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Books

Veterans Find Peace on America’s Trails (yesmagazine.org)

Spending time in nature, or “ecotherapy,” is increasingly recognized as a helpful therapy for people suffering from PTSD. It’s a path to recovery that Cindy Ross promotes in her new book, Walking Toward Peace: Veterans Healing on America’s Trails . She profiles former soldiers who suffer from depression, guilt, nightmares, and hypervigilance as a result of their damaging experience in war. Regaining equilibrium in civilian life is yet another battle for these wounded warriors, sweated out on...

How Biology Prepares Us for Love and Connection (greatergood.berkeley.edu)

Our brains and bodies are wired for empathy, cooperation, generosity, and connection. Humans are social creatures with a propensity to connect with others and to form relationships. Our relationships can be sources of fun, gratification, peace, well-being, obsession, love, pain, and grief. They inform the rhythms of our days, the work that we do, and how we feel about ourselves—and they add meaning to our lives. But our social nature isn’t just a product of the way we are raised or the...

In a Breaking World, Mending Takes on More Meaning (yesmagazine.org)

Coronavirus has exposed all the things we knew were broken down and somehow could never find the time, money, or political will to fix. Now, there is a cascade of collective breaking—our cities, our bodies, our minds, our hearts. More optimistically, the global pandemic is revealing all the unprecedented opportunities we will have for fixing. Though, of course, whatever we fix will always, by definition, mark prior brokenness. Mending our clothes is not going to bring the wheels of the...

How to Live a More Courageous Life (dailygood.org)

(Image: GlennAzar.com ) In my new book, The Courage Habit , I argue that when it comes to dealing with fear, we often go about it all wrong. Instead of seeing fear as bad and trying to get rid of it when it arises, we can choose to accept fear as part of the process of change and instead practice courage. This choice can help you to feel more emotionally resilient as you make life changes or go after big dreams. Though courage is often thought of as an inborn character trait, it’s actually a...

6 Habits of Hope (dailygood.org)

If we are not present, we will not see what’s happening and therefore miss out on life. Conversely, whenever we pay attention, life reveals itself to us Being present also cultivates intrinsic hope because it gives us more choices about how to act and makes it more likely that our choices will be appropriate in the moment. Mindfulness Being present is not only about noticing what is happening in the external world; it is also about noticing what is happening in our minds. In fact, you can’t...

Resources for ACEs Survivors

With the link between ACEs and health outcomes now firmly established, many people are asking how to help those who have survived ACEs. Often people are seeking written resources. Having developed resilience curricula that were piloted at the University of Maryland School of Public Health and taught to various high-risk populations, I’d like to suggest some resources. As an outgrowth of these trainings, I developed three books that are skills-based and experiential, since information alone...

Opening Up by Writing It Down: How Expressive Writing Improves Health and Eases Emotional Pain

In my last post, I highlighted a book Vincent Felitti mentioned at the CAMFT conference in Orange County. In the same talk, Dr. Felitti also recommended a form of therapeutic writing developed by James Pennebaker to help individuals uncover painful emotions and heal trauma. Pennebaker's book Opening Up by Writing It Down: How Expressive Writing Improves Health and Eases Emotional Pain details the why and how. The Pennebaker method has been referenced elsewhere on ACEs Connection; I thought...

Why Your Brain Needs to Dream (dailygood.org)

Research shows that dreaming is not just a byproduct of sleep, but serves its own important functions in our well-being. It’s said that time heals all wounds, but my research suggests that time spent in dream sleep is what heals. REM-sleep dreaming appears to take the painful sting out of difficult, even traumatic, emotional episodes experienced during the day, offering emotional resolution when you awake the next morning. REM sleep is the only time when our brain is completely devoid of the...

 
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