Janet Pozmantier, a licensed professional counselor, marriage and family therapist, play therapist, award-winning author, curriculum developer, trainer, and child advocate specializing in primary prevention programming, believes we should.
In this last episode honoring Women’s History Month, we will explore the importance of teaching children about their own development and positive discipline techniques that might prepare them to be mentally healthy future parents. The hope for this teaching is to diminish the risk of children passing on dysfunctional or abusive parenting techniques that may have been used in their homes.
Pozmantier, who has created and successfully implemented child abuse prevention, relationship, parenting, mental health, trauma, and youth suicide prevention education curricula for children, youth, and adults is the co-author of a book on early childhood development (The First Years, DK Publishing, 2001).
She was instrumental in establishing several children’s advocacy organizations in Houston and served as the founding director of the Center for School Behavioral Health at Mental Health America of Greater Houston.
Pozmantier has spoken at local, state, and national conferences and specializes in “hands-on,” interactive presentations.
She is a recipient of the Unsung Hero Award from Children at Risk, the Distinguished Service Award from ChildBuilders, and the Trainer of the Year Award from Texas Association for the Education of Young Children.
Pozmantier is also a certified Mental Health First Aid Trainer (Youth and Adult), a certified Training Specialist for Mind Matters, and an American Leadership Forum Senior Fellow. As a consultant, she provides strategic planning, board and staff development, specialized trainings, and other services for non-profit organizations.
Social worker and PACEs Connection supporter Becky Green hiking with her partner, Kerry Toner (l) and good friend Paul Gerlitz (r).
The number of donors giving to PACEs Connection with a monthly gift is increasing.
“While we’ve added about 16 new monthly donors recently, and we are grateful for them, it would be good to see more of our members — and visitors — supporting our work to prevent and heal trauma,” said Ingrid Cockhren, PACEs Connection CEO.
With more than 58,000 members of this networking community, and with the staff needed to support the site, the communities, the newsletters, our podcasts, webinars, and conferences, Cockhren is asking members to sign on right now to make a monthly donation.
“If just ten percent of you made an automatic monthly donation of $10, you could help us cover a substantial portion of our budget,” said Cockhren.
If you would like to be featured as a monthly donor, please send an email to Carey Sipp, director of strategic partnerships, with “Donor Spotlight” in the subject line to answer the 15 questions and let your fellow community members know more about you, how you use PACEs Connection, why you support the work.
Please consider following in the footsteps of social worker and supporter Becky Green, who shares below her reasons for making her monthly gift to PACEs Connection.
Name:Becky Green
Occupation:I’m a social worker by training, my current role is Director of Trauma Informed Care and Integrated Services for an outpatient behavioral health organization called South Shore Guidance Center in Freeport, NY.
Connection to PACEs Connection/PACEs science?I’m a student of PACEs science, I relate to it personally and use PACEs Connection as a key source of information in my work.
Do you work in the field?Yes! I have the amazing privilege of helping an outpatient behavioral health organization become more trauma-informed, using PACEs science.
How did you find out about PACEs Connection?I stumbled across the ACES study around 10 years ago, and immediately was blown away by the science linking psychological trauma to physical health outcomes. At the time, I was giving trauma-informed care trainings to a variety of audiences, including medical providers and students, and I knew how important it was for those audiences to understand the science. I would often refer folks to the ACES Too High website for more resources, and then discovered PACEs Connection through that resource.
Were you surprised to find this resource?I’ll say yes, simply because it is such a gift that this incredible resource freely exists.
What part of PACEs Connection do you like best?The Resource Center is my go-to.
How do you use PACEs Connection?I use PACEs Connection to stay current on trauma-related research, trainings, content, etc. I often will visit the Resource Center (my favorite section) when I’m putting together a training or updating our internal trauma-informed care resource directory.
Do you read the Weekly RoundUp?Yes!
Do you share stories from the Weekly RoundUp?Yes, I’ll often forward specific stories or articles from the Weekly RoundUp to our staff.
Do you belong to a resiliency initiative?I joined several of the PACEs Connection communities when I first started in my role (like Books! Educational Videos! Documentaries! and others) but admittedly, am not as active as I would like to be in those spaces. I’m not a big social media person in general, so I tend to use other aspects of PACEs Connection more.
What prompted you to support PACEs Connection with your monthly gifts?I think PACEs science is so incredibly vital to so many areas, and PACEs Connection does such a good job as reliable clearinghouse of information and connection.
What keeps you giving as a monthly donor?If I can play a small part to support such vital work, I am in.
What would you tell others, to encourage them to support PACEs Connection on a monthly basis?Imagine if we lived in a world where we all truly understood the connections between the adverse experiences we have as children and lives we lead as adults…imagine if we lived in a world where we had adequate resources to support children and their families to prevent or minimize those ACES, and also to support adults in truly healing from them…imagine if the systems that shape our lives (schools, healthcare, social services, etc) were trauma-informed…this is the work that the PACEs Connection does, but only with our support.
What is your greatest hope for what happens with PACEs science? That we end child abuse? Create equity? Eliminate racism? Do away with poverty? Create a trauma-informed and healing-centered planet?Oof. That is a hard question, PACEs science has the ability to positively influence so many things wrong with our world. Yes to all the examples named and a million others.
Green encourages fellow members of PACEs Connection to join her in making a generous, tax-deductible donation to PACEs Connectionhere.
If you’d prefer to mail your gift rather than give it online, here’s how…
Make check payable to: TSNE (Third Sector New England, our fiscal sponsor) and write PACEs Connection Donation on the memo line.
Mail check to: PACEs Connection, c/o TSNE, 89 South Street, Suite 700, Boston, MA 02111
Making a wire transfer or need Tax ID information?
Bo Dean with New Hanover area Community Resiliency Model trainers Audry Hart, the late Chris Johnson, and J’vanete Skiba.
Bo Dean answered the call for monthly donations to PACEs Connection more than a year ago for many reasons, one of the main ones being that PACEs Connection and the work it supports helps us “live into our humanity.”
In addition to his supporting learning and development for some 2200 employees in New Hanover County, North Carolina, Dean also co-chairs the County’s Resiliency Task Force and helped found and support a new resource for people teaching various courses to help increase resiliency in the region, which was devastated by Hurricane Florence almost six years ago.
PACEs Connection CEO Ingrid Cochkren says she wishes more people would follow Dean’s lead in doing the work and in making monthly donations.
“While we’re steadily adding monthly donors, it would be good to see more of our almost 59,000 members — and hundreds of thousands of visitors — support our work to prevent and heal trauma,” said Cockhren.
She is asking members to sign on now to make a monthly donation to help fund the staff needed to support the site as well as our work with communities, and the newsletters, podcasts, webinars, Resource Center, and other free tools and guides offered by PACEs Connections.
“If just ten percent of our members made an automatic monthly donation of $10, you could help us cover a substantial portion of our costs,” said Cockhren.
Please consider following in the footsteps of community leader and PACEs Connection supporter Bo Dean, who shares below his reasons for making his monthly gift to PACEs Connection.
Name: Bo Dean
Occupation: Sr. Human Resource Analyst, Learning and Development, New Hanover County, NC
Connection to PACEs Connection/PACEs science? We are a trauma-informed/ACES informed county agency and have been working with and informed by ACES, now PACES, for over six years. We began our work by participating in and with the New Hanover County Resilience Task Force, a multi-agency partnership that began as a primary focus on childhood resilience, and still has that as its primary work, but has become a central change agent for building community resilience.
Do you work in the field? Yes. In my job, I work in PACEs science by using it in all I facilitate. I am the architect for learning and development of professional growth and strategic alignment for our agency for our over 2200 employees. In that work, I have found it essential to permeate our development with foundations of ACES-informed science and understanding in ALL of the work, whether we are looking at individual, team, department, or enterprise-wide learning. The four realms of trauma (as seen in the PACes Connection infographic below) affect our internal and external service, and drive some of the ways we can build compassion and empathy. The science drives the ways we connect to that service, but also how we see one another as we create care and understanding for ourselves to improve our overall well being. It factors into all aspects of how we optimize our service.
How did you find out about PACEs Connection? We are fortunate to have had Carey Sipp (PACEs Connection director of Strategic Partnerships) as a motivator, teacher, and partner from the very beginning. (Note: Sipp moved to Wilmington, NC, in 2018 to join the New Hanover Resiliency Task Force, learn from its leaders, use the learnings to guide her work with other communities in her role as as PACEs Connection’s southeastern community facilitator. Now as the national director of strategic partnerships for PACEs Connection, Sipp continues to learn from the local task force, and plans to stay in North Carolina because she loves it!)
Were you surprised to find PACEs Connection? Being a witness to so much good in public service, I am constant in awe at what IS done for others. Surprise is not the word I would use. It is gratitude that I have for those who see purpose in using data to drive efficacious practices to help connect us all to better means to serve everyone. In doing this work, we see revelations in the systems and issues that are not at the forefront of all discussions, but are related to living. These have to be addressed and discussed.Some of our folks see and deal with trauma-related challenges on the regular, but don’t always have the ability to articulate their needs and connect with resources. PACEs Connection is not only a connector; it is also a means to voice the validity, the reality of the issues we see, and to help those who want to make a difference to make a difference with a feeling of being supported. It helps those who don’t see these issues in the day-to-day, be able to hear and see it the traumas they might not have seen had they not been made more aware by information received in PACEs Connection.
What part of PACEs Connection do you like best? The ready access to information that has efficacy, and the connection to others nationally and locally.
How do you use PACEs Connection? I take the information and deliver it directly to our groups here in the county to help keep us updated. We have a Resilience Working Group that helps permeate the science into our work as well as professional staff. PACEs Connection helps me offer information for ongoing professional development resources.
Do you read the Weekly RoundUp? Yes. It is the summation that I can give to our leaders. They are inundated with information, but with the RoundUp, they can choose items that they then use for their own purposes. It is clear and concise. Digestible. That is so important.
Do you share stories from the Weekly RoundUp? Of course!
Do you belong to a resiliency initiative? I belong to several 😊. I am on the steering committee and I co-chair the NHC Resilience Task Force, which has over 100 agencies signed on! I staff our Resilience Working Group in the NHC government. I founded the Resilience Working Group that is now led by a chair, vice chair and secretary. Its members who have been through the eight-hour Community Resiliency Model (CRM) training. We are a peer support, trauma-informed leadership team. We have over 200 members and meet monthly. We also offer twice-monthly resilience “huddles” virtually for folks to check in and receive support. In addition, we hold eight-hour CRM training sessions each month. I am a CRM trainer and Resources for Resilience (R4R) Trainer.
What prompted you to support PACEs Connection with your gift? This is the most valuable work I have been involved in. This is where we SEE one another, open up lines of communication, compassion, empathy and support. This is where we lose judgment and find and practice “What happened to you?”NOT “What is wrong with you?” ways of being. The more we do this, the more we see one another and lift up one another, the more we begin to LIVE “What is right with you” and what can we do to celebrate one another.
What keeps you giving as a monthly donor? All that I said, this work has to continue. Shootings, drag bills, systemic issues that are engineered to separate us in sex and race and orientation, all of these wedges that draw us away from each other are so intentional and purposeful. We need one another. We are our brother’s and sister’s keepers. PACEs science and PACEs Connection allow us to be as one. To know we are not perfect, to know we all experience something and together. Together we heal; we thrive. This is the work of being human and living in that humanity.
What would you tell others, to encourage them to support PACEs Connection on a monthly basis? I don’t give a ton, but folks, if each of us gave $25 a month, think of the multiplier effect of that! All for less than five coffees a month.
What is your greatest hope for what happens with PACEs science? That we end child abuse? Create equity? Eliminate racism? Do away with poverty? Create a trauma-informed and healing-centered planet? I said it before. My hope is that we live into our humanity. We can end the issues that challenge us by connecting. We can find, secure and share empathy and compassion. We are human. We are wired for connection and protection even though we have a negativity bias. What we feed the protection and connection, what we share in our experiences, what we give to each other in those connections and sharing will make that difference. We don’t change who we are as biological animals, but we can create better spiritual beings and “human livings” that are connected to the best of what and who we are.
Dean encourages fellow members of PACEs Connection to join him in making a monthly tax-deductible donation to PACEs Connectionhere.
One-time donations are encouraged as well!
If you’d prefer to mail your gift rather than give it online, here’s how…
Make check payable to: TSNE (Third Sector New England, our fiscal sponsor) and write PACEs Connection Donation on the memo line.
Mail check to: PACEs Connection, c/o TSNE, 89 South Street, Suite 700, Boston, MA 02111
Making a wire transfer or need Tax ID information?
If you would like to be featured as a monthly donor, please send an email to Carey Sipp, director of strategic partnerships, with “Donor Spotlight” in the subject line to answer the 15 questions and let your fellow community members know more about you, how you use PACEs Connection, why you support the work.
The Hearst Foundations announced it would award $300,000 to PACEs Connection as a part of the philanthropic organization’s effort to support nonprofits working across a range of disciplines.
The award reflects the philanthropic interests of William Randolph Hearst and the Foundations’ goal of providing opportunities to people of all backgrounds.
“We are thrilled to receive this generous support,” said Ingrid Cockhren, CEO of PACEs Connection (PACEs stands for positive and adverse childhood experiences).
“These funds will help us on our mission to raise awareness of the negative health consequences of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), and the buffering effects of positive childhood experiences (PCEs).
“Racism, poverty, climate trauma, inequity, injustice, domestic and community violence, environmental racism, and the collective and historical traumas our nation’s people have endured for hundreds of years and are enduring now have major health and economic consequences for all of us,” Cockhren said.
PACEs Connection is a social network that supports communities to accelerate the global PACEs science movement, to recognize the impact of positive and adverse childhood experiences (PACEs) in shaping adult behavior and health, and to promote trauma-informed and resilience-building practices and policies in all communities and institutions — from schools to prisons to hospitals and churches — to help heal and to develop resilience instead of traumatizing already traumatized people. Learn more about us here.
Cockhren encourages fellow readers of PACEs Connection to join her in making tax-deductible donations to PACEs Connectionhere.
If you’d prefer to mail your gift rather than give it online, here’s how…
Make check payable to: TSNE (Third Sector New England, our fiscal sponsor) and write PACEs Connection Donation on the memo line.
Mail check to: PACEs Connection, c/o TSNE, 89 South Street, Suite 700, Boston, MA 02111
Making a wire transfer or need Tax ID information?
Please contact Carey Sipp, Director of Strategic Partnerships, at csipp@pacesconnection.com
More than 550 researchers, advocates, educators, community stakeholders, clinical and practitioner groups, persons with lived experience, legislators, and representatives from state agencies, among others, attended a statewide summit in Raleigh, North Carolina—“Leveraging North Carolina’s Assets to Prevent Child Trauma,” April 27-28.
Diana Fishbein, Ph.D., senior scientist in the Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute (FPG), University of North Carolina, in Chapel Hill, and the primary organizer of the event, said the purpose of the Summit was to “scaffold community activism with solid research and supportive legislative and agency policies.”
Melissa Clepper-Faith, MD, MPH, who works with Fishbein in FPG, co-chaired the event, and said, “Time spent making connections across all these groups was precious.”
“What became clear is that NC is primed and ready to institute the reforms needed to protect our children from harm. We are ahead of many other states given the dozens of entities working toward this goal. However, there’s a difference between intervening at the level of the risk factor for trauma and focusing our efforts on the underlying social and structural determinants of trauma,” said Fishbein.
“We must move upstream to the roots of the problem, such as the uneven distribution of resources and opportunities, health disparities, racism and discrimination, poverty, violence, and other adversities, to strive to eradicate the sources of trauma before it’s felt”. said Fishbein.
“The more than 50 speakers – all but three were from NC – were all outstanding and 100% aligned with our agenda to activate communities using solid research and supportive legislative and agency policies,” said Fishbein, adding, “Rather than exhaustion after two days of back-to-back talks, our speakers energized us around a common goal and hope for what we can do collectively to exert a profoundly meaningful impact on child trauma.”
In a post-Summit report to attendees, Fishbein and Clepper-Faith said the Summit was a “call to action to establish a protocol for partnerships across NC that can play an instrumental role in invoking meaningful change to prevent trauma.”
Their report detailed the need for an action plan based on
The notion that community activism is at the heart of true change. Community members must be the central decision-makers, as reflected throughout all our discussions and action plans. We want to lift up the voices of “quiet constituents” to be sure they are heard and are co-equal in the co-creation process.
The recognition that solid, culturally sensitive research provides the foundation, backing and support for activism at the community level and policy change. That tack ensures our methods are well-tested and that we can expect desirable results.
The need for agency-level and legislative policies that are informed by communities and the existing evidence about what works to implement, scale and sustain that change.
“This is the beginning, not the end,” said Fishbein.
The organizers detailed next steps, which include the production of an Executive Summary and 6-8 articles on key topics raised during the summit.
“We will also work on a set of specific policy recommendations to share with the General Assembly, state agencies and local officials. There will be webinars—we welcome the opportunity to work with some of you on specialized topics—meetings, and other follow-on activities,” said Clepper-Faith.
Clepper-Faith and Fishbein also said they advocate for “a task force comprised of a wide range of constituent groups and individuals to co-create a statewide action plan for NC.”
For opportunities to become involved and advocate nationally for policies that consider evidence from trauma science, Fishbein invited attendees to visit the National Prevention Science Coalition to Improve Lives: https://www.npscoalition.org/. There, speaker Whitney Marris’ training in advocacy is available on the home page by scrolling down for the video “Science Advocacy Training.”
“Another avenue for advocacy at the national and community levels is with the Campaign for Trauma Informed Policy and practice, CTIPP, directed by our speaker Jesse Kohler, who is the group’s executive director.”
“We also recommend joining and turning to PACEs Connection, which supported the Summit with social media and networking efforts. PACEs Connection works across NC and around the world to raise awareness of the impact of positive and adverse childhood experiences across the lifespan, and to prevent and heal trauma. PACEs Connection helped boost attendance for the Summit as a part of its critical work to promote resilient communities,” said Fishbein.
Summit sponsors and contributors included the FPG, The University of North Carolina Seminar Series, the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, SmartStart, HopeStar, Child Trust Foundation, Duke Endowment, Prevent Child Abuse North Carolina, KB Reynolds Trust, the Campaign for Trauma Informed Policy and Practice, the National Prevent Science Coalition, and summit coordinators, Wake AHEC.
This report is absolutely inspirational! A lot of groundwork and effort must have gone into bringing this array of concerned parties together. May the force be with you! Obviously the potential for improving many lives and families in North Carolina is terrific. This also serves as a template for other states as we all work to create/recreate a humane and empathetic civil society.
The question remains: does this coalition have the momentum to confront the political gerrymandering and the legislative imposition of values that do not support every family and do not value every human life equally?
Could a workplace actually help prevent trauma and help people heal?
If you are burned out, tired of a toxic workplace, looking to join the Great Resignation, or, if you’re an employer, if looking for ways to prevent a mass exodus and retain valued employees, you are not alone.
The last three years have seen the pandemic, racial unrest, environmental traumas, increases in poverty, major policy and political shifts, and the effect these existential threats have on our stress levels. These collective traumas have inevitably affected our tolerance for challenges to our lives, livelihoods, and wellbeing.
To explore the future of work; ways work both contributes to our stress and could in fact be a means of promoting wellbeing, PACEs Connection called on experts from the fields of PACEs science, human resources, public policy, infant and child development, trauma-informed leadership and more for a deep look into the workplace and we were met with these topics to consider:
A History of Work – Paid and Unpaid Labor in America
Nurturance: The Fundamental Condition Every Human Needs to Thrive
Do Policies Create Poverty, Child Abuse, and Neglect ?
What If Babies Ran the Workplace?
Compassion Fatigue
Toxic Workplaces
Trauma Informed – Being Embraced by Every Professional Sector
Partnering across Georgia to Create Trauma Informed, Inclusive Workplaces
The American Laborer
Empathetic Leadership: Toward a Workplace that is Human-Centered and Trauma-Informed.
Reimagining Workplaces, the Role of Wellness
How One Organization is Tracking and Recognizing Organizations that are Becoming More Trauma Informed.
PACEs Connection will explore these topics and more for three afternoons next week, and invites you to register here now for the conference, taking place from noon – 5:00 p.m. ET, June 13 – 15. Tickets range from $150 for a single day to $399 for the full conference. Conference sessions will be recorded and offered for sale at a later date.
Join PACEs Connection CEO Ingrid Cockhren and authors and leaders from the field of PACEs science, human resources and trauma-informed leadership as they share historical and late-breaking perspectives on work and trauma, our economy, the dignity of work, lived experiences, the impact of policy, who’s looking to create “trauma-informed workplaces”, and the future of work.
How would we work in a “Just Society”, where all are valued equally? The healing-centered workplace – and the disruptions it will take to create it – will happen through community.
Descriptions of each day:
Day 1:The Great Resignation: How did we get here? How is it that we created and now perpetuate a system that values the work of some and denigrates the work of others? How did we get to the point of The Great Resignation? When and how will it stop? How does historical trauma in America affect the way we work– and overwork – ourselves and each other?
What about economics, racism, and poverty and their impact on how we work?
How do current policies and practices encourage child abuse and neglect?
Clare Anderson, MSW, Senior Policy Fellow at Chapin Hall at the University of Chicago, will share research on the economics of child abuse and neglect, and how some polices perpetuate poverty.
Day 2:Change starts here: Toxic stress, burnout, and work life balance. We have to look at where we are – as individuals – with toxic stress, burnout, and work life balance. What are the lived experiences of people who’ve survived toxic workplaces? Racism on the job? Microaggressions for being LGBTQI? Loss of employment or income due to lack of quality affordable childcare? What are the lived experiences of people in places where new parents are given time off, and high quality childcare is state-sponsored, as is healthcare? How are states handling the mental health crisis and creating trauma-informed, inclusive workplaces? Is diversity, equity, inclusivity, and belonging work the solution?
Speakers will include Porter Jennings-McGarity, PhD, LCSW, PACEs Connection Director of Community Data + Continuous Quality Improvement and Trauma-Informed Criminal Justice Consultant, Alison Cebulla, Healthy Workplaces Consultant, and Becky Haas, internationally recognized advocate, trainer, and organizational coach on using a trauma-informed approach.
Haas is the co-author of the Building a Trauma Informed System of Care Toolkit for the Tennessee Department of Children’s Services. It details a blueprint for creating community resilience, as featured in PACEs Connection, Growing Resilient Communities 2.1, and has been recommended as a “practical tool” in Johns Hopkins, Progress in Community Health Partnerships: Research, Education, and Action.
Emily Anne Vall, Ph.D. and executive director of Resilient Georgia, and Jenn Graham, founder and CEO of Inclusivv will discuss how Resilient Georgia has created several tools, resources and opportunities that all partners can take advantage of to create a more trauma informed workplace culture and recognize secondary trauma and/or empathy fatigue.
Vall and Graham will also discuss ways regional coalitions have bolstered this work through workplace training opportunities, leadership opportunities, and courageous conversations. They will also share more about the work of Inclusivv across Georgia to embrace workplace culture and inclusivity.
Day 3:The Future of Work – Envisioning a healing-centered workplace and just society. Diversity, equity and inclusion, and health and wellness. What does work look like in a “Just Society”? Do we value – or not value – the sacredness of work? How do we pay people what they’re worth? How do we ensure that people are able to do work they love? How will it be when all work is honored and valued, when all are assured an income that makes truly living – being able to afford the basics of housing, food, clothing, transportation, education, and healthcare as a given, but also earning enough to enjoy life’s pleasures of vacations, entertainment, free time? Will we actually be more productive? Can we create enough trust in the workplace to ask for empathy? Who is monitoring what organizations become trauma-informed, what does that mean, and how do we find out which workplaces are “Family Forward”?
Manning has worked on issues of trauma and victimization for more than 25 years. As a senior attorney advisor with the Executive Office for United States Attorneys, for fifteen years, Manning guided the Justice Department through its response to victims in cases ranging from terrorism to large-scale financial fraud to child exploitation.
Crawford’s Trauma-Informed Institute certifies leaders as trauma-informed professionals to reduce workplace trauma and prioritize wellness. Her presentation will emphasize the non-negotiable nature of wellness in our lives, and how prioritizing our physical, mental, and emotional well-being impacts personal and professional success.
Finaldi, Community Engagement Leader at the North Carolina Early Childhood Foundation, has led the charge on creating Family Forward NC, an initiative to “improve children’s health and well-being and keep North Carolina’s businesses competitive”. The program is “employer-led change to increase access to research-based, family-friendly practices — big and small — that improve workplace productivity, recruitment and retention; grow a strong economy; and support children’s healthy development.”
At the end of each day’s presentations, a panel discussion with the speakers will give speakers and attendees alike the opportunity to make comments and ask questions.
For current and future sponsorship packages and other information, contact Carey Sipp, PACEs Connection, director of strategic partnerships, at csipp@pacesconnection.com.
Register here now for Healing Centered Workplaces: The Future of Work conference, taking place from noon – 5:00 p.m. ET, June 13 – 15. Tickets range from $150 for a single day to $399 for the full conference. Conference sessions will be recorded and offered for sale at a later date.
As a reflection on the past weekend’s celebration of Juneteenth, and the historical trauma of chattel slavery influencing our lives today, this week’s episode of the History. Culture. Trauma podcast is an excerpt from a recorded interview of Dr. Bruce Perry conducted by hosts Ingrid Cockhren, PACEs Connection CEO, and Mathew Portell, director of education and outreach, in June, 2022.
In this interview Perry discusses, within the context of historical trauma, his #1 New York Times Bestseller “What Happened to You? Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing” (2021), which he co-authored with Oprah Winfrey.
“If you don’t understand history, you’re never going to understand trauma. And if you don’t understand trauma, you’re never going to understand history. And this is part of our problem as a field,” said Perry in the wide-ranging interview discussing the intersecting fields of trauma and historical trauma.
“There are some really exciting and important things that are happening in the area of historical trauma,” said Perry. He addressed the history of colonialism, treatment of indigenous people, kidnapping and enslavement that are such a part of the history and historical trauma of the United States.
“You know, we are living in systems that are fundamentally colonial in construction,” he said. “And colonialism basically means I’m going to come into your space, your place, and I’m going to take your things and I’m going to make you feel privileged, if I give you a little bit of it back.”
Historical perspectives about trauma deserve “as much attention and funding and support” as is given to people studying the effects of a drug on post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), or the effects of other treatments, he said.
Perry is the principal of the Neurosequential Network, senior fellow of The Child Trauma Academy and adjunct professor in the Departments of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University in Chicago and the School of Allied Health, College of Science, Health and Engineering, La Trobe University, Melbourne, Victoria Australia.
According to his website, “Over the last thirty years, Dr. Perry has been an active teacher, clinician and researcher in children’s mental health and the neurosciences holding a variety of academic positions. His work on the impact of abuse, neglect and trauma on the developing brain has impacted clinical practice, programs and policy across the world. Dr. Perry is the author, with Maia Szalavitz, of “The Boy Who Was Raised As A Dog”, a bestselling book based on his work with maltreated children, and “Born For Love: Why Empathy is Essential and Endangered”.
Perry, a native of Bismarck, North Dakota, earned his undergraduate degree at Stanford University and Amherst College. He attended medical and graduate school at Northwestern University, receiving both M.D. and Ph.D. degrees, and completed a residency in general psychiatry at Yale University School of Medicine and a fellowship in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at The University of Chicago.
To listen to Thursday’s podcast at 1 p.m. PT, 4 p.m. ET, click here.
To hear prior episodes via your favorite podcast service, use the links below.
By Daniel Amen, Image: Chelsea Victoria/Stocksy, mindbodygreen health, August 2, 2023
Your childhood upbringing plays a major role in your brain development. If you grow up in a happy, functional home, it supports the developing brain. However, when you experience childhood trauma—such as the death of a parent, neglect, sexual abuse, or other traumatic incidents—it negatively impacts the way your brain develops. Sadly, this can have lasting consequences on your mental health and cognitive function.
What are adverse childhood experiences?
Adverse childhood experiences, or ACEs, continue to affect people in adulthood. Many adults with emotional issues don’t realize that the traumatic experiences from their childhood are at the root of their problems. And they certainly don’t understand that those incidents changed the way their brain functions, which further contributes to their ongoing mental health issues.
The neurobiology of ACEs doesn’t get discussed enough, so I appreciate this article. That said, I have a different perspective than the author’s, which has more of a pathologizing tone that I like. My Western medicine training is based on the model that the patient I serve has pathology and that they need me to fix them, often with medications, surgeries, or injections. I have used my more recent trauma-informed approach with the PACEs science education I’ve had to recognize that the person who was exposed early in life to too much adversity without enough support has a brain that adaptively develops in a way to make their body really efficient at responding to potential threats/stressors. This adaptation makes sense, given that babies are born to be experience-dependent in our development. It also reframes the situation in a way that we now are appreciative of the body doing what it can to protect us, as opposed to “there’s something wrong with me”. A crucial additional point to make is that the traumatic world we all live in now is regularly triggering all of us, potentially more so in people whose brains are efficient at going into survival states.
Pilot is for DEIB professional development with Yolo County, California, Division of Health and Human Services
As the first phase of PACEs Connection’s consulting engagement with Yolo County, California, draws to a close, CEO Ingrid Cockhren is announcing the launch of the organization’s Sustaining Resilient Communities (SRC) initiative, expanding services to include consulting and professional development for counties, cities, corporations, and government agencies.
“We’ve branched into a new area in supporting and sustaining communities by developing and leading a series of trainings for the Yolo County Health and Human Services staff. The work began in December 2022, to facilitate awareness building, capacity development, and operationalization of racial equity, diversity, inclusion, and belonging (DEIB), and trauma-informed principles in the workplace,” said Cockhren.
“We hoped to increase understanding of core DEIB and trauma-informed principles and to see a demonstrated commitment from staff to racial equity, DEIB, and trauma-informed practices. I’ve done this work for several years, in other roles, and it is good to offer it through PACEs Connection now, as we have the capability and experience. It fits in our overall strategy not only to serve our members in ways they’ve said they need help but in our efforts to expand the awareness beyond community organizations to state agencies, corporations, and other entities to support our goal of this being a worldwide movement. ” she added.
Yolo County’s lead contact for the work, Tessa Smith, diversity, equity, and inclusion coordinator for the Health and Human Services Agency, would agree that the work is being achieved.
“We’re working with 760 employees in this training. Some of them may be in the managerial track, and some of them may be in the general track. Success here will look like better leadership-to-staff relationships, better colleague-to-colleague relationships, better service and service outcomes, or treatment outcomes for the people we serve. From a trauma-informed approach we are learning not to assume or judge another person’s stories or experience by the chapter of their story we came in on,” said Smith.
The work has included a leadership track to help leadership identify and practice effective ways to talk about racial equity as well as intersectionality and privilege. PACEs staff also helped Yolo leadership learn about the role of trauma on the nervous system and practices and policies to help create a trauma-responsive workplace, and how to support racial equity practices come alive in the work across teams.
“Our hope was that we would generate empathy for each of us, in our own humanity, and then work a different way in a different way, stay in service to each other and the community. These ideas used to be only for behavioral health, but now it’s for everybody, the whole agency, and for anybody that does any business with us, that we have a shared language, a shared vision and shared goals,” said Smith.
She said it was important that the groups address communications issues that come from lack of knowledge and lack of understanding about “how we intersect as people, and about what should be everybody’s basic human rights.
“Any group has got its own history of trauma that they bring. When we start talking about history, we knew it could be hard with leadership. That history was 400 years in the making, and people today need to understand this. So the historical trauma training for leadership was important,” said Smith.
“If anybody can talk about a hard subject and not have people running from the room screaming, it will be Ingrid (Cockhren) and Mathew (Portell, PACEs Connection director of education and outreach). We have plans to reinforce this training, because people need to hear things over and over again. So this needed to NOT be a ‘one and done training.’ We worked it out so that people would have a piece of this training every month, to keep it constantly in their thought processes,” Smith explained.
Smith says doing this training can be delicate work sometimes.
“It takes someone who has an understanding of what that feels like in a person’s body, mind and spirit, and that’s what you get from Paces Connection. You get that actual linkage back to somebody who can speak to the humanity of all of this, and that kept the conversations on the rails,” she said.
Smith also shared the challenges of this initiative.
“This is really hard work. Facing history and ourselves can be jarring. I think organizations need to be prepared for the sensitivities of their staff because all staff are on a spectrum of what it means to be trauma- and DEIB-informed with some being prepared to do the work and some being pulled along reluctantly into the present and future,” Smith said.
“So our approach in our agency right now is that we have got to take care of ourselves in order to be able to give the best service to our clients and the people that we serve. That means being an inclusive space where everybody feels like they belong, where we appreciate diversity. And the way people show up is as a healthy and good team that’s being trauma informed,” she said.
Among other benefits of doing the work?
Smith says, “It’s helped us in recruiting. People hear we are doing this work and they are much more interested in wanting to work with us.”
The work has also included multiple sessions on trauma-informed care and psychological safety in the workforce, becoming anti-biased and culturally responsive, and exploring the historical trauma specific to Yolo County and surrounding areas.
PACEs Connection is also providing training videos on a number of topics including health, mental health, child welfare, education, criminal justice and other social determinants of health, the historical trauma of the region with regard to LGBTQI+, migrant workers, Native American peoples, immigrants, and refugees, and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMSHA) trauma-informed principles and practices.
Candice Valenzuela, whose 2022 podcast was among the most popular episodes last year, joins hosts Ingrid Cockhren, PACEs Connection CEO, and Mathew Portell, director of education and outreach, this Thursday at 1 p.m. PDT; 4 p.m. ET, to discuss the importance of healing intergenerational trauma.
“How can parents ensure that generational issues do not continue to impact future generations?” is one of the questions to be addressed in this live episode.
“This topic is especially important for parents who have a background of historical trauma, including slavery, and genocide,” said Cockhren.
Valenzuela’s last episode focused on self-care and minority mental health, and addressed how, according to Cockhren, “Self-care has become a buzzword when discussing solutions to the mental health crisis in BIPOC communities.”
Valenzuela, who describes herself as a “parent, a pet owner, a friend, a survivor, a geek, and a nature lover,” says, “I have learned that no professional titles will ever reflect all of who I am or my worth. I strive to be human before I strive to be a worker. I identify as Black, Indigenous, Queer and working-class allied.
“Professionally, I have been working at the crossroads of education, justice and community healing for 16 years. I have extensive experience in mindfulness, trauma informed care, anti-oppressive practices, cultural competency, liberatory education and youth empowerment,” she adds.
Valenzeula holds a bachelor’s degree in humanities, an master’s degree in East-West psychology, a masters’ degree in counseling psychology, and a 200-hour certificate in mindful yoga through the Niroga Institute.
Carey Sipp 3/28/232:31 PM
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“We’ve branched into a new area in supporting and sustaining communities by developing and leading a series of trainings for the Yolo County Health and Human Services staff. The work began in December 2022, to facilitate awareness building, capacity development, and operationalization of racial equity, diversity, inclusion, and belonging (DEIB), and trauma-informed principles in the workplace,” said Cockhren.
Carey Sipp 