Liz Huntley framed by a photo of her as a 5-year-old
Liz Huntley is a passionate children’s advocate who believes that all children should have access to preschool. It could make a life-changing difference in a child’s life. It did for Huntley.
The attorney and author described her childhood to a rapt audience of more than 800 gathered on Oct. 16 for the two-day 2018 National ACEs Conference in San Francisco. She was one of four speakers at a plenary session that touched on foundational themes of the ACEs movement. Huntley’s anecdotes illustrated how caring adults can build resilience in children who have experienced severe childhood trauma. Huntley’s parents were drug dealers. Her father went to prison. Her mother became addicted to drugs, dropped off her and her siblings at relatives and committed suicide. She was sexually abused by a relative. And as she was headed to her first day of preschool, she recalls feeling deep shame.
“I was so scared. I was ashamed that my mother was a drug addict and killed herself, and I was ashamed that my dad was in prison. I was ashamed that I was sexually abused and I felt dirty,” she recounts in a strong and resonant Alabama drawl. “And those preschool ladies come in and they said, ‘Come on in here baby.’ They got down on their knees and talked to me and I loved that, and I learned if you do really smart stuff then these ladies are going to bring love on you!”
Huntley’s good fortune continued in elementary school where she was riddled with panic because she had arrived at school alone on the first day without her grandmother and without being registered. When the teacher approached her and asked her name, Huntley notes, “She could have chalked me up as one of those children. “But instead, that lady with tears in her eyes looked me in my face and said ‘Elizabeth Huntley, you’re going to be the brightest student I ever had!’” recalls Huntley.
“She didn’t even know about ACEs, but she understood the position of her role and knew how to tap into the potential, and she also understood the feeling of resilience among kids who are survivors!”
Dr. Sandra Hernandez, the president and CEO of the California Health Care Foundation, shared an anecdote that highlighted why health care providers need to learn from their patients “What happened to you?” And why the ACEs movement needs to break down silos.
She talked about a man who had been her patient for six years who was intermittently homeless. He arrived at an appointment hours late, intoxicated and fell asleep in the waiting room. “I could have started [the appointment] with ‘Are you using clean needles?’ But it struck me as so odd that he would be so intoxicated, but take two buses to see me. There was something he needed from me. And he said, ‘I’ve never ever told you why I am this way,’” she said.
The patient started to cry and tells Hernandez that when he was seven years old he and one of his younger brothers were playing along an arroyo and neither of them knew how to swim. “His younger brother went to chase something, fell into the water and he watched his baby brother drown.” The patient told her that his father blamed him for the younger brother’s death, he blamed himself and he was ostracized. “I had not been trained in trauma,” she said. “He cried, I cried. I had shared his grief that had been unresolved. And I felt as a primary care provider somewhat impotent.”
That experience, explained Hernandez, was pivotal. “I know that what we need in this movement is to build systems that allow us to integrate all of these pieces together.” That means “integrating primary care, ACEs screening, substance use, mental health and physical health,” she explained.
Dr. Renee Boynton-Jarrett, associate professor of pediatrics and the founding director of the Boston-based Vital Village Network, tells a story from her own childhood to illustrate how her experiences led her to the work she does today. In a photo projected behind her, she points to herself as a preschooler with her fellow “lovebugs” as they were known. All of the preschoolers are beaming at the camera, including her “besties,” Floyd and Chanelle, sitting on either side of her. And she says they had this early feeling of connection to one another, a sense of family.
However, said Boynton-Jarrett, “Many of the lovebugs [later] suffered from anxiety and depression, substance abuse. Many struggled with the justice system, police brutality, and my very best friend Chanelle committed suicide before she finished high school. Not surprisingly, thinking about my lovebug family, I was interested in the whole ecosystem. What was it we could do to change community environments?”
One problem with her story, said Boynton-Jarrett, is that it was incomplete: “The institutional racism that caused our school to be underfunded, intergenerational trauma, violence, redlining in the neighborhood are all factors, but they’re invisible.” And for Boynton-Jarrett and her work with Vital Village in Boston, the solution has been focusing on the question: “What can we do collectively that we can’t do alone?” One key ingredient, she says, “is focusing on the solutions within communities that are already working.” And, she continued, “We have to use a trauma-informed lens to bring non-traditional partners into the same space, and to use a co-designed lens, where community members are in leadership at the center.”
Dr. Tami DeCoteau, a licensed psychologist at DeCoteau Trauma-informed Care & Practice, PLLC, described how family narratives were used in her family to counteract the disconnect that narratives from the dominant culture created in her as a small child. She described how she came from a family in the Midwest who were Christian, and as a child she was perplexed that in all of the stories she read about Jesus, he never visited indigenous people in North America.
“I wondered why didn’t he visit my relatives. Didn’t he love us too?” When she asked her father, whom she described as the keeper of Native knowledge in the family, she said, “My father said that Jesus was a great physician. He came to heal the sick, and our people were well. My ancestors were physically, mentally and spiritually healthy. They had access to everything they needed.”
“I’ll never forget that conversation with my father,” she continued. “Because it helped me to understand that my ancestors were not terrible, but that something terrible had happened to them. It helped me understand that we were not inherently bad, but that we needed healing.”
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