The first session of the Starting & Growing Resilient Communities: Online & IRL (In Real Life) was a success. Over 100 ACEs Connection members tuned in despite some issues with registration. I have embedded the video in this post. You have also find the video on the ACEs Connection site here . If you have any questions about the series, please contact Ingrid Cockhren , TN & Midwest Community Facilitator.
Painful emotions are a natural and adaptive response to a harmful environment, so labeling them as an illness or disorder is not helpful. Instead we should move in the direction that our human nature leads us, toward correcting the conditions that cause our pain.
Mindfulness is a fast growing trend both in the world generally and in schools. Teachers are turning to the practice as a simple way to restore calm to the classroom , help students find some quiet space, and build self-regulation skills. Some teachers say their personal mindfulness practice has helped them respond more calmly to students and helps them keep perspective. But it’s also important to realize that some of the ways mindfulness is practiced -- sitting still, eyes closed, in...
LA QUINTA, Calif. (AP) — There is nothing left to do, no more frantic phone calls to make, no begging or fighting that can fix this because the worst thing that could happen already has, so Doug Biggers settles into his recliner and braces for his daughter’s voice to echo through his head. “Keep going, Daddy,” she’s saying. It’s been months since they knelt over his 20-year-old son on the bedroom floor. But in these quiet moments, her words haunt him. [For more on this story by CLAIRE...
Before Geoffrey Pesce got on methadone, his addiction to heroin and oxycodone nearly destroyed him: He lost his home, his job, custody of his son—and his driver’s license. So even after he began to rebuild his life, Pesce relied on his parents to drive him to a methadone clinic for his daily dose. One day last July, his mother was unexpectedly unavailable, and desperate not to relapse, he drove himself. En route, Pesce was pulled over for going six miles above the speed limit and charged...
SAN JOSE, Calif. — Chally Grundwag, a mental health consultant, faced three teachers gathered around a pint-size preschool table. “What kind of kids really push your buttons?” she asked the group. The teachers at Kidango’s Dorsa Center in San Jose thought for a moment. “Crying ones,” one responded. “I want to say, ‘Stop crying; you’re going to be OK!’ But I can’t.” A crying toddler may be a commonplace challenge for a parent, but for teachers confronted with more than a dozen meltdowns at...
When @Nadine Burke Harris, a pediatrician recently appointed to serve as California’s first ever surgeon general, talks about her work, she invariably brings up Diego. Diego was a 7-year-old patient who came to her clinic because he had stopped growing. He also had asthma, eczema, and behavior problems. When Harris sat down with Diego to discuss his medical history, she found out that he had been sexually assaulted as a 4-year-old. That’s when it all clicked for her. Years of...
During the first half of my life, I tried to find THE solution to my depression and anxiety — a cure that would forever eradicate my symptoms. I was a gullible consumer of dogmatic books and advice promising Nirvana: by balancing my gut bacteria, by committing to a daily meditation practice, by taking fish oil and vitamin D, or by sweating out my toxins through hot yoga six times a week. While those are all pieces of my recovery program today, none of them alone provided the answer. After...
Stephanie Land’s new memoir, Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother’s Will to Survive , is a bracing one: When Land was 28 and unexpectedly got pregnant, she threw out her plans to study creative writing at the University of Montana in favor of raising her child. But with little support from the father and no close relatives who could help out in any meaningful way, Land soon found herself in a homeless shelter in Washington State with her tiny daughter, Mia. In the years following, Land...
What is possible when we address #AdverseChildhoodExperiences #ACEs #Trauma... "...that my voices were a meaningful response to traumatic life events, particularly childhood events, and as such were not my enemies but a source of insight into solvable emotional problems," explains Eleanor Jane Longden in her Ted Talk, "This is My Story of Schizophrenia," linked below As introduced on Ted.com/talks/eleanor_longden, To all appearances, Eleanor Longden was just like every other student, heading...
CentraCare Health has partnered with Twin Cities Public Television (TPT) to raise awareness of childhood trauma and its effect on health. Research has shown that life experiences – especially during childhood when brains and bodies are developing rapidly – play a major role in overall health later in life. The health and social effects of these events, known as ACEs (Adverse Childhood Experiences), are featured in a series of five documentaries – much of which was filmed in St. Cloud and the...
Incarceration in the United States peaked in 2008. Since then, many jurisdictions have expanded alternatives for low-level offenders, decriminalized some minor offenses, and reformed police practices. As a result, the nation’s incarceration rate has declined from 1,000 inmates per 100,000 adults to 830 inmates per 100,000 adults . The FIRST STEP Act, signed into law last year, is federal criminal justice reform that is designed to reduce sentences for nonviolent offenses — a sign that this...
Ron Clewer couldn’t believe what he was hearing. A single mom, a black woman in her early 30s, had just told housing authority officials in Rockford, Ill., that she would kick her 15-year-old son out of her apartment if it meant she could keep the place for herself and her two younger children. It happened because private security guards hired by the housing agency had stopped the son, and, when they found he wasn’t carrying identification, searched him. They found the remains of a marijuana...
U.S. officials at the southern border will begin sending some asylum applicants back to Mexico on Friday as the Trump administration implements new measures preventing migrants from waiting in the United States while their cases are processed. The initiative, announced by the Department of Homeland Security on Thursday night, follows high-level talks between the two governments late last year as U.S. border officials struggled to contend with waves of Central American migrants fleeing...