Source: UNC Greensboro
Read time: 1.8 minutes

This Happened
University of North Carolina at Greensboro launched an online training program for educators to become trauma-informed. The Trauma-Informed Professional Practice K-12 Educator Certificate Program was announced on their website February 5, 2024.
 
Who Did This?
The training program is a product of UNC Greensboro’s North Carolina Academy for Stress Trauma and Resilience (NCA-STAR), which is housed within the university’s Department of Counseling and Educational Development. NCA-STAR was created in 2019, and the inaugural director, Anita Faulkner, was appointed in 2021.

The Premise
The premise is that when teachers learn how trauma and stress impacts a wide range of children’s emotions, sense of self, learning, and aggression, then they can implement new skills in classrooms to make children and schools more successful.
 
Analysis
The fourteen-hour course provides educators with an understanding of trauma’s impact on the lives of students, teachers, staff, and families. The topics include:

• What Is Trauma & Where Does It Come From
• Impact of Trauma Across the Lifespan
• Trauma’s Impact on Brain & Body
• Building a Trauma-Informed Approach
• How Trauma Shows Up in Pre-K, Elementary, Middle, and High School Students
• Trauma-Informed Classroom Strategies
• Educational Wellness
• Fostering Resilience

 
The cost is $349.
 
Why Is This Happening?
The “trauma-informed” concept originated in the early 2000s but has always been vaguely defined, with no consensus on a definition. This vagueness may be seen as a strength by allowing many projects to fall under its umbrella. As a result, the number of training programs, such as this one, have grown tremendously over the past fifteen years.
 
Should This Be Attempted?
Despite many individuals claiming that one or another interaction with a trauma-informed approach greatly helped them, there are no known tests of the effectiveness of these approaches. Because of the way trauma-informed approaches are broadly defined, it is nearly impossible to test them. The studies that have been published relied mostly on trainees’ self-perceptions of whether they feel better educated.
 
What’s Next?
Proponents of trauma-informed approaches appear to be more interested in promoting the premise that trauma is the root cause of nearly all disadvantages than in gathering evidence. It seems likely that controversies at the school level may start to increase as more funds and time are invested in these approaches without an evidence base.

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Source: WFMJ 21 news
Read time: 2.5 minutes

This Happened
Akron Children’s School Health Services hired an individual to fill a new position called a “trauma and resiliency coach” who will work with local schools.
 
Who Is Doing This?
Akron Children’s is a hospital and outpatient clinics system that provides pediatric care in multiple counties in northeast Ohio. The system includes a School Health Services program to treat primarily medical problems in school-based clinics. Addressing trauma and stress in schools has not previously been a service they offer.
Covelli Enterprises, one of the largest restaurant franchisees in the United States, provided the funding.
Nick Morio, a former educator, will be the new trauma and resiliency coach. He does not appear to be a licensed counselor. It’s not clear what his training is for this position.
 
The Premise
The premise is that when teachers learn how trauma and stress impacts a wide range of children’s emotions, sense of self, learning, aggression (and much more) then they can implement new skills in classrooms to make children and schools more successful.
 
Why is the coach needed? The justification for this new position, according to Missy McClain, Community Outreach Coordinator for Akron Children’s, is that trauma has a wide and enduring impact on everything. In an interview, she stated, Trauma “is more than just about experiencing sad or scary things. . . . And it can impact us throughout our lives. And it can impact the ways we’re able to behave at school, the ways we’re able to learn in school, the ways we’re able to communicate about our feelings, our physical health as we grow older. Trauma is something that can color everything that we do in our lives.” (emphasis added).
 
What will the coach do? He will go into schools to help teachers and other school staff understand what children are going through after experiencing trauma and stress. He will provide professional development for teachers and tips on classroom planning to help keep troubled children in classrooms. McClain stated that she thinks of the coaching job as “building a culture of wellness for all of the students who are there but especially for our students who might be having a tougher time at home or in their communities.” McClain explained that the coach will educate teachers on how to help students handle stress “through positive communication,” and “coping mechanisms like taking deep breaths, and counting to ten, and, you know, even doing things like mindfulness can really help.”
 
Analysis
The theory that trauma and stress have enduring impacts on every aspect of our lives is the identical theory behind the unproven adverse childhood experiences (ACE) theory, the toxic stress myth, and the debunked theory of the best-selling book The Body Keeps the Score. Many schools have implemented various types of these programs across the country over the past ten years. There is little good or consistent evidence that the programs have positive impacts on school attendance, learning, disruptive behavior, or mental health. It is unlikely that this program will truly help many children who are struggling with these issues.

Given recent publicity about teachers across the nation providing controversial gender and race communications without parental awareness, it was notable that McClain's description of the job did not include how parents would be informed of or give consent for interventions with students.
 
Why Is This Happening?
These types of programs keep expanding across the country because they are seamless with the ideological beliefs of many educators that human nature is highly malleable by life experiences and a more ideal society can be reached someday if we invest more. These types of interventions are in line philosophically with other controversial efforts by schools to teach progressive interpretations of race and gender.
 
What’s Next?
How will they know if it works? No plan for program evaluation was announced. It is impossible to gather conclusive evidence on the effectiveness of uncontrolled, unsystematic, and unstandardized interventions like this one. At best, the program ought to document case reports of how individual teachers and students were helped.
​

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written by Michael S. Scheeringa
Read time: 3.9 minutes
 
Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score was the strike of lightning every science popularizer wishes for. Since publication in 2013, it has parked on the non-fiction best-seller lists, often at #1. At the time I am writing this, it is ranked number ten among all books sold on Amazon.  Due to its popularity, it became the bible of a new social movement for trauma-informed care.
 
The Premise
In the first half of the book, van der Kolk explained that psychological stress and trauma lodges in the body and damages the operation of many brain functions. The dysfunctions include thoughts, memory, relationships, personality, and the most basic capacities to live, work, and enjoy life. These dysfunctions are vast, ergo, the only logical conclusion is that trauma is the supreme public health crisis.
In the second half of the book, van der Kolk then promotes “body treatments” that follow from that conclusion, including sensorimotor psychotherapy, somatic experiencing therapy, psychomotor therapy, EMDR, neurofeedback, theater, yoga, singing, and dance. According to van der Kolk, these treatments are superior to standard treatments, namely cognitive behavioral therapy and medication, because they treat the soul, the whole self, by connecting at the visceral level.
Consequently, the book became for the nascent trauma-informed approaches movement what Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth was to climate change activists. Whenever progressive bills and projects have been proposed for saving children from violence, preventing crime, or transforming the culture of public schools, this book is almost always cited as the fountainhead of evidence that trauma is the root cause of every group’s problems.

Analysis
Does trauma really damage the brain? Van der Kolk is provably wrong on every neuroscience claim he makes about trauma damaging the brain. I published a booklet in 2023 that debunked every one of the 42 different claims he made (Analysis of The Body Keeps the Score. Update 11/14/24: This booklet was superceded in 2024 by The Body Does Not Keep the Score).
 
Are the “body treatments” really that great? There is no solid evidence that these treatments are better than conventional treatments, mainly because few controlled studies have been conducted with them. The evidence is so sparse that it’s arguable whether they are even treating PTSD; they could simply be helping with distress from related or separate problems, which get conflated with trauma symptoms. The treatments undoubtedly help some types of people with some issues, but they are not the potent answers to healing trauma, the self, or the soul as van der Kolk suggests.
 
The stunning lack of evidence begs the question of what was the real purpose of this book? If so much effort was put into making dozens of wrong science claims, and alternative treatments were promoted so strongly on nearly non-existent evidence, why was the book written? In my booklet, I concluded that the point was to create a fabricated reality. The aim was to construct a view of human nature that brains are fragile; experience, not genetics, molds nearly all human behavior; and only those who believe this message are the best type of people who have the right morals to truly care about disadvantaged people.
The moral high-handedness in this narrative leaks out everywhere in the  book. Van der Kolk tries to shame nearly every constituency for treating patients wrong because they are ignorant or greedy: psychiatrists, “mainstream medicine,” therapists, medical journals, and drug companies. He even blames patients for wanting medications as a shortcut instead of dealing with their problems the right way. The disdain seems like a feature, not a bug, of his writing style. Shaming is the point when we realize that this is really about creating an ideology. It seems inconceivable that his aim was to get the facts right; the point was to have the right beliefs.
 
Why Did This Happen?
Thus, the most illuminating issue may be to ask why the book resonated so strongly with so many people. It clearly seems to have filled a gap that many people were waiting to have filled.
Viewing the popularity of the book as an index of public appetite, the book is a thick, satisfying sandwich that pretends to address the entire self and soul and experience of being human. It is a revolt against the reductionist, evidence-based thin sandwiches of science that can address only what is actually true and known. It feels better to attach oneself to a belief that promises more, even if it’s not true. The message in this book is that nurture, particularly the negative experiences of nurture, not nature, determines almost completely how we turn out.  This narrative is part of a radical leftist ideology that runs from Locke’s blank slate, through Rousseau’s noble savage and Marx’s proletariat, that there is no such thing as human behavior due largely to genetics; all personality traits are developed mostly by life experiences. We all start with the same potential for success, and it is only the forces of oppression that mold some people to be disadvantaged, ipso facto, we need to revolt against the establishment, which, in van der Kolk’s expert manipulation of language and ideas, is the handmaiden of trauma.


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Source: Kenny, Business Insider
Read time: 3.2 minutes

This Happened
A reporter wrote an article on five signs that you may have intergenerational trauma by interviewing one psychotherapist.
 
Who Did This?
Serafina Kenny is a health reporter at Business Insider. Her work includes multiple articles based on the views of single experts on diet, longevity, relationship problems, sexology, and dermatology. Among her accomplishments on her bio page on Business Insider includes “She has a Masters degree in Gender, Sexuality and Culture; . . . and has hosted a feminist pop culture podcast.”
 
For this article, Kenny interviewed Hendrix Hammond as an expert on intergenerational trauma. Hammond, based in London, has a master’s degree in family & couple psychotherapy. He has provided workshops on a variety of topics including: The importance of identity and intersectionality; Race and racism in the workplace; and Applying systemic ideas in educational settings. He devoted a page on his personal website to promote Black Lives Matter.
 
The Claim
Experiencing trauma and stress can negatively impact individuals who can then pass down to their children a host of maladaptive thoughts, feelings, and behaviors through repetition. The negative impacts on children include relationship dynamics, unconscious thinking patterns, and personality traits. Each impact can be passed down through multiple generations.
 
Analysis
Hammond asserted that the following signs indicate that you likely are the victim of intergenerational trauma:
(1) You’re very suspicious of people. Your mother or father experienced a trauma that involved betrayal and taught them to be suspicious, and you, as an infant, mirrored this until it became part of your personality.
(2) You need to be around people all the time. Your mother or father experienced a trauma and reacted by always “looking around to check if they have enough around them to help them survive,” and then you, as a child, mirrored this and integrated it into your thinking and behavior.
(3) You struggle to regulate your emotions. Your parent(s) responded to traumatic events with abnormal numbness or excessive emotionality, and this “gets modeled to their children."
(4) You may not have the tools to deal with low moods and mental health issues. If your family never modeled the practice of reaching out to speak to other people to manage their low moods, you never learned how to do that yourself, and, according to Hendrix, “it can quickly turn into extended periods of depression.”
(5) You self-harm or have destructive coping mechanisms. Cutting, burning, undereating, or taking risks with your life are other indicators that you modeled after your parents to be “really repressed” in your emotional responses to life.
 
The attractiveness of the theory is obvious because children feel unconscious connections to parents, and we can easily observe so many other examples where children learn culture, language, and skills from parents. But the concept has received criticism from scientists for multiple concerns.
One concern is that the theory of intergenerational trauma is not needed to explain why children are similar to parents. Children inherit many similarities through genetics.
 
Another concern is that the “generational” aspect of the theory is difficult to defend. If individuals can be permanently negatively impacted by repetitive exposure from parents, why don’t individuals unconsciously integrate maladaptive thoughts and behaviors of others they frequently observe such as best friends and favorite teachers? And why do some children turn out very different from their parents?
 
Another concern is that many of the life experiences that allegedly impact parents are not traumas. Trauma has a specific meaning in psychiatry of being life-threatening because those are the types of experiences that typically cause posttraumatic stress disorder. By promoting the idea that everyday stress is the more potent “trauma,” when it’s not, the health advice is unlikely to truly help anybody.

Another concern is that the theory is based on influences passing from unconscious mind to unconscious mind by repetition, but the mechanism of how that happens, whether it be psychodynamic or physiological in nature, is unproven. Proof of a mechanism is not needed for a theory to be true, but it would help with plausibility. A physiobiological mechanism that is frequently proposed is epigenetics, which is most frequently described as the methylation of DNA causing changes in gene expression. Whether methylation patterns can be transmitted from parent to child remains unproven and is highly controversial in humans. Kenny mentioned the epigenetics theory as a possible mechanism, but to her credit, qualified it as needing more research to confirm it.
 
Why Did This Happen?
Despite the lack of evidence for intergenerational trauma, the concept first gained traction in psychology to explain problems in children of Holocaust survivors. The concept has been used often to explain problems in descendants of slavery, refugees, and other forms of oppression.
 
The phrase intergenerational trauma is one of many attempts to control language that have been promoted in the trauma research and clinical fields over the past thirty years. Other phrases for concepts that lack sufficient evidence include toxic stress, adverse childhood experiences, complex PTSD, and racial trauma. All of these have in common the aim to control the idea of human nature as having brains that are fragile and nearly all problems in disadvantaged groups are due to life experiences, as opposed to genetics; and the solution to most of these problems requires revolutionary change in how society treats disadvantaged individuals through expansion of governmental entitlements. 

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