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She had developed post-traumatic wisdom.
It is impossible to be truly wise without some real-life hardship.
This really hits home!
It’s such an unfair expectation of our society. No other society in the history of this planet has ever asked a single adult to provide the physical, social, emotional, and material needs of multiple children by themselves.
That is relational poverty.
Stress becomes distress. And distressing experiences become sensitizing, resulting in the same physical and mental effects as trauma.
How can we create community when we are so mobile, so screened up, so disconnected? It’s a major challenge for creating a healthy future.
Shaka, tired of being betrayed by the people he loved most, says he built an emotional wall and sought protection and acceptance from the streets.
He was in a culture and environment that perpetuated the idea that a young man’s worth was defined by having money, attention, and a reputation as “the bad guy.”
At the heart of his work is the belief that people should not be defined by their past mistakes, and that redemption is possible.
This is true. Your past is not an excuse. But it is an explanation—offering insight into the questions so many of us ask ourselves: Why do I behave the way I behave? Why do I feel the way I do? For me, there is no doubt that our strengths, vulnerabilities, and unique responses are an expression of what happened to us.
truth. It takes a long time to change people—and even longer to change systems.
And as each system has grappled with what “trauma-informed” means, they’ve used their own particular lens—their own view of the world. The result is that defining the term has been a challenge. Like the word trauma, it’s been used by many different people and groups in many different ways. It may take some time to sort this out.
And then using that awareness to act accordingly and respond appropriately—whether you’re a parent, teacher, friend, therapist, doctor, police officer, judge.
How do we make sure we don’t “retraumatize” someone by unintentionally continuing the marginalizing, dehumanizing experiences that gave rise to the very problems we’re supposed to be addressing?
Marginalization is a fundamental trauma.
So many of the things that people and systems do with good intentions actually cause additional pain for the families and children they’re supposed to be serving.
More children are expelled from school in pre-K than at any other grade level; children of color, especially boys of color, are expelled at rates three times higher than white children.
This is the start of a toxic mismatch between the child’s capabilities and the unrealistic expectations of an education system that is all too often underresourced, developmentally uninformed, and trauma-ignorant.
Year after year, they fall further and further behind. Their delays in developing skills, together with their trauma-related symptoms, begin to attract mental health labels
This is the school-to-prison pipeline.
This isn’t just a few children; studies show that between 30 and 50 percent of children in public schools have three or more ACEs. And as we’ve discussed, these adversities have an impact.
Our behaviors begin to shape themselves around the emotional landmines left by previous trauma.
Later on, if you talked to the boy and said, “You shouldn’t swear at a teacher,” he’d say, “I know, it’s not a good idea.” But in the moment, he truly didn’t have access to that ability to reason.
The more you learn about trauma and stress response, the easier it is to understand certain behaviors you encounter in a workplace, in a relationship, or at school.
Rather than suspending and labeling the child, the school would try to create a process to connect with and understand him.
the classroom uses regulatory strategies, the teachers are supported and respected, the needs and strengths of children are identified and addressed, the outcomes are much better.
But all of the successful models have one thing in common: They emphasize regulation and connection.
These are often viewed as elective or enrichment activities, when in fact they can be the very bedrock of academic learning, thanks to their regulatory and relational elements.
Patterned, repetitive, rhythmic activity makes the overactive and overly reactive core regulatory networks (see Figure 2) get back “in balance.”
Our mental health systems tend to be crisis-focused.
These teams know that any “one size fits all” solution does not work. Think about how absurd it would be if everyone who had chest pain and a cough got the exact same antibiotic.
What we know is that the key ingredient of effective healing involves using your healthy relationships to revisit and rework the traumatic experience.
The therapeutic web is the collection of positive relational-based opportunities you have throughout your day.
This isn’t to suggest that therapy isn’t helpful, but therapy without “connectedness” is not very effective.
While less obvious to some, I believe that our existing child-welfare, educational, mental health, and juvenile-justice systems often do the same thing. They fragment families, undermine community, and engage in marginalizing, shaming, and punitive practices.
Exactly. In 1994, when the oppressive practices of apartheid ended, people’s brains didn’t immediately change. White people were still associated with dominance and marginalization. Even though things had theoretically changed, when people who were raised in apartheid interacted with each other, there was an unconscious reestablishing of power differentials, and an eliciting of old patterns of adaptation.
One of the hardest things to grasp about implicit bias and racism is that your beliefs
and values do not always drive your behavior.
When you’re young and you’re forming your primary associations about how the world works, your major influences come from your parents. And not really what they say, but how they act. You’re also influenced by the other children and adults around you. If you’re a white child who spends no time with children of color, you don’t have any personal experiences to help build those important relational associations.
But as you say, for many white people, their only association with Black people was what they saw on the news or in the movies.
Everybody has some form of implicit bias—some distortion of the world—that’s based on how and where they grew up.
Law enforcement should be at the top of the list.
Implicit bias suggests that the bias is present but not “plainly expressed”—sometimes even unintentionally expressed.
Remember that the cortex is the most malleable, the most changeable part of the brain. Beliefs and values can change.
Implicit bias is much more difficult. You may truly believe that racism is bad, that all people are equal. But those beliefs are in the intellectual part of your brain, and your implicit biases, which are in the lower part of your brain, will still play out every day—in the way you interact with others, the jokes you laugh at, the things you say.
The challenge of addressing implicit bias is first recognizing that you have it.
Moderate, predictable, controllable stress can build resilience.
And this is why you can’t be in a corporation and address these issues by simply having everyone go to an anti-racism course or cultural-sensitivity training. You don’t get trained in cultural sensitivity—you go spend time immersed in the culture, spend time with other people.
it means that cultural-sensitivity training, which may help get at the intellectual elements of learning, needs to be coupled with real experiences and real relationships.
We have to think about ways to raise our children with more opportunities to be exposed to the magnificence of human diversity earlier in their lives.
