Author Archive: ACE Aware

GOLDen opportunities for learning about the early years

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Conferences… Ever since I was an experienced volunteer breastfeeding counsellor (somewhere around the last years of the previous century), I have been eager to increase my breastfeeding knowledge. I upped the ante once I decided to become a lactation consultant IBCLC and in the years after, I got totally hooked on attending lectures, conferences, symposia and whatever kind of training I could reasonably take part in. Such a wealth of experience was out there! Once you are an IBCLC, you have to collect CERPs, Continuing Education Recognition Points, to prove that you take care of remaining up to date with the most recent insight from science, the latest developments in the field, and the most important aspects of ethical practice. In 2008 or 2009, I discovered the GOLD Lactation online conference. In those years, GOLD, as an acronym, stood for ‘Global Online Lactation Discussion’. It was a great way for IBCLCs from all over the globe to attend high quality lectures, even if their own nations hardly offered any training opportunities because there were too few IBCLCs in the country to organise that in such a large-scale and impactful way.. With a stable internet connection, everyone could attend GOLD and get to know colleagues far away, working and learning together  on the very same topic! Such fantastic value for money!

I remember how excited I was each year, and how I carefully planned a couple of days without any other obligations. In those days, there used to be three live time blocks, spread over only two or three days: a morning block, an afternoon/early evening block, and a night block, so as to facilitate all time zones! We used to share about our circumstances in the chat, such as being awake as the only one in a silent, nightly house, while others had just dropped off the kids at school or were cooking the family evening dinner. We would joke about GOLD Lactation being the only conference where you could show up in pyjamas with a blanket wrapped around your shoulders and a hot tea or a wine to keep you awake! A one-hour lecture, a one-hour interval for some after-chat, a bathroom break, and a drink refill and… on it went! There would be four or five lectures in a row and I would preferably attend all of them live in those two days, so as to have the benefit of asking questions and exchanging with colleagues. Afterwards, I would make a selection of the ones worth listening to a second time. In those years, I also took up the role of the Dutch group coordinator; this year again, 2021, I was able to register a beautiful group of colleagues wanting to follow GOLD Lactation and we enjoyed many good speakers once more.

Several times, I gave a short presentation myself in the Cultural and the Hot Topic-sections, addressing characteristics of the Dutch breastfeeding situation. Online conferences weren’t as common as they are today; GOLD providing such a possibility to attend trainings was still quite new and we were always amazed at how smoothly the whole technical part went. Not much has changed there – the technique is still a wonderful part of how GOLD works! Therefore, I’m really pleased and excited to be part of the upcoming Early Years-symposium! The GOLD Learning Early Years Online Symposium 2021 is a brand new event created specifically for healthcare professionals working with families with children ages 0-3 years. It takes place live on October 4 & 5, and includes 6 speakers sharing the latest research on early childhood brain development, the importance of healthy relationships, and the impact of healthy childhood environments. I will have the honour of being one of those six, with one of the others being Robin Grille. I looked up my notes from 2010, when he spoke on ‘Attachment, the Brain… and Human Happiness’. A few great lines: ‘Long before there is a vocal language, there is body language’, ‘The amygdala thinks much faster than the rational brain’, ‘The heart is more and more thought of as the second brain’, ‘Answering dependency creates independence and autonomy’. Robin ended by saying: ‘I dedicate this seminar to a better world!’ What inspiration we can get from listening to one another’s wisdom and paying it forward! GOLD does a great job facilitating this and bringing people closer from all corners and walks in life.

An important aspect of Robin’s presentation in 2010 and of the latest insights in neurophysiology is that breastfeeding is part of a wider, more vital process, namelijk attachment-focused parenting. There is no artificial substitute for responsive, compassionate connection between infants and their adult caregivers. Therefore, my own presentation this year, ‘Building Strong Children: The Power of Buffering Protection Through Responsive Parenting and Caring Communities,’ is full of information on the power of Positive Childhood Experiences. I’ll be speaking about reframing conversations to focus on caring connections that promote healthy brain development and stress regulation. I will also deal with the differences between a pathogenic and a salutogenic approach in healthcare and in life more general: do we focus on what to avoid to prevent falling ill… or do we focus on what to seek out in order to remain healthy? And what is the role of power relations in all this? You are invited to join us and learn about the impact of loving relationships, why humans actively try to connect with others, and how we can support the development of lifelong resilience. I’m thrilled to be speaking on this important topic and I hope you can be with us! Registration is open and includes both live and recorded access to all presentations: https://www.goldlearning.com/early-years-symposium . See you there, maybe!

#GOLDEarlyYears2021

The wisdom of ‘minor’ trauma

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When daily life’s ‘bad habits’ light the way to healing your pain from early experiences

“Fire can warm or consume, water can quench or drown, wind can caress or cut. And so it is with human relationships: we can both create and destroy, nurture and terrorize, traumatize and heal each other.” – Bruce Perry

A much loved and widely shared quote of Bruce Perry shows how relationships can be both detrimental and beneficial to the health of the individual. The nurturing and healing ones are the ones that support health, while the traumatizing ones can consume and destroy the individual.
Bruce Perry is a renowned psychiatrist who has observed thousands of individuals, especially children, suffering the effects of severe trauma. He has written books and conducted research on these effects. Not so long ago, we shared a post on his book ‘What happened to you?’, where we discussed the parts that we found most enlightening.
In this blog post, we will focus on the wisdom part of trauma and to discuss not just the effects of severe trauma but also those of ’minor’ trauma. Many people are reluctant to categorise the adverse experiences they went through as trauma, yet constantly dripping water can also hollow out the stone in the end.

Trauma is a Greek word (τραύμα) which means ‘wound’. A wound can be big, but given a proper treatment, it may heal and never cause any discomfort again. It can also be small and, if treated without care, get infected and increase in size and severity, and thus trouble the individual for a long time or even cause irreparable damage. (Think, for example, of gangrenous injuries.) The same can be said about trauma. Trauma can be big and it can be seemingly ‘small’, causing severe symptoms straight away or only minor difficulties in everyday life at first. The seriousness of either form of damage may only show up much later. As many trauma professionals explain it: trauma falls on a spectrum.

Because of our understanding of trauma within the academic literature, as a clinical term and in our societies, sometimes we are left without the proper words to discuss ‘minor’ trauma and its effects on everyday life.
Some professionals working in trauma awareness and trauma healing, have suggested an interesting new paradigm to view trauma as a learning experience instead of a gloomy destiny. Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) can teach children that the world is a scary place and that their caregivers cannot be relied upon to meet their needs. This can lead to the fight-flight-freeze-fawn responses that we discussed in earlier blog posts, becoming deeply ingrained in them. These are all both instinctive reactions to threat, as well as learned behaviors if repeated often.

Some symptoms of ‘minor’ trauma could be seen through that lens of learned behaviors. They can be quirks we have, annoying habits we may have tried to quit, but that we somehow could not get rid of. They stayed with us and can even be traits that make us who we are and constitute the way others describe us.

Think of:
– being loud, energetic and cheerful;
– making jokes in every situation;
– being empathetic;
– having the habit of procrastinating;
– wanting to be in control of every little detail.

The list goes on and on…

Some of these traits might be characteristic of how you and others perceive you, especially if you never looked at them through the lens of trauma. They can, however, be symptoms of coping mechanisms you created to help protect yourself against the effects of toxic stress and trauma. You may have learned them through the course of your life, especially during the early formative years. While you experienced stress, toxic stress or trauma, these mechanisms were there to help you cope, which is a sign of the wisdom of nature in case of serious threats. The mechanisms have stayed with you, however, despite the circumstances being completely different now. They were adaptive and beneficial at first, given the tough circumstances, but may now have become maladaptive and a stumbling block on your path.
Another reason why it’s difficult to discuss these traits is because they are sometimes helpful so you probably wouldn’t want to give them up.

Let’s go back to that previous list and discuss them a bit more analytically (and yes, a bit bluntly, but bear with us, for simplicity’s sake):

Being cheerful, loud, and energetic can:
– help you have many positive interactions every day and enthuse others (good)
and
– drain you emotionally or physically or make you become a ‘pleaser’ (bad).

Making jokes can:
– make you a good comedian, a person people want to be around because you make them laugh (good)
and
– make it more difficult to connect with others on a deeper level and give them the impression you do not take them seriously (bad).

Being empathetic can:
– help you be a great therapist or teacher, someone people want to talk to because they feel they will be heard (good)
and
– drain you emotionally and, if you don’t look well after yourself, cause you compassion fatigue (bad).

As you can see, all of these characteristics are not ‘good’ or ‘bad’. They can simultaneously be both, or be one or the other depending on the circumstances. You might want to closely observe and then work on them to help you set healthy boundaries, find your true self, or minimise the burden they cause in some areas of your life. Or, now that you are aware of what they are, you might feel that this is a wisdom you carry with you after having experienced trauma. This is why we feel that certain experiences that can be ‘Adverse’ without buffering protection, can also be ‘Awesome’ and positively formative if well taken care of by sensitive adults around the child. Thus, toxic stress and trauma can be reduced or prevented. If your brain learned a coping mechanism at some point to mitigate the effects of toxic stress and trauma, then it can perhaps be trained to use these in a positive way. This can help you to not just survive, but thrive in life. This paradigm offers a lot more hope for the future for the adults who have already experienced ACEs.
And if you lacked that buffering protection then, but have managed to build a caring social environment in the present, your trauma may turn out to be a source of great wisdom for you and those around you!

A new season!

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It’s September already! Summer is (almost) behind us, although it looks like we still have some sunny days ahead of us. We hope that you were able to relax, that you could find some quiet time alone or with your loved ones from everything that demanded your attention and energy in the past year, and that you have beautiful things to look forward to!

At ACE Aware we are also going back to work. We’ve got a few more special interviews lined up that deserve to be fleshed out as soon as possible, so that the wisdom the interviewees have shared with us becomes available to you!

For example, we spoke with Bertus Jeronimus, who works at the Faculty of Behavioral and Social Sciences of the University of Groningen (RUG). There he studied clinical and developmental psychology and Dutch law and obtained his PhD on research into the interaction between personality and life events. He is currently working on a better understanding of personality and how people experience their well-being. We spoke to him based on his article about ‘The (un)happiness of a corona generation’, in which he draws attention to the fact that close proximity is a necessity for young people. He mentions that a lot of pain among young ones causes damage that you do not immediately see and that is therefore underestimated.

We also interviewed Jessica Boerema, also in Groningen. From her own practice ‘Contact in beeld’ (‘Contact in view’) she provides training courses to parents and professionals to create more insight into the importance of effective communication with young children at difficult moments. Communication in which you as an adult understand the baby or young child well and learn to decipher the signals, helps enormously to ensure that a baby feels safe and develops trust in the world. That is of course a wonderful way to support a child’s resilience from an early age.

In Amsterdam we met with Beatrijs Smulders, well-known author and midwife. She has played a prominent role in midwifery care for the past four decades and is a passionate advocate of home birth and an innovator at heart. Nowadays she no longer supports labouring women in childbirth, but provides personal guidance and advice in the field of women’s affairs through consultations. She has helped thousands of mothers and fathers get started in parenting over the course of her career and has developed idiosyncratic views based on her professional experience, combined with scientific insights. In short: a fascinating discussion partner, with ideas that invite and challenge you to think more deeply!

There are also some special professionals who said they would like to be interviewed, but with whom the date has not yet been set. We will also follow up on this shortly. Are you working in healthcare, education, the judicial sector or are you a professional who works from a trauma-informed approach? We would love to hear from you and perhaps set up an interview!

In addition, there are interviews with people who have lived through adverse experiences while growing up. We honourably call these ‘people with the lived experience’, people who are experts, because they have first-hand knowledge of what the impact of toxic stress and trauma can be. Of course we can’t share their names, but that doesn’t make their stories less important. In fact, it is those stories that are at the heart of the work for ACE Aware NL; they show how early experiences affect later life. When people look back on their youth in a phase in which they have been able to take a little more distance, many things sometimes come to the fore. Also, sometimes it is confronting to face aspects of that life stage when they have to make choices in their parental role. The needs and individuality of their own children can sometimes be very confronting. These can raise questions about what it was like as a child to need your parents’ support and not get it, or to feel like you were not seen and were hardly ever ‘good enough’. That can release a lot of grief. That grief can look like anger or frustration or impatience, but at the core, the pain and the feeling of insecurity and loneliness are often underneath. And what do you do in that case…? Do you manage to be kind to yourself? Do you allow yourself time and space to talk about it with a loved one? Do you have a social environment available paying attention to you where you can safely be vulnerable? It can already help if you know that you are not alone in your grief and that it can be liberating to talk about it, especially when parenthood is imminent or has just started. We will also give concrete form to this aspect this year by setting up meetings.

At the beginning of October, Marianne Vanderveen-Kolkena will give a presentation for GOLD Learning on behalf of ACE Aware NL in the Early Years symposium. Among other things, she will talk about the difference between avoiding risks and looking for beneficial aspects of human life, or, put differently, the difference between a salutogenetic approach (what do we need to stay healthy?) and a pathogenetic approach (what should we avoid to not get sick?). It will also be discussed that health is not an individual matter, but is socially constructed and is therefore the result of the interaction between the environment and the individual. Furthermore, the idea of ‘adult supremacy’ will be looked at, the idea that adult interests often outweigh the interests of the dependent young child that is still fully developing.

In short: there is a lot that we will work on!
During the holiday period, some themes took shape in a more creative way and we are happy to share a photo with poem with you.
Enjoy the reading and we look forward to meeting you somewhere, live or online!

A father-daughter-talk about connection

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A father and daughter in a conversation with each other about parenting stuff and about the parent ‘screwing up’ the child… that must be interesting, right? Well, it is, especially because in this case, it is not just a random parent-child-couple, but dr. Gabor Maté and his daughter Hannah. They are the ones who share their wisdom with us in this almost an hour long Instagram Live-session.
Following up on our review of ‘The Wisdom of Trauma’ last week, we are pleased to share with you this father-daughter talk. They pick several of an abundance of questions asked by those present and we see a loving interaction between the two of them. Maté points out that as soon as we start asking questions about how to heal from trauma, we are already on the healing path, or we would not bring up the issue. He encourages everyone to trust that process and continue on that road, not towards perfection, but towards awareness.

These are the questions from the audience that they speak about together:

  • Will there be an update of the book ‘When the Body Says NO’?
  • Is there any trauma-related research you can share to prove that trauma is actually a thing?
  • What is the best thing I can say or do for my daughter who was sexually abused between 2 and 6 years old and is 14 now and  who is seriously suicidal?
  • How can mothers/parents forgive themselves and take responsibility for creating change in the environment the child grew up in?
  • Can you touch on and explain the difference between trauma and disturbed/non-attachment in infants? Are presentations the same? Are healing processes different?
  • How has the pandemic affected addiction and alcoholism?
  • Do you have tips for enmeshed families and for healing unconscious relatives in denial?
  • Is the main reason for mental illness in the neurotransmitters and their genetic characteristics? Is it correct that trauma is not the main reason?
  • Safety is not just absence of threat, but also the presence of connection; how can you learn to be present in connection?
  • What are the tools to connect to and feel safe in the present moment?

(A funny moment, where Hannah suddenly understands an explanation and dad is surprised to have actually taught her something!)

Every time, for all questions and cases, the advice seems to be similar in a certain way in the sense that Maté keeps motivating everyone to work on their own trauma, as no one can solve someone else’s issues. The harder you push, even if it’s in the ‘right’ direction and with honest intentions, the more resistance you are likely to meet with. With regard to parents and how they communicate with and are present (or absent…) for their children, it is important to realise that there is always a difference between ‘acts of abandonment’ (by the adult) and ‘experience of abandonment’ (by the child). Most often, the parent does not harm or emotionally abandon the child on purpose, so the child may have the experience of abandonment without the parent consciously abandoning the child and although for the child the result may be the same, this makes a huge difference with regard matters of guilt. It does not mean, however, that the parent should not take responsibility for what happened; acknowledging the child’s pain is actually a crucial thing to do. As Gabor Maté says somewhere in the session about something the parent feels to have done to their child: ‘It happened through you, but you didn’t do it in any conscious sense. You cannot be blamed, but you can take responsibility for it.’ This addresses the ever present issue of shame and blame and guilt. Trauma, he explains, keeps us from being present around the ones nearest and dearest to us, to really see and hear and feel them, and this is the heart of healing from trauma: moving into connection with your authentic self in the present moment and thus healing from the wounds you carry inside up until this very day as a consequence of what happened to you in the past.

We hope you enjoy this father-daughter-session in which they addressed questions from a live audience. We will keep you posted, if we come across another one!

Film review of ‘The Wisdom of Trauma’

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One month has passed approximately after we, at ACE Aware NL, watched ‘The Wisdom of Trauma’ and, after letting it sink in for a while and after discussing the film’s best moments and its strengths, it feels like a good time to write a review about it.

The 1.5 hour film is made by Zaya and Maurizio Benazzo from Science and Nonduality. It was provided on a donation-basis screening that gave you the opportunity to access the film for 7 days, and (with an upgrade) watch discussions by professionals such as Stephen Porges, Fritzi Horstman, Esther Perel, Peter Levine and many more. There is also a very active Facebook group with many interesting discussions and a lot of networking.

Dr. Gabor Maté is probably one of the most outspoken and quoted trauma writers. He has been invited to many events, conferences and festivals around the world. If you perform a Google search, you can find an incredible number of his appearances on screen. In this film, you will encounter most of the themes he addresses in his lectures and that he is well-known for. On top of those, he goes into deeper depths by sharing his ideas from decades of working in the trauma studies field.The way the film is shot and made, draws the viewer into the stories that are being told; with Dr. Maté in the lead and in the voice-over, we are provided with the insights of people from all walks of life who work and live using the principles of his books and lessons.

The title refers to two forms of wisdom:

  • the mindbody has a lot of wisdom in dealing with adversity; coping strategies and behaviours caused and triggered by trauma usually show the person’s wisest way of surviving under difficult circumstances and are not a sign of them being ‘faulty by design’;
  • the wisdom we gain from going through trauma, gaining insight and healing from it can be used to support other people in their healing journey.

In the film, we get to know more about the way he works with his clients, about his approach of respectfully asking for their history (a method called ‘compassionate inquiry’), and his relationship with his wife Rae Maté. They both speak with sincere openness about the turbulence but also about the love and connection they have shared ever since they met in 1967.

The part where we get to know the couple better is quite moving in its candour. We see a man very much oriented towards knowledge who tries to learn to integrate his vulnerability as a strength, and we see a woman who, as an artist, is very much in touch with her intuition and who tries to learn to respond in a balanced way to her partner, integrating her own pain with that of a man affected by intergenerational and personal trauma resulting from the holocaust. They admit having had rough times, but have found ways to, instead of acting out their traumas by arguing or withdrawing from each other, coregulate and heal reciprocally. In a later shot, we see them walking side by side in the park – an elderly, wise, and deeply connected couple.

Outstanding, impressive moments

We like to share with you what, for us, were really impressive moments in the film.

  • Early on, we see Fritzi Horstman, founder of the Compassion Prison Project. Prisoners in the jail yard are in a huge circle and are asked to ‘step inside the circle’, everytime they have to answer with a ‘yes’ to the questions Fritzi asks about humiliation, punishment and trauma they experienced as a child. Watching them realize how much they share in terms of early life adversity and childhood trauma and how they need the support of the community around them (represented by the circle) in order to heal, is both chilling and heartwarming.
  • Somewhere in the last third of the film there is a really funny scene, where Maté responds to a question with a hilarious answer filled with self-mockery. We’re not going to spoil it; you will notice, for sure!
  • Several people tell about their own lived experience; these moments piercingly illustrate the impact of early adversity or neglect. Addressing the issue of losing connection to the self and the ‘meaningfulness’ of the pain it causes, one of them replies to Dr. Maté: “You’re telling me that having that pain showed me deeper inside of myself how I was abandoning myself.”

The film’s strengths

  • The lack of commentary lets you hear the people talk about their trauma, while the camera focuses on their hands, their eyes, their personal space and their artsy, symbolic, or day-to-day belongings.
  • Seeing compassionate inquiry in action is very revealing. Maté has developed this way of gaining understanding about a person’s life experience of trauma and of their childhood, while leaving them in charge of what and when they want to share and inviting them to look at these elements with compassion and understanding of how it helped them survive. Most addiction behaviours are a solution to a much deeper, underlying problem. Compassionate inquiry shares some similarities with motivational interviewing and non-violent communication. However, it is focused on uncovering trauma and helping the person find the root cause of their struggles, usually in a past, traumatic experience or the person’s upbringing.
  • The core message of the film is this widely shared quote from Gabor Maté: “Trauma is not what happens to you; trauma is what happens inside you as a result of what happened to you.” In the trauma-informed approach, professionals ask “what happened to you?” as a starting point to explore a person’s coping mechanisms to stress, behaviours that cause them health problems. In this film, Gabor uncovers another layer to this important question: it’s not the event itself that traumatizes the individual; it’s the impact inside their body as a result of that event.
  • The film explicitly addresses the importance of sensitive parenting and for example, the importance of not letting babies and infants cry-it-out without any consolation. It is summarised in this quote: “Children don’t get traumatised because they get hurt; children get traumatised because they are alone with the hurt.”
  • The film does not stop at the personal level, but also addresses big issues, like the influence of patriarchy, of capitalism and globalised materialism that often feed competition and prestige and lead to stress that increases the risk of people feeling unworthy and falling short. The link is intriguing: if we lose the connection to our authentic selves (the essence of trauma) and come to experience the world as a dangerous, horrible place, this will inform how we will approach the world around us: aggressively, suspiciously, cunningly. People acting this way, often get rewarded with power, which makes the vicious circle start all over again. Separating the mind from the body and the individual from the environment, still a very dominant approach in medicine, is what we should get rid of in order to heal the world, Maté says.

Conclusion

The makers kindly provide another donation-based screening of the film on July 28th till August 1st. So… if you want to watch the film… grab your chance! You can find the film’s details for registration and information here: https://thewisdomoftrauma.com/
Below, you can find the trailer from the film.