99 Matching Annotations
  1. Last 7 days
    1. for - Elon Musk Don Lemon interview - Elon Musk - cancels Don Lemon - Elon Musk - South Africa, early childhood trauma

      Summary - Lemon points out Musk's consequential role in the world and that people who invest in his various projects have a right to know about the wellbeing of the leader of the company they are investing in. - Actions speak louder than words and his cancelation of Lemon's show demonstrates he was very uncomfortable with Lemon's questions. It was obvious from Musk's defensive body language.

      Reference - https://fortune.com/well/2023/09/17/does-elon-musk-have-ptsd-walter-isaacson-biography/ - https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/05/world/africa/elon-musk-south-africa.html

  2. Feb 2024
  3. Jan 2024
    1. Eine neue Studie kommt zu dem Ergebnis, dass die Haltung zu fünf großen Krisen das Wahlverhalten der Europäer:innen in diesem Jahr bestimmen wird: der Klimakrise, der Migrationskrise, der Wirtschaftskrise und Inflation, dem Ukraine-Krieg und Covid. Klimakrise und Migration hätten, wie schon bei den Wahlen in der Niederlanden, ide größte Kraft Wähler zu mobilisieren. Die Autor:innen sprechen von einem "Clash zweier 'Extinction rebellions'". Als wichtigste Krisen werden im Durchschnitt der europäischen Länder die Klimakrise und dann Covid bewertet.

      https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/jan/17/crises-have-split-european-voters-into-five-tribes-survey-suggests

      Report: https://ecfr.eu/publication/a-crisis-of-ones-own-the-politics-of-trauma-in-europes-election-year/

  4. Dec 2023
      • for: transition - emotional pain of, degrowth - emotional pain of, Kristina Bogner

      • title: Coping with transition pain: An emotions perspective on phase-outs in sustainability transitions

      • author
        • Kristina Bogner
        • Barbara Kump
        • Mayte Beekman
        • Julia Wittmayer
      • date

      • HIGHLIGHTS

        • introduce the idea of transition pain in transition-in-the-making
        • explain how emotions in transitions are
          • process-dependent,
          • culturally and socially embedded and
          • political
        • suggest a 'coping with transition pain' perspective for more integrated engagements with phase-outs
      • ABSTRACT

        • With this perspective paper, we aim to raise awareness of and offer starting points for studying the role of emotions and associated behavioural responses to losses in relation to phase-outs.
        • We start from a psychological perspective and explain how
          • losses due to phasing out dominant
            • practices,
            • structures, and
            • cultures
          • may threaten core psychological needs and lead to - what we introduce as - ‘transition pain’.
        • We borrow insights from the psychological coping literature to explain that different forms of transition pain may elicit characteristic coping responses (e.g.
          • opposition,
          • escape,
          • negotiation),
        • shaping
          • individual meaning-making and
          • behaviour
        • in ongoing sustainability transitions.
        • We then expand this psychological lens and present three additional perspectives, namely, that transition pain is
          • (1) dynamic and process-dependent,
          • (2) collectively shared and socially conditioned, and
          • (3) political.
        • We discuss how a ‘coping with transition pain’ lens can contribute to a better understanding of
          • individual and collective meaning-making,
          • behaviour and agency in transitions as well as
          • a more emotion-sensitive governance of phase-outs.
      • SUMMARY

        • It's good to have knowledge about the emotional aspects of transition as these challenging emotions constitute obstacles to transition.
        • It is really a letting go process. High density fossil fuels has created a high energy lifestyle that we have become use to. When we no longer have access to high energy density fossil fuels, our life has to change quite radically.
        • We are like a spoiled child that must now contend with the loss of what we took for granted. The politics of libertariansim is based on protecting our right to a high energy density lifestyle.
        • We need to now how to deal with this loss, as it is very profound
  5. Nov 2023
  6. Oct 2023
    1. ``` Trauma Releasing Exercises are a form of Cult Deprogramming

      [[Trauma Releasing Exercises]] (TRE) by [[David Berceli]]

      related articles: [[Tremor]], [[Quakers]] (aka "shakers"), [[Bradford Keeney]] ([[Shaking medicine]]), [[Somatic experiencing]] ([[Peter A. Levine]]), [[Ecstatic dance]], [[Runner's high]], ... (its revealing that wikipedia has no articles on these "alternative medicine" topics... all hail the cult of big pharma!)

      this association assumes that cults use [[Psychological trauma]] to imprison their slaves.

      Psychological trauma is an emotional response caused by severe distressing events such as accidents, violence, sexual assault, terror, or sensory overload.

      in every cult, there are people who want to escape. this "want to escape" starts early in childhood, where it is counteracted by punishment = by creating psychological trauma.

      Sigmund Freud's [[Psychoanalysis]] always blames "some childhood trauma" for "neurotic" behavior in adults, instead of fixing the child education, to prevent the creation of that trauma in the first place = radical solution.

      the cult slaves are expected to use their body only for working, not for sports, not for fighting, not for pleasure. all problems should be solved peacefully and intellectually ("let us talk..."). because the cult leaders know: if the slaves make too much use of their body (shaking medicine), the slaves would escape.

      also related: [[Slave morality]] is another word for [[Cult]], because the [[Public opinion]] of every cult is a form of slave morality (beautiful lies), and hard truths ([[Red pill and blue pill|red pills]]) are hidden as master morality. ```

  7. Sep 2023
  8. www.blueprintsprograms.org www.blueprintsprograms.org
    1. BOULDER COUNTY IMPACT:Building and Sustaining Policy, Practice and Improvement Standardsfor a Multi-Program, Multi-System Collaborative
    2. immediate & ongoing data-driven case planning Moving away from always least restrictive to matching
    1. using the best availablescience, to maximize physical and psychological safety, facilitate the recovery of thechild and family, and support their ability to thrive.”

      trauma-informed treatment model

    1. F742*, §483.40(b)(1), treatment/service for mental/psychosocial concerns (1) A resident who displays or is diagnosed with mental disorder or psychosocial adjustment difficulty, or who has a history of trauma and/or post-traumatic stress disorder, receives appropriate treatment and services to correct the assessed problem or to attain the highest practicable mental and psychosocial well-being;

      services to correct the assessed problem or to attain the highest practicable mental and psychosocial well-being;

      42 CFR § 483.40 - Behavioral health services.

    2. Trauma-Informed Care Regulations and F-tags   The regulations and F-tags that apply to trauma and trauma-informed care
    1. Trauma-informedServices are provided under a trauma-informedorganizational structure and treatment framework

      Find more on trauma informed care, because requires inclusion of whole family, necessary expertise, constantly argues it's necessary for misdiagnosis/treatment resulting in damage, danger, no-reunification (destruction of family), and inclusion of whole family

    1. A trauma-informed approach to care acknowledges that health care organizations and care teams need to have a complete picture of a patient’s life situation — past and present — in order to provide effective health care services with a healing orientation.

      Trauma-informed care seeks to: * Realize the widespread impact of trauma and understand paths for recovery; * Recognize the signs and symptoms of trauma in patients, families, and staff; * Integrate knowledge about trauma into policies, procedures, and practices; and *** Actively avoid re-traumatization.**

      https://hyp.is/go?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.aapacn.org%2Farticle%2Ftrauma-informed-care-what-it-is-and-isnt%2F&group=world

  9. Aug 2023
    1. Storytelling functions as a tool to heal from and protect against historical trauma and ongoing challenges Indigenous communities experience. "It is medicine." —Beltran & Begun, 2013 (quoted in @Okeefe2021 video at 10:41)

      Basic knowledge and understanding for me, but nice to have a source for it in particular.

  10. Mar 2023
  11. Dec 2022
    1. I came here after recalling a critique by Bessel van der Kolk's "The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma" regarding the disease model and it's negative impact on adequately helping people with trauma. van der Kolk's critique was similar to Marc Lewis' critique of the disease model as it applies to addiction from "The Biology of Desire: Why Addiction Is Not a Disease". This made me wonder what the term "disease" actually means and whether or not some general consensus existed within the medical community. This article suggests there is no such consensus.

      This article is by Jackie Leach Scully who holds a "PhD in cellular pathology, University of Cambridge; BA (Hons) in biochemistry, University of Oxford; MA in psychoanalytic studies, Sheffield University".

      Scully does several insightful things in this paper the following are the ones that were most salient to me upon the first read: - distinguishes "disease" from "disability" - contrasts the "social model" and "medical model" perspectives on "disability" - The "medical model" referred to here is probably what Lewis & van der Kolk are critiquing as the "disease model".<br /> - Are the "medical" and "disease" model different? - the social model seems to have arisen as a response to the inadequacy of the medical model

          - "The social model's fundamental criticism of the medical model is that it wrongly locates 'the problem' of disability in biological constraints, considering it only from the point of view of the individual and neglecting the social and systemic frameworks that contribute to it. The social model distinguishes between impairment (the biological substrate, such as impaired hearing) and the disabled experience. In this view the presence of impaired hearing is one thing, while the absence of subtitling on TV is quite another, and it is the refusal of society to make the necessary accommodations that is the real site of disability. A social model does not ignore biology, but contends that societal, economic and environmental factors are at least as important in producing disability."
      
      • brings up a subtle point that there are two jumps "from gene to phenotype, and from phenotype to experience" and that some of the arguments mentioned "suggest that the 'harm' of the impairment is not straightforwardly related to phenotype. What ought to concern us about disease and disability is the disadvantage, pain or suffering involved, and in a sense the impairment is always a kind of surrogate marker for this experience."
  12. Jun 2022
    1. My methodological approach comes from thinking along with Sara Ahmed’s work on complaint. By “complaint”, I mean grievances we lodge within our workplaces, which can look both like formal complaints made to human resources (excuse me, I mean “people operations”) and informal complaints which we hold between our peers, comrades, and friends. Anyone who has engaged in the process of a formal complaint can tell you how exhausting it is to register one, how management and decision-makers can stall, and how much one has to relive their trauma to do so.
  13. Apr 2022
  14. Mar 2022
    1. China’s Mao Zedong and Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaucescu also had brutal childhoods, with consequences that, in Mao’s case killed 35 million people, and in Ceaucescu’s case, forced women to have unwanted children, Miller pointed out. We can add others: the members of Myanmar’s junta who have murdered millions, mostly Rohingya as well as other minority groups; the Chinese leadership that is imprisoning hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs in prison camps….the list goes on,  

      Chairman Mao was brutalized and his unhealed trauma caused tens of millions of deaths.

    2. Stalin was also brutalized by his father when he was a child, she pointed out. Stalin was an only child. Like Hitler he was the first child to survive after three siblings who had died in infancy. His irascible father was almost always drunk and laid into his son from an early age. Despite the fame and power he later achieved, Stalin suffered throughout his life from a persecution mania that drove him to order the killing of millions of innocent people. Just as the infant Stalin lived in fear of sudden death at the hands of his unpredictable father, so the adult Stalin lived in fear even of his closest associates. But now he had the power to fend off those fears by humiliating others

      Stalin suffered trauma as a child and later brutalized millions, acting out his unhealed projections of fear and control.

    3. This was Hitler’s OWN PERSONAL BRAND OF MANIA. And it is traceable to the insecurity of his existence in his own family, the insecurity of a child constantly living under the threat of violence and humiliation. Later millions were to forfeit their lives so that this child – now a childless adult – could avenge himself by unconsciously projecting the grim scenario of his childhood onto the political stage.

      Hitler's unhealed trauma induced the death of millions of other lives, continuing a cycle of trauma.

    4. what’s also evident is what he didn’t seem to get: appropriate attachment—the strong and requisite bond between a parent and a child that leads to a healthy life and without which children can die or be damaged.

      We create monsters, large and small through the neglect of the child's needs. We continuously create them and new, large scale events like wars create the next generation.

    5. The reality is that Ukraine didn’t attack Russia, had no plans to attack Russia, and why would it? Russia’s military is 10 times larger AND they have nuclear weapons. It’s clear that Putin has created his own reality about the situation, one that isn’t shared by people who operate in facts. Besides, his actions cannot be justified merely because he believes his reality. He’s a damaged person who needs to stop what he’s doing before he shatters the lives of millions more.

      Historian Yuval Noah Harari makes an astute observation to this same effect, which I comment on in my other Annotation: https://hyp.is/go?url=http%3A%2F%2Fdocdrop.org%2Fvideo%2FyQqthbvYE8M%2F&group=world

      Harari says "these are the seeds of hatred and fear and misery that are being planted right now in the minds and the bodies of tens of millions, hundreds of millions of people, really. 00:26:20 Because it's not just the people in Ukraine, it's also in the countries around, all over the world. And these seeds will give a terrible harvest, terrible fruits in years, in decades to come. This is why it's so crucial to stop the war immediately. Every day this continues, plants more and more of these seeds. 00:26:44 And, you know, like this war now, its seeds were, to a large extent, planted decades and even centuries ago."

      In true abuser/abused cycle, Putin is foisting his unhealed trauma onto the rest of the world, perpetuating another cycle of intergenerational pain.

      We as a species must surface this as the root cause of all the misery that never seems to go away. We need to see this as the systemic root cause of the entire perpetuation of pain that keeps humanity locked in perpetual misery, one generation after another. This is the key cultural change that will boost humanity to the next stage of cultural evolution.

      We are now experiencing the unhealed pain of the previous generations. They are fruit that have ripened. We in THIS generation have to recognize that if we do not identify this at this system level, it will always be this way. We need to make an effort RIGHT NOW, in OUR generation to stop this cycle on a mass scale.

    6. How Vladimir Putin’s childhood is affecting us all

      Putin is merely at the extreme end of the spectrum of people with ACE. Indeed we could take the title of this article and substitute with many other people, in public as well as our own private lives: How X's childhood is affecting us all. We all know at least one person we could substitute for X!

  15. Feb 2022
    1. Ana Mardoll. (2022, February 12). I used to be a history major, with a focus on social history. And I remember reading about WW2 in a very fascinating book about the evolution of courtship and dating dynamics in America. (I’m going somewhere with this, bear with me.) [Tweet]. @AnaMardoll. https://twitter.com/AnaMardoll/status/1492398681303261184

  16. Sep 2021
  17. Aug 2021
  18. Jul 2021
    1. Sergio: Why did your family migrate to the US?Rodolfo: The reason why my family moved to the US was because both my grandfather and my biological fathers struggled with addiction, with alcoholism and drug abuse. They were just not very... Mostly my biological father, he really wasn't always there, and he was always very violent towards my mother. My mother had me when she was 14 years old. When she got pregnant everybody decided well, okay, she messed up. She is this, that, like very, very taboo. She wasn't really accepted in the family anymore. It wasn't so much my family and I moving to the US, it was just my mother and I when she was 16 and I was two and a half years old. They weren't really interested in what was going on with me or my mother. She just wanted a better quality of life for her and for myself.Rodolfo: In Mexico at 16 years old, with no type of education past probably middle school, she knew she wasn't gonna get very far. I guess she made that decision in order to have a better quality of life for her and myself, she went on. She was 16, and I don't know how she did it. I don't know the details and all that, but she met the right people, or she got in contact with the right people, and she went over there. She went to the United States. To this day, I still remember a lot of the things, even though I was very, very young. It's something that I always tell everybody that I meet, it's not just for this interview.Rodolfo: I always remember the bad things that happened or the very... I don't know if it's because it had such a big impact in my life and my mother's life or just because of how everything was set up. I remember everything that happened from start to finish. From the beginning where we got picked up, to being in the desert. I still remember eating cereal with water. It was... I don't know, it was very, very... I feel like it was... it obviously had an impact psychologically, because I still just have a lot of anxiety when I'm in certain places that I'm really accustomed to. A two, three year old in the middle of the desert, it definitely had to have an impact on me.Sergio: How old were you when that happened?Rodolfo: I was two and a half years old, so that's why I'm saying it's very odd for me to be able to remember that at a very, very young age. It wasn't only that, just even when I was here, when I was two, two and a half, I used to remember asking my mom certain memories that I had. She would say, "Oh you were one year old, one and a half years old, how did you remember that?" It was always very, like a violent, violent memory that I had. It was more so like my father being drunk or high or whatever and coming in the house. Taking any little money my mom made for the week, in order for him to keep on doing what he was doing. Just coming in and just tearing up the place.

      Mexico before the US, Mexican Childhood, Memories, Family; Mexico before the US, Migration from Mexico, Reasons, Violence, Domestic Violence, Border Crossing, Desert

  19. Jun 2021
    1. Luisa: I told my mom about this and I remember vividly having a conversation with her and telling her, "Hey, you know what? This is happening at school," but I think my mom was going through so much stuff that she didn't know how to deal with it or she didn't … there wasn't enough of my mom to go around back then. I know now. I forgive her, but certain things … [Pause] I forgive her a lot for it now because I get it. It was extremely traumatizing. She had a lot of health issues and then this man who was her entire world just dumped her aside and she had to leave her whole life behind and everything she knew, all the comforts and work. She had never worked in her life [Chuckles]. I respect my mother a lot. She started going to design school for designing clothes and it’s pretty great.

      Time in the US, Homelife

    1. I didn't really have a relationship with my family. When there was a family events or anything, I felt like an outcast. I would never go to them. Christmas, I was always in my room. Every little... It's just weird man. Everything messed me up. I feel like traumatic. Just the trauma of everything.

      Time in US - homelife - family - mental health

  20. May 2021
  21. Apr 2021
  22. Mar 2021
  23. Feb 2021
  24. Dec 2020
    1. 5The Missouri Model for Trauma-Informed SchoolsA school that only addresses the impact of trauma on students will struggle with staff burnout, turnover, and compassion fatigue. The science around trauma is clear: the most powerful resource for young people is a supportive, unwavering relationship with an adult. Adults in schools must be capable of being unwavering supports for students. This means addressing the vicarious and secondary trauma experienced by staff-not as an afterthought, but as a focal point of the trauma-informed journey.

      Important point.

  25. Nov 2020
    1. An accountability model of discipline employs behavioral supports and restorative practices to enable individuals to develop the skills they need to be successful in an educational setting.

      This shift toward "accountability" sounds like an interesting approach. What would a "restorative" model look like in course policies, or for academic infractions?

    1. Frustrating that putting a PDF in a frame seems to break Hypothesis. Saving for this quote, which I think is a pretty strong point which a lot of us are zipping past:

      "A school that only addresses the impact of trauma on students will struggle with staff burnout, turnover, and compassion fatigue. The science around trauma is clear: the most powerful resource for young people is a supportive, unwavering relationship with an adult. Adults in schools must be capable of being unwavering supports for students. This means addressing the vicarious and secondary trauma experienced by staff-not as an afterthought, but as a focal point of the trauma-informed journey."

    1. A trauma-informed pedagogy enables us to recognize that amid a pandemic, our students may have a difficult time completing basic tasks they normally would, including keeping track of the slightest changes in our classes, making decisions about their learning, being motivated to study or to show up, prioritizing assignments, engaging with classmates or the subject, managing their time, or simply not quitting.

      Interesting list - from the procedural to the motivational.

  26. Oct 2020
    1. Unfortunately, saying, "Build a relationship" is too vague and leaves too much up to the teacher's instincts.

      Not just in regards to students processing trauma, unfortunately...

    1. Between the self and other, between where you come from and where you end up, between the personal narrative and collective history, between genders and cultures and languages and countries and the similar calls for dignity and recognition contained in stories

      This statement is the most compelling answer to the question: "why stories matter".

  27. Sep 2020
  28. Jul 2020
  29. Jun 2020
  30. May 2020
  31. Apr 2020
    1. Sure. So I do want to start by just reminding listeners that talking about trauma, learning about trauma, can bring up some feelings, which is a very normal reaction to that. So I just want to remind people, if you notice that, that it’s okay to take a rain check on listening and engaging in this conversation. I also do recommend that even if you feel okay to engage with a discussion about trauma that it’s recommended that you do so in small doses, especially during these very challenging times.

      This is a lovely way to introduce this topic.

    1. Patients at risk for an esophageal injury should undergo bedside esophagoscopy or soluble contrast esophagography followed by barium examination to look for extravasation of contrast
    2. For penetrating thoracic trauma, physical examination, plain posteroanterior and lateral chest radiographs with metallic markings of wounds, and pericardial ultrasound will identify the majority of injuries.44 Injuries of the esophagus and trachea are the exceptions.
    3. Pneumomediastinum following blunt trauma that is identified on CT imaging is a poor predictor of aerodigestive injury; selective workup is appropriate
    4. After blunt trauma, a hemothorax is usually due to multiple rib fractures with severed intercostal vessels, but occasionally bleeding is from lacerated lung parenchyma, which is usually associated with an air leak
    5. Thrombosis of the internal jugular veins caused by blunt trauma can occur unilaterally or bilaterally and is often discovered incidentally because most patients are asymptomatic. Bilateral thrombosis can aggravate cerebral edema in patients with serious head injuries; stent placement should be considered in such patients if ICP remains elevated.

      blunt trauma can cause thrombosis of int jugular veins asymptotically, can cause cerebral edema if bilateral in serious head inj, and if ICP remained elevated stenting should be considered

    6. Vertebral artery injuries due to penetrating trauma are difficult to control operatively because of the artery’s protected location within the foramen transversarium. Although exposure from an anterior approach can be accomplished by removing the anterior elements of the bony canal and the tough fascia covering the artery between the elements, typically the most efficacious control of such injuries is angioembolization. Fogarty catheter balloon occlusion, however, is useful for controlling acute bleeding if encountered during neck exploration.

      penetrating traumatic vertebral art inj are better controled by angioembolization, rather than removal of ant of foramen transversarium. and Fogarty catheter baloon occlusion for acute bleeding while exploring.

  32. May 2019
    1. The Third-Generation normalized the process of dialogue. Bar-On and his team developed a paradigm for how to work through the Holocaust through knowledge, understanding, emotions, attitude, and behavior. What they discovered is that for the Third-Generation, the Holocaust either has no relevance, which they call “under generalization” or “over generalization,” where everything is seen through the prism of the Holocaust. A more normalized reaction to a Shoah family background is the “partial relevance,” an “in-between” and more balanced perspective.
    2. The Third-Generation in America (or “3Gs,” as they are known) have only recently started to become a visible group, but not with the same intensity as the Second-Generation. Age-wise, they span the gamut from newborns to forty-year-olds. Among them, those in their twenties and thirties are grappling with identity formation, with establishing intimate relations, and with having children.
    3. From the psychological research the only significant finding is that grandchildren of survivors as a group, are higher achievers than their peers. In 2002 Ellisa Ganz found that Third-Generation individuals are twice as likely to choose an occupation in the helping professions. Ganz also found, however, that those 3Gs who are in therapy are in treatment for longer periods than a comparative group.
    4. Yoslow observed that the Third-Generation has a deep affection for humanity, which is a transformation of the post-Holocaust trauma. This process is the ability to transform the emotional effects of the Holocaust by letting go, and thus increases the quest for meaning in ones life and concern for social issues.
    5. Today, Third-Generation individuals whose professional lives have been shaped by their grandparent’s ordeals are found in the creative arts, in helping professions, human rights work and in Jewish studies and communal work. The Third-Generation members are no different from those in the Second-Generation, who gravitated towards the creative arts in order to remember the barbarity committed against the Jews living in German-occupied countries and , the Jewish life that was destroyed, and to raise consciousness about present-day racism, human-rights violations, and genocides.
    6. Flora Hogman conducted a case study of Second and Third-Generation, and in her sample of the grandchildren of Holocaust survivors she noticed that they feel a sense of pride and awe of the survivors. This awareness of the suffering is part of the fabric of their lives, but is channeled into empathy, political activism, greater consciousness of others suffering, and a reluctance to intermarry.
  33. Apr 2019
    1. Trauma-Informed Screening and Assessment Tools

      Difference between trauma screening and trauma assessment tools: Screening tools are brief, used universally, and designed to detect exposure to traumatic events and symptoms. They help determine whether the child needs a professional, clinical, trauma-focused assessment. Functional assessments are more comprehensive and capture a range of specific information about the child’s symptoms, functioning, and support systems. A trauma assessment can determine strengths as well as clinical symptoms of traumatic stress. It assesses the severity of symptoms, and can determine the impact of trauma (how thoughts, emotions, and behaviors have been changed by trauma) on the child’s functioning in the various well-being domains.

    1. “The greatest hope for traumatized, abused, and neglected children is to receive a good education in schools where they are seen and known, where they learn to regulate themselves, and where they can develop a sense of agency.”
    2. “trauma produces actual physiological changes, including a recalibration of the brain’s alarm system, an increase in stress hormone activity, and alterations in the system that filters relevant information from irrelevant”
    3. “Under normal conditions people react to a threat with a temporary increase in their stress hormones. As soon as the threat is over, the hormones dissipate and the body returns to normal. The stress hormones of traumatized people, in contrast, take much longer to return to baseline and spike quickly and disproportionately in response to mildly stressful stimuli. The insidious effects of constantly elevated stress hormones include memory and attention problems, irritability, and sleep disorders. They also contribute to many long-term health issues, depending on which body system is most vulnerable in a particular individual.”
    4. “After trauma the world is experienced with a different nervous system. The survivor’s energy now becomes focused on suppressing inner chaos, at the expense of spontaneous involvement in their lives. These attempts to maintain control over unbearable physiological reactions can result in a whole range of physical symptoms, including fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, and other autoimmune diseases. This explains why it is critical for trauma treatment to engage the entire organism, body, mind, and brain.”
    5. “Children who don’t feel safe in infancy have trouble regulating their moods and emotional responses as they grow older.
    6. “Sadly, our educational system, as well as many of the methods that profess to treat trauma, tend to bypass this emotional-engagement system and focus instead on recruiting the cognitive capacities of the mind. Despite the well-documented effects of anger, fear, and anxiety on the ability to reason, many programs continue to ignore the need to engage the safety system of the brain before trying to promote new ways of thinking. The last things that should be cut from school schedules are chorus, physical education, recess, and anything else involving movement, play, and joyful engagement.”
    7. “We have learned that trauma is not just an event that took place sometime in the past; it is also the imprint left by that experience on mind, brain, and body. This imprint has ongoing consequences for how the human organism manages to survive in the present. Trauma results in a fundamental reorganization of the way mind and brain manage perceptions. It changes not only how we think and what we think about, but also our very capacity to think.”
    8. Trauma victims cannot recover until they become familiar with and befriend the sensations in their bodies. Being frightened means that you live in a body that is always on guard. Angry people live in angry bodies. The bodies of child-abuse victims are tense and defensive until they find a way to relax and feel safe. In order to change, people need to become aware of their sensations and the way that their bodies interact with the world around them. Physical self-awareness is the first step in releasing the tyranny of the past.
    9. “As long as you keep secrets and suppress information, you are fundamentally at war with yourself…The critical issue is allowing yourself to know what you know. That takes an enormous amount of courage.”
    1. Thalamus: Our Thalamus is like a cook.  It takes in info from all the senses and then blends it with our autobiographical memory. Breakdown of the thalamus explains why trauma is primarily remembered not as a story with a beginning, middle, or end, but as isolated sensory imprints: images, sounds, physical sensations that are accompanied by intense emotions usually terror and helplessness. In normal circumstances, the thalamus also acts as a filter or gatekeeper. This makes it a central component of attention, concentration, and new learning—all of which are compromised by trauma. People with PTSD have their floodgates wide open. Lacking a filter, they are on constant sensory overload. In order to cope, they try to shut themselves down and develop tunnel vision and hyperfocus. If they can’t shut down naturally, they may enlist drugs or alcohol to block out the world. The tragedy is that the price of closing down includes filtering out sources of pleasure and joy as well.
    1. All of us, but especially children, need … confidence that others will know, affirm, and cherish us. Without that we can’t develop a sense of agency that will enable us to assert: “This is what I believe in; this is what I stand for; this is what I will devote myself to.” As long as we feel safely held in the hearts and minds of the people who love us, we will climb mountains and cross deserts and stay up all night to finish projects. Children and adults will do anything for people they trust and whose opinion they value. But if we feel abandoned, worthless, or invisible, nothing seems to matter. Fear destroys curiosity and playfulness. In order to have a healthy society we must raise children who can safely play and learn. There can be no growth without curiosity and no adaptability without being able to explore, through trial and error, who you are and what matters to you.
    2. The challenge of recovery is to reestablish ownership of your body and your mind — of your self. This means feeling free to know what you know and to feel what you feel without becoming overwhelmed, enraged, ashamed, or collapsed. For most people this involves (1) finding a way to become calm and focused, (2) learning to maintain that calm in response to images, thoughts, sounds, or physical sensations that remind you of the past, (3) finding a way to be fully alive in the present and engaged with the people around you, (4) not having to keep secrets from yourself, including secrets about the ways that you have managed to survive
    3. Nobody can “treat” a war, or abuse, rape, molestation, or any other horrendous event, for that matter; what has happened cannot be undone. But what can be dealt with are the imprints of the trauma on body, mind, and soul: the crushing sensations in your chest that you may label as anxiety or depression; the fear of losing control; always being on alert for danger or rejection; the self-loathing; the nightmares and flashbacks; the fog that keeps you from staying on task and from engaging fully in what you are doing; being unable to fully open your heart to another human being.
    4. Securely attached kids learn the difference between situations they can control and situations where they need help. They learn that they can play an active role when faced with difficult situations. In contrast, children with histories of abuse and neglect learn that their terror, pleading, and crying do not register with their caregiver. Nothing they can do or say stops the beating or brings attention and help. In effect they’re being conditioned to give up when they face challenges later in life.
    5. When our senses become muffled, we no longer feel fully alive. […] In response to the trauma itself, and in coping with the dread that persisted long afterward, these patients had learned to shut down the brain areas that transmit the visceral feelings and emotions that accompany and define terror. Yet in everyday life, those same brain areas are responsible for registering the entire range of emotions and sensations that form the foundation of our self-awareness, our sense of who we are. What we witnessed here was a tragic adaptation: In an effort to shut off terrifying sensations, they also deadened their capacity to feel fully alive.
    6. The body keeps the score: If the memory of trauma is encoded in the viscera, in heartbreaking and gut-wrenching emotions, in autoimmune disorders and skeletal/muscular problems, and if mind/brain/visceral communication is the royal road to emotion regulation, this demands a radical shift in our therapeutic assumptions.
    7. Despite the well-documented effects of anger, fear, and anxiety on the ability to reason, many programs continue to ignore the need to engage the safety system of the brain before trying to promote new ways of thinking. The last things that should be cut from school schedules are chorus, physical education, recess, and anything else involving movement, play, and joyful engagement. When children are oppositional, defensive, numbed out, or enraged, it’s also important to recognize that such “bad behavior” may repeat action patterns that were established to survive serious threats, even if they are intensely upsetting or off-putting.
    8. Social support is not the same as merely being in the presence of others. The critical issue is reciprocity: being truly heard and seen by the people around us, feeling that we are held in someone else’s mind and heart. For our physiology to calm down, heal, and grow we need a visceral feeling of safety. No doctor can write a prescription for friendship and love: These are complex and hard-earned capacities. You don’t need a history of trauma to feel self-conscious and even panicked at a party with strangers — but trauma can turn the whole world into a gathering of aliens.
    9. In trauma survivors, Van der Kolk notes, the parts of the brain that have evolved to monitor for danger remain overactivated and even the slightest sign of danger, real or misperceived, can trigger an acute stress response accompanied by intense unpleasant emotions and overwhelming sensations. Such posttraumatic reactions make it difficult for survivors to connect with other people, since closeness often triggers the sense of danger. And yet the very thing we come to most dread after experiencing trauma — close contact with other people — is also the thing we most need in order to regain psychoemotional solidity and begin healing.
    10. This, he points out, is why we’ve evolved a refined mechanism for detecting danger — we’re incredibly attuned to even the subtlest emotional shifts in those around us and, even if we don’t always heed these intuitive readings, we can read another person’s friendliness or hostility on the basis of such imperceptible cues as brow tension, lip curvature, and body angles.
  34. Oct 2018
    1. teach-ers are generally not prepared to address the intersections of healing, politics, and emotion in classrooms.

      Nor are most of the teacher-educators working with pre-service teachers. And can we be fully prepared, any of us right now? I survived my own trauma through years of therapy and work, and I have learned a fair bit about socio-emotional learning and trauma-informed practice. But right now, my adopted city, Pittsburgh, is grappling with a massacre. I am aiming to act and lead from my heart; yet I am scattered, hurt, and deeply tired.

  35. Sep 2018
    1. A common lament among educator-survivors is the way that personal boundaries shift within the school community. Abbey Clements, who taught second grade at Sandy Hook, says that after the shooting, she would take her entire class to the bathroom at the same time, so that no one would have to leave her sight. But as they drew their students close, she says, she and her colleagues distanced themselves from one another. “You’re afraid that if you start talking about your own trauma, you might trigger someone else’s,” she says. “You’re also afraid of looking weak or unstable, afraid you’ll be asked to leave or take leave if you admit how much you’re struggling.” As a result, many teachers bury their fear and anger and guilt, until it changes into something else entirely. The question of where to erect a memorial, or when to take one down, can create fierce divisions. So might similar questions about how long to allow comfort dogs on campus, or what to do with the mountain of gifts and condolences that pile up. Students may come close to blows over whether to discuss the shooting during class time. Teachers may feel close to doing the same. “It’s not all ‘Kumbaya,’ ” Clements says. “When the system is cracked by a trauma of this magnitude, a lot of stuff leaks out. It gets messy. And it can change relationships.”
    2. Teachers are at the quiet center of this recurring national horror. They are victims and ad hoc emergency workers, often with close ties to both shooter and slain and with decades-long connections to the school itself. But they are also, almost by definition, anonymous public servants accustomed to placing their students’ needs above their own. And as a result, our picture of their suffering is incomplete. We know that the trauma that teachers experience after a school shooting can be both severe and enduring. “Their PTSD can be as serious as what you see in soldiers,” says Robert Pynoos, co-director of the federally funded National Center for Child Traumatic Stress, which helps schools coordinate their responses to traumatic events. “But unlike soldiers, none of them signed up for this, and none of them have been trained to cope with it.” We know that teachers who were least able to protect their students in the moment tend to be especially traumatized. “For teachers, the duty to educate students is primary,” Pynoos says. “But the urge to protect those students is deeper than that. It’s primal.” And we know that their symptoms can include major sleep disturbance, hair-trigger startle responses and trouble regulating emotions.
  36. Sep 2015
    1. Unlike many of my peers, I do think that there are direct and relevant connections between efforts by progressive students to regulate content Look: I have already said more about trigger warnings than I want to. I will simply note that every trigger warning necessarily contains ideological presumptions and political baggage. Someone I know said “I don’t want to ban American Sniper on campus, but I do want it to carry a trigger warning as war propaganda and Islamaphobia.” That trigger warning preempts the very critical conversation that we should be having about it! It’s a classic “when did you stop beating your wife?” tactic. It’s tautological; it presumes precisely the issue in question. Clint Eastwood, who made the damn movie, called it an antiwar film. I disagree with him; I quite despised it, actually, and for political reasons most of all. But I don’t pretend that my opinion on this question amounts to proof positive. Every trigger warning ever devised makes presumptions about the nature of trauma, the treatment of PTSD, and which kinds of content are potentially offensive. You would think that a bunch of close-reading academics would recognize that.
  37. Jul 2015
    1. The result? Students’ sense of vulnerability is skyrocketing.

      I had similar thoughts around the immensely popular video about street harassment made by hollaback! after a former partner compared an unwelcome invitation I had extended to see a concert together to street harassment. It got me wondering what disciplines have good dialectic for separating useful from harmful exposure. So far I have only an inkling that trauma therapy offers some hope, and it connects the conversation to concepts like triggers.