Blog

Pediatrician Nadine Burke Harris is a masterful storyteller. I learned in a conversation with her at Wheelock College before her presentation for the Brookline, MA organization Steps to Success , that before she decided to become doctor, Dr. Burke Harris wanted to be an author. Only after the smashing success of her TED talk: How childhood trauma affects health across a lifetime , when she was approached by a literary agent, did she find her way to writing. Her newly released book The...

We don’t see it coming. We are having a moment of intimacy: a moment we’ve been desiring and have been moving towards. And here it is, clothing is coming off and the connection is good and new and hot and then boom—a flashback comes at the tip of a lover’s fingers, the thrust of a tongue, a hand at the throat—suddenly we are pulled back to a moment of terror, violation, or confusion. Our bodies feel caught up in that memory state and cannot register the present moment, can’t tell if we are,...

Sometimes my patients tell me they feel hopeless. They know they repeat self-destructive behaviors. They know they should break away from unhealthy relationships. They are aware of their critical self-talk and the ways they keep themselves small. When my patients lose hope, I hold it for them. Although change takes work, my conviction that the brain and mind heal is unwavering. Everyone knows that the body heals itself. You fall and scrape your knee. Then, if you take care of your wound...

From an evolutionary perspective, babies attach to their parents for survival. A baby who is securely attached, experiences her parent as a safe haven and secure base. When a baby experiences stress, pain or other negative emotions, she will seek the support of a parent and will allow herself to be soothed. Moreover, a baby who is securely attached will feel free to observe and explore an environment in the vicinity of a parent. 'There are strong differences in the quality of attachment...

In the late 1990s the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development conducted an experiment on economic mobility by tracking thousands of public housing tenants and residents of low-income neighborhoods to see how they fared when moved to other neighborhoods, particularly those with less poverty. Called the Moving To Opportunity project , it tracked nearly 4,600 families, making it one of the largest-scale experiments of its kind—unless you count that other enormous moving-to-opportunity...

Trauma Awareness & Resilience Mini-Seminar Training Series

Trauma Awareness & Resilience Institute for Youth Workers

Marisa Luse is pictured above, on the right. Marisa Luse was accustomed to juggling multiple roles: as the mother of a three-year-old son, a parent ambassador for the Boston Children’s Museum and a board member for the Boston Association for Childbirth Education. She was used to helping youth and families access and achieve their goals: a healthy family, a school-ready child. But when leaders of a Community Organizing for Family Issues (COFI) training asked Luse to name priorities for her...

This is Part Four of the State of the States 2018 series. As President Donald Trump and Republican leaders in Congress set out to impose tougher restrictions on welfare, their conservative allies across the country are trying to help them accomplish their mission, state by state. Republican governors and state legislators are moving ahead with proposals that would make it harder for people to get and keep welfare benefits and restrict what benefits they get. Measures already have been...

The Trump administration has prioritized reducing immigration by any and all possible means, a pursuit that literally brought the government to a standstill this weekend. While the nation tries to decipher the mixed messages coming from the White House and Congress scrambles to develop a reform agenda that will garner bipartisan support, it's easy to survey our national conversation about immigration and see only anger, dysfunction, and a fundamental disagreement about what it means to be an...

On top of America’s long-running political divide between red and blue states, and its widening economic divide between the rich and the poor, there is a troubling gap between its geographic winners and losers. The United States is growing spatially more unequal, in ways that are ripping the country apart and threaten to undermine prosperity for all of us. New data released earlier this week by Mark Muro and Jacob Whiton of the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program get to the...

I identify as an activist, and I am tired. Not yet ready to move on to some dreamscape. Hoping to be re-energized. But very, very tired. Part of the reason I’ve reached this level of exhaustion is that I seem to be living what life would look like if ‘painted into a corner,’ met ‘put in a box’ in a car wreck, leaving the two a tangled idiomatic mess. Yes, this ‘painted box’ in which so many activists of so many kinds seem to find themselves stuck is all the harder to escape for its...