This touching video was put together by the Cleveland Clinic and posted as “Empathy: The Human Connection to Patient Care” on Feb. 27, 2013 on the clinic’s YouTube channel. (Everyone Matters wrapped their logo around it, gave it a catchier title — “If we could see inside other people’s hearts” and published on their YouTube channel on March 20.)

You could take this approach beyond the hospital setting to Anywhere, USA/Canada/Australia/Mexico/Kenya, etc. And you could place it in any school, mental health clinic, prison, court, social services waiting room, or workplace. It goes to the heart of the trauma-informed/resilience/compassion approach of asking: “What happened to you?”, not “What’s wrong with you?”

A woman once told me a story of how her world shifted after she learned about the CDC’s ACE Study, epidemiological research that revealed the link between childhood trauma and the adult onset of chronic disease, depression, violence and being a victim of violence. She said she never looked at homeless people the same again. Instead of regarding them as “lazy” and wondering why they just didn’t pull themselves together and get a job, she realized that they were survivors — just barely — of the worst things that people do to each other and systems do to people.