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- Steve Haines’ Trauma Is Really Strange (2016): This graphic illustration booklet explores the impacts of trauma on body and brain, drawing on much of the research we explore in the STAR curriculum (from Bessel van der Kolk, Peter Levine, Judith Herman, Stephen Porges, and Charles Figley, among others). Haines and illustrator Sophie Standing provide accessible, clear information as well as preliminary steps, anchored in the body, toward finding safety, reorienting, and improving well-being.
- Nadine Burke-Harris’ TED talk on ACE Study: How childhood trauma affects health across a lifetime (2014). “There are real neurologic reasons why folks exposed to high doses of adversity are more likely to engage in high risk behavior… and that’s important to know. But it turns out that even if you DON’T engage in any high-risk behavior, you are still more likely to develop heart disease or cancer! The reason for this has to do with the hypo-thalamic pituitary adrenal axis, the brain’s and body’s stress response system that governs our fight or flight response.
- Paper Tigers (2015): This powerful documentary explores the impact of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and toxic stress on struggling teens. The film follows a year in the life of Lincoln High Alternative School in Walla Walla, Washington. After radically changing its approach to disciplining students, Lincoln High School saw a dramatic turnaround in everything from the number of fights to test scores to graduation rates. The school has become a promising model of how to break the cycles of poverty, violence and disease that affect families through the practice of trauma-informed educational strategies and is a testament to what the latest research on childhood adversity is proving: that one caring adult can change the trajectory of a young person’s life. Check out the trailer here, or come view the film here at EMU at the Restorative Justice in Education (RJE) Academy on June 27, 2016.
- David Emerson’s Trauma-sensitive yoga in therapy: bringing the body into treatment (W. W. Norton & Company, 2015). While many of us may never have practiced (or even intend to practice!) yoga, this book offers valuable lessons for anyone working with individuals and communities responding to trauma. Emerson unpacks how many of our attempts to work with trauma focus on the brain’s frontal lobe, which is where we make meaning, reflect on the past, or plan for the future. He emphasizes that while these cognitive strategies have a place, trauma lives in the lower brain and our bodies: “To be traumatized is to live in a body with which you have an unreliable and unpredictable relationship.” He discusses ways of engaging the body, and opening to the possibility of practicing feeling sensation in the body, as a key step toward survivors regaining power, sensation, and foundations for healthy choice and action. He stresses the importance of making all activities invitational, empowering people “to practice choice without external coercion or influence of any kind.”
- Danielle Sered’s interview on Race and Justice in America. A restorative justice practitioner based in New York, Sered speaks to a series of key topics ranging from mass incarceration to unequal treatment of blacks and whites in the US legal system to the value of circle processes for honoring victims. Note especially the story she shares at the end about a process where a victim of a violent theft agreed for his attacker to train him in self-defense – an incredible testimony to how training new patterns in the body-mind can foster new life possibilities. In fact, the whole series from The Atlantic is worth our time and attention, especially for those working in the US. Check it out here.