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Hello, everyone. I am the new Community Co-Manager of the Practicing Resilience for Self-Care & Healing community . I’ll be joining Morgan Vien in working with all of you to build a virtual space that encourages and supports us in creating better health for ourselves. Thanks to Morgan and a rapidly growing, active membership, the community is already off to an energetic start only one month after its October launch. My ACEs (Adverse Childhood Experiences) “aha moment” happened in 2009. I...

JACKSON, MISSISSIPPI — Juan Cloy remembers being suspended when he was at Provine High School in the 1980s. He and several friends got in a fight with some kids from the neighborhood at school. Everyone involved got suspended. Of course, the idea of suspension is for kids to stay home, but none of the boys did. He and his friends went outside and walked around the corner to find the boys they got into a fight with in a car. “One of the kids pulled a gun out on us,” he said. “… [T]here was no...

GOLDEN, CO -- A new study of Colorado adults shows a correlation between a difficult childhood and adult health problems, lack of productivity and criminal involvement. The study, by the Council for a Strong America shows that adults who report four or more " Adverse Childhood Experiences," or ACEs have a three-times higher risk of an arrest by age 18 and were three times more likely to have a felony charge by age 25. Kids with a higher number of bad childhood experiences also report more...

The practice of mindfulness, such as meditation, can be a challenge for trauma survivors. Trauma disconnects you from your body in the moment to survive a perceived or real threat. Most survivors do not get the support they need to heal and process the abuse they suffered, which leads to chronic inner tension and toxic negative believes that feed unhealthy behaviors and feelings about themselves. We think we are bad, we feel bad, and believe the abuse was our fault. The thought of...

Psychosynthesis considers a human life to move toward self-realization: “developing a committed relationship to the source of our being, a willingness to follow the call or vocation of our deepest truth, no matter the experiences in which we find ourselves” (Firman & Gila, 1997, p. 181). At all stages of life, the individual immanent “I” (non-ego) and the transcendent (Common)Self are connected. Thus, (Common)Self realization involves both personal development and transpersonal...

In 1991, the city of Medellín in Colombia registered a homicide rate of 381 per 100,000 —among the highest ever recorded anywhere. In neighboring cities like Barranquilla, Bogotá, and Cali, the levels of violence associated with drug trafficking and political unrest were equally fearsome. Entire neighborhoods were cordoned-off, even to police and public service providers. Gangs, paramilitaries, and guerrillas routinely brought city services to a standstill. The rampant insecurity had severe...

(Des Moines) -- A new study finds Iowa children face more Adverse Childhood Experiences or ACEs than kids in many other states. ACEs might include the death of a parent, being a victim of violence, or living with someone with a drug or alcohol problem. Martha Davis, a senior program officer for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, says ACEs can have a far-reaching impact. “They have implications for schools, for families and communities, for health care systems,” Davis says. “What it says is,...

In April 2015, Ashley Sprague was making $2.13 an hour plus tips as a waitress at Waffle House when she was pulled over for speeding in a small city near her home outside Nashville. The speeding ticket, plus another citation for failure to have proof of insurance, totaled $477.50, a sum that might as well have been a million dollars. Over the course of the next 13 months, she was cited twice more for administrative infractions, including — she was surprised to discover — driving on a...

Police officers kill and injure an alarming number of people in the United States each year. According to a 2016 study published in Injury Prevention, the police killed or injured over 55,000 people in 2012; the police-brutality monitoring website Mapping Police Violence reports that over 1,000 people have been killed by police so far in 2017. Previous studies have found that the police disproportionately use excessive force against, search , and kill people of color, particularly black...

There’s been a fight at Marrero Middle School. Two sixth graders traded insults during football practice, someone threw a punch, and soon enough they were on the ground with a ring of students egging them on. A few years ago, a fight like this might have ended with someone being suspended, or even arrested. But over the past year and a half, the New Orleans-area middle school has rebuilt its entire approach to discipline. Now, the two boys are sent to John Kulakowski, a teacher who splits...

Last week, we bought more than a dozen housing ads excluding categories of people explicitly protected by the Fair Housing Act of 1968. Were these actual ads? No. And as someone who’s spent the past month on a New York City apartment hunt, I’m pretty confident that no one would mistake our “ real estate company ” for an actual brokerage. But here’s the question: could they have been real? Yes — and our ability to limit the audience by race, religion, and gender — among other legally...

Becoming a father for the first time can be difficult for anyone, but when you do so in your teens or early 20s and have been incarcerated, it can be overwhelming. The right supports — stable housing, reliable networks, ties to employment, knowing how to build skills in fatherhood and healthy relationships — are essential. This was certainly true for 22-year-old James* and 20-year-old Marcus*. Both became fathers before their incarceration; both wanted to be the best dads they could be, and...