learned was not to be afraid of their experience, that alone would change the world“ – Sydney Banks. While there are many words to describe resilience such as spirit, strength, toughness, buoyancy, no one truly understands just how many...
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The Friend of Love
This article was originally posted on the Forward-Facing Institute Blog written by Rebekah Brown The Friend of Love - Resiliency My best friend is moving away. She’d been dropping hints for months, but I decided to retreat behind a wall of denial and hope for the best. The best was not to be. Ellen is moving, and there isn’t anything I can do about it. We had our share of joyous events over the time we had together. Once, a seafood company sent $300’s worth of prime, unreturnable Maryland...
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Re: Learn How to Truly Forgive – and Truly Heal (wakeup-world.com)
This is a topic that always evokes strong emotions, and rightly so. I am coming to terms with the principle that forgiveness is an act on my part that does not require the prior demonstration of remorse by the other person. It is challenging emotionally to deliberate on this as I believe many of us prefer to see some form of contrition before we forgive. Another aspect surrounds how to engage, if at all, with the other party thereafter. On the one hand, it may appear that to forgive means to...
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The Method For Receiving Infinite Support and The Power of Gratitude and Appreciation
Those who struggle with ACE’s have a tendency to focus on the negative as a means of self-protection. We fear opening our hearts because of the brutality we experienced in early childhood when our hearts were already open. It takes a tremendous amount of inner work to free our energy from continuing to produce the false barrier of protection, which constitutes our barrier to experiencing all of the love and joy and support that we long for. In this article I offer an alternative view that...
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Left Behind: Surviving Suicide Loss (dailygood.org)
In the spring of 2017, Nandini Murali, a South Indian journalist and author, returned from an out-of-town assignment to an eerily quiet home. Typically, her husband would greet her at the front door, but that morning he hadn't answered her phone calls. It was Nandini who discovered his body, and confronted an unfathomable reality. T.R. Murali, one of the most prominent urologists in India, and her beloved husband of 33 years, had ended his own life. "Space dissolved," writes Nandini, of that...
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Colleen Risk
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Professional Joy Stalker
I was thinking today that I might make t-shirts and coffee mugs that say, “professional joy stalker” and come with a list of blissful things to remind myself and others to appreciate. As my friend Lynn says,” What if joy is stalking us?” and all we need to do is be still long enough to notice and marinate in multiple daily pleasures. I love that idea but it didn't come naturally to me. What came naturally was fear. I was always on the search for danger, betrayal, and disappointment. I hunted...