The National Alliance for Drug Endangered Children training was presented as part of the Drug Endangered Children’s Initiative, a collaboration between the Plymouth County District Attorney’s Office, Plymouth County Outreach and the United Way of Greater Plymouth County’s Family Center which is funded by a federal grant from the Office for Victims of Crime.
By James Gordon, The Telegraph, November 10, 2019 There are two common and dangerous misconceptions about psychological trauma. The first is that trauma (the word is Greek and means “injury”) comes only to some of us: combatants or civilians in a war, victims of natural disasters, survivors of rape and incest, children who’ve grown up in the most callous and sordid families. The second is that trauma is an unmitigated disaster, causing permanent emotional crippling, requiring never-ending...
By Diana Hembree, San Francisco Bay View, November 11, 2019 “My 2-year-old keeps falling down when he tries to walk.” “My son is almost 24 months old, but all he can say is ‘mama’ and dada.’” “She just turned 2, and she still can’t follow the simplest instructions.” When your toddler misses a developmental milestone, like taking her first steps by age 2, it’s natural to fret. After all, in very rare cases, such delays may be a sign of an underlying condition. But a recent study suggests that...
By Louis Freedberg, EdSource, November 8, 2019 Exactly a quarter of a century ago, on Nov. 8, 1994, Californians went to the polls to vote on Proposition 187, an initiative to expel undocumented students from its public schools and universities. That was despite a Supreme Court ruling a dozen years earlier that schools were required to educate all students regardless of their immigration status. Among its many provisions was that schools officials would have had to identify all undocumented...
By Peg Streep, PsychCentral, October 23, 2019 Not long ago, I got a rather plaintive message from a reader who wondered whether there was a connection between her own childhood experiences and her problems dealing with stress: When I feel stressed or worried, it’s practically impossible for me to stay on an even keel; I am up most of the night, unable to shut off my brain, and all my worries seem to run on an endless loop. Of course, being sleep-deprived only makes me more anxious. How is...
By Monica Humphries, NationSwell, November 6, 2019 SIDEWALK TALK IS A MOVEMENT TO UNITE STRANGERS AND COMBAT LONELINESS. IT ALL STARTS WITH TALKING TO A STRANGER. Psychotherapist Traci Ruble believes that everybody — even folks with close-knit friends and family — gets lonely. It can happen anytime, and it doesn’t only happen when you’re alone. You might have felt it at a party with friends; or on a crowded subway watching strangers on their phones; or while you’re spending time with your...
The PACEs Connection Cooperative of Communities launches today. We want to continue to contribute to the PACEs movement for as long as it takes to create a worldwide healing-centered culture based on PACEs science. We want that to take hold in this world in the same way electricity has — we only notice it if it isn’t there. Nothing on PACEsConnection.com changes! Membership remains free! Everything our current 300 communities use stays free, and remains free for new ones.
Dr. Elizabeth Grady is a pediatrician at the South San Francisco Clinic, a community clinic of San Mateo Medical Center. She and Susana Flores , a senior public health nurse with San Mateo County Health, spoke with me about how the clinic and other health agencies in San Mateo have been able to craft ways to work together to prevent and heal toxic stress in children. Grady also talked about how she and Flores have been working with the Resilient Beginnings Collaborative (RBC), a group of...
If you follow me online you know I teach that Childhood PTSD is, at it’s root, a brain injury, and that therefore, resilience begins with healing the brain. This comes as a HUGE relief to most people with Childhood PTSD. It explains so much. They feel understood for the first time, and give themselves over to the work of healing. And then... obstacles appear! And mostly, they come from (of all places) within. It's normal, but if we don't build strengths to overcome inner obstacles, we get...
By Josh Sattely, Healthy Places By Design, October 10, 2019 As a board member for Healthy Places by Design who works on affordable housing at the New Hampshire Community Loan Fund, I often tout the connection between health and housing. Luckily, and somewhat belatedly, society increasingly understands just how interconnected housing and health are when considering challenges related to access, affordability, location, quality, and racial disparities. (Healthy Places by Design offers an...
By Denisa R. Superville, Education Week, November 5, 2019 The country's second-largest school district—where 82 percent of students are Latino and African American—is tapping principals to root out racial bias and inequitable practices in their schools. Los Angeles Unified School District and the Race and Equity Center at the University of Southern California have partnered to train principals and other school leaders to tackle systemic inequities. The Racial Equity Leadership Academy for...
By Kelly Farrell, The Paducah Sun, November 10, 2019 Adverse childhood experiences and toxic stress are of grave concern to Dr. Patrick Withrow, outreach director for Baptist Health Paducah. "I absolutely agree this is a major public health crisis," he said, on toxic stress. Withrow and other panelists addressed a crowded Barnes Auditorium Saturday morning at Carson-Myre Heart Center about "ACEs," toxic stress, prevention and awareness. Their panel was part of the 13th annual Addiction &...
In our trauma-informed classrooms blog post last week, we talked about choices. We mentioned the benefit of having a space in the room where a child can go to help them calm down and become regulated. While this has become increasingly common at the elementary level, we have found that this is a tool that can work for students of all ages. Even when we survey adults about the things that help them to calm down when they are upset, one of the most common answers we hear is that they want time...
Hello ACEs and Trauma-Informed Community, My name is Travis Hales, and I am a researcher at the University of North Carolina Charlotte. I have recently collaborated with the University at Buffalo's Institute on Trauma and Trauma-Informed Care to conduct a multi-year study on the impact of a substance-use residential agency adopting and implementing Trauma-Informed Care on a variety of organizational, staff, and client level outcomes. I wanted to briefly share the results of our study that...
Treatment fails when we provide traumatized families a plan to heal the child’s problems but do not troubleshoot loopholes or practice the plan’s delivery with dress rehearsals. Stuck families need help onboarding a plan otherwise it will fail. The FST (Family Systems Trauma) Model developed a Troubleshooting Countermoves Checklist that allows both the therapist and the family to identify any potential loopholes and “what will you do if?” scenarios to proactively address each one. A...