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By Thomas Rutledge, Photo: Thomas Rutledge, Psychology Today, November 20, 2022 Traumas constitute the most difficult experiences in life. Assaults, severe accidents and injuries, natural disasters, life threatening diseases, and the loss of loved ones comprise just some of the most frequent types of traumas. Tragically, traumatic events are also common, with at least half of adults experiencing one or more major traumas according to the best survey research. Although the mental health...

By Zach Mortice, Photo: Zach Mortice/Bloomberg CityLab, November 22, 2022 When the Ruth Ellis Center , a Detroit nonprofit that helps support LGBTQ youth, began a foster care program 10 years ago, they kept it very quiet; no press release, not even a sign on the door. “We were so afraid of how the community would react,” says Mark Erwin, Ruth Ellis’s co-executive director. Now things are different. In October, the nonprofit held a ribbon-cutting ceremony for their new permanent supportive...

Greetings. This is another open thought piece. It's not fully finished out, in part because the words haven't been ever been written for me. Not in quite this way. I had to build it myself. Not as a "hobby". It is an act of survival against oppressive forces. It's taken a lot for me to, conceptually, free myself from standard notions of mental health. Notions that I was taught for years by both experts and lay communities. I now feel ready to state the following as a position statement. I...

“I feel like all my textbooks in elementary school glossed over reality and today's session leaves me wanting to read ‘what really happened,’” said one attendee during the most recent session of the PACEs Connection Historical Trauma in America series . Nearly 80 people attended the webinar on November 17, 2022. Focused on Historical Trauma in the Northeast, this most recent event was facilitated by Ingrid Cockhren, PACEs Connection’s chief executive officer, and supported by St. David's...

Join us for an encore of PACEs Connection’s “School-to-Prison Pipeline Using a Trauma-Informed Lens”, our first-ever interdisciplinary collaborative event! In this informative and interactive event, we explore the many contributing factors to our country’s school-to-prison pipeline, including outdated understandings of behavior, lack of knowledge about trauma and adversity, unexamined bias, increased presence of school police, exclusionary discipline practices, and more. We also discuss how...

One of the biggest fallouts from the pandemic is that parent-child conflict was amplified or exacerbated to an extremely high level. At the Family Trauma Institute, we call this “interactional trauma” or constant conflict between parent and child (drama=trauma) that leads to resentment, bitterness, and lost attachment. Often, the quickest way to heal this type of deep trauma is through the child or adolescent’s love language. Each child has a special one. For some its “words of affirmation”...

People who experienced authoritative parenting rarely if ever commit atrocities. In order to prevent these tragedies perhaps it’s time for an entirely new kind of parenting education that reaches everyone, everywhere. Visit www.advancingparenting.org . In our own low tech yet highly effective way we are pioneering this new kind of education that focuses on authoritative parenting.

Organizational restructuring is often on the table when companies decide they need transformational change. And when organizations take on the major change of trauma-informed implementation, many of them also decide to change their organizational layout. When we talk about organizational structures through a trauma-informed lens, we often focus on moving away from a hierarchal structure and toward a flat structure—but those are not our only two options. There are 5 other organizational...

We are excited to announce that this year, for the first time, we will be participating in the 16 days of Activism against Gender Based Violence. Do look out for the daily posts and updates, beginning November 25 through to December 10th. “UNITE! Activism to end violence against women and girls”

Resilience Investment, Support, and Expansion (RISE) from Trauma Act Please sign this letter in support of key provisions of the Resilience Investment, Support, and Expansion (RISE) from Trauma Ac t— specifically programs that would support hospital-based intervention programs and community-based trauma and resilience coordinating councils. The deadline is TODAY—Monday, November 21. To sign, please contact Claire Kao at Futures Without Violence, ckao@futureswithoutviolence.org . For...

“City Voices seeks to Make Mental Illness Fun Again! (CLICK ME!) Through good peer-to-peer programming that builds friendship and community. That helps to transform pain and suffering into joy, peace, and acceptance, even if for a little while. Seeds are being planted and watered. City Voices organizes in-person gatherings at city parks and museums, often involving a little physical exercise, qigong, yoga and energy movements. We do comedy shows and variety shows that share our talents with...

By Amanda Levinson and Natasha Freidus, Photo: iStock/Gary Sandy Wales, Stanford Social Innovation Review, November 17, 2022 Last year, our social impact startup hit a milestone that eludes 96 percent of female founders: we hit one million dollars in revenue. It felt like reaching the summit of a mountain nearly everybody had said would be impossible to climb. We started NeedsList with the idea of creating a “wedding registry for aid”—a software solution to match needs to resources in times...