Category Archives: Resilience

Fight burnout and compassion fatigue with lots of self-care ideas

November 30, 2017 By in Adverse childhood experiences, Resilience 6 Comments

By Larissa Krause 

For years I have sought out with fierce determination conversations, books and articles such as this. Articles with titles like “5 Steps To Wellness,” “7 Must-Have self-care Tips” or “10 Ways for a Healthier You.”

From peer-reviewed articles to O Magazine, I sift through pages with critical eyes looking for that aha moment where I find something new to share with teachers, administrators, students and other caring professionals. I usually ignore the introductions and skip ahead to the bullet points and bold print, only to find the same strategies time and again, like mindful breathing, healthy boundaries, diet and exercise, aromatherapy, etc.

It is this moment when I immediately feel let down … again. How can something as simple as taking care of ourselves turn into something so challenging? Why don’t these things feel satisfying? What is getting in the way?

Seven years ago, I started out on a mission to break down self-care, give it some rules, some structure and some checkboxes. I saturated myself with data and conversations with anyone who had gained ground in this area. I wanted to synthesize in a bento-box format the dos and don’ts of self-care.

Continue reading →

England and Wales produce new animation about ACEs & resilience

May 1, 2017 By in ACE Study, Adverse childhood experiences, Child abuse, Child trauma, Resilience, Solutions 8 Comments

Here’s a new ACE animation that was posted last week by Dr. Helen Lowey and Prof. Mark A. Bellis at Public Health Wales.

Lowey, consultant in public health, Blackburn with Darwen Borough Council in Northwest England, sent this information with the animation:

Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) are those that directly harm a child; such as physical, verbal and sexual abuse or physical or emotional neglect – as well as those that affect the environment where they grow up; including parental separation, domestic violence, mental illness, alcohol abuse, drug use or incarceration.

Continue reading →

After ICE detains father, Los Angeles sisters cope with trauma, disruption

April 28, 2017 By in Adverse childhood experiences, Child trauma, Resilience Leave a comment

The Avelica family

By Holden Slattery

Fatima Avelica was riding to school in her father’s car when a traffic stop by immigration officers in northeast Los Angeles suddenly turned her world upside down.

In the car, 13-year-old Fatima sobbed as she pointed her cell phone camera at the windshield and shot a video that shows Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers handcuffing and detaining her father, Romulo Avelica-Gonzalez.

Continue reading →

Anxious parenting: Parenting with ACEs

April 23, 2017 By in Adverse childhood experiences, Resilience, Solutions 9 Comments

When my daughter was younger I was anxious. I didn’t have full-blown anxiety attacks, as some do. I had an almost constant anxiety motoring within me that would ebb and flow.

Sometimes, it lasted days. Other times, weeks. It always returned. When it did, it was hard to read, concentrate or focus. It was hard to eat or sleep or work.

It was hard to parent.

Continue reading →

Greater Kansas City first responders, educators, health care workers, sports & faith community embrace learning about childhood trauma, practicing resilience

April 20, 2017 By in ACE Study, Adverse childhood experiences, Community prevention programs, Resilience, Solutions 1 Comment

In a video on the Resilient KC website, police officer Mikki Cassidy notes that “my regular day is everybody else’s worst day.” Then she describes how mindfulness training has helped her find peace amid the clamor: “This moment, right here, I’m okay.”

Later in the clip, Sonia Warshawski, a Holocaust survivor, recalls being shoved onto a train to Treblinka and, later, losing her mother to the gas chamber. “One of my highest points is when I speak in schools, when students tell me, ‘You changed my life,’” she says.

And Josiah Hoskins, a youth raised in foster care, talks about the mantra that helped him survive: “Even if all you have is yourself, with a wall behind you and the world coming at you, you can make peace with yourself.”

The video concludes with four words—“Stories Matter. What’s yours?”—and an invitation for others to share experiences of adversity and healing.


Awareness on Both Sides of the State Line

The campaign is just one prong of Kansas City’s multi-sector effort to raise awareness about adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and build resilience on both sides of the state line. Resilient KC — a partnership between the pre-existing Trauma Matters Kansas City (TMKC) network and the Greater Kansas City Chamber of Commerce — has worked to cultivate “ambassadors” who can bring the ACEs message to colleagues, clients and community members in business, the armed services, education, justice and health care.

ACEs are adverse childhood experiences that harm children’s developing brains so profoundly that the effects show up decades later; they cause much of the U.S. and the world’s chronic disease, most mental illness, and are at the root of most violence.

The CDC-Kaiser Adverse Childhood Experiences Study (ACE Study), a groundbreaking public health study, discovered that childhood trauma leads to the adult onset of chronic diseases, depression and other mental illness, violence and being a victim of violence.

The ACE Study looked at 10 types of childhood trauma: physical, emotional and sexual abuse; physical and emotional neglect; living with a family

Continue reading →

April the Giraffe: An unplanned social experiment and what we can learn from it

April 18, 2017 By in ACE Study, Resilience 14 Comments

Viral videos are not new. Every few weeks, something will be posted in a forum such as YouTube or Facebook; a few friends will share the video with one another, and then suddenly, that video is being watched by millions. The most recent viral video takes this to a new level. April the Giraffe was not just a video, it was a live camera streaming online, allowing viewers to watch a pregnant giraffe and ultimately watch the birth of her calf.

So, what makes the viral giraffe cam different than other viral videos? The answer is simple: the length of the video. Instead of a clip lasting several minutes, April was streaming live for days, and then weeks. And people were tuning in consistently, day after day, for hours at a time — that was new. April delivered a healthy baby boy calf on Saturday, April 15, 2017. On April 17, Good Morning America estimated that more than 1.2 million viewers watched the birth live on their computers or mobile devices.  Jordan Patch, the owner of Animal Adventure Park, estimates that more than 300 million people viewed April the Giraffe since the park installed the live camera.

Continue reading →

Putting resilience and resilience surveys under the microscope

February 5, 2017 By in ACE Study, Adverse childhood experiences, Resilience 25 Comments

aflower

“Resilience is a message of hope,” says Debbie Alleyne, a child welfare specialist at the Center for Resilient Children at Devereux Advanced Behavioral Health, located in Villanova, PA.“It is important for everyone to know that no matter their experience, there is always hope for a positive outcome. Risk does not define destiny.”

Continue reading →

Building human resilience for climate change addressed at Washington, DC, conference

December 13, 2016 By in Adverse childhood experiences, Community prevention programs, Resilience, Solutions Leave a comment

rooftop-view-from-apa

The missing piece in the response to climate disruption—preparing humans to cope with the trauma and toxic stress it causes—was the focus of a recent Conference on Building Human Resilience for Climate Change sponsored by the International Transformational Resilience Coalition (ITRC). About a hundred mental health professionals, emergency response and disaster management officials, and others from education and faith communities gathered in Washington, DC. Continue reading →

Congressional briefing addresses public policy to improve response to ACEs

December 5, 2016 By in ACE Study, Adverse childhood experiences, Child trauma, Chronic disease, Community prevention programs, Epigenetics, Legislation, Resilience, Solutions 3 Comments

Room view with Senators Heitkamp & Durbin.jpg

In the final weeks of the 114th Congress, Senator Heidi Heitkamp (D-ND) welcomed her colleague Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) as a new host for the third and final briefing on addressing adverse childhood experiences (ACEs). The December 1 briefing focused on public policies to improve coordination, prevention and response to childhood trauma.

ACEs comes from the CDC-Kaiser Permanente Adverse Childhood Experiences Study and subsequent surveys that show that most people in the U.S. have at least one ACE, and that people with an accumulation of childhood adversities — including divorce, racism, living with an alcoholic parent, and physical abuse — have a higher risk of adult onset of chronic health problems such as heart disease, cancer, diabetes, suicide, and alcoholism.

Continue reading →

I’m not cured, but I am healing

December 4, 2016 By in ACE Study, Adverse childhood experiences, Child trauma, Chronic disease, Epigenetics, Neurobiology, Resilience, Solutions, Trauma 17 Comments
Donna Jackson Nakazawa

Donna Jackson Nakazawa

More than 133 million American adults — one in two of us — suffer from a chronic condition, including autoimmune disease, fibromyalgia, digestive disorders, migraines, back pain, depression, diabetes, cancer and chronic pain. A recent study published in JAMA Internal Medicine found that those of us in our 40s, 50s and 60s are twice as likely as our parents were to suffer from debilitating chronic conditions in middle age.

I’m one of those statistics. I’ve spent much of the past decade navigating my life around health crises. Twice I’ve been paralyzed by Guillain-Barre Syndrome, an autoimmune disease similar to multiple sclerosis, but with a more sudden onset and a wider array of possible outcomes. Other diagnoses — low blood cell counts, thyroiditis and the need for a pacemaker — have also complicated my health and my life.

Continue reading →

%d bloggers like this: