Smart Justice
Smart Justice covers the pursuit of better outcomes in incarceration, foster care, and community collaboration on justice system issues. Website: http://smartjustice.org Support: https://smartjustice.supercast.com
Smart Justice
Bonus: Understanding Childhood Trauma's Lasting Impact
Ever wondered how early childhood experiences shape a lifetime? Dr. Sufna John from the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences gives her profound insights into infant and early childhood mental health. This special bonus episode kicks off with a compelling discussion on the real-world impact of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and PTSD. Dr. John’s expertise sheds light on the importance of understanding and addressing trauma to foster genuine compassion and create better outcomes.
We then navigate the intricate relationship between childhood trauma and parenting. Learn how pregnancy and early childhood can stir up past traumas, reigniting symptoms of PTSD and depression. This conversation tackles the issue of toxic positivity and underscores the importance of safe spaces for parents to express their challenging emotions. Dr. John says that by normalizing these experiences, we highlight the need for compassionate communication and regular support to mitigate the overwhelming stress parents face, making it clear that coping mechanisms like substance use are often misguided attempts at managing trauma.
The discussion evolves to emphasize the critical role of adult support in building resilience among children. Discover why investing in the adults who nurture young minds is pivotal for positive outcomes after trauma. From correcting personal biases to ensuring honest and empathetic communication, Dr. John stresses the importance of creating emotionally safe environments. By shifting perspectives and truly understanding trauma’s physiological impacts, we can build trust and foster supportive relationships that pave the way for healthier families and communities.
website: https://smartjustice.org/
fb: https://www.facebook.com/restorehopearkansas
Hi and welcome to Smart Justice, a service of the nonprofit Restore Hope which helps communities move their families from crisis to career by providing software and services. We are getting excited about releasing season four, which will cover juvenile justice, but first we wanted to release a very special bonus episode of the show. Recently, restore Hope staff and many of the wonderful service providers across Arkansas who we collaborate with met for a two-day conference. We had some very impactful speakers and one of those speakers was Dr Safna John of the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences. After she spoke, some of the attendees were asking for the audio of her speech, so we decided, with Dr John's permission, to just release it as a podcast episode so anyone can benefit.
Host:Dr John specializes in infant and early childhood mental health. She leads several statewide cross-system collaborative efforts across Arkansas, including serving as co-director of Our Best, which stands for Arkansas Building Effective Services for Trauma. Since many people who attended the conference work with families in crisis every day, this presentation was designed for them, so you'll hear her referring to that, but really it applies to anyone who has had adverse childhood experiences, otherwise known as ACEs, and anyone who has experienced PTSD as a result, or, of course, their loved ones, just trying to understand them better. Before we dive into Dr John's conversation, we'd like to play the trailer for our upcoming season, season 4,. Feel free to send us feedback on our podcast or anything else that we've released. Send it to media at restorehopearorg. That's media at restorehope and the two letters ARorg.
Podcast Trailer:The COVID-19 pandemic brought far-reaching changes to society. One troubling consequence has been the rise in juvenile delinquency and youth crime, and it's just continued to pick up. We've had several juveniles in our court system. With schools closed, community programs disrupted and families under increased stress, many young people found themselves isolated and families under increased stress. Many young people found themselves isolated and without essential support systems, which led them down some dangerous paths.
Dr. Sufna John:We have gone from what I would consider more petty kind of things within the schools and within our community to communities surrounded by guns and engaging in violence.
Podcast Trailer:They've suffered trauma by guns and engaging in violence, they've suffered trauma. Their family situation is just not that stable. In this season of Smart Justice, we'll explore how communities across Arkansas are tackling this challenge, spotlighting innovative solutions designed not only to reduce juvenile crime, but also to create pathways to brighter futures. We'll hear from judges.
Host:There are alternatives that are more effective and get better outcomes.
Podcast Trailer:Law enforcement. It blew my mind and I wanna ask why, why, why? And community leaders, we won't say what's wrong with them. No, that's the wrong question. The question is what happened to them About what's working, what's not, and how we can restore hope for Arkansas families. Our kids are genuinely scared. I am just very motivated to make sure we get it right.
Host:Join us for the upcoming season on Juvenile Justice. And here's Dr Safna John in her presentation, which is meant to, in her words, recharge that genuine compassion battery that tends to get drained sometimes, so sit back and recharge.
Dr. Sufna John:When you're in positions like ours, I think it's really easy to slide into this idea of I've heard this story before, I've been in this storm before. It's almost sometimes like you can predict the next things people are going to say and do, because you've seen something like this over and over and over again. Okay, and that's your brain doing its job, by the way. Like we're supposed to learn from the past. Like can you imagine if, every time I walked up to a door, my brain was like what is this slab of wood? What am I supposed to do to get to the next room? Like that wouldn't be practical, right, like we have to learn from our prior experiences. But, accidentally, what that sometimes does is make us underestimate the individuality of people that we serve. We go. I've seen this storm and I don't appreciate the boat someone is in in navigating that storm. For example, we've all went through the storm of COVID. I was fortunate enough where I didn't lose anybody. I loved during that period of time. Can I really say I was in the same storm as someone who lost their spouse or their best friend or their child? Of course, not right. And so, even when we are in storms, we want to be really mindful of the boats that people have to navigate those storms, and one of the most powerful things that builds our boat is the life experiences that we have. So when we talk about trauma, I want you to realize that these are experiences that are felt as scary, violent or dangerous, that overwhelm our ability to cope, and, unfortunately, that these experiences are extremely common. That's one takeaway I want you to have from this presentation. Trauma is not the exception. What we know is two-thirds of people across the nation will experience a traumatic event by the time they're 16 years old. So we shouldn't be thinking this is not most of who I serve. We should probably be defaulting to. This is who we are serving most of the time.
Dr. Sufna John:And unfortunately, trauma often begets more trauma. If we think about a kid who has experienced an abusive household, then they get into the child welfare system, then they have to move around to three different homes and lose track of their family and lose sight of their siblings. All of these things cascade in ways that are really hard and I want you to picture. Have you had those moments in your life, you know where, like nothing can go right and it feels like you're like universe. Really right now, there's going to be more of your piling upon me Now. Can you imagine in those moments if you were on a stage where everyone was judging who you are based on the worst moments in your life? That would suck. None of us would want that right. None of us would want to be under scrutiny when we're barely hanging on.
Dr. Sufna John:But a lot of times, service systems, in an effort to help you tease apart every single thing that you're doing, make you talk about your story over and over and over again, and then we kind of do things that aren't super helpful for people, and so I want y'all to just remember this idea that we often look here are the aces. By the way, we often look at what's above the surface in this tree. Right, we think about experiences that happen to individuals or families, specifically things like child abuse, depression, community violence, mental illness, but what we don't realize is that not all those trees are equally likely to take root. We cannot pretend we are in a community where everyone is at equal risk for experiencing trauma. To heal, you have to tell the truth, and the truth of it is is that many people are experiencing a lot more of these roots. They're experiencing a lot more of poverty and discrimination and lack of upwards mobility and lack of opportunity. And so what we end up finding is that people who have experienced a lot of these types events have significant impairments or problems with their biological and their psychological health.
Dr. Sufna John:I work for a hospital and so sometimes people are like I mean, how do you convince an oncologist or a nephrologist or a pulmonologist to care? And what I often tell them is ooh, your physical health is way impacted by the experiences that you've had. And so what we know is people with four or more adverse childhood experiences in their life end up being at higher risk for lung disease, heart disease, copd, most types of cancer. Do you remember, by the way, what put people at greater risk for worse outcomes from COVID, lung disease, heart disease, metabolic conditions, diabetes, types of cancer, and so what you see here is like risk begets risk. A lot of times, when we think about trauma, we reduce it down to the impact on people's choices. So we say, like they did this or they made these choices, which is why they're in the situation that they're in.
Dr. Sufna John:If you are blessed enough to be born into a body that did not have to experience this type of dysregulation. We should really be thankful for that, because our bodies will change. Okay, I can't help but nerd out on science facts sometimes, sorry guys. But okay, when you are carrying the eggs that become your children, those eggs are present at birth. Okay, we don't make more eggs in our lifetime. All the eggs we will ever have are present in birth. That means the eggs that were my children were raised in my mother's womb. The eggs that are you were in your grandmother's womb. And when we think about generational trauma, what were your grandparents going through and I'm really looking at some of you more Does that make sense? Because some people, if they trace back to their grandparents, we are in horrific adverse events, things like slavery, right, and so, again, as we think about the impact of trauma, we cannot heal if we do not tell the truth.
Dr. Sufna John:And so let's look at adverse childhood experiences here in Arkansas. I want you to realize that the national average for experiencing four or more childhood experiences that are adverse in your life is 15%. Okay, that means any county up here that's not dark gray is higher than the national average here in Arkansas. Anything that's not dark gray is higher than the national average here in Arkansas. Anything that's not dark gray, okay. What you should know is whoa right that probably snaps you into attention. For example, sebastian County. One in three of the adults walking around in your community have experienced four or more ACEs. That's not one in three of the people who come to mental health. That's one in three of the people you see in Walmart and who are your neighbors, who go to the same church or synagogue as you. This is the general population that you are in.
Dr. Sufna John:And then if we look at the caregivers you specifically serve, this is 100 Families data. 15% of the parents you serve were in foster care themselves as children. Right of the parents you serve were in foster care themselves as children. Right, and so when you care a lot about kids which I believe you do families is in the name of what you do. I believe you care a lot about kids. My goal for you is to widen that to parents as well, because they are often the kids you feel so much love for. They just grew up, and often with limited access to the types of things you're able to provide for families now, and so trauma really can impact the way that you parent.
Dr. Sufna John:Becoming a parent is a huge stage in adult development. Of course, you can be an adult without being a parent, clearly, but most of us who are parents will tell you I went through substantial changes in my life once I became a parent. It represented like a turning point in my life where things started to be different, and what we need to understand is that that naturally, would trigger anyone's thoughts about their own childhood. Becoming a parent forces you to reconcile your own childhood in some ways. So for those of us who had healthy childhoods that might be loving things right, you might think, wow, these are beautiful memories that are getting activated for me when I become a parent. Did that just go out? I thought it did.
Dr. Sufna John:Hold on, oh, I'm getting like a battery sign. That's not good. Hold on, is that? Oh, okay, this one's on. Hold on one second. Let me clip it in. Okay, no, is that better? Can you all hear me A little higher? Okay, is that better? Yeah, okay, will you just tell me in the back. If you can't hear me, just put a thumb up and I'll try to do readjusting. Okay, as we go through things, my voice is fairly loud, but I'll do my best to kind of project, and so what we want to think about is pregnancy, and particularly early childhood, is a time where most people will start reflecting on their own childhood, naturally.
Dr. Sufna John:The problem with that, though, is those of us who had extremely traumatic childhoods. This can be a reemergence of PTSD and depressive symptoms. This can be a time where most people also have a lot of toxic positivity, where they're like mama and daddy, aren't you happy? Oh my God, the amount of times when I was raising my children, people were like soaking every minute. I don't want to soak in every minute. It sucks. I haven't slept for more than three hours in years, so, like when you confront my pain with platitude, that shows me you don't understand me at all, and I think sometimes, what we do in our efforts to cheerlead people is we show them we don't get it at all, and, again, we're doing it because we're trying to make someone feel better. But the therapist in me wants to say I think the person you're trying to make feel better the most is yourself, because you're uncomfortable with people's pain, and so we try to resolve it very quickly. Okay, and the reason. I hope you see, as we're talking, by the way, how many nods are happening around the room. You are not alone in this. This is what all of us go through as we're trying to help people who desperately need our help and our compassion.
Dr. Sufna John:So parenting does come naturally, but often in the way you were parented, and it is very difficult to give someone something you did not have. Very difficult, and we're going to talk about the ways this might manifest in what we see, because, unfortunately, once you've experienced childhood trauma, you are at greater risk for experiencing trauma throughout your lives. It's like a domino effect where, once that first domino is pushed, we know that people are at much greater risk for experiencing a cascade of dominoes, a cascade of trauma throughout the course of their life, of trauma throughout the course of their life. And what do you think people think when they can't seem to make it, when they keep getting knocked down every time they try to pull themselves up, what do you think happens to people? They think they're worthless, they think it's hopeless, they give up, they feel damaged. I've sat with so many people who are like it's me. After a while, if something keeps happening to you, most people go. It's me, it's me and I'm the reason it's happening. And so let's think about what are ways. Then we can hold that idea of compassion as we do our work.
Dr. Sufna John:So what I'm going to do is quickly go through domains that are impacted by trauma and I'm going to be asking quickly go through domains that are impacted by trauma and I'm going to be asking you a series of rhetorical questions. You don't need to respond, by the way, out loud Sometimes. I just want to say that because when you hear a question, sometimes you feel like you need to. But feel free to talk out loud, by the way, as long as you're not doing too much of it to distract your neighbor. So trauma can really impact the parent-child relationship and I think we're very used to talking about it as the trauma in parents impact the kids. We talk about it as a one-way, directional thing. Let me tell you if you have been through domestic violence and then has a child who hits you when they're mad, that is an example of your child triggering you. Okay, this is a bi-directional relationship and we're not going to blame kids, but we're also not going to blame parents, because that's a compatibility of fit issue.
Dr. Sufna John:Okay, my husband and I have very different temperaments. Okay, I'm this and my husband's the most type B, laid back zen. He could sit all day and not say a single word out loud and he would feel totally chill with that. And then we had two kids, my oldest of which is my husband and my youngest of which is his mama to a T. And so there are moments where, when my five-year-old, six-year-old now, when my six-year-old pitches like crazy, there are moments where I'm like I get it, like I get what you're doing, that's me, like I almost find it endearing, like it's almost funny to me, versus my husband's like oh my gosh. And similarly, when my oldest gets very sullen or like whiny, I'm like and my husband's like yeah, I get that, I get why that happens. So it's not that either one of us are bad or good. It's the reality that both people contribute to a relationship and the way a relationship goes.
Dr. Sufna John:But most times parents don't have space to talk about the things about their children that make them unhappy. They don't have a place to say sometimes I regret doing this. Sometimes this wasn't even my choice to have a child. I didn't even sign up for this voluntarily. And look at what my life is now. And we don't really create spaces a lot of times for people to tell the truth, because we are uncomfortable with hearing those truths, and so we'll talk about skill sets to help you, because trauma impacts you on a biological, physiological level and those stress symptoms don't just disappear when you're in a better circumstance.
Dr. Sufna John:So a lot of people think, oh well, you're not stressed now, you're not in trauma now. Why does your body keep acting like you are? Let's take the example of a car accident. I was in a really bad car accident where I rear-ended someone when I was like 17 or 18. Still in my body. If someone brakes too hard in a car, my body does this Exactly right. My body goes whoa right. Still still over a one-time event in which, by the way, nobody got hurt in that event either my car, I guess my Honda, was never the same, but nobody got hurt and I still can't stop it. I still can't stop my body from reacting in that way.
Dr. Sufna John:We also know that one of the most pronounced ways trauma impacts your body is in the way you experience and regulate emotions. Experience means the way you understand what you're feeling. Regulate means the way you're able to modulate or change how you're feeling. Have you all ever worked with caregivers who struggle with this, where they don't know what they're feeling and they don't know how to change how they're feeling or modulate how they're feeling. This is a really common symptom we see at a biological level.
Dr. Sufna John:Similarly, trauma really wipes out or reduces your level to do executive functioning. What that means is like planning, organizing, reasoning. Okay, those types of skills are really hard. By the way, those skills don't fully develop until your mid twenties. So if you're like, wow, what was early twenties, safna, thinking Part of it is you could blame your brain for not being fully developed, then Okay, but please remember that when your trauma occurs will change the way it manifests in your body and in your brain. Okay, because 90, I'll stop there because that's such a big percentage right? 90% of your brain is developed by the age of five 90%. So stuff that happens to you in your childhood can have dramatic impacts on the way your brain is organized through a lifetime. That's true for positive things, by the way, too Right, this idea of when we have positive supports in early childhood, that also builds a brain that's ready to take on those types of challenges, that has the abilities that it needs to regulate.
Dr. Sufna John:So at this point in the presentation I think it's tempting to go. Well, it's screwed because people experience trauma early in childhood. There's nothing we can do about it. That's not true. Actually, take it from a therapist who devotes their whole life to PTSD. Ptsd is actually one of the most researched and treatable mental health disorders we have. We know exactly, actually, what to do to support people who've been through trauma. The problem is most people never get to me. They never get to a type of therapy that's actually been shown to do anything. Treatment as usual, your generic community health, is probably not going to be touching PTSD the way that if you had cancer, you wouldn't only get treatment from your PCP. That wouldn't make sense, right? You need someone who's a specialist. This is a very similar thing here. Ptsd is a specialist level mental health concern and we have resources in our state which I'm happy to pass forward that helps you to start finding who in your communities are those specialists. So what I want to encourage you this quote is my desktop background.
Dr. Sufna John:A lot of times it says when it feels disheartening to learn that trauma changes the brain. Remember that healing changes the brain too. We are today is changing your brain right now. That's not like an exaggeration. You are literally changing your brain sitting here right now, okay, and so it's not that people are too late, but it's also. We're not going to go in there cheerleading and pretend like these are easy things to undo. They're not easy things to undo. It's possible, but it's not easy and it's definitely not willpower. So when we look at biology, we can see that parents have increased issues of pain, increased usage of psychotropic medications, increased inflammatory diseases and autoimmune conditions, and so I would question for you, like, how easy is it for you to parent when you have the flu, because that's what our parents are doing every day, by the way is they're parenting when their body is really compromised?
Dr. Sufna John:I told you already that trauma one of the biggest impacts of trauma in early childhood is emotions. That it really changes the of trauma in early childhood is emotions. That it really changes the way your body experiences and manages emotions, because how we learn to manage our emotions is through relationships with others. Okay, so let's say this was a baby and that baby was crying and I picked it up and I went there, there, there, there, baby. What's wrong with this picture? What do most people do you go right here, right? Do you know? Statistically, here's my science nerd. Do you know? Statistically, most of you will bring your baby to the left side of your body, no matter which handedness you are. Why, yes, that's where your heartbeat is. You know that babies learn to regulate by regulating. Through me, I'm the one that helps my children learn to regulate.
Dr. Sufna John:Now let's rewind into a house where you didn't have a parent that was able to pick you up and hold you and take care of you. Maybe they were high, maybe they were depressed, maybe they also had a childhood where no one took care of their nervous system either, and what you end up seeing then is it's really difficult to regulate your emotions later in life. It's not untreatable, but can't we admit that it would be harder to be able to do? And so I wonder for you how easy is it for you to parent on your moodiest days and the days when your emotions are in least of your control? And, unfortunately, emotions drive a lot of the behaviors that we have. How we are feeling is a direct pathway to how we act most of the time, and so what we often see then is people who have more difficulty managing their emotions guess what also have more difficulty managing their behaviors.
Dr. Sufna John:You might see things like high impulsive decision making, high risk-taking behaviors okay, and I would encourage you all those behaviors that we talk about as hugely problematic in adults. We kind of do them too. Here's an example when you have a stressful day at work, many of you will go let's go get a beer, let's go drink a glass of wine. You're using substances to manage your emotions in that moment. That's normal. That's a lot of us. But why, when parents do that behavior that we're serving, do we talk about it as completely inconceivable to us how you would use substances when you know what a bad impact they have?
Dr. Sufna John:And so, again, we want to be thinking about how easy is it to parent when your child is having a meltdown and you are running late for work, when your body right. It's so bad when your body's like this and you're having to parent still, because parenting is relentless, it never stops, you can never stop. And when you have difficulty with your emotions and difficulty with your behavior, it changes the way you think, it changes the way you think about the world and it really changes the way you think. It changes the way you think about the world and it really changes the way you think about yourself. I will tell you, nothing has made me feel more incompetent in my life than my six-year-old when he was three. Who'd be like, yeah, no, I'm not going to do anything, you say? I was like I'm a child psychologist who literally teaches people around the country about this, and my six-year-old's like, nah, I'm not going to do it. Right, kids can make us feel terrible about ourselves, which is so funny, right, because we talk about kids as, like, they bring us so much joy, blah, blah, blah. They do. I love my kids. They're everything to me, and some days they make me feel so bad about myself, right, and that's normal, right? So we open up conversations for all the different ways that parenting impacts people, not just the ways we want to hear, so we can check off on our plans that you're getting better.
Dr. Sufna John:Finally, this one, I think, is not one that people talk about often enough. It's called dissociation. What this means is I'm not connected to what's happening in real time. Now, okay, how many of you in the course of this talk? You don't have to raise your hand, but feel free. To how many of you have found that you've drifted away for like a minute or two and then you lock back in to what we're talking about you guys don't think I'm good enough, I'm just kidding. But that's normal, right? Is? We kind of go away for a little while and we get snapped back into attention. Have you ever driven to like a familiar place and you park your car and then you're like did I drive here? Like I don't remember any of that. I literally I hope I was following the rules. I don't remember.
Dr. Sufna John:Dissociation is a normal thing that we do, okay, but it's also a survival strategy for trauma, because can you imagine what it would be like to stay fully connected to your body during a sexual assault? Would you want someone to be fully connected to their body in the middle of a house fire? We don't want that. Our bodies are built to protect us and they go. This is not a good idea. Right, you need to go somewhere else, because this is immanageable without that. But what the problem is then is your body starts getting on high alert and going oh, I know what this is happening. Let's get out of here. I need to escape you and pull you way too quickly. So then from a house fire it turns into any time. My heart beats really, really fast. My body's like something's happening, something's going down, pull her offline Right, we need to protect her. Pull her offline.
Dr. Sufna John:And this happens a lot with parents. Have you noticed that sometimes you feel like you're repeating yourself a lot with families? We were like we've definitely talked about this before, like several times, and you We've definitely talked about this before, like several times, and you're acting as if it's brand new information. A lot of times it is because their body wasn't locked in in a moment when you thought they were Because dissociation. I couldn't tell which of you were going off into your own land and coming back here. I can't tell that from looking at you, right. And so part of it is us thinking about how do we normalize that for parents and then say something like so I'm going to check in with you every once in a while to make sure your brain hasn't done that thing where it just like pulls you away, right. So every once in a while I'll go like hey, you still with me, like what did we just talk about? And I'm doing that not because I think you're stupid, not because I think you're dumb. I'm doing that because I understand how brains work when they've been through trauma and I'm not going to forget that knowledge when I'm interacting with you Because I have a lot of profession.
Dr. Sufna John:I train professionals as most of my job Okay, it's the best and I train a lot of professionals who can sit in a conference room like this, nod their head and understand everything I'm saying, and then the minute they're in front of a parent, all that goes out the window and they just treat the parent as if they didn't know all this information. It is great that you're learning new things, but they won't help people if you don't do something differently. Okay, it's not enough just to build your knowledge. We have to use that knowledge to change our behaviors, or else we're going to keep doing the same things that we have been doing for a long period of time, and so that might lead you, hopefully, to this idea of like okay, safna, I'm bought in.
Dr. Sufna John:I get the idea that trauma impacts people in a variety of ways, that it's understandable the problems that I'm people in a variety of ways, that it's understandable the problems that I'm having in engaging families in services and helping them to meet their milestones. I'm at a place now where I need to know what can I do about that. If I have a tagline for my entire career, this would be it. I don't know if you guys noticed that I've been dragging this soapbox behind me this entire day. It's very exhausting, right, but this would be my whole life. If I could sum it up is that fostering resilience in children means investing in the adults who support them. When you look at this graphic, adults literally carve out pieces of themselves to build their children. My kids still have cells from me in their bodies now, and I still have cells from them in my body too. This is happening for all caregivers and children. This is happening for all caregivers and children Because the best predictor this is the good news.
Dr. Sufna John:Okay, the best predictor of how someone does after trauma is not the type of trauma or the severity it was. It's not the age that you were, it's not your personality, it's not your intellect, it's not your race, it's not your religion, because those are all things, most of the time, we can't control. The single best predictor of if you do well after trauma is their presence of at least one significant and consistent adult who can buffer the impacts of this on you. That could be your caregiver, it could be a coach, it could be a pastor, it could be a neighbor, it could be an aunt when you think about your own life. Okay, you have people like this, hopefully, people that you can trace back to in adulthood, that really made a difference for you when you were a kid and those aren't always permanent relationships, by the way.
Dr. Sufna John:So I told you that I train a lot and that this is my personality all the time. So if you're wondering, like, what's Safna like as a friend? This, what's Safna like as a therapist? This, right, this is just who I am, right, this is how I operate, and so it probably doesn't surprise you then that I'm someone who talked a lot growing up in school, all the time, and I got in trouble for it all the time, all the time, daily trouble for talking too much.
Dr. Sufna John:And then my third grade teacher, mrs Frank I have no idea where she is now, by the way, I don't even know if she's alive anymore. She's not a permanent fixture in my life at all. She was the first person that was like hey, safna, she's like, this is something really special about you, and she's like I bet you're going to use this voice for like really good things. And that was the first time I had any adult who was like this isn't something we dislike about you. This is a part of you that you're going to use and I do use it every day now and so I want to help you realize you can be this adult for people, even if you come into their life for very short periods of time. So we're going to be shifting that lens I bet you've heard this before of what's wrong with you, to what happened to you, and I would add, and what continues to happen to you, right, that we want to shift that lens, but it's not sufficient enough to go yeah, we know this person's been through a lot of trauma and then completely throw it out the window when we get frustrated with them.
Dr. Sufna John:I often ask therapists that I'm training, so, knowing dad's history, how does that change the way you act towards him? And if you can't tell me pretty quickly how you're making accommodations for that, that might suggest you aren't, that you aren't really holding it present in your mind when you're doing that. Interacting, that it's kind of that information that sits in the back of your mind and you can do it when someone reminds you, but maybe you're not doing it as proactively, so that may be one piece of homework for you when you leave today is to think about what's. One thing I wanna do more intentionally with families. I serve knowing that most of them have a trauma history like this, and we need you to do this as authentically as possible.
Dr. Sufna John:Spoiler alert people can tell when you're faking compassion. They know when you actually don't feel that way. When you grow up with trauma, you become an expert observer of other people. Okay, because you had to be right. You had to be able to tell is dad sober or drunk? In this moment, you had to be able to tell is mom having a bad day or a good day or a medium day? Right, because that that was what made you safe or not safe. But what that means now is they're watching you. They're watching the way you talk to them. They're watching what your face is doing. They are paying attention and, by the way, they're also paying attention to how you treat each other, and we're going to talk about that soon, because the most compatible stance with the trauma-informed stance is one of benevolence.
Dr. Sufna John:Most compatible stance with the trauma-informed stance is one of benevolence. What this basically means is I assume most people are doing their best with what they have and what their environment allows them to do, because it's not just about what we know right, it's also about what our environment allows. I can know that having a stable house is good for my kids If I can't afford one. My environment's not letting me use that knowledge right. But a lot of times I think we assume that it's just that people don't know. They know. A lot of times they just can't do it within the environmental constraints that they're in, and so this might sound really floofy to some people, this idea of like I just assume the best intentions of other people most of the time. But I encourage you. This is mostly a gift you are giving yourself. You will be so much more of a regulated, authentic, optimistic. This will keep you in this job for a lifetime if you are able to genuinely recharge that benevolence for other people.
Dr. Sufna John:Okay, and so what we you want to think to yourself? What makes granting that benevolence to people difficult? Because that'll be different for each of you. For some people, it's when a parent explicitly does not do what I told them to do. That's going to make it hard for me to have benevolence for them. Or if a parent doesn't think about the impact of their interactions on me, my staff, or their spouse or their partner. That's going to be the thing that makes it hard.
Dr. Sufna John:The first idea of correcting your biases is to know where they exist in the first place, and that's different for everyone, right? So this is another piece of homework to examine in yourself, and that's different for everyone, right? So this is another piece of homework to examine in yourself. What are the things that people do that drive me the most crazy, that make me drop benevolence the easiest?
Dr. Sufna John:Because, if I know that I can course correct for that, one of my favorite supervisors of all time told me something that I think about daily that you are not responsible for your first thought, but you are responsible for your second thought and your first action, that all of us will have these gut feelings. You can't take this out of your brain, okay, trust me as someone who does a lot of bias, anti-bias work. You can't pull this out of your brain. This is built into the way your brain works. Shortcuts, okay, but I am telling you, even though you have breathed the smog in of bias right, you can't control to breathe in smog, we're all in it. You can't control that. It is your responsibility to expel your lungs, though. It is your responsibility to challenge those thoughts that you have and change the way you're acting. So hear me when I say you're not a bad person. If you have these reactions, frankly, they're probably a sign you really care about what you're doing, that you have these reactions and we don't have the luxury of just operating on our first reactions, because people are relying on us for really important things. So we need to take the time to think about the reactions we have and the impact that has on other people. Because we need to take the time to think about the reactions we have and the impact that has on other people because we want to avoid making assumptions.
Dr. Sufna John:I've spent today telling you all the ways that trauma can impact people. Okay, what I didn't tell you is only one-third of people who go through trauma develop PTSD. Two-thirds of people don't. Even within PTSD, you can look totally different. Some people with PTSD have heightened alert systems, which means they get scared all the time. Some people have dampened alert symptoms, which means that when something's scary, they don't perceive it as scary.
Dr. Sufna John:It is a wide variety of ways that trauma can impact someone and we don't want to assume that knowing someone's history means knowing really anything about them because you don't know how that impacted them. Sometimes I've had judges or lawyers or other people tell me what is this person's trauma history and on the stand I go. I'm not going to talk about that because the actual events are not nearly as important as the way this impacted someone. So I don not going to talk about that Because the actual events are not nearly as important as the way this impacted someone. So I don't need to graphically go into detail with you about what this person's history is. For us to appreciate the way that history is impacting their life and that's the thing to focus on here we want to support protective factors, because what that does is show someone you are so much more than the bad things that have happened to you. You might be a mom who loses her temper on her kids a lot, and you might also be a mom who nails chocolate chip cookies every time. That's true. You're all of those things, right? Remember? I started this presentation with telling you I'm all of those things. I am all of who I am.
Dr. Sufna John:And if we only focus on deficits which, by the way, our insurance systems and our healthcare really try to get us to do if we only focus on the weaknesses. We kind of accidentally tell the story that you are only what has happened to you, and that's not fair to anybody. And we should ask about values, because we often assume that poor behavior reflects poor values. So if someone doesn't do something, it's because they don't have enough value for it. Okay, let me tell you, if someone came up to me and said something, I will give you a million dollars if you can solve this one calculus problem. Let me tell you, a million dollars is 10 out of 10 motivating for me. Okay, I really want it. So if any of you have that lying around, I want it. Just know that this is highly motivating for me. I cannot do that. I do not have it in me. I purposely took a job where math is not a thing in my world. Right, I can't do it. It's not that I don't have value for it, it's not that I wasn't motivated appropriately enough, I just can't do it.
Dr. Sufna John:But we assume when people don't do what we tell them, it's because they don't care. But a lot of human behavior isn't dictated by our values. A lot of it is either automatic, that comes out of our bodies day to day, or it's reflective of lagging skills, that we have things that we don't know how to do yet right. And so I want you to start thinking about why has someone acted in a way I don't like. So maybe that first thought is ew, I don't like that at all. And that second thought is I wonder why. I wonder what it is about them that is making me react this way. And I wonder what it is about me that's making me react this way, because my own values also shift, the way I listen to other people and the things that bother me when other people do them.
Dr. Sufna John:Because most of the time, new therapists especially struggle with this idea of I have to know everything to do to fix things. So if someone comes to me with a problem, I need to be the expert who solves their problem. And for me, I'm like girl one that's a little arrogant to assume you are the holder of all these solutions. If there was a simple solution to most of this, don't you think it would have been done already? Right? You're dealing with very complex social problems. These do not have easy solutions, okay, but most of the time, if we give people space, the solutions they come up with are better than ours because they make more sense for their own lives. They make more sense for their own lives. They make more sense for their own culture and their own values. How many times have you kind of like accidentally forced a parent to do something a different way because you want them to, and then, the minute you're not paying attention, they'll just do what they were going to do, because all of us are like that. All of us will default in that the things that make most sense to us, and so when you allow people space to generate their own solutions, those solutions are more likely to stick because they are already something that feels congruent and feels values-focused.
Dr. Sufna John:Because choices are often taken away as a part of trauma. Traumatic experiences broadly took away your power. They took away your choices. Things happened to you that you couldn't control. The last thing we want to do is accidentally coerce someone who has been through trauma. Okay, and that's a painful thought to sit with that. Maybe some of the things I'm doing, even though they have a good intention of helping, are forcing people into things who have a life history of being forced into things against their will, and so we also need to do, I think, a better job of accepting no's and boundaries when people set them. A boundary isn't a place I'm going to push. Initially, because when people tell me to stop, I should stop, because a lot of times with trauma, when people said stop, people did not, and so coercion is a really important thing to remember In our efforts to convince people. We don't want to bulldoze them or else we are accidentally maybe recreating dynamics they've had to experience in a lot of other relationships in their life.
Dr. Sufna John:Okay, this is the one where it's like I'm going to ask you to look at you and I'm going to ask you to look at your colleagues. Okay, remember I told you people pick up on the tone of the room, naturally. Okay, so I've picked up some things about the tone of this room. Any guesses on things I've picked up as a presenter up here about the tone of you, I've made a lot of judgments about you as I've been talking, right, because I've had to alter things as a result of that. We all do this. If you start talking to someone and their eyes go somewhere else, you go. Okay, I need to redirect. This is not working right. What do you think I've come to learn about you as a room by this last 45 minutes I've spent with you.
Dr. Sufna John:Ah, so maybe I've realized y'all are nodding a whole lot with how trauma affects grownups. I wonder if those grownups are here. And what I will tell you is, statistically, absolutely those of us who go into helping professionals like me, like you, have way higher rates of childhood trauma than the general population. We are here either because we want to be the adult we wish we had or we want to honor the adults we did. That is true for most of us in here. Don't worry if, by the way, that's not true for you. There's still a great place for you in this work, even if you didn't have a trauma history, right. But let's acknowledge that a lot of us do and that it influences the way we think about this work. It's a part of our why? Right, yeah, lovely.
Dr. Sufna John:What else? Anything else that I've picked up about? Y'all Say it again oh, that sometimes I'm having some drift. The after lunch spot woof, it's hard, right, it's a hard thing. You know what's so interesting about that, though? I think I'm picking up a little of that. More of me is picking up people engaging, though, like leaning in and listening and nodding and talking, because when I see you talking to your neighbor. I don't read that as you not listening to me. Oftentimes you're talking to your neighbor because something sparked for you that I said or because you need to get this out so that you can pay attention to what's going on. So do you notice how I interpret your behavior changes, how I feel about you, and it changes what I would do then. So we have to realize that the tone we set in our clinics, in the way that we talk to people, in the way that we talk to each other, is influencing in real time the way people are engaging with us and talking with us.
Dr. Sufna John:And a great way to gauge this on yourself is when you vent about your job. How kind are you? Yowzer? Right, that's a ducky one. I'm not saying there's no place for venting. Remember we're avoiding toxic positivity. But if all you do is vent and ruminate with your colleagues and then you jump right back into work, that's not healthy. As a person who does a lot of rumination, work with people don't do that. You can have space for your rumination. You need to also get out of that space, because otherwise you're bringing all of that cluster into right where you're talking to somebody, okay, and it's going to show up in you looking at your watch more often. It's going to show up in you cutting them off because you're feeling impatient. It's going to show up with you not listening to some things they're telling you because they don't align with what you already think Okay. And so we need to hold ourselves and our colleagues accountable. So something you might want to practice is how would you let a colleague know if you think they're dropping a trauma lens?
Dr. Sufna John:I grew up in Michigan y'all in like suburbs of Detroit. How I would tell someone and give them feedback. Something might be really different than if you grew up in Arkansas. When I first moved here, I was like does anyone say what they're thinking at all? Like it feels like everyone's just kind of like if this is the target, people are like running around in circles and circles to try to avoid the target, right, and now that I've lived here for almost 15 years, when I go back to Michigan, people are like what are you saying? Just say what you want. Just say what you're thinking, right? Southern culture has some indirect communication styles built into it, but remember, people who have been through trauma need direct, they need honesty One of my taglines that I encourage you to borrow is I respect you enough to tell you the truth?
Dr. Sufna John:That is respect, is telling you the truth, because it's not respectful for me not to tell you and then proceed to bitch about it to everybody else. That's not respectful, right. And so we need to think about. We need to think about how we're doing this, okay. Okay, because building emotionally safe relationships takes time. Relationships are built over thousands of moment to moment interactions. If you ask me, safna, who's like a ride or die person in your life? That's one of those people. For me is my husband. And then, if you ask me, what's the one moment that he proved that to you, that's not a thing. He proved it to me by, like, countlessly showing up right, by being consistent over lots and lots of moments. And I'm telling you, you don't get someone's trust for free. Just because you know you're here to help doesn't mean you've earned any sort of trust from the person in front of you, because weren't they hurt by people who said they were there to help? They were hurt by that.
Dr. Sufna John:Let's say, I took a bowl of M&Ms. Okay, can I use you for an example? I took a bowl of M&Ms and I went here. What's your name? Marley, marley? I said, marley, take a hand. Wait. Did you say Marla Marla, thank you. I was like oh. I was like, oh, I noticed I took in context clues to notice. Okay, and so I handed you this bowl of M&Ms and I said, here, take a handful of M&Ms. By the way, only like one or two of them in here are poisonous. The rest are totally fine, normal M&Ms. Okay, the whole bowl is normal M&Ms, except for a couple. I guess you can't tell. But really, most of these are fine.
Dr. Sufna John:How likely, on a scale of one to five, are you to take the M&Ms? She's a zero folks up here off the Likert scale. Okay, what I'm telling you is you look like an M&M who hurt someone. You look like a person who said I really care how you're doing and then use it against you in court. Or you look like someone who said I believe care how you're doing and then use it against you in court. Or you look like someone who said I believe you and then started questioning you when you told them the truth. So unless you prove you're a safe M&M, why would people trust you at all, especially with the most important thing in their lives, which is their children. Why would anyone trust you? You have to earn it, and you have to earn it over and over and over again, and that can be exhausting, but that's also part of what we've signed up for in the job that we chose, okay, and so it's been really nice, by the way, hanging out with y'all. This is such a beautiful drive from Little Rock coming over here too, so this was a really nice respite for me.
Dr. Sufna John:Anyway, this is my email address. You're not bothering me at all, by the way. Please email me if you have any questions, any feedback. But also, I really want you to pay attention to these links down here. If you Google, our Best, our Facebook page will show up. We have a YouTube channel full of free recorded webinars on all aspects of trauma, and probably one of our most utilized tools is we have a clinician registry that shows you, in every county in the state, who are providers that have gone through trauma-focused treatment training, so you can start to find the people in your communities who have a higher likelihood that, once we go, please go to therapy. It's actually going to work, okay, and so please email me with anything you have. I think we've got like four minutes, but thank you for your attention and I'm happy to take any questions.
Host:Thanks for listening to this episode of Smart Justice with Dr Sufna John of the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences. You can find out more about Our Best at the website ourbestuamsedu. That's A-R-B-E-S-T, dot. U-a-m-s, dot, e-d-u, and you can find them on YouTube at UAMS Our Best. Please follow the Smart Justice podcast so you can be notified when we drop episodes. Leave us a rating or review and please visit smartjusticeorg. Smart Justice is a non-profit publication and podcast that covers the pursuit of better outcomes on justice system related issues, such as child welfare, incarceration and juvenile justice. Our coverage is solutions oriented, focusing on the innovative ways in which communities are solving issues and the lessons that are being learned as a result of successes and challenges. Until next time.