Guest Author
Posted in Our Voices, Therapies, Trauma, Treatment
Mental Health Awareness Month
Every May, advocacy organizations such as Mental Health America come together to raise awareness around needs related to mental health. These needs have increased during the coronavirus pandemic. Now that we have entered the month of June, we should reflect on the lessons learned during Mental Health Awareness Month so we can better support and advocate for mental health awareness all year long,
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Blog Manager’s Note: Today’s post is about this strange new world in which we all find ourselves learning how to home school. If you’re like me, the possibility had never even crossed your mind in the days and years leading up to COVID-19! As part of our series on coping with the pandemic,
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Blog manager’s note: Welcome to the third installment of our Coping with Coronavirus series! This comes to us from long-time ATN Angel Jane Samuel, who shares some activities we can do with and for our kids…and ourselves.
I said to my husband the other day,
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Guest Author
Posted in Our Voices
Blog manager’s note: Before you get all up in arms wondering what kind of gift the novel coronavirus could possibly be, read on. This is the second of what will be a series of posts by ATN‘s wonderful staff and volunteers concerning the COVID-19 pandemic.
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Guest Author
Posted in Education, Our Voices, Parenting Traumatized Children, Trauma Sensitive Schools
A neuropsychologist said of my oldest son: “His brain is not organized the way the world wants it to be, so he has problems functioning. But he doesn’t have behavior problems. His brain doesn’t do those.”
My youngest son also has a brain that doesn’t fit the world he lives in,
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Guest Author
Posted in Advocacy, Education, Our Voices, Trauma, Trauma Sensitive Schools
Child trafficking: from victim to advocate
In 2019, I found myself in front of an auditorium full of school staff members from 70 Colorado school districts, speaking at a training on how to identify child trafficking. Several years earlier, my therapist had told me, “One day, you will be addressing the systems that failed you.
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Guest Author
Posted in Education, Our Voices, Trauma Sensitive Schools
A word about gender
Before I talk about boys in school, let me start by acknowledging that gender is complicated. We learn more every day about its many complexities and intricacies. We know, for example, that gender exists on a continuum. Even if we oversimplify and separate people into “boys” and “girls” and the qualities associated with each,
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Guest Author
Posted in Our Voices, Parenting Traumatized Children, Trauma
Recap
In last week’s post, I introduced the idea of the AAA student: Amygdala Always in Action. I referred to Dan Siegel and Bruce Perry, among others, for their work on the effects trauma can have on the brain. And I talked about the need for a massive paradigm shift,
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Don’t you mean an A student?
Nope. My child is not an A student. My child is an AAA student: Amygdala Always in Action. If you are a parent reading this, I bet you have an AAA child too. And if you happen to be a teacher, you almost certainly have AAA students in your classroom.
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Guest Author
Posted in Our Voices, Parenting Traumatized Children, Trauma
-by Meredith Poynter
A Rough Ride
I learned early that this journey to heal childhood trauma is a bit of a rollercoaster ride. How do we participate in that ride and yet remain resilient? I love my child with all my heart, but know if I don’t have the right mental tools,
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