TRANSCRIPT Somatic Experiencing Along the Spectrum of Ability 5/19/25 >>Camille: So we're here today to talk about the bodily response to trauma as it relates to people who are blind or have a visual impairment. And more globally people with disabilities who exist in their bodies differently than people who are not disabled or who do not have a sensory impairment. I originally named this presentation Somatic Experiencing Along the Spectrum of Ability, but that's a mouthful and I didn't really love that title. We've kind of reworked the presentation since then so if that's the presentation that you came for, don't worry. You're in the right place. So just some quick background before we start. I worked at the School for the Blind for around five years. Several years ago, it's been several years now. And one of the people who I most enjoyed working with and learned so much from is Rachel, who I believe may be potentially is in the virtual room today. I don't know. I can't see. So Rachel called me up and said, hey, Camille, you know about trauma. I said, oh, is it that obvious? So she asked me to take part in this talk and I invited Dana, who is my clinical supervisor, former professor, and trauma nerd, just to co-facilitate this with me because that would be easier on me to share the load. Also because we are both pretty passionate about this topic. So we kind of just smashed our wheelhouses together and we're really just hoping that you get anything, even just a little something out of this presentation. We will have done our job. So hopefully you do. Okay. So just to introduce ourselves, I'm Camille. She/they pronouns. I am a social worker. Yeah. And I think that's it. So Dana, do you want to introduce yourself? >>Dana: Yeah, hard to follow, Camille Smith. My name is Dana. I am a clinical social worker and I have been doing this for a minute. I have been really honored to work in a lot of different settings along the way from Child Protective Services to inpatient acute care with adolescents to outpatient mental health and then, lastly, in schools. So I feel like sort of the through-line of families or children that I have been able to work with that have experienced hardship in their lived experience. Stress, trauma, all of the things has shown up along the way. And being able to learn a little bit of information about what's helpful for all the folks, including ourselves, because trauma is the great equalizer. We've all experienced it. It's just a by-product of living, it seems. So a lot of the information that we want to talk with you guys about today, while intended to be helpful for you guys in your roles as teachers or family members or whatever, is also, hopefully you might find a takeaway or two for ourselves. I'm glad you're here and if you guys have any questions, thoughts, ideas, drop them in the chat along the way and Kaycee's going to help us speak to anything that comes up for people as we go. >>Camille: Yeah. Just to add to that, just as a disclaimer, we are not disability experts. We are not experts in the field of visual impairment. And so we really are relying on the knowledge and the expertise in the room as well and we hope this conversation can be dynamic and engaging and we really do want to hear from y'all. So please do share your thoughts as they come up. Also, if there's any feedback around language or we are always trying to evolve in our understanding and grow our own knowledge base. We're happy to have kind of an ongoing evolving conversation with y'all. Okay. Dana, you're going to do some acknowledgments. >>Dana: As Camille mentioned, we are drawing a lot of the content from Bessel van der Kolk book the body keeps the score. But there are a lot of contributors in the field of trauma, in terms of the research, the science, interpersonal neurobiology, all of it. These are a few of the folks whose work that we looked at to be able to put together some thoughts to share with you guys today. All right. So the most important thing that we'll probably do today, we want to find out who you all are. And what your super powers are. The children that you work with in your role, or if you're a family member, your own children. Name one of your super powers. Put your name, role, and then one of your super powers and Kaycee will let us know what we see from you guys. No, Camille, I haven't thought about what I would say if I was asked to put that in the chat, but if I were forced to -- oh, nice. Braillist. >>Camille: I'm super nervous right now. Is that a super power? >>Dana: You're able to name your feelings. That's a super power. >>Kaycee: Dawn shared that she is a parent and teacher and Braillist in training and listening. >>Dana: Excellent. Love that. >>Kaycee: Aracely, TSVI, mother, and positive cheerleader. Christine is an O&M, orientation and mobility, and advocating. >>Dana: Nice. We don't get asked every day what it is that we're amazing at. But the things that you guys are listing, it's so important. It kind of gets to the heart of what we're talking about today, which is relationships, right? So being able to listen and to be positive and kind of be there for somebody on the sidelines cheering them on or advocating if they need an extra voice to help them. All of that's just huge. >>Kaycee: Lori is a TVI and Certified Orientation and Mobility Specialist. And she shares that empathy. >>Dana: Guys, I think you're being modest out there. It's okay. Thank you, guys for those who did share. I feel like being able to talk about who we are and what we bring to the table kind of can keep us in this work too, you know? And so being able to be empathic and listen and show up for people day in and day out when needs and demands of this job that you guys do is pretty profound, I would imagine. That in and of itself is a super power, just being able to show up and continuing to do so for people. So we're going to say thank you on the front end for all that you have do. We have been in the helping profession from a different angle and it matters when people show up. We can't do much when we don't. Thank you, guys and I'm glad you're here today. So we've talked about who we are and maybe some of the strengths we bring, let's find out how we are. Okay. So I want to describe this image on the screen right here. This is an image that comes from Trust-Based Relational Intervention, TBRI for short. And just a sideline about that, this is a therapeutic approach that came out of TCU in Fort Worth from the work of Dr. Karen Purvis and David Cross. In this work they basically were -- put together a summer camp in 1999 for a group of children who had had trauma and had been in the foster care system and were in adoptive placements. It was a 30-day summer camp in Fort Worth. They called it the Hope Connection, I think. The intention behind it was to have a 30-day summer camp and perhaps teach the kids some skills and help them feel safer in the relationships they were creating. So what came out of that 30-day camp, besides everybody was like we don't want it to stop, was that they had some realizations about what was really impactful for these children and their families. Karen Purvis coined the term "Kids from hard places," all the different ways kids experienced stress and trauma. What they found was the power of relationship and the power of paying attention to their bodies, they gave a lot of emphasis on teaching kids to pay attention to sensations in their bodies. They did a lot of OT activities to help kids kind of get more comfortable in their bodies. They talked a lot about the importance of hydration and protein snacks and kind of what we put in our bodies. And so through this came this therapeutic approach, Trust-Based Relational Intervention. This is actually a wonderful protocol that some of you are familiar with, that I first learned about what I was working in schools. Long story long, this is a tool that comes from TBRI and what is on the screen is literally a picture of a paper plate, okay? It's a round paper plate. And on the top portion of the plate you have three pie slices. On the far left is a blue slice. In the middle is a green. On the right is a red. And we use those handy dandy brads and cut out a black arrow to make -- it looks like what I imagine an engine check plate. So the little arrow can move between the different color slices of pie, okay? And so how we use this with kids, with families, is to think about how are we inside our bodies. Like these are called sensations, right? It's helpful to start with -- I'm going to ask us because if we were all in the same room, we would be doing this together. I'm going to ask you guys, if you would, put one hand to your heart and one hand to your belly, to your gut. If you feel ready and comfortable, go ahead and close your eyes. We're going to pay attention to what it feels like inside of our bodies for just a second. What are you noticing in there? Any kind of sensations? And then take a deep breath in through your nose and exhale out your mouth. Okay. That right there is something that is a skill to teach kids to be able to pause and kind of take stock at any moment in time. And so the engine check plate is basically around teaching people to pay attention to how much energy they have in their system. So if we look at the left slice of pie, which is the blue slice, this is low levels of energy. Camille is going to help me out here. When we're having low levels of energy, what might be some of the reasons for that? >>Camille: Just did not get enough sleep because I was up all night working on a presentation. >>Dana: Hypothetically. You could be really tired. Right. Absolutely. You could feel -- you might feel a little -- kind of sad, you know. You could be worried about something. Something on your mind. You might be getting sick. Like, your body is just feeling a little off and you just don't have the same level of energy that you might normally. Yeah, any of those things. Just thinking low levels of energy. And if we were to shoot to the other side of the pie, the red slice is the opposite. It's a ton of energy. A lot of energy pulsing through our system. It's very aroused. What kinds of things might red energy be? >>Camille: When I think red energy, I think road rage. [ Laughter ] >>Dana: That's a good example. Exactly. So just rageful driver. There's that kind of thing. You could be -- you know, you're really frustrated by a situation. You could be super fidgety and anxious. I have a little red energy right now. Same thing. Kind of getting ready to have this conversation today. Feeling a little nervous energy, hoping it goes well, but also a little excited. But all of that's just kind of pulsing in there and that feels like a lot. It could also be really excited, you know? Kid could be having a birthday and it's excited. So what's important to know, if you choose to use this with the kids you work with, it's not good or bad. Kids tend to think concretely when they're younger, like green is good, red is bad, and I don't know what blue is. And when you do this with children, by the way, they're going to go I'm like blue and red, which is perfectly honest and true. Because have any of us ever had a red racing mind, perhaps, and then a blue tired body, right? You can have both at the same time. And then lastly, in the middle, is the green slice. And this is where we're in kind of a good state. There might be still a little stress in our system, because stress in and of itself is not a bad thing, which Camille will tell us more about in a minute. But rather we're alert, engaged, ready to do this thing. And so for kids, again, just one last thing about it, you can think about blue as like the gas tank's kind of low. Running out of energy. Green, the tank is full ready to go. We're cruising down 35. There are no road ragers next to us and there's no traffic. We're cruising. And red could be our tank may be full but we are revving down the road. So not assuming that we -- if we were to have like four students in our class and they all said, hey, I'm in red energy, I got the red. It is helpful not to assume that we know why, because it could be a lot of different reasons. So always being curious about that and helping kids understand, oh, you know that you're in the red. So what's making you feel that you have red energy? And they'll know. They usually know kind of what that is. And then the last thing I'll say about this, and we'll kind of refer back to this throughout the presentation, is that our states change all the time. So it's not like we do this once in the morning and we stay in that state. And so that's actually kind of a hopeful thing. We can change our states and get ourselves back to the green when we're ready to engage. Yeah. So that is the check engine plate. >>Camille: And I would just add to that as well. But even though this has kind of been popularized by the TBRI world, framework. This is also something that you can create, that you can tailor to whoever you are working with, whatever population you're working with. You can really develop your own system. If it needs to be something more , you know, manipulative, tactile, however you want to make this work for the folks you're working with, that's really feasible. That's really up to y'all. >>Dana: Absolutely. >>Camille: Let's see where we are now. Okay. Great. So now we're going to bring it back to the book, the body keeps the score, and kind of why we're here today and what we're focusing on. I don't know if I can see the little hand raising emojis, because I was going to ask that if folks had read the book or are familiar with it to raise their hand, but I don't know if I can see that. >>Kaycee: We don't have the hand raising so if you read it, you can put "me" in the chat. >>Camille: Or if you have read it, you can score it. So if you're familiar with the book or if you have read it, you can score it in the chat. If you want to put a 1 in there, oh my gosh, hate this book, trash. Couldn't get through it. Or put a 5 if you're like, wow, this book is right up there with the Bible or the Twilight saga or whatever you consider to be the best book ever written. Just want to get a better understanding of where folks are coming from with their opinion around this book. >>Kaycee: We've got 3, 3. 3. A lot of threes coming in. >>Camille: Yeah, yeah. I find that 3 very relatable. So I do want to acknowledge just from the beginning, kind of the perspective that I have coming into this space. There are a lot of valid critiques about this book and about the author. For one thing, it was written I think before the trigger warning trend really started to take place. So there's a lot of unfiltered, raw depictions of some pretty traumaizing events. When I was reading it, I couldn't get through it because I was pretty triggered by the language. It's written by a white man so it's written from a Euro-centric male perspective. And then I found, in my reading, that it tended to kind of pathologize some of the female survivors and their stories. And then I also found it to be a little bit victim blaming. And so I just wanted to remind y'all that in the handout there is a list of kind of other resources that you can research and look into. I think it's really important that we continue to do our own research and do our own digging and explore this topic from the diverse array of perspectives. From Indigenous perspectives, from the folks who have lived experience with trauma and all the intersections there. I did want to read a quote from a Mother Jones article. This person said the body keeps the score stigmatizes survivors, blames victims, and depoliticizes violence. It creates a hierarchy in which marginalized victims are even more marginalized. So that person is not a fan but there is a lot of good stuff in the book. There is a lot of important content. So I just wanted to acknowledge that right off the bat. It's okay to live in that conflict of not loving the lens but also there's some validity in here and it's okay to be in that space. And then also just to -- on the topic of trigger warnings, we are going to talk about some stuff in our presentation that might be uncomfortable. So, as always, please prioritize yourself and do whatever you need to do to take care of yourself. If you need to step away, turn down the volume, whatever. We don't even know what's happening outside of the two of us, I don't know what's going on out there. So we will not take that personally. Okay. Let's see. And so there are a couple of outtakes on the screen here. I will read through them quickly. These are from the book. Traumatic experiences leave traces, whether on a large scale, on our histories and cultures, or close to home on our families with dark secrets being passed down through generations. They also leave traces on our minds and emotions, on our capacity for joy and swims and even on our biology and immune systems. Trauma results in a fundamental reorganization of the way mind and brain manage perceptions. It changes not only how we think and what we think but also I cannot see the rest of the text because my zoom -- Dana, can you finish that sentence? >>Dana: And what we think about but also our capacity to think. >>Camille: Long after a traumatic experience is over it may be reactivated at the slightest hint of danger and mobilize disturbed brain circuits and secrete massive amounts of stress hormones. Trauma leaves scars, physically, mentally, culturally. We are prone to triggers that cause us to reexperience the source of a trauma, even if it didn't originate with us. So, in other words, the body remembers and stores experiences of trauma even if the conscious brain does not. Or the conscious mind. So this presentation is focused on the body's experience as it relates to trauma and the idea that we can actually minimize the effects of trauma with an intentional focus on the body and creating safe relationships and safe environments that are conducive to healing. So we're going to be talking about how the body stores trauma. How the trauma affects the brain and the nervous system and how that may show up in the people that we work with. And how we can better support those folks through our work and increasing our awareness around the somatic experience. Yeah. All right. So now we're going to talk about types of stress. In one of the prior Coffee Hours, the presenter did a deep dive around stress and it was really -- I thought it was really good. If you want to watch that, I encourage you to watch it. I'm just going to touch on it quickly. So stress is just the body's response to something that's new or challenging. There's a lot of things that cause us to feel a little stressed out and it's not necessarily bad, right? So if we think about preparing for a job interview or getting a new job or entering into a new relationship, these are all things that can make us feel really stressed out. But that's actually the kick in the pants that we need to get through that moment and to further develop our skillset or hone our existing skills. Those stressors have a positive outcome. Tolerable stress is a more serious, more intense than our everyday stressors. But it's buffered by the protective factors that we have in our life. For kiddos, that could be something like a positive caregiver or positive relationship. I like to think of tolerable stress as an event that's on its way to becoming a traumatizing event but then family and friends show up. They bring food. You're telling stories and before you know it the kind of acute pain of that moment has subsided and you're able to come out on the other side of that just a little bit more worldly, a little bit more wise. So it's tolerable. It's something that we can overcome. Toxic stress is just that. It's actually toxic. The national scientific council on developing child considers toxic stress the most dangerous type of stress response. Also just letting you guys know that I have several kittens that are loose in the room with me. And so if I seem a little distracted it's because they bring me joy but they are also very annoying and loud and they make noises. So in response to stress, the brain produces the hormone cortisol and prolonged exposure to cortisol levels actually can change the architecture of a child's brain. So when we say toxic stress, it's because it is a toxic chemical poisoning your body and reshaping our brain development. Altered brain architecture can result in long-term problems mentally, physically, and in our learning and in our behavior. Dana, do you have anything to add about stress? >>Dana: It's real. You know, I used to work in schools too and we would often talk about we're in the business of stressing kids out. Because, to your point. Stress is not all bad. And so I think stress -- really, I think we have all been through COVID but that was a prolonged, severe, unpredictable, and led to a lot of trauma for a lot of people. But stress that we can kind of -- that's moderate or we can have -- kind of the tolerable that you talked about. We have some sort of ways to manage and moderate that a little bit. Then that leads to strength and resilience. It's all stress but it matters. So, yeah. >>Camille: Okay. So next I have a couple of quotes that I will read. So disability-related stress is a type of toxic stress related to identity-based stress that can lead to pre-traumatic stress, trauma, and long-term negative health and mental health outcomes. For people with disabilities, disability-related stress is caused by stigmatization, inaccessibility, discrimination, and other abusive violent or exclusionary experiences or circumstances. These abuses can either be directly related to their disability or societal misperceptions about their disability. Disability-related stress can be caused by a single event, a series of events -- and that is from disability-related stress and inaccessibility as trauma from the communitycommons.org. I just wanted to highlight this. We are going to talk more about the adverse childhood experiences. But I did just want to highlight where toxic stress comes up for some of the folks we're working with and just being mindful of the populations that we serve and kind of the context that they're navigating. Waiting on you, slides. That's you. >>Dana: That's me. That's us. It's all of us. So just to have a working definition, as we move forward and kind of start talking about how trauma shows up in our bodies and then what we do with that. Basically it's a response, an emotional response, a psychic response to a perception of danger or threat. And it can happen with an individual or be witnessed by an individual. We really like the three E's of trauma that SAMHSA puts out because it really kind of highlights that an event in and of itself is not equal trauma. Okay? And so if we think about events, the event is the thing that happened. Right? The experience, the second E, experience, is basically was I directly involved in the thing, in the event? Did I witness it? Did I hear about it from my loved one? Or did I read about it in the newspaper? Kind of the continuing the ways we can experience an event. And the effects is the impact it has on the individual. So an example that I really liked from the work of Dr. Bruce Perry, who works out of the child trauma institute in Houston and has written a couple of books. The boy who was raised as a dog, or what happened to you with Oprah Winfrey. Those were really good reads, by the way. He gave the example of if you had a fire in a school -- I think it was a school. And so say the fire was outside of a first-grade classroom. Okay? So it was right outside the door. Fire alarms go off. Fire department called. And, good news, the firemen come in and they're able to put out the fire. But the experience, the impact, people's experience and impact was very, very different. First-graders and teacher in that classroom were scared to death, right? They felt trapped. They didn't know if they could escape. They didn't know if they were going to live or die. They had huge impacts from that experience. Other part of the school building, fifth-grade classroom, fire drill went off, we went outside on the playground and then we saw a fire truck. Didn't see anything. Didn't smell anything. It was just a typical fire drill. Maybe a fifth-grader in that class had a sibling in the first-frayed class so that experience of the trauma, being worried about the sister or brother in first grade, very different. The firefighters who came in to extinguish the fire, not only were they traumatized but they have skills to extinguish the fire and get the people out safely and they can have a positive feeling of mastery. One event fire, lots of experiences from the same event. >>Camille: Slide? >>Dana: Yes, slide. And then, just finally, a last word about this before we start talking about different kinds of trauma. Gabor Mate. This is about the imprint or what's left after the trauma. And so Gabor talks about the psychic wound that leaves a scar or imprint in your nervous system, in your body, and it shows up in multiple ways that are not helpful to you later on. I think that's pretty straight and to the point. Van der Kolk, same thing. Not the story of something that happened back then but the current imprint of that pain, horror, and fear living inside. It sticks around and so it's important to know what to pay attention to and what to do about it, which is where we're going to go next. >>Camille: Just quickly, before I move into the types of trauma. I know it can be kind of tricky to differentiate or to wrap your brain around the differentiation between toxic stress and trauma. And so just a quick note that trauma can be a source of toxic stress. And prolonged exposure to trauma or the after effects of a traumatic event can lead to heightened stress that is considered toxic. Two different things but the way they overlap and interplay is important. >>Dana: Okay. So types of trauma. This is going to be familiar to all of us but just wanted to kind of highlight. And so as we go through this part, I want you to go ahead and maybe think about some students that you work with, who you may know or have a hunch perhaps of lived through some hard things that might be at least the toxic stress, if not trauma. Start in the middle with acute trauma. And that results from a single stressful or dangerous event. Think natural disaster, tornado, hurricane, car accident. Right? It could be an acute medical episode. It could be abuse and neglect. A sexual assault, domestic violence. But a single stressful episode. Chronic trauma, on the other hand, results from repeated and prolonged exposure to stressful events. Some of the same events but, you know, trauma, like continued abuse or living in a home with somebody with a severe mental illness where there's unpredictability and frightening behaviors at times. Complex trauma, on the other hand, results from exposure to multiple traumatic events. And that has a cumulative impact. Often this is the case with child abuse and neglect in early childhood. It becomes very complex and layered and impacts in lots of different ways. These are all direct forms of trauma. And then here are some -- you know, we talked about the earlier definition that it can also be witnessing. You don't have to directly experience something. You all are helpers and the roles of family members, teachers, support staff for students. You know firsthand kind of the impact of seeing kids that you care about or people that you care about struggle and have hard things happen to them. And so that can lead to compassion fatigue, burnout, vicarious trauma. So paying attention to the signs and symptoms for yourself, that is real. Complex developmental trauma is repetitive trauma as a youth. It's often that early childhood abuse and neglect, physically, sexual. The developmental piece is important because what can happen with a traumatic event when it happens to a younger child. At the age that the trauma occurs, there can be an arrested development, kind of a pause, a freeze in the system, if you can think about it that way. And I think I had heard this term before, but it came home for me when I think about a kid that I worked with, who was an eighth-grader. And he had had early trauma. And we were in counseling at the school. He was a big guy, eighth-grader, football team, wasn't thrilled about being in counseling but I think it got him out of a class he didn't care so much about, and he came. I would Goldfish and that was a draw. We had games in there and before long, once he knew this was 30 minutes of his life once a week and I was kind enough and safety and trust, was developing. Of all the games in the room of things he wanted to do, he wanted to play Candyland. One, he didn't know what it was. Taught him how to play Candyland. That was his choice week after week along with a cup of Goldfish, which he had never had in his life either. When we were in the room together he felt like he was about 5, which is the age the trauma happened. He swore me to secrecy not to tell a single soul, but I'm telling y'all. But that's where he was at. That's what he needed. It had stopped there and he needed to continue there. So it's powerful the way trauma can impact development. And then lastly, the historical and/or intergenerational trauma that can happen. We're all acutely aware of that in the world we live in >>Camille: And there's a whole field of study around epigenetics and generational trauma and how that shapes us genelogical. I encourage everyone to explore everything around trauma. >>Dana: We just wanted to poll you guys because we're tired of hearing ourselves talk. What are some examples of trauma that you guys are witnessing with the students you work with. Just drop in the chat the different kinds of things that you feel might be traumatic that your kids are experiencing. I would be interested to hear. >>Camille: Yeah, or even just stressors. What are the daily stressors that are showing up for the folks that you're working with. >>Kaycee: We've got some coming in. Limitations or inability to self-regulate. Medical trauma, surgeries, seizures. Language deprivation. Language deprivation. Family dynamics, parents who have abandoned children. Inconsistent responses from adults to the children's behaviors or needs. Ongoing physical bullying at a young age. Neglect. Physical abuse. While people are still typing, I want to remind everyone to make sure your chat says "everyone." Over exposure to inappropriate content or inappropriate scenarios or too much screen time. >>Camille: Yeah, yeah. Right. >>Dana: Absolutely. So well done. So just through the range of experiences that impact kids. One of the things that I feel like is important for us to highlight is that a lot of trauma happens in the context of relationship. Right? And the wound happens in relationship and then healing will happen in relationship as well. Any thoughts, Camille, before we move on, just about -- >>Camille: No. And I think it's just interesting to ask that question and be like I want to be like we're going to teach you how to heal all that trauma. And we're going to teach you how to handle that. But I think just the awareness that everyone said something different. Like there's just so many stressors that we are all navigating daily. And then when you compound that by living at the intersection of marginalized identities, you know, it's even harder. And so I do hope that in this space and also when you leave the space, just continue to understand the power and the impact that you have by modeling some of what you're learning today and being able to kind of cultivate those experiences with the students that you work with around how to navigate and so some agency over their own healing and own coping strategies and things of that nature. >>Dana: Well said. I think they listed everything, so I think we can move on. >>Camille: So on the screen is just a list of different things that could potentially be traumatizing events. Something that we don't go into in this presentation is just kind of the role of protective factors and how not everything that you experience that's on this list potentially can become a traumatizing event. I might go to the hospital and be hospitalized and I have enough of a protective, you know, social support system in place that that doesn't end up being something that's traumatizing to me. But someone did just mention working with somebody who has repeated hospitalizations or medical trauma and not feeling seen or heard in the space or may be feeling disempowered in that space. There's different factors that can contribute to how these things, how we cope with these things or how we navigate these experiences. So just adding that to be mindful of that as well. Okay. Now we're going to talk about ACEs. Since I cannot see raised hands, I will assume most people are familiar with ACEs, adverse childhood experiences. What's on this screen is a circle that talks about physical, emotional, and sexual abuse. Neglect, household dysfunction. Mental illness, substance abuse, divorce. These are all experiences kiddos can have at a young age and research shows the greater your adverse childhood experiences, the more of these increases your potential to have health outcomes and engage in risky behavior as you grow up. So in your handout there's a couple of videos from Nadine Burke Harris, who is a doctor who is a trauma powerhouse. And I really suggest watching her videos because she does a great job of making this information accessible and kind of demonstrating the physiological component of how this changes our brains and our bodies. And, again, how that toxic -- the hormones' toxicity, how that's changing the shape of our brain. This is the expanded ACEs. It just zooms out and talks about the larger context that people live within. So we have bullying, community violence, neighborhood safety, racism, living in foster care. And I wanted to highlight that having a disability or having a visual impairment is not in and of itself an adverse childhood experience. Everybody self-defines differently. There are folks who have a visual impairment that do not consider themselves disabled. I am not here to make that determination for anyone. But what we do know to be true is that having a disability, having a visual impairment, they increase the likelihood that you will experience a traumatizing event or experience toxic stress. Because as we have stated and as we all know that holding a marginalized identity puts us at a greater likelihood of having bad things happen to us. And so one statistic that I found is that children with disabilities are three times more likely than children without disabilities to be the victims of sexual abuse. And the likelihood is even higher for children with intellectual or mental health disabilities. And I don't think that that citation is in the handout so I can drop it in the chat if somebody, somewhere, some day will remind me. Another fact that I found is that it's estimated about 50% of the deaf community has been sexually assaulted in their lifetime and only 5% of deaf survivors report the abuse. That's a statistic from 2020. Girls with language impairments are more likely to experience sexual abuse. So we talked about toxic stress and [Indiscernible] can be traumatizing for any marginalized identity for whom the status quo was not built to include. Even the experience of navigating a world where how you access information, how you navigate your world is not part of the status quo. So our society was not built with disabled people in mind. It was not built with visually impaired people in mind. When you compound that with bullying or community violence and all these other things we talked about, it just increases the likelihood of your vulnerability. Does anyone have any thoughts or questions around that? Another way to think about it is that trauma can be disabling and a disability can be traumatizing. So there's overlaps. Yeah, I'll just wait and see if anyone else has anything to share. Questions. Trying to go to the next slide. There you go. So this is just another statistic. Here we go. One study in Norway found that people with visual impairment appear to have an increased risk of experiencing potentially traumatizing life events and also subsequently developing post-traumatic stress disorder. [ Reading screen ] [ Reading screen ] While many individuals with intellectual disabilities have known histories of abuse, the rate may be attenuated by underreported or lack of recognition. So those are really unfortunate statistics and I think that we're going to talk about this a little bit later on when we talk about how we're creating environments that are trauma informed and trauma responsive, but it's just really, really important to remember that the folks we are working with are the populations that we belong to for folks who are joining us today. There is an increased rate of potential to experience a traumatizing event. So we have to be really intentional and really mindful when we're working with folks, right? >>Dana: Speaking of mindful, we're at 3:48, so I'm going to -- I know. I know. So here's what I'm thinking. We're going to be -- we're going to pivot. Who on this screen is used to pivoting when we need to? We're going to be flexible with our time. I'm going to speed through a couple of slides because I really, really want us to be able to get to the pieces around what are the things that we can do to be helpful and support. I think the good news is you're going to find you're doing a lot of these things but it's helpful to know that science backs up how to move trauma through the body. This image comes from the work of Dan Siegel. It's called the hand model of the brain. It's a super useful tool. I'll describe what's on the screen. If you take your hand and you make a 5 and then you roll your thumb into the middle, you'll have 4. Then you take your other remaining four fingers and roll them down over your thumb, that is a hand model of the brain. And this is simplified but super helpful. And I've done this with kids who are like 4 and they get it. They proudly get it. So, in short, what this is, the front part where the fingers are on top is your thinking brain. This is your cortex. Okay? These two fingers in the middle, the prefrontal cortex right behind the brow bone and the occipital lobe. Think decision making, problem solving, morality, impulse control, all of the executive functioning skills are in our cortex. Our thinking brain. With little kids we call it our smart brain. If we lift those fingers up we see our thumb in the middle. Below the fingers here is also known as the downstairs brain. Upstairs brain, downstairs brain. It also uses the image of a house. That's another way to think about it. The thumb in the middle, limbic brain, is the seat of emotion. It's feelings. So this is known as the feeling brain. Okay? And down at the bottom, it's like the back of our neck is where our brain meets the spinal cord. That's known as the hind brain or reptilian brain. You see our cortex, our fingers hug our limbic brain. A way to talk to little kids about this is the idea that our thinking brain is going to help our feelings stay in check and it's going to help our body make good choices. But when we get stressed out and Camille throws her pencil at me or the cat scratches my face or I spill my water all over my computer, quickly my lid will flip, okay? And so when my lid is flipped, my thinking brain is offline. I don't have access. And what's in control are my feelings and my actions. So this is super helpful for kids and learning to teach them how to put their lid back on is helpful. So that's breathing. That's moving. That's talking to a safe person. That's rubbing something that has a soothing texture. It's all of the things that you guys do day in, day out to kind of help kids soothe. And kids have learned that where if they're starting to feel stressed, flip their lid up and that's a signal to you that, whoa, whoa. I need help. I'm not okay. So that's a handy little tool. >>Camille: Yeah, Dana. I feel like we have to breeze through all of these. >>Dana: We do. Yeah. Let's go on to -- yeah. You can go and pass this but what I'll say as you're doing this, this quote from Bruce Perry is the idea that a lot of times when we have a flipped lid, for instance, that can look behavioral. Flight, fight, freeze. It can look like hiding under a desk, running away. All of the behaviors that are not particularly exciting to have in a classroom but that can mean they are kind of activated and out of their kind of comfort zone or window of tolerance. And so that can look behavioral. And it's very easy and almost natural for us to say what is wrong with that kid? What is going on with him? He is so violent. She is so sassy. And even the kids who go to shut down and hyperarousal. The kids who want to hide on their desk and fall asleep, they can be described as, wow, she's such a great student. It's because she's disassociated over there. She's withdrawn into herself. So kind of the invitation that I would have to people -- this is just a personal box that I like to stand on from time to time. It's like to see the kid underneath the behavior. When we're thinking trauma informed, it's really helpful to use the question of what happened to this person or what is happening to this person, versus what is wrong with them? And it encourages us to go underneath and look for what stress response is happening and meet that need. Co-regulation is a way that we go about that. You guys know better than I that if we go back to the analogy here, if I am the adult and I have a flipped lid but I'm going to help the kid who has a flipped lid, that's not going to go very well, right? So it behooves us as the adult to find ways that we can quickly put our lid back on. I'm going to flock to Camille, my friend. She didn't mean to throw that pencil at me. I'm going to pet that kitten, go for a walk. Now I can approach and do whatever this kid in front of me needs to help them put their lid back on and co-regulate. That in repetition, over time, individuals can eventually learn to self-regulate. I co-regulate with people regularly, so that's a life thing. >>Camille: Also just from a hormonal perspective, when we talk about oxytocin, dopamine and the neurochemical component of you're trying to down play the cortisol and what's happening neurochemically in your body. >>Dana: We can go on through. We will link the video, the TBRI video. It's a nice three-minute description of how kind of some of the stuff we've been talking about kind of plays out and how relationship and regulation is helpful. I would like to go to the recovery slides. Let's look at a few of these together super quick. Things that are helpful -- and this is coming from the book. Sometimes medications are helpful if there is severe trauma and you are kind of staying in a hyperaroused or hypoaroused state. You're not able to access your calm to a degree you can process anything, even if you have safe relationships. That is not 100% of the time, some of the time. Just to list that in there is one of the things. Movement. All the ways that we move our bodies. Yoga is hugely helpful for trauma. They have yoga for trauma, specifically. Any kind of rhythm, drumming, music. Our first rhythm is regulating. Bruce Perry says this, in utero, mother's heartbeat, first exposure to rhythm. Any kind of rhythmic activities are super helpful. A friend of mine that I work with said our bodies need to move and our minds need stillness. Relationships, we have spoken about. Nature is our friend. Physical touch is huge, you know? And that is done carefully when there's been trauma, if there's been physical abuse trauma or sexual assault trauma. But safe touch, massage, acupuncture. And empowering kids in all the ways. Giving them power of choice, compromise. A say.