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Our interview for this profile took place over two continents, from the U.S. to Lima, Peru, where Lourdes Valdez, pediatrician in Butte County, California, for 23 years, was attending to family affairs after the death of her mother. Valdez grew up in Lima, and later earned her medical degree in Peru before moving to Iowa City, Iowa, in 1992 for her residency. She said her mother helped make her a resilient person. Although working full time as an economist and statistician, her mother made a...

Free educational Webinar invite! Topic: Ending Mass Incarceration and Uniting families Join WashingtonCAN on 12/6 and 12/9 to learn about a tool that could help your loved one get resentenced and released early in Washington State! My name is Rashell and I’m the Lead Organizer with Washington Community Action Network (WashingtonCAN), a grassroots organization with 44,000 members that advocates for mass liberation and an end to mass incarceration, through lobbying, advocacy, and grassroots...

By Jura L. Augustinavicius, Sarah R. Lowe, Alessandro Massazza, Katie Hayes, et al., Image: Virginia McCaughey, International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies, December 2021 As human beings, our physical and mental health cannot be separated from the environments in which we live. Climate change, if left unaddressed, is projected to have catastrophic consequences on the mental health of entire populations. The impacts of climate change on traumatic stress and other aspects of mental...

By Brigid Delaney, Image: fedrelena/Getty Images/iStockphoto, The Guardian, December 2, 2021 Hey, how are you? You’re tired? How tired? Oh, you’ve never been this tired in all your life kind of tired? You dream of sleeping for 10 years tired? Every part of you is tired, even your hair? Yeah, same. After 2020’s first lockdown, people bounced back. There was a buzz to getting back out again and reconnecting with people, a release of pent up energy, and the commitment to beat the virus back and...

By Hannah Natanson, Earl Neikirk/The Washington Post, The Washington Post, December 6, 2021 Matthew Hawn checked his phone to see if the wait was finally over. It had been five months since he was fired for teaching about White privilege at a high school in rural Tennessee. Two months since he had fought to regain his job at an emotional three-day hearing, becoming a symbol of the acrimonious debate over the way race, racism and history should be taught in America’s schools. Now — nothing.

By Iridian Casarez, Photo: Kaite Rodriguez/Cooperation Humboldt, North Coast Journal, December 2, 2021 M ost of the seven stress-busting strategies the California Surgeon General's Office have identified to help reduce toxic stress feel so simple, like being out in nature, eating a balanced, nutritious diet or getting sufficient, high-quality sleep, but they work. So when Mary Ann Hansen was looking through applications for the 2021-2022 First Five Humboldt and Humboldt County Department of...

Please join us for December installment of Education Upended: Talking Out of Turn . This monthly series features a conversation facilitated by Lara Kain, PACEsConnection Education Consultant , with special guests on education related current events and hot topics. We will use a trauma-informed and PACEs science aware lens to examine what is going on K-12 education, what needs changing, and strategies being used in the field to disrupt harmful policies and make positive changes in the system.

This essay is part of a special issue of PREE magazine that seeks to raise awareness of the causes and impacts of ACEs in the Caribbean and elsewhere. PACEs Connections is working closely with PREE to ensure the issue reaches a broad audience. PREE is a unique online magazine for contemporary writing from and about the Caribbean. This special issue on ACEs is co-edited by children’s writer Juleus Ghunta and PREE’s editor-in-chief Annie Paul. The initial Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs)...

National Grief Awareness Week "Crying isn't the hurt, it is the process of being unhurt". Althea Solter ------------ The chronic grief of children and youth who are impacted by a parent's substance use can often go unacknowledged or be invalidated. As such, it is important for professionals to understand the chronic loss that can occur in a child's life when a parent struggles with addiction, particularly if both parents struggle. This grief can be compounded by a stigma that prevents...

Healing from complex trauma takes time, and having a treatment team that is supportive and well-trained in trauma-informed care can be an enormous help. In this article, we shall discuss together more disciplines you can have on your care team and how they can help you heal. Your Trauma Treatment Team In a former post , we examined what disciplines you might expect on a mental health treatment team: a psychiatrist and a therapist. We also covered some of the forgotten members who can also...

The Identified Patient is a concept where an individual in a family “acts out” in their behavior dysfunction coming from their family when it reaches a point where that patient can no longer tolerate it. What does that mean? Imagine you’re a child in a family where there is much more conflict and anger between your parents than there is cooperation and lovingness. As you step out into the world, something we refer to as Separation, and you run into an obstacle or a victory, you look back...

Women’s Resilience Circle Join Coach Kristie in this multigenerational approach to what it means to identify as a woman in our society. Using the We Are Resilient approach as the foundation, we will examine how our Cultural Patterns have shaped how we view the world, each other, and ourselves. Some topics include Protective Patterns and Safety, Resilience and Health, and The Power of Coming Together as Women. This circle meets once a week for six weeks. $79 to join, or join for free with...