Trauma - Doesn't Excuse, But Explains

Childhood trauma doesn't excuse bad behavior and crime, but it helps in understanding 'why' which is important in the creation of more successful interventions that yield better ROI for our communities.

To improve outcomes in complex problems around child welfare, incarceration, and crime we journey upstream to examine the Family as the institution we should   
Interviewed:
Circuit Court Judge Shanice Johnson
Clinical Phycologist Dr Rose Smith
Restore Hope A.D. of Community Development Karen Phillips
Chairperson of Parent Counsel and Harding University professor Dr Andrew Baker
100 Families White Co Coordinator Dana Baker
Reentry Manager Billy Inman
Empowering My Environment cofounder Charles Benson
Empowering My Environment cofounder Charles Newsom
Restore Hope Executive Director Paul Chapman

Narrator Charles Newsome
Producer Renie Rule
Producer Ed Lowry

"A change of perspective is worth 80 IQ points." - Alan Kay
Through SmartJustice we explore issues from new perspectives in pursuit of better communities and better outcomes.

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https://smartjustice.supercast.com

Transcript

00;00;01;16 - 00;00;13;09
Shanice Johnson
So at the time in which I'm seeing a case, is there's normally an issue, some sort of somewhere either abuse, neglect or lack of appropriate supervision. There’s just various things that are going on in that child's life.

00;00;13;26 - 00;00;18;16
Charles Newsom
Pulaski County 10th Devision Juvenile Judge Shanice Johnson.

00;00;18;16 - 00;00;44;25
Shanice Johnson
All the families that I see before me have some at some point in their life, either the parents or the children that are impacted or experience ACES which are adverse childhood experiences and the significance of this is that individuals who experience ACES have a lower life expectancy, engage in more risky behavior, and are... it just significantly impacts decision making and the outcomes that they receive and experience in life.

00;00;45;26 - 00;00;54;29
Charles Newsom
This is Season One, Episode Five of the Smart Justice Podcast. Trauma’s Long Term Impact.

00;00;55;15 - 00;01;02;00
Paul Chapman
Crime and punishment are hot topics. Are there solutions different than what we're hearing about at national level?

00;01;02;06 - 00;01;09;06
Andrew Baker
We led the nation in all the wrong categories, especially when it came to child welfare and recidivism. Like, why are we dead last?

00;01;09;16 - 00;01;16;28
Kirk Lane
Now we're seeing illicit fentanyl as the number one drug threat in our state backed very closely with methamphetamine.

00;01;16;29 - 00;01;23;16
Misha Martin
If you really want to focus on the kids, stop acting like you're going to use foster care to punish parents.

00;01;23;25 - 00;01;29;05
Paul Chapman
There is a different way to approach justice that has better return on investment.

00;01;29;11 - 00;01;35;28
Misha Martin
Working with families on the prevention is more cost effective than placing them in foster care.

00;01;36;09 - 00;01;44;23
Paul Chapman
That seems to strengthen both law enforcement and courts and tie that together with community resources.

00;01;45;01 - 00;01;52;10
Andrew Baker
Justice has to be served for civil society to exist, but the place of mercy falls in the hands of the people.

00;01;52;21 - 00;02;03;15
Paul Chapman
And then track the impact to communities and better outcomes. And we're calling this approach Smart Justice.

00;02;03;15 - 00;02;22;07
Ed Lowry
Smart justice is a work of Restore Hope and partner organizations. Restore Hope is a software and services organization that helps communities achieve better outcomes for justice and child welfare efforts. Smart Justice is focused on optimizing the system by improving the relationships among its parts.

00;02;25;25 - 00;02;54;03
Ed Lowry
Paul As we've been proceeding through the Smart Justice podcast, our previous episodes, it seems like in almost every case, whether it be foster care, incarceration, addiction and substance abuse issues, it seems like the word that keeps popping up time and time again is trauma. So how is it that trauma is so much a part of all of these various justice involvement issues that we keep running into?

00;02;54;09 - 00;03;59;26
Paul Chapman
I think it comes from the realization of once you start looking at the individuals that are in the justice system, whether they be in jail or or they're stuck in district court or they have child welfare issues, or all three of those things going on at the same time. Then it what we see is that the individuals that are stuck, when we start understanding what their life was like when they grew up, it was usually a pretty chaotic event. There might have been physical abuse, sexual abuse, or there could be poverty related things that were hungry. They were always bouncing around, just trying to survive. And and now what we know from decades of research is that when you grow up in an environment that's chaotic like that, it starts to where we've got hard numbers on the predict of outcomes, both medically. And that was a big surprise. That understanding of adverse childhood experiences first came about in the medical field.

00;04;00;07 - 00;05;06;11
Rose Smith
My name is Dr. Rose Smith. I'm a clinical psychologist, and my background is in doing post-traumatic stress disorder research. But my main background is in studying the effects of trauma on women and children and how that affects the family system. So when we define trauma, it has to involve sort of feeling like your physical integrity or someone close to use physical integrity might be in danger. But adverse childhood experiences we've learned, those are things like a parent going to jail or being in condition of poverty, or having a parent that has a substance abuse disorder. That doesn't necessarily mean that your life was threatened. But what we've learned through research is that these adverse childhood experiences, especially when accumulated, create the same type of neurological, psychological and behavioral response that childhood trauma would.

00;05;06;21 - 00;05;40;11
Rose Smith
And so we now take these adverse childhood experiences just as seriously as we would, let's say, if a child was maybe beaten or was molested by a family member. We now know that living in poverty, living in a crime ridden neighborhood, having a parent removed from the home for going to prison or jail, that those have the same types of impacts on the brain, on the development of the child and on the family system that a true trauma would.

00;05;40;22 - 00;06;14;10
Rose Smith
It basically came out of this body of research that we see people that don't formally have post-traumatic stress disorder because they either don't meet the diagnostic criteria of having had an actual trauma like being assaulted or whatever, but they have the same clinical outcomes and manifestations of people that have post-traumatic stress disorder. So they're suffering from a variety of like mental illnesses, physical illnesses, PTSD like symptoms, behavioral issues, etc..

00;06;14;26 - 00;07;10;07
Rose Smith
And so physicians and therapists and psychiatrists all kind of we're trying to sort out, okay, well, what is this phenomena that we're seeing of these really difficult childhood environments? They're mimicking the fallout that we would see from classic post-traumatic stress disorder, which is poor health outcomes, poor mental health outcomes, poor interpersonal outcomes, etc.. How do we reconcile those? And so what became developed was the adverse childhood experiences scale, which looked at these other stressors that impact what we call the our static load. That's the load that of sort of like neurological and physiologic stress that somebody can experience. My dissertation and a lot of the research I did in graduate school was on methamphetamine use and trauma.

00;07;10;18 - 00;08;17;12
Rose Smith
And so I went out and recruited methamphetamine users in northwest Arkansas, and many of them did not actually have formal traumas that they had never been assaulted, they had not been in the military, they had not been in a tornado, a car accident. But they still manifested these clinical symptoms that looked a lot like PTSD. And they also had the same physical health outcomes, the same kind of psychosocial outcomes. And so that's one good anecdote of just living in a culture where people are in and out of prison, where they're exposed to illicit substances, poverty, things like that, creates what looks a lot like post-traumatic stress disorder. But it posed a real problem in my dissertation because, you know, right now the American Psychiatric Association is still really focused on keeping post-traumatic PTSD or post-traumatic stress disorder as its own sort of like diagnostic category, which requires a trauma.

00;08;17;23 - 00;08;30;25
Rose Smith
And so it was challenging of like, well, what do we do with all of these people that have clearly had what you and I would consider to be a traumatic life, but it doesn't meet the medical definition of trauma.

00;08;30;25 - 00;09;27;28
Paul Chapman
And I'd like to also point out that that understanding that someone had traumatic events or had hard times in no way excuses criminal behavior. But if we're going to try to solve the problem of less incarceration and needing foster care less, given the expense to the taxpayer and the social expense to the families, then we need to understand the problem more. And trauma is one of those areas which we need to have a real understood ending on so that we can employ proper remedies to it. So resilience, helping people overcome that traumatic event. And mostly we need to figure out how do we minimize trauma for kids in our communities today so that they're not dealing with these types of issues 15 years from now?

00;09;28;02 - 00;09;55;18
Paul Chapman
And we as a community are not paying for them wondering where they came from. We are sowing seeds today in our communities in Arkansas that we will reap ten, 15 and 20 years down the road. There's a layman's test that you can take that shows you based upon how you grew up, the environment that you grew up in, and the situations that you encountered in that environment.

00;09;56;13 - 00;10;09;11
Rose Smith
So you can actually go online and take it. It's the adverse childhood experiences scale. That's what ACES stands for. And it essentially asks you a series of questions about kind of what went on in your childhood environment.

00;10;10;03 - 00;10;59;09
Paul Chapman
And so all these are prior to your 18th birthday, did any of these things occur? One is that a parent or other adult in the household, often or very often swear at you, insult you, put you down, humiliate you, or act in any way that made you afraid that you might be physically hurt. So the threat of physical violence would be one, and that's a yes or no. And if it's a yes, you get one point. And so that that's important. So number two, did a parent or other adult in a household often or very often push, grab, slap, throw something at you or ever hit you. So, you know, and often physical violence that you were afraid of or encountered. Three, did adult or other person at least five years older than you ever touch you, fondle you, or have you touch their body parts in any sexual way.

00;10;59;10 - 00;11;55;11
Paul Chapman
So was there sexual abuse from an older person in the home. Four, did you often or very often feel that no one in your family loved you or thought that you were important or special? And so it would be kind of an emotional neglect. Five Did you often or very often feel that you didn't have enough to eat or had to wear dirty, dirty clothes and you had no one to protect you, so you were kind of all out on your own. Six, where your parents were separated or divorced. Seven Was your mother or stepmother abused, physically abused in the home? Eight Did you live with anyone who was a drinker, alcoholic, or used street drugs? Nine Was there a household member that was depressed or mentally ill? Or did anyone attempt suicide? And then lastly, did a household member go to prison?

00;11;56;01 - 00;12;22;07
Paul Chapman
These events or situations have an impact on a child. The predictive outcomes are fairly certain now. Like I've I've heard the statistics. So if you answered yes to four or more of those questions, then it starts to move into an area where you're going to have significant barriers to overcome. Like like physically, you're going to be more than 400% more likely for chronic bronchitis.

00;12;22;16 - 00;12;48;09
Paul Chapman
Now, why? Why is that? And I think that's a mix of the cortisol that's constantly being released as you're trying to survive. And maybe your behaviors. Maybe you’re smoking, which is not good for your lungs. If you have six or more, you can mark 20 years of kind of life expectancy because, again, of of the medical impact, but also the environment that you're likely to find yourself in.

00;12;48;14 - 00;12;51;28
Paul Chapman
Again, these are not certainties. They're just predictions.

00;12;52;07 - 00;13;22;21
Rose Smith
I mean, I hate as a therapist to say that something's, like, inevitable, right? I mean, that's kind of giving up on the idea of behavior change. What I will say is that it puts them at incredibly high risk. I mean, we're all born with genetic vulnerabilities to something bad. I mean, all of us have some kind of either, you know, cancer, diabetes or, you know, proneness to hypertension or depression in our in our DNA.

00;13;22;21 - 00;14;50;04
Rose Smith
And, you know, the higher your ACES score is, the higher the more likely you are to end up manifesting those illnesses. So I don't want to say inevitable, but I would say that it's pretty close. Part of the issue with ACES is that it's environmental, right? So they're living in poverty. There's food shortage. They don't know when mom's going to get home because she's doing shift work because dad's in prison. And so a lot of the treatments that one would come up with are community based or psychosocial. It’s like, how do we change this system that keeps putting children and developing minds at risk? You know, then there's sort of like the back end of that where, yes, we can treat the depression or the trauma symptoms or the diabetes, but prevention and a change in the way that the system itself works would be like if I had a, you know, a magic wand, that would be the way to to fix it. Right? Because it's really, really tough to ask a kid or even a grown up, okay, come see me for 2 hours a week and we'll work on your depression and then throw them right back into the environment that's generating this chronic stress. I mean, it's I wouldn't say it's impossible, but I would say it's very difficult.

00;14;50;04 - 00;14;59;17
Karen Phillips
Data shows that children that are in foster care long term do not have, you know, wonderful outcomes.

00;15;00;11 - 00;15;04;06
Charles Newsom
Karen Phillips, director of the 100 Families Initiative.

00;15;04;17 - 00;16;35;23
Karen Phillips
You can, you know, read over and over again about the outcomes of children in foster care. And it's largely due to trauma that they have faced when being removed. And people a lot of times don't, you know, understand or can visualize that trauma. But if you just place your place yourself in the child's shoes for a moment and then know that that child has connections with their parents, they love their parents. They have connections with aunts and uncles and grandparents and neighbors, and they have teachers that they have connections with. And all of a sudden, everything single connection in their life is cut. They have to move into a different home, oftentimes a different school, new friends. Everyone is new in their life and that is traumatic. And children don't know how to show how traumatic that is or talk about how traumatic that is. They definitely show it. You can tell through their behavior that that something is wrong and that they and they just don't know how to to process or talk about the their feelings. They just know they feel a certain way. They don't even understand exactly why.

00;16;36;05 - 00;16;41;07
Charles Newsom
Dr. Andrew Baker, Harding University professor and long-time foster parent.

00;16;41;07 - 00;17;00;15
Andrew Baker
I have a friend at Harding who directs our counseling program, and when you start talking about trauma and almost all of the people who you deal with in child welfare are living through trauma, just the simple experience of a child being removed is traumatic, not to mention the layers of layers of layers of trauma that most have experience in their life right.

00;17;01;04 - 00;18;08;09
Andrew Baker
And Dr. Patton will talk about how in trauma, one of the challenges is for us to understand success isn't moving past trauma. Success is, the longer you go between having something that becomes a traumatic experience to having something else, that becomes a traumatic experience because you're not going to get rid of it. Right. So my success rate is not that, oh, I'm all good. My success is I went longer between this and the next time I acted out right. Like I have a kid who's had severe trauma in his life and living in our home. Well, there's not a magic wand to fix the kid, and it doesn't doesn't exist. Right. But to know, you know what? We kept a record and we went five days without having a major blow up when we had to blow up on the fifth day. Well, what? What happened? What what what was the catalyst to that? Let's try and make sure we don't do that again, you know? Right. And so using that as an example, you know, I don't know of a kid who woke up today to say I want to raise all the hell I can, but he made it to about 10 a.m. and he's already started.

00;18;09;11 - 00;18;31;21
Andrew Baker
Why? Well, most of the time there's something back there that explains the action. Again, I am nowhere a person trying to justify actions that are not good. But I am a person that says, but what makes an action makes sense? Why would someone do fill in the blank? And so when you get in a context in a community, this is complex.

00;18;31;21 - 00;18;54;00
Andrew Baker
If this was easy, it hadn't been done right. And it becomes more complex with a new generation of kids, rig ht? You start going to family court often as I've sat in the back of the room, and you start saying, that's grandma and that's mom and that kid. And that's great... Man, they're all in here. Okay, what? What what's going on?

00;18;54;01 - 00;18;58;21
Charles Newsom
Dana Baker, director of 100 Families, White County, Arkansas?

00;18;58;24 - 00;19;22;10
Dana Baker
We actually have seen here in White County three generations of kids that have been in foster care. We have the third generation of children that have been in care. And so and a lot of that is poverty. And it's also not having the support and they're role models. The parent modeling that we expect that you and I would have and they haven't had that for generation upon generation upon generation.

00;19;22;18 - 00;19;58;02
Dana Baker
Kids that are in foster care have a lot of trauma. They are often moved from house to house to house. They're not with their siblings. They changed schools over and over. They are going to have a lot of trauma and sometimes react negatively. They're going to have a lot of behavior issues. They may have had a lot of emotional problems coming into this. And sometimes kids that are left in care for a long time will have... will turn to substance abuse as elder teenagers or as young adults.

00;19;58;12 - 00;20;19;15
Paul Chapman
And we know that if children are taken into foster care or, you know, a parent is incarcerated, that that that's a traumatic event. Children are removed from their parents, either by the parent being removed from them and incarcerated or the children being placed in a in a foster home or group home somewhere apart from their parents. So that that's traumatic.

00;20;19;15 - 00;20;38;21
Paul Chapman
And and that is going to show up in adulthood in that child's life as a barrier to success and happiness. But for the adult, it's a traumatic event also. So being incarcerated is is traumatic in itself.

00;20;39;20 - 00;20;55;28
Charles Benson
My friend Charles Benson and myself speaking with Paul Chapman. Trauma in the community from going to prison is most guys who get out of prison have a psychological issue. They have something something wrong.

00;20;55;28 - 00;20;56;26
Charles Newsom
They’re going to be off a little bit.

00;20;56;26 - 00;20;58;15
Charles Benson
That’s what I mean.

00;20;59;00 - 00;21;01;13
Paul Chapman
The decompression phase.

00;21;01;25 - 00;21;42;17
Charles Benson
We call it he ain’t wrapped tight. You go right, you can't get right. You can't get right. No matter how hard he try that traumas so think. It's like gravy. If I had turkey and gravy at Thanksgiving, that gravy. In our community, boy, they make that gravy so think and good. And that's how thick the trauma is. So it's just stuck there, and you have to... You can't water it down because it's so thick and it's so much. So many men and women has been in prison. So, so many people getting out, traumatized, getting out with their psychological baggage and that we don't know how to get rid of it. We're just stuck in limbo.

00;21;43;01 - 00;22;47;01
Billy Inman
My name is Billy Inman and in November, retired from the Department of Correction, 27 years. They're the last seven. I was a deputy warden. I'd like to see the effects. PTSD has on incarcerated folks and PTSD. I know correctional officers have a higher rate of PTSD. If you think about it, they're there among folks every day, 12 hours a day. That's got to have an impact of what you're seeing every day. But then if you're living in the barracks and you're living... Me and some of the guys in the jail, the incarcerated guys had a conversation about PTSD and and how when you get out, you're not very trustful of things, not very trustful of the system, not very, you know, the rules that you have to obey in the prison. A lot of times we we take those out outside the prison. And so just the emotional things you have to go through every day, if you can imagine, you know, living in a barracks of 40 or 50 men every day. Not all of them have your best interest at heart.

00;22;47;01 - 00;23;18;17
Paul Chapman
You know, if you're in jail or prison, there is a certain amount of just daily survival that goes on, you know, dealing with the the other people that are incarcerated with you, some of which may be experiencing real anger and may be really dangerous, some that have severe and persistent mental health issues. And so they're unable to, you know, operate in the world and perceive the world and what's kind of reality.

00;23;18;18 - 00;23;40;04
Rose Smith
When I worked at the Acute Day Treatment program, we had lots of people that have been in prison or jail, and they went into prison or jail with some kind of mental health diagnosis or or substance abuse. But they would come out of prison with that existing diagnosis, plus PTSD, because they were traumatized in jail or prison.

00;23;40;04 - 00;24;20;23
Rose Smith
I mean, the violence level inside of prisons is tremendous, right? I mean, it is it's like sending somebody to Afghanistan, essentially. So, you know, this place where we're rehabbing people to bring them back to society, we're essentially putting them at risk, retraumatizing them. They're already likely to have had childhood trauma and creating more mental health diagnoses. So, you know, changing the prison system so that it actually helps people as opposed to, you know, ignite further mental illness, further drive towards criminal activity and substance abuse, etc..

00;24;20;28 - 00;24;53;11
Rose Smith
I think that culturally there is less and less stigma about post-traumatic stress disorder. And at the same time, I think that we still mentally confine it to sort of like textbook examples. So veterans or somebody who was sexually assaulted, for example, and we don't think about some of the more complex types of trauma where, you know, there's multiple traumas within a family environment, etc..

00;24;53;26 - 00;25;26;08
Rose Smith
So I think there is there's a lack of knowledge about it still. That's pretty profound and how widespread it is. And so we don't do a good job of identifying it and then there's naturally the shame that's associated typically with having been traumatized. So I think there's just a lack of education about PTSD out there that we still have this very narrow, sort of like the Vietnam veteran mentality about what can cause PTSD.

00;25;26;23 - 00;25;55;08
Rose Smith
And so there are these I know huge areas to where we just ignore trauma because we blame it on the victim as opposed to recognizing that it's, you know, still a trauma and still part of this systemic issue, whether you're a felon or not. If somebody pulls a gun on you, that's a trauma. So and that's one of the things that I think gets looked over and glossed over a lot is that and that's victim blaming.

00;25;55;08 - 00;26;18;01
Rose Smith
Right. And we know not to victim blame, a five year old who says they've been sexually assaulted, but we still victim blame a felon who has been assaulted. Right. Because he shouldn't have been in that position. And it's inherently unjust and unfair, but people are still pretty invisible to it.

00;26;18;18 - 00;26;52;07
Paul Chapman
And I in no way am I justifying crime and hurting people and and I'm very much pro safety in our communities. But but as leaders trying to figure out how we get better outcomes, then we have to understand what are interventions, you know, the unintended consequences of intervention so that we can have better solutions. All these things just kick in your survival instinct.

00;26;52;08 - 00;27;26;06
Paul Chapman
And if you are living in a survival kind of mindset, you're just trying to maintain your safety, figure out how you can everyone fighting for the same, you know, set of limited resources that often prevents your ability to think abstractly and almost all high paying jobs that are legal today require you to engage in abstract thought. Gone are the days in which we have people that are just on an assembly line doing repetitive tasks.

00;27;26;17 - 00;27;51;17
Paul Chapman
What we need now is people that understand how to keep the robot doing the repetitive task, how to fix the robot when the line goes down, how to optimize the flow and and that. And to be able to do that, you have to be able to understand at a higher level. You've got to engage. You've got to have enough stability to be able to engage that part of your brain that allows you to understand.

00;27;52;08 - 00;28;21;15
Rose Smith
I like to use a physical analogy, so imagine that your leg bones are trying to grow, right? And somebody every day just whacks them, just whacks your leg bones. It's going to affect how they're shaped. Right. And it's going to affect their ability to function and work. So, you know, all of us are born with this normal developmental trajectory of how our brain should be developing.

00;28;21;27 - 00;28;54;16
Rose Smith
And that's psycho socially, how we relate to other people. That's mathematically. That's how we move our body. That's how we problem solve. That's how we think through future decision making. All of that has a very normal like trajectory. It's supposed to... and for the most part, we're all born with that system intact. But if you go back to that analogy of like me whacking on little kids bones every single day, their leg bones aren't going to develop properly.

00;28;54;16 - 00;29;20;24
Rose Smith
Well imagine that happening to the entire brain, to the entire nervous system as it's developing. It's going to completely change the trajectory of all of it. And so it literally affects everything. I mean, it it affects how the brain develops and affects how our executive functioning develops, which is the part of our brain that controls impulses and helps us plan for the future and makes good choices.

00;29;21;26 - 00;29;38;03
Rose Smith
It affects problem solving. I mean, literally every single cognitive domain it affects, it's shaping and molding the chronic stresses, shaping and molding how the brains are developing themselves. It's really, really tragic, actually.

00;29;38;15 - 00;29;42;20
Paul Chapman
And we talked a little bit about that ACES test. You remember that test? It's got those

00;29;42;20 - 00;29;43;24
Charles Benson
We took that test.

00;29;43;24 - 00;30;02;03
Paul Chapman
Yeah. And it's kind of predictive. You know, it doesn't say for certain these are the things. But, you know, the more you've got there, they've kind of the science behind it says that certain things are more likely to happen. Like if you got four more on that test, you're over 400% more likely to have chronic bronchitis as an adult.

00;30;02;03 - 00;30;19;16
Paul Chapman
You're 100% more likely to attempt suicide as an adult. So that's kind of the way that that some of these traumatic things are coming out. Physical abuse, sexual abuse. I mean, like hungry, like on a regular basis. Had a parent locked up before you were 18.

00;30;20;04 - 00;31;49;11
Charles Benson
I took the test and mine was six, so I was two over four. So I didn't know I was that traumatized. I didn't I didn't know I'd been through that high of a degree of traumatic experiences. Me personally, I went to counseling do the last two years I've been going through counseling and it helped a lot. It helped me get out of my chest what I've been through, why maybe why I went through it, why my decisions were bad or good in certain cases. I want to announce to my community that everyone needs therapy. Therapy is very important because we all have some kind of traumatic baggage that we don't know. It’s probably way back in your mind. You don't remember, you was a kid, but you don't want to think about it. You buried it, but it's there. And I want to. I started talking about it with my therapist. It just started flowing. I started expressing myself. He started to give me more feedback and got to know me more. It it changed me. It kind of I'm already aggressive. I think I'm already aggressive. And sometimes but it kind of softening me a little bit and it kind of helped me to look at other people's aspect. Instead of being selfish or just thinking about me, I started looking at how what other people might have been do. So I can't get mad at what you're doing because you've been through some traumatic too, so you might not even know you're disrespecting me and I think you're disrespect. So in the community, trauma is so prevalent. It's like it's deep, it's everywhere is so deep, it's... Talking things out is so therapeutic. I didn’t know...

00;31;49;11 - 00;31;56;16
Paul Chapman
Get you unstuck is what they're saying. And so those are all those traumatic things that may have become your six.

00;31;56;19 - 00;31;56;29
Charles Benson
Yeah.

00;31;57;12 - 00;32;10;11
Paul Chapman
And it may not even take that much. It's just a pile on one another. But what the kind of the data shows is oftentimes it's going to keep you stuck in some way. Maybe you can't trust people. So, you know, your relationship, you.

00;32;10;16 - 00;32;18;26
Charles Newsom
And you can infect your health and in the community, cancer, to this day, I don’t...

00;32;18;28 - 00;32;19;27
Paul Chapman
You don't sleep well.

00;32;20;20 - 00;32;26;19
Charles Newsom
Nights, I can't sleep. I might be up three, four. And still to this day.

00;32;26;19 - 00;32;31;10
Charles Benson
A lot of the diseases in our community are can be traced back to traumatic experience.

00;32;31;18 - 00;32;54;03
Paul Chapman
That was how it was originally found. There was a doctor that was over in California and he was treating a lot of obese clients. He was trying to help them lose weight. They were morbidly obese. And what he started to find was that many of them had actually been seriously abused as children. He was like, Wait a minute, how is that impacting your physical health?

00;32;54;22 - 00;33;18;00
Paul Chapman
And so they put all this together and so the hospitals now know they call it social determinants of health. But some of the biggest impacts to my physical health right now have nothing to do with the medical care that's available. It's my behaviors and my background and how work is going. My relationship with my wife and kids are going mental.

00;33;18;27 - 00;33;27;08
Paul Chapman
There's a direct connection between your environment, whether it be stressful or healthy. All right. And your physical health.

00;33;27;13 - 00;33;27;23
Charles Newsom
Right.

00;33;28;08 - 00;33;56;05
Rose Smith
So any disease is affected by cortisol, which is the stress hormone, the inflammatory stress hormone. All of those diseases are more prevalent in people with high ACES. So that basically is essentially almost every physical illness you can think of. But, you know, the classic, you know, obesity, hypertension, diabetes and autoimmune disorders are what come to the forefront.

00;33;56;20 - 00;34;00;11
Paul Chapman
Plus, I mean, and it also impacts my decisions.

00;34;00;12 - 00;34;00;24
Charles Newsom
Yes.

00;34;01;05 - 00;34;23;16
Paul Chapman
Right. Do I drink too much? My using drugs to try to escape? I just want to feel a little good. And so, you know, I'm I'm bouncing around relationships because it felt good right now. It never feels good long. But you're always trying to chase some little bit of of help to just make you forget about how painful.

00;34;23;22 - 00;34;24;13
Charles Benson
It's a temporary.

00;34;24;13 - 00;34;28;02
Paul Chapman
Fix. It's a temporary fix usually comes with its own baggage.

00;34;28;02 - 00;34;31;27
Charles Benson
Yes. And outcome. The aftermath is.

00;34;32;03 - 00;34;32;10
Paul Chapman
Not good.

00;34;32;10 - 00;34;33;16
Charles Benson
Not good at all.

00;34;34;05 - 00;35;01;15
Ed Lowry
So someone is listening to this podcast and they've heard us walk through the ten items on the ACES test and all of a sudden they're thinking, Oh my goodness, that applies to me. That sounds like my life. What are steps they might take to help themselves now that they're realizing maybe the ACES test applies to their life a little bit more than they thought?

00;35;01;25 - 00;35;29;18
Paul Chapman
Right. So I'd say a couple of things. One is educate yourself. You go to the CDC website and look up aces or just Google CDC adverse childhood experiences. And there's a lot of information that's there. Number two is I would seek an appropriate counselor who is trauma informed and understands how this they've been through the appropriate and seek some counseling.

00;35;30;19 - 00;35;52;21
Paul Chapman
I would imagine that if you took the test and and you saw that that there were some traumatic events in your life, that that if you're listening to this, you probably are at a point where you're realizing that some of that now is playing itself out in your relationships, in your work, and in the way that that you kind of perceive yourself now.

00;35;53;16 - 00;36;22;21
Paul Chapman
And so I'd say, if that's you, please do your research and please go find a counselor who is trauma informed so that you can work this this out because as we talked in previous episodes, kind of the meta analysis on all of this is that our relationships and the depth of our relationships are the things that are the most important.

00;36;23;11 - 00;37;21;05
Paul Chapman
It's the relationships that we have with our higher power. It's the relationships that we have with our family and with our loved ones. It's the relationships that we have with our friends. And it's the relationships and the and your ability to find meaning and value at work that constitute a life that leads to satisfaction. And so you're those barriers, those things that happened to you as a child are going to impact your ability to have those relationships and to do that work and to do it in a way that ultimately brings you satisfaction and and meaning in your life. And therefore, it's worth going in with a skilled therapist, bringing that up and dealing with it in an appropriate way.

00;37;21;05 - 00;37;53;09
Charles Newsom
That's the best thing about our community. We we trying to heal. It's a long process, but we're we are healing slowly because we had a lot of we lost a lot of good people around. We miss them. And this homeboy might have did this to this homeboy. This homeboy... So we're healing slowly, we trying to heal. A lot of those wounds. Some people still don't like other people. Understand, you know what I'm saying? Because... and when lives are taken. People, you know what I’m saying?

00;37;53;09 - 00;37;53;23
Paul Chapman
Hard to get over.

00;37;53;23 - 00;38;27;17
Charles Newsom
It's hard to get over it. It might effect 30 families. That one murder effect 30 families and then other side, 30 families, they lost this person to incarceration. So it's a lot of healing going on right now. And we seen the most amazing thing, me, Mack and C.J. A woman’s son was murdered and she is now advocating for the murderer of her son, to parole.

00;38;27;24 - 00;38;33;06
Charles Benson
Yes. It was amazing. I couldn't believe it before. I never saw that.

00;38;33;06 - 00;38;39;07
Charles Newsom
I never saw that in my life. You know, she sends him money on his book and she's advocating.

00;38;39;07 - 00;38;51;14
Charles Benson
She goes to the parole board when he goes in and talks for him. And he son, her son’s no longer here. You know what she did? We forget. She adopted him as her son.

00;38;51;19 - 00;39;10;01
Charles Benson
He told her he wrote a letter. He said, I'm your son now. I took your son from you. I'm your son. She has a new son now. You know what a mother does... You know, women don't play about their children, especially their sons. They go to war about she's going to war, about this young man getting back out and getting a second chance at life.

00;39;10;21 - 00;39;34;22
Charles Benson
Now that's forgiveness. That's the ultimate form of forgiving. Forgiving someone that took your child's life and you want them back out in the streets to live another, live of a better life. You can’t say... that’s love right there.

00;39;34;22 - 00;39;58;19
Charles Newsom
Thank you for joining us for this episode of Smart Justice. If you find yourself stuck in a disruptive cycle that may be caused by our results from, we encourage you to seek professional counseling to find healing and hope. Join us next episode for a discussion about finding a way forward. Thank you again.

00;39;59;03 - 00;40;20;27
Ed Lowry
Thanks to our guests, Judge Shanice Johnson, Dr. Rose Smith, Karen Philips, Dr. Andrew Baker, Danny Baker. Billy Inman, Charles Benson, and Charles Newsome. And thanks to Churches for life for sponsoring. Musical credits include “H2O” by Lee of the Stone, “I Dream In Three” by Jay Carr, “Lonely Company” by Anthony Catacolli and “Love in Truth” by Cast of Characters.

00;40;21;06 - 00;40;48;12
Ed Lowry
Music is licensed through soundstripe.com. Smart Justice is a work of Restore Hope. Please consider helping us produce more work like this by becoming a sponsor at www.smartjustice.org. Thank you again.