trauma informed care

Imagine

Imagine a society where everyone understood and knew how to appropriately respond to wounded behaviors, symptoms of stress, mental illness, grief, fear, pain. Instead of attempting to get revenge, enable, shame, punish or publicly humiliate each other for our faults, we’d surround each other with compassion, encourage the building of strengths, promote social learning, practice…Read more Imagine

Love Notes

This is not an invitation to ‘good vibes only’. Choosing to actively Love, as a verb, is the hardest work we, as spiritual beings attempting to have a human experience, will ever do. Turning each other into verbal and physical punching bags through jokes, passive aggressive insults, degrading comparatives, volatile threats and reactive headlines is…Read more Love Notes

It’s a Crime

The headline: 20 Inmates Show the Heartbreaking Cost of Growing Old Behind Bars The invisible subtext: Their crimes are the direct result of untreated trauma within the context of systemic oppression. They are being punished for society’s lack of humanity which essentially makes criminals of us all. That's all I have to say about that,…Read more It’s a Crime

Not Buying It

Healing from complex trauma while moving up the food chain is like running a marathon across a mountain range. No time for souvenir shopping or group sing-alongs. The third and fourth shift are waiting. Hurry up! There's a reason we're tired. Well intended self-help gurus ultimately hurt because they fail to address the blanket of…Read more Not Buying It

Reporting Our Way to World Peace

Why Journalism Need a Therapist Journalism isn't dead, it's just going through a metamorphosis which looks and feels like dying from the inside out, kind of like therapy. For instance,"The irony was thick. Here was a veteran of the industry, a Harvard journalism lecturer no less, getting facts wrong in a book about “the fight…Read more Reporting Our Way to World Peace

A Modest Proposal

In 1729 Jonathan Swift suggested we stew, roast, bake, or boil the excess of poor children who were clearly becoming a drain on society's resources. Not to mention their filthy, begging hands and faces were detracting from the quaint storefronts of beautified down towns and the general, picturesque landscapes of a country. His solution was…Read more A Modest Proposal

Telling Stories

“Balanced emotions are crucial to intuitive decision making.”-Michael Eisner  “There's a saying in Neverland that every time you breathe, a grown-up dies.” -J.M Barrie Peter Pan If the media told the story of the human experience through a trauma-informed lens could it lead to world peace? Yes. According to headlines women are either selfish hags, whores, damsels in distress,…Read more Telling Stories