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Integrating the Community Resiliency Model (CRM) into the multifaceted landscape of higher education carries its own complexity. Under the guidance of Erica Coates, Virginia Tech’s CRM teachers are actively engaged in not only cultivating equilibrium within their own nervous systems but also disseminating Zone language and skills throughout their student body, faculty, and various departments.
In our dialogue, we'll delve into the mental health needs of our transitioning young adults as they pursue higher education, examining Virginia Tech's comprehensive strategy for CRM integration. Their CRM team has delved into understanding the cultural nuances of the model with young individuals and identified the obstacles hindering its implementation within intricate systems.
They are enthusiastic about the potential of fostering a common language across different initiatives, aiming to extend CRM into discussions surrounding team cohesion, inclusion, and a sense of belonging. Moreover, we are developing a research framework for future exploration into community resilience, conceptualizing innovative outreach tools such as a CRM Sensory Bike for campus engagement, and crafting a web-based quiz to enhance understanding of individual nervous system responses.
Through these initiatives, they anticipate facilitating a more resilient and connected campus community while also contributing valuable insights to the broader field of mental health research and practice. We welcome this conversation with Erica Coates on Resiliency Within. -
Across the globe, there exists a pressing demand for effective treatment of complex trauma. While a growing number of trauma-informed mental health professionals dedicate themselves to supporting individuals, relationships, communities, and systems, the daily confrontation with trauma can take a toll, leading to exhaustion and burnout. Who stands ready to provide support to these therapists and aiding professionals along their professional journey?
Brad Kammer, a Somatic Psychotherapist, Educator, and NARM® Senior Trainer, serves as the director of the Complex Trauma Training Center (CTTC), a professional organization dedicated to offering therapist training, consultation, mentorship, and community for psychotherapists and mental health professionals working with Adverse Childhood Experiences and Complex Trauma. Brad will discuss the crucial need mental health professionals have for both continuous professional development and personal support.
CTTC is dedicated to empowering therapists and aiding professionals to enhance their effectiveness in working with complex trauma while safeguarding against burnout. The vision is to cultivate a professional community centered on supporting mental health professionals across three dimensions of human experience: personal, interpersonal, and transpersonal.
CTTC will offer comprehensive, ongoing professional development and mentorship opportunities for clinicians, including NARM® Therapist and NARM® Master Therapist training programs. Grounded in a mentorship framework, CTTC is committed to guiding mental health professionals through their professional voyage of addressing complex trauma, ensuring their sustained growth and well-being.
The spirit of CTTC is encapsulated by its three guiding principles: depth, connection and heart. Discover how Brad and the Complex Trauma Training Center team epitomize this spirit and foster a thriving professional community committed to delivering effective, transformative, trauma-informed care. -
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Dr. Luissa Kiprono will share the wisdom she gained from her remarkable journey. She had the desire to help people inspired from a young age. Becoming a women’s physician—first OBGYN, then maternal-fetal medicine—allowed her to fulfill this desire. When she cared for patients of all ages, from all walks of life through residency and fellowship in academia, as a military doctor, and in private practice, she discovered a privilege incomparable with anything she had ever experienced: the power of doing good, making a difference in people’s lives, helping them regain something that most of us mistakenly take as status quo, our health.
She will share how she started to realize that people need emotional and spiritual healing as well as physical, organic healing. This meant coming full circle spiritually, making it her mission through her own vulnerability and personal trauma to help her fellow women and patients face their fears, overcome perceived shortcomings, and pursue their inner value.
Three decades after she stepped foot on American soil, she decided to share her story with the world so others could see the light in the darkness if they only believed in themselves and the power they held within. She states, “We cannot ignore, avoid, or run away from it. We must go through it to come out to the other side. Otherwise, it takes over our lives and our future; it keeps us bound, feeling sorry for ourselves, guilty, ashamed. What we can do is realize that each one of us has an inner desire to succeed and to reach our own potential. -
One of the most significant sources of suffering comes from our human tendency to avoid difficult emotions. We are not taught how to face these unpleasant, often daily inner experiences, so we tend to push them away, ignore them, or become unwittingly overwhelmed by them. Yet how we meet and greet these difficult emotions has everything to do with our well-being, resilience, and ability to connect with ourselves and others. Instinctually, we fight against our uncomfortable emotions. In doing so, we reinforce messages of “not good enough” or “something is wrong with me that I am feeling this way.”
In You Don't Have to Change to Change Everything we learn that, instead of forcing ourselves to feel “happy” and pushing away what is unpleasant, or instead of getting hooked by intense emotions, we can change our perspective. Dr. Beth Kurland offers six vantage points to shift to when difficult emotions arise. They include:
• The Anchor View: Finding Stable Ground
• The Child View: Curiosity Is Your Superpower
• The Audience View: Learn to Zoom Out
• The Compassionate Parent View: How to Become Your Own Ally
• The Mirror View: Your Strengths and Imperfections Are Welcome Here
• The Ocean View: We’re All in This Together -
Britt Frank, LSCSW, will share the key concepts and methods expressed in her book,
The Science of Stuck, Breaking Through Inertia to Find Your Path Forward. Ms. Frank states that we all experience stuckness in our lives—in our relationships, careers, our bodies, addiction issues, and more. We know we need to move forward but don’t know how creating a loop of self-doubt that goes nowhere. The problem has been exacerbated by the isolation and setbacks of the pandemic, resulting in burnout, dissatisfaction, and life questions.
Based on clinical research, theory, and her experience as a therapist, Britt has developed an empowering and action-oriented guide to discovering why we can’t think our way forward—and how to break through what’s holding us back in life, in love, and in work.
The Science of Stuck offers researched-backed solutions—ranging from shadow work to reparenting, embodied healing, and other clinical practices—along with empowering personal stories and tools. The Science of Stuck synthesizes and simplifies that stack of self-help books we all have on the nightstand collecting dust. The book argues that you don’t need to be a mechanic to drive your car. You don’t need to be a doctor to care for yourself when you have the flu. You don’t need advanced training in neuroscience to get unstuck. Ultimately, Britt provides us with a hands-on road map for moving forward with purpose, confidence, and the freedom to become who we are truly meant to be. -
Elaine Miller-Karas, the host of Resiliency Within, will turn the table and be interviewed during Women’s History Month by her colleague and friend, Dr. Michael Sapp. She will discuss with Dr. Sapp a concept that she calls the “Rebecca Effect.” The “Rebecca Effect is the empowerment and transformation possible for all of us who have been oppressed, marginalized, or shamed. Her ideas were sparked by the fictional character Rebecca Welton, the owner of the fictional Richmond football team in the Ted Lasso television show.
Initially, Rebecca is consumed by a desire for revenge against her ex-husband, Rupert, who betrayed their marriage. She aims to destroy his beloved football team, which she received in their divorce, by hiring the soccer-illiterate American football coach Ted Lasso. Her eventual journey is littered with reminders of her ex-husband's public attempts to marginalize and shame her. Through her self-reflections, the support of friends, and her relationships with Lasso and her best friend, Keeley, she reclaims herself
Like Rebecca, many people endure betrayal, marginalization, and oppression. Despite possessing great strength, they may experience doubt and question their value. Many of us encounter individuals who espouse misogynistic views and attempt to diminish our worth. The Rebecca Effect describes the process through which women can embrace themselves in totality—their gifts and their imperfections. They gain the courage to confront injustice. This transformation includes embracing vulnerability, acknowledging their inner child, and realizing their inherent power and worth. -
We all have many beliefs about why we may act out sexually or with drugs and alcohol in ways of which we are not proud. For those of us within certain religious communities, some of those beliefs may include personal weakness or a disconnection from God. With this theology, the more we act out, the more we see proof that we are unworthy of connection, both human and divine.
From a neurobiological perspective, we may act out because we are managing difficult emotions like anxiety and depression. Anxiety and depression are very primal responses to our environments. If we experience abuse, neglect, or even environmental or human-made disasters, we may become uniquely sensitized to the stressors that cause negative emotions, and thus acting out behavior.
While religious beliefs that promote certain standards may provide us with useful goalposts, especially with sex, those beliefs that do not also consider our deeply embodied emotional response to experience and the ways in which we all uniquely respond to life’s stressors set us up for failure and hopelessness.
In his book Faith & Sex: Toward a Better Understanding of Recovery, Being, Relationship, and God, Steven Luff explores the neurobiological underpinnings of emotions and how our faith lives and faith communities, can be profound resources to us—instead of impediments—as we locate our emotions and gain skills in human and spiritual co-regulation. -
The is Part 2. The nurse midwives, Molly Jobe and Hanna Walters, and childbirth education teacher Tracey Goddard Johnson return to Resiliency Within to continue the discussion on how they are improving the mind and body health and well-being of pregnant people, birth givers, and new parents through their innovative programs. They will share how they have implemented the Community Resiliency Model through their Wellness Within project, which is a community-based research project taking place at the Center. The project aims to equip birth givers with the wellness skills taught in the Community Resiliency Model and to understand better how these skills can mitigate the impact of chronic stress and trauma during the perinatal period. The Atlanta Birth Center has Certified Community Resiliency Model Teachers who are implementing the project.
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On March 20th and May 22nd, 2023, Elaine Miller-Karas interviewed Dr. Brooke Ellison. Brooke died on February 4, 2024. We are rebroadcasting this episode in tribute to her life, her wisdom, and her brilliance. We are acknowledging her family and all the love and support they gave her during her short lifetime. After a nearly fatal run-in with a car at age 11 that left her paralyzed from the neck down and unable to breathe on her own, Brooke Ellison went on to graduate from Harvard, write a memoir, earn master’s and doctoral degrees, and teach policy and ethics as a tenured professor—all the while navigating the world as a woman with ventilator-dependent quadriplegia. Christopher Reeve's last directorial work prior to his death was the Brooke Ellison Story, which chronicled a part of her life.
Brooke shared her perspectives and her wisdom about disability and life. In her book, “Look Both Ways,” published before her death, Brooke refused to let us look away. She tears off the cloak of invisibility around disability not only to champion the rights of the blind or the mobility-impaired but to make a far more earth-shattering claim: what she’s experienced—having to relearn how to live—differs from what every human being endures only in a matter of degree. We are more alike than we are willing to see. Brooke’s transformation was “an amplified version of the kinds of adjustments we all need to make when we have undergone an unexpected and, often, undesired change in our lives.” She was only 44 and she lived an amazing life. -
Resiliency is found at every stage of the recovery process; from the very beginning of wanting to continue living without a substance, a person’s brain may have convinced him/her it needs to survive. This is a remarkably courageous first step. Tolerating the withdrawals, shame, and existential crisis soon follow, and millions of people have been able to stop this cycle, while many others cannot break free. Why? Dr. Blair Steel will explore the correlates of successful recovery and the targeted interventions that Carrara Wellness Treatment and Spa has implemented in its treatment. For example she will describe ways in which people can calm their nervous systems and learn effective self-care and self-regulation techniques. She will share the concepts of the “5 C’s of Resilience” (community, compassion, confidence, commitment, and centering) and how they relate to the support they provide in helping people achieve and maintain long-term sobriety.
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The Atlanta Birth Center’s Nurse-Midwives, Molly Jobe and Hannah Walters, and Childbirth Educator, Tracey Goddard-Johnson, will present its innovative Wellness Within Project. The Atlanta Birth Center is a Georgia-based non-profit organization that operates Atlanta’s only freestanding, nationally accredited birth center, providing an optimal birth experience as anticipated by a childbearing woman and her family. They offer a home-like environment with a program of family-centered care before, during, and after pregnancy, labor, and birth. They adhere to eligibility guidelines set forth nationally by the Commission for the Accreditation of Birth Centers and the rules and regulations of the state of Georgia.
Our guests will describe the Atlanta Birth Center and the Wellness Within project, which is a community-based research project taking place at the Center. The project aims to equip birth givers with the wellness skills taught in the Community Resiliency Model and to understand better how these skills can mitigate the impact of chronic stress and trauma during the perinatal period. The Atlanta Birth Center has Certified Community Resiliency Model Teachers who are implementing the project. -
Clarence Nero will share his wisdom from his lived experience and his contributions to youth with innovative writing projects. He is an Associate Professor at Baton Rouge Community College, author, and screenwriter whose accomplishments include his critically acclaimed novel, Cheekie: A Child Out of Desire, nominated for ’Best Books for Young Adults’ by the American Library Association and selected as ’One of the Best First Novels’ by Library Journal which he adapted into a screenplay and is currently in pre-production. He served as a literary consultant to help his students self-publish a book called “Voices from the Bayou” that he adapted to the stage with the LSU Theater Department, and he then wrote the screenplay that led to the making of the short film “Voices.” He is the writer, producer and director of the stage play, “Trauma on this Land.” In 2011, after his brother was murdered in New Orleans, he launched the Bayou Soul Youth Literary Conference to empower and inspire Louisiana high school students
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Survivors of childhood family trauma typically go through many stages in their path to healing. Kaytee highlights 6 of them: pre-awareness, uncovering, digging in, healing, understanding, and nurturing. Using elements from her clinical work, as well as personal experience, she provides support and tips for survivors navigating the healing journey. Kaytee will discuss the stages and provide insights into healing childhood family trauma.
Most of us are only starting to become aware of how our foundational years contribute to who we are today. Our childhood environment shapes the foundation for our sense of self, how we feel about the world, and how we relate to others. If we experienced trauma or dysfunction along the way, it likely disrupted the pathways to these fundamental structures. Understanding our trauma is not about blame but about understanding, learning, and growing. In most cases, our caregivers did the best they could with the tools they had, often while dealing with external or internal stressors as well. With the world’s increasing understanding of trauma, this paves the way for understanding and growth. -
Resiliency Within celebrates the legacy of Martin Luther King. This year, on Martin Luther King's Day, Dr. Brenda Ingram, who has made significant contributions to our collective understanding of Resilience, Recovery and Resistance will be my guest. She has co-authored a chapter in the book titled Black Women and Resilience: Power, Perseverance, and Public Health. The chapter she contributed Resilience, Recovery, and Resistance: Black Women Overcoming Intersectional Complex Trauma will be the focal point of discussion.
When examining the pervasive issue of racism and its profound collective trauma experienced by people of color, it becomes evident that the concept of resilience may require a more nuanced definition and a broader perspective. Within communities of color, resilience can sometimes be perceived negatively when it exclusively emphasizes the psychological strength of individuals, inadvertently perpetuating the existing racism status quo. To truly address the healing process from racial trauma for communities of color, resilience must encompass an element of active resistance. -
Dr. Ravii Chandra will share his wisdom and personal reflections about how we can amplify compassion to contain cruelty and abuse. Dr. Chandra's inspired words reflect what is important for all of us to remember at this time in our history. He said, The voices of all marginalized individuals and communities are profoundly important for the future because our survival and growth as a nation and world depend on empathy and compassion for vulnerability. When we see each other, when we see our own vulnerability and create connections out of the disconnections of our past, we can transform our predicament into possibility. Within this discussion, he will also share his views on models of power, from social psychology and cultural observation, and highlight what Dacher Keltner calls “enduring power,” which he has modified with the need for accountability and reparation.
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This is an encore episode. As we start 2024, it is a time of reflection. It is important to remember, what else is true? This lively discussion explores Dr. Church's work and how we are all designed for creativity, resilience, and joy. Award-winning author and thought leader Dawson Church, Ph.D., blends cutting-edge neuroscience with intense firsthand experience to show you how to rewire your brain for happiness. Dr. Dawson will talk about his book, Bliss Brain: The Neuroscience of Remodeling Your Brain for Resilience, Creativity, and Joy
In Bliss Brain, famed researcher Dawson Church digs deep into leading-edge science and finds stunning evidence of rapid and radical brain change. When we cultivate these pleasurable states over time, they become traits. We don't just feel more blissful as a temporary state; the changes are literally hard-wired into our brains, becoming stable and enduring personality traits.
The conclusions of Church's research show that neural remodeling goes much farther than scientists have previously understood, with stress circuits shriveling over time. Simultaneously, The Enlightenment Circuit—associated with happiness, compassion, productivity, creativity, and resilience—expands.
During deep meditation, Church shows how the 7 neurochemicals of ecstasy are released in our brains. These include anandamide, a neurotransmitter that's been named the bliss molecule because it mimics the effects of THC, the active ingredient in cannabis. It boosts serotonin and dopamine; the first is an analog of psilocybin, the second of cocaine. He shows how cultivating these elevated emotional states literally produces a self-induced high. -
This is an encore episode of Resiliency Within. The great spiritual leaders, Desmond Tutu and His Holiness the Dalai Lama wrote about their commitment to compassion and joy and expressed their ideas in their book, The Book of Joy. Desmond Tutu called himself the “prisoner of hope” and his message of hope and joy will live on. Many people in our world have expressed being tired and feeling a sense of hopelessness about the world condition. Desmond Tutu faced great hardship in his life, yet he was hopeful about the world condition, and he would say, “Hope is being able to see that there is light despite all of the darkness.” Reena Patel, LCSW discusses with Elaine Miller-Karas, the meaning of joy and how we can be lifted from suffering and hopelessness to embrace the spring of joy within each one of us. They discuss the eight pillars of joy: perspective, acceptance, humor, forgiveness, gratitude, compassion, and generosity. Listeners will be asked to explore how they can nurture their joy to live life with greater meaning and restore hope.
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What causes schizophrenia? Is it a genetic glitch or are environmental factors at play? A combination of the two? Whatever the reason, what medication and course of action will give the patient the best chance at a normal life?
Of all the mental illnesses, schizophrenia eludes us the most. Despite the strides scientists have made in neurological research and doctors have made in psychiatric treatment, schizophrenia remains misunderstood, almost complacently mythologized. Without a reason for the illness, patients feel even more alienated than they already do, families are left hopeless, and doctors struggle to provide effective care.
After an almost forty-year medical career dedicated to caring for those affected by schizophrenia, Dr. Steven Lesk became determined to find the answer to its existence. In Footprints of Schizophrenia, he presents a groundbreaking theory that weaves evolutionary evidence with neurological findings. His conclusions promise to forever change the lives of the mentally ill by generating much-needed cultural dialogue about this stigmatized illness, and ultimately by provoking new psychiatric and pharmacological research.
Dr. Lesk’s “primitive organization theory” has its basis in human evolution—from Neanderthals to Homo sapiens—and the specific changes to our brains after the emergence of language. We’ve existed in human-like form for six million years, but we’ve only had language for 50,000; as Dr. Lesk explains, within the vast span of evolutionary time that’s hardly any time at all. He posits that the twenty million people in the world who have schizophrenia don’t suppress the hormone dopamine, which is affected by language, in the way evolution has trained us, so their brains don’t process language well, leaving them to function as if they’re in a hallucinatory, delusional dream state.
In addition to focusing treatment efforts for schizophrenia, Dr. Lesk’s theory could affect what we can do to help people with other dopamine-related illnesses like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, Huntington’s chorea, Tourette’s, ADD, and more. Calling on such diverse fields as anthropology, language theory, neurochemistry, evolution, and even the second law of thermodynamics, Footprints of Schizophrenia offers hope to those with schizophrenia whose dopamine doesn’t flow in our new, adaptive way. It will usher in a new era of psychiatric understanding—one that the field and the public desperately need. -
This show is a story of hope, resilience, and love. Resilience is sometimes the outcome of some of the darkest moments in one’s life. My guests, a mother, Sue Borrego and her daughter, Kelsey Bunker Robertson, had very different experiences following Sue’s coming out when Kelsey was 9. Sue was occupied by the fear of losing her children and job and moving through the generational shame of her sexuality. Kelsey became a fierce advocate, proud of her parents and much less touched by the shame her mom felt.
Sue gave birth to her children, Kelsey and Bryce in the 1980s. When they were toddlers, it became clear to Sue that she was a Lesbian. Nothing about her life and work had space for her truth. She was married to a man and working successfully at a Christian University. She chose to live closeted until she could no longer live so incongruously.
Sue needed to find a different job and initiate divorce proceedings. Initially, Sue was not public about her sexual orientation. Ironically, Kelsey’s dad came out several months later. Together they lived as a “non-traditional” family in a very traditional town. Sue, consumed by the worldview of sexual orientation she grew up with, was terrified of costing her kids a “normal” life and losing the world she had carefully built.As an “emancipated minor” she had carefully constructed a world that she thought would protect her future. Kelsey continued to develop her sense of justice and love. She was a guest on panels, an advocate at school and an educator in her life.
Today Kelsey is a mom of 6 and Bryce a father of three. Both of their parents are married to their partners and have lives filled with joy and love. There are many LGBTQ+ parents who wonder about the impact of their lives on their families and LGBTQ+ young adults who wonder about their futures. The culture wars, with vitriolic rhetoric and attacks on LGBTQ+ individuals, are taking their toll. They will share their journey of love, hope and resilience. -
In Crusade to Heal America, Judy Pearson shares the never-before-told story of Mary Lasker, a woman who was savvy, steely, and deliberate, with the goal of eliminating human suffering. While scientists looked at disease as a problem to be solved, Lasker saw it as a beast to be slain. Her first step was creating, with her husband Albert, the Lasker Foundation, which bestows annual awards for medical research. Next, they reimagined—and renamed—the American Cancer Society, greatly increasing the donations. But when Lasker learned that 40% of WWII volunteers had been rejected for health reasons, she asked the question no one else had: Why wasn’t the federal government funding medical research? Proclaiming herself a “catalytic agent,” she led a ceaseless, behind-the-scenes crusade to improve the health of Americans.
Lasker’s crusade transformed the National Institute of Health from a single, poorly funded entity to the greatest medical research facility on the planet. And while she counted legislators, medical experts, celebrities, and presidents as allies, she was not without naysayers and enemies who wanted to see her fail. When her beloved Albert died of cancer, Lasker doubled down on her crusade, insisting that a cure for the disease was within reach with more research money. Her crusade ultimately resulted in an extraordinary $1.3 billion for cancer research ($9.6 billion today), turning the nearly always fatal disease into one that was survivable. - Visa fler
