I have not blogged for over a year because I needed to step back and evaluate what I was trying to do with the blog. I started it with the intention of sharing my story of working at a youth behavioral health residential facility in Missouri. I thought it was a story that needed to be told and I still do. However, at the same time I had started looking into how to change the system which led me into politics. I still believe that voting is the way to change some things but I cannot handle our current political climate without becoming enraged. So I took a lot of steps back, I moved to another state and I have been working on myself based on the knowledge I now have about how children’s brains develop and the impacts of “trauma” on that development.
Trauma is a very complex subject and it has a lot of definitions. The one that has stuck with me is: Trauma is when the world as you know it completely changes. The reason this stuck with me is because my focus is on children and a child’s world is very small. Almost anything changing in a child’s world can be traumatic unless it is handled in a way that allows the child to understand what is happening and that they are safe.
I grew up in a world where no one understood anything about trauma and children were expected to just do what they were told and they didn’t need explanations. I also grew up in a family that believed talking about any thing that caused them pain or discomfort was not a good idea. I have spent the last year exploring some events that happened in my childhood that were traumatic for me, understanding how those events shaped my perceptions and affected how I reacted to circumstances. This exploration has allowed me to let go of some false beliefs and to change the way I react.
I am going back to my original goal of telling my story, all of it not just the experience of working with traumatized kids in a less than ideal environment. I hope that my stories can and will help someone else understand their own trauma. I also hope that they will help others see why we have to start prioritizing children in every part of our society if we ever want to have a society where kindness is the norm and where hatred is an anomaly.
More to come soon.
BE FOR KIDS 