October 2018

Our Buncombe County/Asheville ACEs Speakers’ Bureau has partnered up with United Way, Green Opportunities, and Asheville City Schools to present community sessions co-occurring with the Homework Diners. The community sessions are open to everyone, regardless of whether you have children or not. By joining with the Homework Diners, a community meal and child enrichment become available to those attending the community sessions. Please invite anyone and everyone you know. The more we connect,...

To set in motion the Pediatric Symposium at the 2018 National ACEs Conference in San Francisco, Dr. Nadine Burke Harris, founder and CEO of the Center for Youth Wellness, told the audience of several hundred attendees that the American Academy of Pediatrics has made it very clear to its membership how critical it is that every pediatrician understand how toxic stress impacts the health of their patients. But, she said, when it surveyed its membership it found that only 11 percent knew about...

Bullying, also known as peer victimization, is a deliberate and unsolicited action that occurs with the intent of inflicting social, emotional, physical, and/or psychological harm to someone who often is perceived as being less powerful. Bullying typically happens repeatedly and is a form of aggression and harassment that prevents someone from enjoying a safe, stress-free living, learning, or working environment. The harmful effects of bullying may be exacerbated by the frequency,...

What a wonderful connection of souls and like-minded philosophies I experienced during this interview with ACEs Connection member Elizabeth Sullivan, founder and CEO of Empower Survivors.

VJ Gupta, 2018 MacArthur Fellow, Courtesy MacArthur Foundation Generational trauma. Parenting with ACEs. Passing along resilience with trauma. Learning to believe in yourself, in spite of your adverse childhood experiences. All of these struck me as I listened to Lulu Garcia-Navarro's interview with 31-year-old Vijay Gupta , a violinist for the Los Angeles Philharmonic and recipient of the 2018 MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, aka Genius Grant. I've copied and pasted excerpts from this...

Do you carry around a beaten child within you? Do you find yourself looking out at the big bad world around you from the internal vantage point of a frightened, injured child who cannot trust anyone, who cowers in the corner of his or her own dark inner corner? You can be a large, strong looking man or woman on the outside and carry a wary, wounded, weak-feeling child bound up in a ball of too much vulnerability to deal with on the inside. This beaten child within you characterizes the...

Dear Illinois ACE Connection members, Children and families from all demographic and socioeconomic backgrounds in Illinois experience trauma, adversity, and chronic stress. Social determinants such as where we live, work, and play, can further exacerbate positive or negative physical, emotional, and behavioral health issues. The critical factor that determines if a child, family, and/or community can manage trauma, adversity, and chronic stress successfully is resilience : the process by...

I am optimistic that as we learn more about the brain's plasticity, meaning its ability to change and rewire itself, these healing modalities will continue to flourish and provide much needed relief for those who have experienced traumatic events.

As I continued practicing it, however, I found comfort in releasing the sound into the universe. There were times I would walk around the rest of the day feeling a beautiful energy, a tingly sensation, radiating from my forehead.

People who had a rough childhood often go through life feeling -- knowing -- that they are a little different than most people. It's common sense that early exposure to violence, addiction, abuse or neglect can have a lifelong effect on mental health and behavior. Until recently, researchers understood these effects to be mostly a) psychological or b) learned from dysfunctional parents. And while this is partly true, we now know the primary injury is neurological. Early trauma dysregulates...

In the dark early hours of Mother’s Day, May 13th , before the 2018 Alaska legislative session adjourned, Senate Bill 105 was approved by both the Alaska House and the Senate...making Alaska one of only a handful of states to pass ACEs awareness into statute. This represents years of education, collaboration, and some creative and dogged advocacy this last legislative session. It also represents a promising path forward.

Through grant funding, we are weaving our way into a trauma-informed family court system in our neck of the woods: http://michildsupportpundit.blogspot.com/2018/09/building-family-resiliency-in-wexford.html Tell us what you think!