November 2018

ACEs Connection Webinar: The trauma toll on pediatric immigrants, refugees and their families You’ll receive tips for health care providers in pediatric settings and beyond When: Friday, Dec. 14, 2018, 10:30-11:30 am Pacific Time/1:30-2:30 Eastern Time Please register here for this webinar. Our speakers include: Dr. Heyman Oo , MD MPH is a primary care pediatrician in Marin County and an Associate Physician/Clinical Instructor for the General Pediatrics Department at Zuckerberg San Francisco...

Lara Kain is an experienced educator, consultant, and national speaker on implementing ACEs science and trauma-informed practices into schools and communities, with a focus on building holistic trauma-responsive systems. She brings over two decades of experience at the local, state, and national level. Before joining ACEs Connection, she developed trauma-informed community schools in Los Angeles, worked for the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction supporting school improvement and as...

“The most striking thing I heard was that when kids were highly escalated in the lower part of their brain, they physiologically can’t learn or take in new knowledge and problem-solve,” Sporleder recounted to participants in “Trauma-informed Schools: A conversation with Jim Sporleder”, an ACEs Connection webinar held on Nov. 19, 2018.

June 17, 2018. The day that would change my life forever. I started drinking at the young age of 14. I fell in love with being drunk. I felt like it made life a lot more fun and entertaining. I felt like it made me a lot more sociable and likable person. It helped ease my nerves in a social environment and made me not care what others thought about me. To be frank, it made me not care at all. I liked the feeling of security and invincibility when I was intoxicated. It wasn’t until after...

As an anxious air traveler I am frequently not the most serene person with whom to travel. Consequently, on a recent Sunday morning, traveling from Florida to New York with my husband and son, I was pleased by the ease of a process that is often so taxing. With few travelers about, flights on time and virtually no lines, we sped through security exceptionally fast. Upon boarding, I noticed a boy, actually a young man – he looked to be about eighteen or nineteen, seated in my son’s assigned...

CHEVERLY, Md. ― When Che Bullock awoke in a hospital in August 2013, the first thing he felt was grateful to be alive. He’d been stabbed 13 times outside a nightclub in the Washington, D.C., area and taken by helicopter to a medical center, where doctors performed lifesaving surgery. Bullock’s sense of relief quickly faded, first into physical pain and anxiety, then into fear and finally into a rage toward his attackers. “It was kind of like they put a hit out on me,” said Bullock, now 30.

America is suffering an epidemic of loneliness. According to a recent large-scale survey from the health care provider Cigna, most Americans suffer from strong feelings of loneliness and a lack of significance in their relationships. Nearly half say they sometimes or always feel alone or “left out.” Thirteen percent of Americans say that zero people know them well. The survey, which charts social isolation using a common measure known as the U.C.L.A. Loneliness Scale, shows that loneliness...

Executive function and self-regulation skills are like an air traffic control system in the brain—they help us manage information, make decisions, and plan ahead. We need these skills at every stage of life, and while no one is born with them, we are all born with the potential to develop them. But, how do we do that? The Center on the Developing Child created this Guide to Executive Function to walk you through everything you need to know about these skills and how to develop and practice...

Early identification of trauma exposure and treatment of traumatic stress is critical to a child’s lifelong health and well-being. Exposure to trauma is common, with approximately 71% of all children exposed to violence, abuse, or other forms of trauma by 17 years of age. 1 Trauma exposure places children at increased risk for a host of developmental, behavioral health, and health problems. For example, childhood trauma exposure is associated with traumatic stress (including post-traumatic...

In 2014, Slate published ten photographs from a work in progress by the artist Brenda Ann Kenneally, documenting the lives of a group of twenty-first-century American teen-agers in Troy, a city in upstate New York. The subjects in her images were not doing much: in one, an obese teen-age boy lay on a mattress in a homeless shelter, disconsolate; an exhausted child at a kitchen table waited for his bottle to be filled with coffee, his favorite drink; a young woman named Kayla, one of...

What does it take to realize the vision of health, safety, and wellbeing for all? Drawing from successful initiatives that dramatically increased the length and quality of people’s lives, Prevention Institute developed the System of Preventionframework to support health leaders and their partners to delve into systems-level work as they innovate, build practice, advance policy and systems changes, and generate momentum for comprehensive prevention and health equity. Now available in print...

This article is not meant to be political. It attempts to be a factual and functional approach to understanding and recovering from our national trauma. The fact is that we in the U.S. are living in a nation that is increasingly traumatized by the malignant, narcissistic rhetoric of its leadership and the shocking natural disasters and human violence that it minimizes and evades. Traumatized people are frozen in their fearful feelings of hopelessness, helplessness and pathetic dependency. As...