Podcaster: Susie & James Kowalsky, Matt Bennett, Curt Mower, & Dr. Jerry Yager
While pre-dating the trauma-informed movement, harm reduction approaches and philosophies are highly effective for programs serving people with trauma histories. Harm reduction and trauma experts James and Susie Kowalsky join Matt, Curt, and Jerry to discuss how harm reduction complements trauma-informed approaches and helps us improve outcomes while increasing our compassion and acceptance. Trauma-informed and harm reduction are changing how we structure programs and approach client and community issues, join us for this fascinating exploration.
Discussion Questions:
- How do our current approaches align with harm reduction?
- Can moving towards more harm reduction-oriented approaches improve the services we provide to those with trauma histories?
- How does harm reduction fit into your personal/profession philosophy on people and social issues?
Susie Kowalsky Information:
James Kowalsky Information:
Podcasters: Matt Bennett, Curt Mower, & Dr. Jerry Yager
Safety is a critical component of trauma-informed care. Without safety, people stay in survival mode and rarely change behaviors or adopt new ways of thinking. Physical and psychological safety provides space for people to test out new behavior and start thinking about their future in different ways. In this episode, Matt, Curt, & Jerry explore the role of safety and its role in the healing process.
Discussion questions:
- Can you identify behaviors and thinking people rely on when they do not feel safe?
- Are there any ways to evolve program structure to improve safety in your services?
- How have you successfully help people take risks to think and act differently?
Watch the video here: https://youtu.be/tjwhypj9Hbo
Last episode we discussed on reaction to stress and trauma when we examined rigidity. In this episode, Matt, Curt, and Jerry explore the other extreme responses include chaos and the related fight or flight response. While the rigid responses often help people in need fade into the background, these responses pull our attention and can elicit a fear-based reaction from us due to the danger it threatens us and others.
Discussion questions:
- When have you seen a chaotic response, fight response, and flight response and what did these reactions look like?
- Why do you think the people you described in the first question have these reactions?
- Are there changes or adjustments you can make to your programming that might help increase safety and reduce the chances of these reactions?
Podcasters: Matt Bennett, Curt Mower, & Dr. Jerry Yager
The trauma symptom of rigid thinking and behavior was a constant theme in our first 29 episodes. In this episode, Matt, Curt, and Jerry will explore this topic in greater detail. Recognizing rigid thinking and behaviors help us to identify people who are struggling with trauma and helps build empathy and compassion for specific behaviors that might otherwise frustrate us. Like so many consequences of trauma, rigidity in thought and behavior serves as a coping skill in high stress or traumatic environments but quickly become maladaptive in others.
Discussion questions:
- Can you identify rigid thinking or behavior in anyone you are working with or worked with in the past?
- How has rigid thinking or behaviors served as a coping or survival skill in the environments which those you worked with?
- How can we help those with rigid mindset increase flexibility?
- Can you identify any rigidity in your program, organization, or system?
Podcasters: Matt Bennett & Curt Mower
Stop the madness! Token economies, level systems, behavioral management plans, IEPs, Positive Behavioral Support, RTI, light systems, and the list goes on and on. It seems like everywhere you look in the helping, parenting, criminal justice, or educational world you see systems of rewards and punishments designed to control and change behavior. Unfortunately, many of these are designed by people without much understanding of behavioral science or neurobiology and often result in unintended consequence which does more harm than good. In this episode, Matt and Curt examine the cost of many of these popular approaches, how they fail those with unresolved trauma, and how we can help those we serve find their own internal motivation.
Discussion questions:
- Why do we have a behavioral management system in first place?
- What science or thinking is behind our behavioral management approaches?
- Are these approaches working to help people find intrinsic motivation or are we just controlling behavior?
- Can we improve our current system to move from external control (outside the skin) to internal control (inside the skin)?
Few things have impacted psychology, education, wellness, and pretty much every other human endeavor like mindfulness. With advance to technology and neurobiology, practices dating back thousands of years are demonstrating incredible measurable effects in brain scans. Also, mindfulness practices are showing practical results in academic achievement, psychological well-being, combating burnout, social and emotional intelligence, and immune functioning. One of the most exciting findings of mindfulness research is how it helps heal a traumatized brain. In this episode, Melissa Springstead joins Matt, Curt, and Jerry to discuss these findings and how we might integrate mindfulness into our work and our own self-care.
Discussion questions:
- Define what mindfulness means to you?
- How do you think mindfulness might help those you work with?
- Do you have any thoughts on how you could implement mindfulness in your settings?
- Are you doing any mindfulness practices on your own? Do you have interest in starting a practice?
Do we have free will? Do we have the capacity to enact our volition even when our neurobiology and environment support us to continue our habits? Does trauma’s effect on executive functioning make free will even more illusionary for those with unresolved trauma? In this episode, Matt, Curt, and Jerry take on the massive issue of free will and talk about why changes in behavior and thinking are often extremely difficult for those with traumatic pasts.
Discussion questions:
- How does the science on volition affect how we see those we work with?
- Do our policies and approaches make sense in light of this research?
- How could we make shifts in our structures and approaches to better match the evolving research on volition and trauma?
Matt’s post on Quantum Physics and the Brain in honor of Stephen Hawking
In this episode, Matt, Curt, and Jerry discuss Oprah Winfrey’s 60 Minute reporting on childhood trauma. In a matter of a few minutes, the number of people exposed to the research on trauma multiplied many time over. What does it could this mean for the trauma movement? How can we utilize this moment to further understanding in our communities? These questions and more are covered in this episode.
Discussion Questions:
- What were your reactions to the 60 Minute episode?
- Who should we be sharing this video with to help people better-understanding trauma?
- Now that many more people in our community understand trauma, how can we become advocated for transforming this knowledge into meaningful action to help those suffering from traumatic experiences?
Van Jones Show Interview with Oprah
Oprah’s CBS This Morning Interview
Boston Globe Article on Bessel van der Kolk
Podcasters: Russha Montag-Knauer, Matt Bennett, Curt Mower, & Dr. Jerry Yager
In this episode, Matt, Curt, and Jerry welcome Russha Montag-Knauer. Russha works as an Analyst for the Evaluation Unit at the Colorado Division of Probation Services and has worked over the years in integrating trauma-informed practices into her criminal justice philosophy and work. One clear finding in the trauma research is that those with unresolved trauma histories have a higher likelihood for involvement in the criminal justice system. While this surprises few, who know the neurobiological impact of trauma, we will examine how a person’s hurt and pain too often results in criminal behaviors.
Discussion questions:
- What is the relationship between trauma and criminal behavior?
- How could helping your clients heal from their trauma prevent future criminal acts?
- What would a trauma-informed criminal justice system look like in your community, state, or country?
This episode finds Matt and Jerry in Washington D.C. attending and presenting at the 1st National Trauma-Sensitive Schools Conference put on by our friends at the Attachment & Trauma Network. For this podcast, we share what we have learned at the conference and reflections on our presentation on Emotional Regulation and Behaviors. Also, we discuss the powerful experience of being at a conference talking about schools and trauma just days after the Marjory Stoneman Douglas school shooting.
Discussion Questions:
- How would trauma-sensitive schools positively benefit your community, those attending, and those that access your services (if you do not work in schools)?
- Can you identify any advocacy you can do to school administrators or policymakers to support adoptions of trauma-sensitive schools in your community?
- How do you see the Marjory Stoneman Douglas school shooting and the advocacy of that school’s students affecting your own emotional state, the conversations in your community, and can you help lead those conversations to help create safer schools and communities?