June 2017

You know that sinking feeling you get when you say yes to too many requests, take on too much when you know you won’t be able to tackle it all, feel obligated to push yourself to the limit out of fear, anxiety , depression, loneliness, competitiveness or something else? Being in over your head is never pleasant, yet it doesn’t have to reduce you to a blubbering mess. [For more of this story, written by Suzanne Kane, go to ...

One Spot Left in the week long Level 1 Residential Training at Myrna' home in Vancouver Canada... The training provides an opportunity to understand the primal period, from preconception through the first year of life is vital for anyone who works therapeutically with people, including infants, children, families or adults.

"If you were to ask me what my thoughts are on the most effective public health advance that I can think of in current times, I would say to figure out how to improve parenting skills across the nation." Vincent J. Felitti, MD ACE Study author Visit advancingparenting.org to read about what we do, why we do it, and our plans for the future.

People recover from the everyday traumas of childhood in many different ways. Here's a personal experience I thought to share. Although it is slightly embarrassing for me to admit certain aspects of myself in this post, I feel proud of it too. This might resonate for you if your curious about your response to disappointment.

On June 20th in Rogers, Arkansas, Gundersen National Child Protection Training Center will be kicking off their Violence Intervention and Prevention Summit. As a leader in the field of child protection, Gundersen National Child Protection Training Center has developed advanced courses in forensic interviewing, prevention, addressing the spiritual needs of maltreated children and reforming undergraduate training of future child protection professionals. Offering a broad variety of session...

Parents with PTSD from ACEs sharing what's hard about parenting while post-traumatically stressed: "Managing the terror around the possibility of everyone being a perp." "How to talk to children about why they won't meet X relative." “There was a point when I would feel completely overwhelmed by something as simple as having to make breakfast and school lunches at the same time.” "I didn't understand that not all parents reacted or were triggered the way I was." "was stone set on not...

Dr. Tasneem Ismailji talks about the creation of the Academy on Violence and Abuse (AVA) and becoming an advocate for Family Violence Prevention.

County jail is the last place someone experiencing a mental health crisis should end up. Emergency rooms are better, but still not ideal as people experiencing mental health crises are often relegated to windowless rooms with limited treatment options and minimal exercise for days, and sometimes even weeks. Both systems can be dehumanizing and traumatic at a time when people in crisis are the most vulnerable. All too often, there is a revolving door between the ER, jail and the streets. [For...

Ten students who helped design their own educational program made up the first graduating class of Hawthorne’s Da Vinci RISE High , a pilot created to help foster and homeless youth conclude their high school education. The students had the responsibility and opportunity to help design the pilot program during the 2016-17 school year. The program focuses on building closer teacher-student relationships and support among peers and incorporates a restorative justice culture. All of them will...

Why would a school cop in Florida throw a slender, autistic fourth-grade student to the ground? You might assume that the child must have presented some kind of serious threat to himself or others, that other skilled experts had already tried de-escalating interventions, and that there was no other choice. Such was not the case for 10-year-old Seraph Jones. This spring, a school cop threw him down and held him against the ground with sufficient force to cause rug burn. It turns out that...

“Awareness does not always associate with action or effectiveness,” Carrie Baron says. “Just because you’re aware doesn’t mean that you’re changing the situation.” Earlier this year, an article published in the Stanford Social Innovation Review urged organizations to “Stop Raising Awareness Already,” decrying the abundance of communications campaigns that fail to gain long-term traction. Another article asked readers to reevaluate their relationship with their daily diet of graphic images —...

An elderly woman leans over to smell a lush flowerbed of lavender in sprawling gardens surrounding an imposing early 20th-century palace in a pastoral corner of eastern Poland. Slowly a smile lights up her face, erasing her previous stony expression -- she suffers from paranoid schizophrenia which often renders her emotionless. The sudden burst of happiness is one of the benefits of horticultural, or garden therapy, as it is better known. She is among 59 female patients at this state-run,...