New Focus on Childhood Trauma and Healing for Adults

By Nancy Minister, MC, Survivors Therapist I recently came across a blog written by ACEs Connection member Elizabeth Prewitt titled, “For the first time, SAMHSA’s annual children’s mental health event focuses on trauma.”  In the article, Ms. Prewitt writes, “It is both… Read More

From Learned Helplessness to Learned Optimism

Tian Dayton, Ph.D., TEPTrauma can leave us feeling helpless in the face of our own lives, our own days, our own relationships. “Learned helplessness,” a term coined by psychologist Martin E.P. Seligman, describes an aspect of trauma akin to giving up. We learn the negative lesson that no matter what we do, we cannot seem to make a difference in the lives of those we love and we can generalize that feeling to other areas of our lives as well. But Seligman who studied this phenomenon began to ask the question, ‘if we can learn how to be helpless then why can’t we also learn how to be optimistic?’ Read More

The Cycle of Trauma and Addiction

By: Claudia Black, Ph. D. Clinical Architect of the Claudia Black Young Adult Center at The Meadows Addiction encourages trauma and trauma can encourage addiction. This process becomes a vicious circle or negative feedback loop, with trauma contributing to addiction, which in turn fuels more trauma, which encourages still more addiction, and so on and so on. The Claudia Black Young Adult Center treats substance and process addictions, recognizing them to be primary disorders that reinforce each other and are often fueled by traumatic experiences. Here are some examples of how this process plays out: Read More

30 Things You Need to Know about Trauma and PTSD: PTSD Awareness Month

My therapist prescribed me to drink more alcohol. I had described symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), yet once again, the diagnosis was completely missed. Even worse, this uniformed therapist suggested that I drink wine “medicinally,” beginning in the morning, to help cope with what he said was… Read More

Neurofeedback and The Sacred Path To Emotional Regulation

By Deirdre Stewart, MSC, LAC Director of Trauma Resolution Services for Meadows Behavioral Healthcare Bessel van der Kolk, world-renowned trauma researcher and Senior Fellow of The Meadows, recently published his Randomized Controlled Study of Neurofeedback for those suffering chronic symptoms of developmental trauma. He showed a 40… Read More

How PTSD Treatment Cured my Back Pain

I was diagnosed with osteoporosis in my early twenties. Why were my young bones already losing tissue? Like me at the time, women who struggle with anorexia nervosa are at a higher risk of developing the disease. I also believe that my eating disorder may have contributed to my sluggish… Read More

Childhood Abuse Is More Prevalent Than You Think

It is estimated that each year three million cases of child abuse are reported to authorities in the United States (source: Childhelp.org). Read More

Growing Up with an Addicted Parent

I remember as a twelve-year-old, sitting alone in our living room after one of our by then typical family meltdowns …….trying to make sense of the pain and general devastation of our once happy family……trying to understand how kind, decent and loving people could cause each other such unrelenting pain, how we could say the things we were saying, hurl insults, act out in anger and rage……I recall saying to myself “wars do these things to people, separate loved ones, wound hearts, tear families apart. But somehow, we’re doing this to ourselves.” Read More

How We Shortchange Men in Trauma and Addiction

By: Dan Griffin, MA When I went to school to learn how to work with people with addictive disorders, I got a lot of great guidance: Brain science. Internal family systems. Motivational Interviewing. Models of change. Working with the criminal justice population. Working with women. Cultural influences on addiction and recovery. Read More

Codependency: What’s It All About?

By Tian Dayton, Ph.D. The word codependency touched a nerve when it first plowed its way into our everyday vernacular. Initially, it grew out of the twelve-step term co-addict, which was a way of describing the spouse of the addict; however, as it didn’t tell the right story, it… Read More