I recently finished a haunting novel, Before We Were Yours , in which Lisa Wingate tells a fictionalized account of the true story of one of this country’s great scandals, the Tennessee Children’s Home Society and its director, Georgia Tann. From the 1920s through 1950, Tann and her organization facilitated the adoption of thousands of children across the country. Tann was a prominent member of society, held up as the “Mother of Modern Adoption,” and consulted by Eleanor Roosevelt on issues...

Excerpt from Washington Post article written by Rene Denfeld: Full article.

I love the idea of having a trauma-sensitive society. "Trauma-sensitive" is another one of those buzz phrases making its way into the mainstream.

“With Trauma-informed yoga therapy, we can tap into how our stresses are stored in the body, and find healing and relaxation,” Kelly Kreutz asserts. Kelly, a yoga instructor and an LICSW, will be teaching morning yoga and mindfulness classes at CRI’s Beyond Paper Tigers (BPT) conference later this month. Her interest in yoga developed alongside her work as a counselor specializing in trauma, grief, and anxiety. As she witnessed the benefits of yoga in her own life, she felt inspired to blend...

This is what happens inside children when they are forcibly separated from their parents. Their heart rate goes up. Their body releases a flood of stress hormones such as cortisol and adrenaline. Those stress hormones can start killing off dendrites — the little branches in brain cells that transmit mes­sages. In time, the stress can start killing off neurons and — especially in young children — wreaking dramatic and long-term damage, both psychologically and to the physical structure of the...