HARVARD CENTER ON THE DEVELOPING CHILD

Brains are built over time, from the bottom up. The basic architecture of the brain is constructed through an ongoing process that begins before birth and continues into adulthood. Simpler neural connections and skills form first, followed by more complex circuits and skills. In the first few years of life, more than 1 million new neural connections form every second.* After this period of rapid proliferation, connections are reduced through a process called pruning, which allows brain circuits to become more efficient.

Brain architecture is comprised of billions of connections between individual neurons across different areas of the brain. These connections enable lightning-fast communication among neurons that specialize in different kinds of brain functions. The early years are the most active period for establishing neural connections, but new connections can form throughout life and unused connections continue to be pruned. Because this dynamic process never stops, it is impossible to determine what percentage of brain development occurs by a certain age. More importantly, the connections that form early provide either a strong or weak foundation for the connections that form later.

Photo Credit - Harvard Center on the Developing Child

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  SHENANDOAH CHEFALO 

Throughout our last several blogs, we’ve explored the broader themes of how to accomplish trauma-informed cultural change. We’ve also discussed how embodying trauma-informed values is essential to accomplishing that change. But what does embodying trauma-informed values look like in real time? How are we practicing the values in our personal and professional lives? How do the concepts we discuss become embedded and embodied in our work? Today, we’ll give you concrete examples of how to embody trauma-informed values and provide some prompts for you to reflect on. By the end of this article, we hope that you’ll be capable of answering some of the more difficult trauma-informed questions and have a solid understanding of how you embody trauma-informed values at home and at work. 

SAMHSA and Sanctuary Trauma-Informed Values
As a reminder, some of the key trauma-informed values we focus on at Chefalo Consulting include SAMHSA’s 6 Guiding Principles and the Sanctuary 7 Commitments.

1. Encourage Curiosity Through Inquiry
Although curiosity is not one of the trauma-informed values we highlight, it is a core value at Chefalo Consulting because we believe that curiosity requires self-awareness and personal development. To embody curiosity, you can ask yourself and other people questions (you’ll get plenty of examples in this article). The point of asking questions isn’t to discover a “right” answer. It’s to start a conversation, explore the possibilities, and cultivate a better understanding of yourself and others. Through this process, we don’t want to establish rigid ideas of “right” and “wrong,” but we may find solutions or resources we weren’t aware of.  

Photo Credit - Chefalo Consulting

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  CHERYL STEP, CREATING RESILIENCE

“Trauma always happens within a context, and so does healing. To understand the impact of trauma means being acutely sensitive to the environment—to the conditions under which people grew up, to how they live today, and to the journeys they have taken along the way.” (Andrea Blanch, Beth Filson, and Darby Penney National Center for Trauma Informed Care guidebook)

Creating an environment that exudes calm, safety, and compassion is a goal of trauma-informed systems. It is a profound paradigm shift in knowledge, perspective, attitudes and skills that continues to deepen and unfold over time. I often explain to agencies and communities that to be trauma informed means not only adjusting programming for an individual or family, but to also transform the environment in which the program occurs and the environment in which the individual or family lives. I recently heard an analogy that simplifies this concept brilliantly.

I was listening to Don Coyhis of White Bison, Inc. He was speaking about healing intergenerational trauma with Native American tribes. He explained how important it is to work with the community not simply with individuals. He used this illustration:

If you have a forest of trees and they are sick, you can remove one tree, give it what it needs- the attention, care, medicine, nutrients- to heal, and it will become healthy. But, if you take that healthy tree and put it back into the forest of sick trees, what will happen? Most likely it will become sick again. So, if you truly want to heal the tree, you must also heal the forest in which it resides.

According to SAMHSA, to create a trauma informed approach we need to incorporate the 4 R’s: Realization about trauma and how it can affect people and groups; Recognizing the signs of trauma; having a system which can Respond to trauma; and Resisting re-traumatization. Many agencies and communities utilize the trauma informed approach principles to scrutinize and strengthen their interventions, treatments and programs. But it cannot stop there.

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  KATHARINE MANNING, HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW

The past two years have been incredibly turbulent, as we’ve faced Covid, racial violence, political upheaval, environmental disasters, war, and more. Anxiety and depression have skyrocketed. Organizations have had to confront issues they never expected and find new ways to support their employees through repeated traumatic experiences.

The reality, though, is that trauma is not new in our organizations. It’s not going away, either. Estimates are that six in 10 men and five in 10 women experience at least one trauma, and approximately 6% of the population will experience PTSD at some point in their lives. Trauma and distress can arise from a wide array of causes, including domestic violence, sexual assault, racism, bias, harassment, economic uncertainty, political division, and more. New challenges arise every day, and conflict and strife anywhere in our globally connected world affect us all.

As we’ve seen the lines between work and home blur and a fundamental shift in our expectations of the places we work, organizations have struggled to provide the support and leadership their employees and customers need. That’s why it’s so important that they take steps now to build the cultures that can see them through this crisis and the ones we’ll all inevitably face in the future. To do that, we need to build trauma-informed organizations.

Photo Credit - Yaroslav Danylchenko

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  CENTER FOR THE STUDY OF SOCIAL POLICY

Children are more likely to thrive when their families have the support they need. By focusing on the five universal family strengths identified in the Strengthening Families Protective Factors Framework, community leaders and service providers can better engage, support, and partner with parents in order to achieve the best outcomes for kids.

Strengthening Families is a research-informed approach to increase family strengths, enhance child development, and reduce the likelihood of child abuse and neglect. It is based on engaging families, programs, and communities in building five key Protective Factors.

• Parental resilience
• Social connections
• Knowledge of parenting and child development
• Concrete support in times of need
• Social and emotional competence of children

Using the Strengthening Families framework, more than 30 states are shifting policy and practice to help programs working with children and families focus on protective factors.

Click on the topics below to find additional information, tools, and resources for understanding more about Strengthening Families and the Protective Factors Framework.

• Protective Factors Framework
• The Research Behind Strengthening Families
• The Strengthening Families National Network
• Translated Strengthening Families Materials

Photo Credit - kabita Darlami on Unsplash