Unburdened by false humility, postmodern trauma activists claim to have understood for the first time what drives all of human suffering
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CATEGORY: CONTROL OF LANGUAGE AND IDEAS  Janna Gordon, Director, Brooke Hancock Family Resource Network Source: WTRF news Read time: 1.5 minutes plus short video This Happened On April 29, 2024, a local nonprofit charity provided a free information workshop for the community on the adverse childhood experiences (ACE) theory and how to be resilient to stress. Who Did This? The Brooke Hancock Family Resource Network is a nonprofit charity which has been led by Director Janna Gordon since 2022. Brooke and Hancock are the two smallest counties in West Virginia, nestled in the northern panhandle sliver of West Virginia between Ohio and Pennsylvania. The Premise The workshop informed participants about the alleged harmful impact of ACEs and techniques to build resilience to stress. In the 30-second video of the workshop below, it briefly shows a participant thumbing through a deck of 52 cards which included the 10 ACEs depicted as aces found in playing cards. The deck also includes 42 “resilience strategies” depicted in the suit of hearts. Some of them seem like reactions that can counter stress, such as developing self-esteem, and hope. Many of them, however, have no clear relation to dealing with stress and seem like everyday advice on how to socially cooperate, such as having clear expectations and rules, learning responsibility, experiencing success, modeling appropriate behavior, helping a friend, trust, a sense of belonging, and showing empathy. Analysis Workshops like these are concerning because they teach participants that they are fragile, when evidence, and empirical experience, indicates they are not. As writer Abigail Shrier emphasized in her new book Bad Therapy, industries of professions that deal with children, such as counselors and educators, treat children as if they are fragile and should be afraid of everyday stressors, which may be more likely to instill harmful anxieties rather than foster resilience and self-reliance [1]. This tends to be the philosophy of progressive leftist policies. The deck of cards seems like a clever way to engage with participants, especially youths who are less disposed to self-reflect in one-on-one conversations with adult counselors. They are, however, mostly common sense that may seem patronizing to youths who already have adequate social skills. A concern is that it teaches individuals that any of their unhappiness is due to life experiences that molded their characters, instead of the more likely explanation that they were born with heritable character flaws. It teaches them to blame their problems on society or on someone else. It’s a potentially counterproductive strategy for teaching people to not look inward to truly deal with inborn limitations. Why Is This Happening? Trainings like these are held frequently across the United States by nonprofits and university centers to try to focus community efforts on ACEs to improve societal problems. These are the grassroots backbone of the ACE movement that promotes an unproven theory that physical diseases and inequities in society are caused by stressful life experiences. REFERENCES [1] Abigail Shrier (2024), Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up. Sentinel: New York Like Trauma Dispatch? You can subscribe to our email notices of new posts on this page. Comments are closed.
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