If a single traumatic experience can change a person’s life for years to come, what must an average day be like for someone who faces traumatic events on a routine basis? For people affected by war or natural disaster, where entire populations from infants to the elderly have been exposed to so much suffering, what can we possibly put in place to help them cope? Researchers wanted to see whether the Teaching Recovery Techniques (TRT) program could be one effective resource for this population. TRT is a skills-based cognitive behavioral therapy program that has significantly reduced symptoms of PTSD in…

When kids have trouble paying attention in school, when they’re too emotional, or reactionary, or downright aggressive, what can we do to help them turn it around? Perhaps too often, these behaviors are addressed with medication for ADHD or bipolar disorder. But according to Bessel van der Kolk, MD, the problem (and the solution) may lie in knowing how to recognize the signs and symptoms of childhood trauma. Bessel walks us through the major markers of this kind of trauma in this short video – check it out, it’s just 4 minutes. Click here to sign up. Bessel will tell…

Can trauma pass from parent to child? It’s an interesting question. Some leading-edge research suggests that it’s possible – trauma felt by survivors might even affect their children’s gene expression. But we don’t need epigenetics to study how trauma strikes across generations. For example, researchers at Auburn University studied a more mundane form of intergenerational trauma transmission. Led by Mona El-Sheikh, PhD, a research team looked at whether household stress harms children’s stress response systems. They proposed that children who experience marital conflict will experience stress that results in poorer cognitive performance. To test this hypothesis, researchers observed 251 children…

We got a lot of heartfelt responses to our last blog post about the tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Judging from the words of comfort, it’s clear that the community of Newtown, CT is still in our thoughts and prayers. Reading through the comments, I noticed that a number of people mentioned a need for our children to have access to mindfulness in the classroom. As Suzy from Colorado put it, “I want mindfulness to be part of the grade school curriculum. Believing in yourself and encouraging positive self-concept in the early years might decrease the possibility of these…

How might our adult lives be different if we’d learned about mindfulness as children? A lot of us didn’t start hearing about mindfulness meditation until we were well into adulthood, not to mention well into managing a hectic and stressful lifestyle. Troublesome habits can form as early as elementary school, as children attempt to juggle homework assignments and test scores, and navigate peer pressure and parental involvement (either too much or too little). But a program called Mindful Schools is helping to change this by introducing mindfulness to students as early as first grade … and it’s making a difference….

One of the perils of trauma is that it can destroy a survivor’s sense of time. But when this happens, how can we help to restore it? Recently, I spoke with Bessel van der Kolk, MD, considered the world’s leading expert in post-traumatic stress. Watch below as Bessel explains how trauma affects our patients’ sense of time, and what type of trauma therapy might help re-establish it − it’s only 3 minutes long. Click here to sign up. We’ll be getting even more into understanding how trauma affects the body and how we can develop an effective trauma treatment in…