Resiliency Within

Todd Wilcher, MA, CTRS, will share his work with Covenant House, Georgia. Covenant House provides services to unhoused youth. Their Crisis Shelter, the P.J. Garcia Youth Shelter, serves as a home for up to 60 youths ages 18-24. Youth can find a safe place to stay and wraparound support for 30-90 days. Youth who stay in the shelter work with a case manager to create a plan for their future. At Covenant House Georgia, youth have access to hot meals and showers, medical and mental health care, job readiness programs, GED and college admissions support, life skills classes, and a community of people who show them absolute respect and unconditional love. Covenant House provides a haven and more. Unhoused youth face an array of challenges. Their lives have not been easy, as statistics demonstrate that: • 49% of youth experiencing homelessness have been sexually exploited. • 40% of youth experiencing homelessness are LGBT. • 42% of youth experiencing homelessness have experienced abuse as a child. • A 19% unemployment rate for 16-19-year-olds is higher for at-risk youth, increasing their risk of being unhoused.

Carmen Turner-Schott will share her book, Sun Signs, Houses & Healing: Build Resilience & Transform Your Life Through Astrology. Carmen will share the themes in her book that can help you transform your life in 2023 through transformation, healing, and resiliency. This beginner-friendly book provides insights on all twelve signs and reveals how your birth chart can help you overcome challenges and improve your well-being. Once you have your chart—which you can easily acquire online using your time and place of birth—Carmen Turner-Schott helps you fully understand it, providing everything from self-care affirmations to strategies for healing and transformation. This book also lets you quickly jump between signs and houses, making it easy to look up information for yourself and your loved ones.

The great spiritual leader, Desmond Tutu died last week, and Resiliency Within was already planning to enter the new year with his message of joy. We will celebrate his life in this episode highlighting his dialogue with His Holiness the Dalai Lama’s about joy as expressed in their book, The Book of Joy. Desmond Tutu called himself the “prisoner of hope” and his message of hope and joy will live on. Many people in our world have expressed being tired and feeling a sense of hopelessness about the world condition. Desmond Tutu faced great hardship in his life, yet he was hopeful about the world condition, and he would say, “Hope is being able to see that there is light despite all of the darkness.” Reena Patel, LCSW, and the Director of Education and Training, of the Trauma Resource Institute will discuss with Elaine Miller-Karas, the meaning of joy and how we can be lifted from suffering and hopelessness to embrace the spring of joy within each one of us. They will discuss the eight pillars of joy: perspective, acceptance, humor, forgiveness, gratitude, compassion, and generosity. Listeners will be asked to explore how they can nurture their joy to live life with greater meaning and restore hope.

A team of multi-generational civil rights leaders, historians, educators, community leaders and clinicians gathered together to participate in a landmark initiative, the Kellogg Foundation’s Racial Equity 2030 grant opportunity. Reena Evers-Everette assembled a team of progressive thinkers dedicated to empowering future generations with historic civil rights truth through a trauma-informed lens. In the process, new partnerships were formed and new meanings about race, equity, and healing were articulated. Kenneth Mason, Kevin McCleod, and Jordan Murphy will share their thoughts and insight into what it means to take steps in courage and confront the truth about race and trauma through a lens of healing and resilience.

Dr. Michael Sapp will discuss the importance of looking at mental health as a public health emergency with our host, Elaine Miller-Karas, a world-reknown trauma therapist. The impact of traumatic experiences on individual and community health is widespread. According to the World Health Organization (WHO, 2021), "Traumatic events and loss are common in people's lives." There is a need to quickly establish programs that provide timely psychological counseling and intervention to alleviate anxiety and improve general mental health. Health and community care systems led by a cadre of psychologists, psychiatric nurse practitioners, chaplains, social workers, marriage and family therapists, nurses, peer counselors and physicians have brought the community resiliency model concepts and skills into medical clinics, community mental health and resiliency programs, shelters for the unhoused, and hospitals. Dr. Sapp will discuss how models like the Community Resiliency need to be scaled to meet the public health emergency of mental health conditions faced by children, teens and adults.

“I think this is what Nelson Mandela meant by the ‘rainbow nation’. Learning about how to stabilize the nervous system is equality and is beyond nations, culture, religion, and ethnicity.”

Community Resiliency Model Teacher, South Africa

The Trauma Resource Institute (TRI) has brought their ideas about healing the wake of traumatic experiences to Asia, Europe, the Mid-East, the Caribbean, Africa, Central America, North America, and the United States. They have created projects to help underserved individuals to learn innovative biologically based interventions (The Community and Trauma Resiliency Models) that can heal individuals and communities during and after human-made and natural disasters. So far, their work has been translated into 17 languages and has been brought to more than 75 countries. In February of 2022, TRI launched the Ukrainian Humanitarian Resiliency Project in collaboration with EdCamp Ukraine and have had over 80,000 views on Facebook.

The CDC Foundation (2022) describes public health as the science of protecting and improving the health of people and their communities. The field of public health fundamentally tries to prevent people from becoming ill by promoting wellness and healthy behaviors. Identifying mental health as a public health issue is imperative to building healthier and more productive communities internationally.

The Trauma Resource Institute’s Dr. Michael Sapp, CEO, and Reena Patel, Director of Education will discuss with host, Elaine Miller-Karas, the Co-Founder of the Trauma Resource Institute their international work and the importance of biological based models that are a bridge to all nations because of our shared humanity.

Natalia Valevska will share her insights from living within their beloved country, Ukraine, during the Russian invasion of February 2022. She will discuss her experiences and work with EdCamp Ukraine, an association of over 40,000 teachers, including her association with the Trauma Resource Institute. She will describe how, out of her despair over the war; she began helping with the resiliency support meetings co-sponsored by EdCamp Ukraine and the Trauma Resource Institute. She will express her passion for helping her country now and her vision of creating support for her people in the future when the war ends. She is dedicated to the children of Ukraine and how to support their teachers, parents, and community through SEE Learning.

Curious about something? Google it. But is curiosity simply information seeking? According to Perry Zurn and Dani S. Bassett, what gets left out in the conventional understanding of curiosity are the relations between ideas and between people. Curiosity, say Zurn and Bassett, is a practice of connection. It connects ideas into networks of knowledge and it connects the knowers themselves, both to the knowledge they seek and to each other. Zurn and Bassett—identical twins who write that their book "represents the thought of one mind and two bodies"—harness their respective expertise in the humanities and the sciences (specifically, philosophy and neuroscience) to identify three distinct styles of curiosity: · The butterfly, who collects stories, creating loose knowledge networks · The hunter, who hunts down secrets or discoveries, creating tight networks · The dancer, who takes leaps of creative imagination, creating loopy networks They go on to explain that many of us are all three types but to differing degrees, and that those degrees can change over the course of our lives and even daily, depending on the task at hand. What's more, they suggest that a true understanding of what happens in the curious brain can pave the way for a curiosity-centric education—an inclusive one that embraces everyone's innate style of learning. Just think of the possibilities such a paradigm shift would engender.

What do you say to the parents of a recent high school graduate who was just killed when the car she was riding in collided with a truck? Or to a son who asks you to do everything possible to save his cancer-ridden mother even though she has opted for hospice? Or to a patient when she informs you, with complete sincerity, that she can't change into a hospital gown…because she's a zebra? While finding the right words is a crucial part of every doctor's job, according to Dr. Jay Baruch it's often less about what you say and more about what you hear. As he explains, "To be an emergency physician, any clinician really, is to be a professional listener of stories." Each patient presents a story; finding the heart of that story is the doctor's most critical task. More technology, more tests, and more data won't work if the doctor gets the story wrong. Dr. Baruch tells of patients who sometimes come to the hospital with lives troubled by scales of misfortune that have little to do with disease or injury. When a patient comes into the hospital with cardiac arrest or a compound fracture, doctors know what to do. The problem is evident, and the solution is practically algorithmic. Dr. Baruch contends that the biggest challenge and the biggest part of an ER doctor's work is often caring for people who come in with not just problems with their body, but also social issues, emotional issues, and substance use issues—and oftentimes all of them at once. He explains that that the toughest part of an emergency physician's work isn't the high-wattage drama, the mayhem and the blood, that is portrayed on television, but rather the actual getting to the heart of the patient's story—and figuring out how to address it.

Even before Covid, parenting was hard. According to physician, writer, and father of three young children, Andrew Bomback, "From day one, parenting can feel like a version of 'we are flying the plane as we build it.'" Bomback investigates the emergence of an immersive, all-in approach to raising children that has made parenting a competitive (and often not very enjoyable) sport. He considers the high costs of commercialized parenting (from the babymoon on), the pressure on mothers to have it all (and do it all), the perils of parenting during a pandemic, and much more. A nephrologist by profession, Bomback shows how being a parent, like being a doctor, has migrated away from a "calling" and toward a "job." We hear what he learned from interviews with other parents as well as stories of his own experiences as a father—the good, the bad, and the two-hour bedtime ritual that ended with his oldest son throwing a Chapstick at his head. As he explores the anxiety that plagues modern parents, he offers both a window and a mirror into how 21st century mothers and fathers are trying to enjoy their time with their children, because "The days are long, but the years are short."