It felt good to wear my pink shirt today and ask my college students – future teachers – to remember this day when their students are looking up to them, to be sure not only to commemorate the day each year, but also to live its meaning all days of the year in their classroom and beyond. One client I worked with today is the parent of a victim of bullying. His 9-year-old son now lives with the pain and shame of having been abused by his peers since his first day of Kindergarten, whose nightmare hasn’t ended yet. Any one of us, whether or not we are in a leadership position, can encourage others to join in on taking a stand against bullying, racism, and any other form of peer abuse. To those of you who understand its far-reaching consequences for all of us in this interconnected society we live in, and who took that stand today, thank you for doing your part. We will eradicate the effects of abuse and every other form of trauma, and we will do it one enlightened act at a time.

This coming Wednesday, February 25th, wear pink and take a stand against bullying, racism and any other form of peer abuse. I, for one, am thrilled, that we are finally taking something seriously that has been minimized for decades, something that we now know can have long-lasting traumatic effects on our children. With the overwhelming amount of evidence we have that reveals the specific kinds of changes trauma can make to the brain, changes that compromise learning and adaptive behavior, let us boldly show that we are paying attention and that we care. Visit http://www.pinkshirtday.ca to learn more.

Whether you are a parent or a teacher, there are 5 things you could be doing right now to help a child who has been shaken by a crisis, too much stress, or trauma. The goal is always to restore a greater sense of balance and ease in the child’s nervous system so he or she can be fully present to learn and behave adaptively. 1) Foster a compassionate RELATIONSHIP that communicates, “We will get through this together.” 2) Create relative SAFETY with consistent rules and regulations that are posted and/or reviewed with clear rewards and consequences that the child can come to predict. Safety comes from predictability. 3) Involve the child in COMMUNITY, a place where they feel they belong, where they matter and have chances to start over anew no matter what. 4) Provide the child with multiple opportunities to experience their own COMPETENCE. What they feel good at doesn’t matter, just that they feel good doing something, i.e. playing a game, making someone laugh, helping someone, making something from scratch, learning something new, teaching something to a younger child, getting a chance to show off a talent, skill, ability, athletic, artistic, or intellectual accomplishment. 5) Support SENSORY AWARENESS by talking to and engaging the child in noticing the sensations that are happening in his or her body, where they are tight, tense, relaxed, calm, shaky, or warm. The body is speaking to us to let us know when we need to take care of ourselves. If you learn to do this for yourself first, you will be able to pass on to your child one of the most important resources of all (please read “Why Students Underachieve: What Educators and Parents Can Do about It” to learn why all of this is so important.)

Someone explained to me recently that the word “trauma” is used so much today that it has become a cliche; it has lost its meaning. Perhaps we call what isn’t neccesarily traumatic “trauma,” and thereby render the word meaningless even when used appropriately. So what do I mean as a trauma healing specialist, when I use the word? I mean an encounter with the possibility of death, an experience of terror that leaves us with the sense, the knowing, that we could die at any moment. This is what traumatized people, including our children, thereafter believe, not only that death is possible but also likely, and whether we live or die is beyond our control. A traumatized child in school trying to concentrate on reading, writing, and arithmetic is at a disadvantage we are only beginning to understand. The number of children coming to school traumatized is a number growing so vast we are tempted to deny it, minimize it, or ignore it altogether. We don’t have to. As parents and educators alike, we have all we need to help these children, we just have to want to know what’s really going on. And I have to tell you, it’s not just tough times.

I have a bee in my bonnet about the problem we all seem to have about using the word “trauma.” A person said to me recently that she wanted me to impart my knowledge to teachers without talking about trauma because it isn’t something teachers need to be concerned about. With everything going on in the world today, and in our own country here at home, it is just shocking to me that teachers don’t know that if they are in front of a classroom of children everyday they are dealing with the effects of trauma – divorce, reconstituted families, death, illness, medical procedures, car accidents, bullying, racism, childhood obesity (an indicator of trauma in many cases), poverty, homelessness, hunger, lack of health insurance, substance abuse, community violence, every kind of abuse, not to mention that children are in front of television and video games instead of outside in nature where natural healing is more likely to take place. Teachers should not be required to take on the role of therapist, and it is not necessary. They can and should operate within the parameters of their own role and know that there are simple yet powerful things they can do – or not do – to be the difference in a child’s life. Let’s at least start with recognizing what we are dealing with…the effects of, uh-oh, here’s that word again, trauma.

1. Knowing that parents are stressed in these tough economic times, is it safe to say that our children are experiencing that stress as well? How? What might they be experiencing as children?

The best way I have come to help others understand how children experience the stress around them is this: Imagine you are walking through the woods. It’s a beautiful day. It’s quiet. You’re all alone, and you feel at peace. Suddenly, you hear a branch break. The silence is broken and you wonder what could have caused it. You orient to the area where the sound came from. You become solely focused, scanning the environment, sensing that something is wrong and you could be in danger. The key word here is sense. You feel a tightness in your throat perhaps, quivering knees, butterflies in the stomach. When your brain and body feel that they may be in danger, it is a sensory experience. The oldest part of our brain – the reptilian or animal brain – is communicating to us through its language – sensations – in order to warn us that we may be under threat and may have to fight for our survival. For children, this economic crisis and the stress it invokes within their home is that branch breaking in the woods.

Continue reading article here … Supporting Children Through This Economic Crisis – Q & A

“There is a healing power in community and a great need for our children and their leaders to come together as a community. When children and adults work together in a counseling or psycho-educational style, they share their lives with one another. As a result, they learn to interact with honor and respect for each other’s experiences.”

Continue reading article here … Group Counseling – Group Therapy – The Process and the Promise

“There are numerous signs and symptoms that let us know when our child has been traumatized. As we review them, it will become apparent that many are also part of other more commonly diagnosed problems, such as ADHD, bipolar disorder, and depression. This has become a serious problem in the fields of medicine, mental health, and education. Children are being misdiagnosed and prescribed ineffective medications that often do not work because the original diagnosis was wrong. It is my hope that with more parents learning about trauma and its impact on children’s functioning at home and at school, we will stop the misdiagnoses and use of medications that have harmed many of our children.”

Continue reading article here … Not ADHD, Not Bipolar, Not Learning Disabilities – Trauma

“Parents of children with so-called ADHD, Bipolar Disorder, learning disabilities anxiety disorders, even Pervasive Developmental Disorder need to know what trauma is for children and that the effects of trauma can be healed. Most times I interview parents they tell me their child has never experienced a trauma. Yet when I ask more specific questions about accidents, injuries, falls, surgeries, hospitalizations, medical or dental procedures, as well as in utero and delivery experiences, their face turns white.”

Continue reading article here … Trauma 101 – What Parents Need to Know

Medical and mental health communities largely believe that the effects of trauma, especially post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), can only be managed throughout the lifespan with medication and traditional forms of therapy. But they would be wrong. In fact, the effects of trauma, inluding PTSD, are natural responses to unnatural events and they can be healed.

The latest neuroscience points to the need for more body- or brain-based therapies that engage the part of the brain that was most involved and ultimately traumatized by the event (or series of events). The reptilian brain, and its more primitive responses of fight/flight/freeze, is what mediates our response to threat. It is left highly activated or “stuck on high” when the completion of these survival energies is not possible at the time of the event(s). New therapies are able to communicate with and soothe this part of the brain in order to bring the nervous system back into balance so it can regulate itself again in a healthy way.

Outcome research is at the infancy stage for these new approaches, but their development was conscientiously based on the most recent neuroscientific findings. Thousands of anecdotal cases as well as preliminary evidence strongly suggest the efficacy of Somatic Experiencing (SE), Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, and Self-Regulation Therapy (SRT), all body-based interventions that do not involve the medication and/or traditional talk therapy that can be particularly disruptive to the healing of trauma.