Fostering Resilience in a World of Adversity

In this episode, Dr. Jennifer Hays-Grudo and Dr. Amanda Sheffield Morris, co-authors of Adverse and Protective Childhood Experiences: A Developmental Perspective and Raising a Resilient Child in a World of Adversity: Effective Parenting for Every Family, provide hope to those who have experienced childhood abuse, trauma, and neglect. Hays-Grudo and Morris discuss how Protective and Compensatory Experiences  (PACEs) not only address, but counter the effects of Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs). The two identify ten concrete, accessible, research-based responses to ACEs as they navigate a path for childhood resilience. Listeners will appreciate how Hays-Grudo and Morris speak about this compelling topic with grace and optimism.

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Transcript

Chris: [00:00:00] Hello, and welcome to OK State of Mind, a podcast by Family & Children's Services based in Tulsa, Oklahoma. This podcast seeks to satisfy inquisitive minds eager to delve into the realm of mental health and overall wellbeing. Join us on a journey to gain insights shared by mental health experts, draw inspiration from remarkable stories of resilience forged by those who've navigated challenging paths and unveil the intricate science that underpins our thoughts and emotions, a sort of invisibilia, if you will.

Through these explorations, we aim to illuminate the captivating whys behind our cognitive and emotional selves, hopefully unraveling the complexities that shape our behaviors, feelings, and perspectives.

Today we're speaking with Dr. Jennifer Hays-Grudo and Dr. Amanda Sheffield Morris. Dr. Hays-Grudo is a Regents Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Science at OSU [00:01:00] Center for Health Sciences, where she directs the Center for Integrative Research on Childhood Adversity. She is also one of the principal investigators of the Healthy Brain and Child Development Study.

She's the founding editor in chief of the Journal Adversity and Resilience Science. Dr. Morris is a Regents Professor and the George Kaiser Family Foundation Chair in Applied Neuroscience in the Department of Psychology at Oklahoma State University. She's the Editor in Chief for the Journal of Research on Adolescents and is an Associate Editor for the Journal of Adversity and Resilience Science Research and Practice.

She is an MPI for the Oklahoma site of the NIH funded Healthy Brain Development National Study and was a co investigator for the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development. Together, Dr. Hays-Grudo and Dr. Morris authored the two books, Adverse and Perspective Childhood Experiences, A Developmental Perspective, and Raising a [00:02:00] Resilient Child in a World of Adversity, Effective Parenting for Every Family.

These books can be found at ACEsandPACEs.com. We are honored to have these two here with us today to continue our discussion about adverse childhood experiences. Welcome, Amanda. 

Amanda: Hi, I'm glad to be here. 

Chris: Glad to have you here. Welcome, Jennifer. 

Jennifer: Thank you. 

Chris: Also today, we have Christine Marsh with us. Christine is the Chief Program Officer for Child Abuse and Trauma Services here at Family & Children's Services.

In our last episode, Christine was our guest, and in this episode, Christine is co hosting with us. So, Christine, glad to have you here with us today. 

Christine: Glad to be here. Thanks, Chris. 

Chris: I want to start off talking a little bit about a concept you articulate in your book. The concept is the Hole in the Bridge. First, can you define it for us, and then can you tell us how it's guided your research and your work? 

Jennifer: I'm glad you brought it up, Chris. This is something I heard years and years ago in a different context, [00:03:00] and it seems so appropriate to describe the frustration, panic, and fatigue that sometimes we feel trying to be everything. The story goes, imagine your work group or your family having a big reunion, a big picnic by the river, and everything is great, the barbecue is going, and people are talking, and then suddenly you hear a scream. And you look down the river, there's a child being swept away. So, of course, several people jump in the river, go in and rescue the child, bring him back to shore, we work on the child, and then we hear some more screams.

And there's several more children being swept away. So, before you know it, we're all either in the river or on the banks of the river rescuing, helping these children recover from this disaster. this trauma And suddenly one person stands up, puts his shoes on, and starts running upstream. And we're like, where are you going? We need you here. And that person says, I'm going upstream to find the hole in the bridge. [00:04:00] There is a reason these children are falling into the river. 

Chris: Mm hmm. 

Jennifer: And so it's not that we don't need to be rescuing children or helping them recover or, as we'll talk later, providing some life rafts for those who have fallen into the river, but we also need to be looking for that hole in the bridge.

Chris: Yeah, kind of that symptom versus sickness thing. I mean, yes, of course, the symptoms need to be treated, but 

Amanda: Look for root causes.

Chris: Yeah. Yeah. 

Amanda: I also want to add from the trauma narrative research, it's this idea of, instead of what's wrong with you, what happened to you? And this idea that we don't all just have to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, that we need resources and supports to move beyond ACEs. And I'm glad Jennifer mentioned the life raft because we'll talk more about PACEs, but that is really what we have identified in our work as the life raft because sometimes kids are going to fall through the hole in the bridge and we want to fix the hole but it's there. 

Chris: Yeah. And this may be an appropriate spot to talk a little bit [00:05:00] about the language that we use when we talk about ACEs and one term in particular being the concept of "victim." How do you deal with that concept of victimhood? 

Jennifer: So there's no doubt that it's an appropriate word to describe people who have experienced trauma. experienced abuse, neglect, other types of maltreatment, but continuing to define oneself as a victim is not usually very helpful. It kind of keeps you stuck in that role.

And so we find when people begin to tell their ACEs story, which is something we encourage, especially if it's never been told, it's very powerful to strip off the covers, get at the secrets that have lied buried for years. It's very powerful. And we find then that being a victim is no longer a helpful way to see oneself. Now we focus on the strengths that that person has exhibited to survive. The supports that are in their environment that helped them survive. And many people go on to thrive, [00:06:00] to use those experiences they had to develop more empathy for others, compassion, drive to change the world. So there's a lot to be said for moving past the victim stage as quickly as one can.

Christine: I love that you say that, and that's one thing that we work with the caregivers on too. To not see your child as a victim, but to see your child with strengths and where you can lay additional supports and strengths in place for them to be able to move forward. 

Jennifer: I'd like to add to that, that one of the concepts we really developed in our first book, which was more for professionals and students, was, adaptation.

How many of the strengths were ways that we adapted to a bad environment that allowed us to survive that situation in the short term. And so in the short term, those adaptations, whether it was our bodies responding, with actual genetic, reactions that helped us survive in our cells, [00:07:00] in our genes, in our brains, or our behavioral adaptations that allowed us to survive.

Sometimes those adaptations then can become problematic when we hold on to them too long. So again, it's complicated. And, and just seeing yourself as a victim is seeing somebody who's struggled and who survived, but not moved beyond.

Chris: Mm-Hmm. 

Jennifer: And we want to keep moving. It's never too late to keep developing and keep recovering.

Chris: Mm-Hmm.

Amanda: And I want to just highlight something that we have been talking about but haven't written much about yet, and Jennifer came up with these ideas of CHASEs and GRACEs. And CHASEs are childhood adaptations to ACEs. And it helps us to get through what's going on in that immediate time. It is an adaptation to help us survive, but GRACEs are grown up adaptations to ACEs. And so what we have talked about in some of our workshops is how to move beyond what is chasing [00:08:00] you to the GRACEs component. And what do you want to keep and give away from what you learned from that past experience? 

Jennifer: So let me elaborate. I'm so glad Amanda brought this up because CHASEs might be something really positive, like a child who does really well in school, you know, Oprah has talked about her child abuse and how she responded by being a reader and just throwing herself into schoolwork and reading all she could.

And, you know, that work ethic was pretty successful for her. That worked out pretty well. But other adaptations might be making sure that nobody knows what's going on in your family. And it works well right now because it might be keeping your family together, you might be taking care of younger children, even though you're still a child yourself, making sure that your family doesn't get split up, that nobody looks down on you when you go to school.

But that inability or reluctance to ask for help may not be helpful to you as [00:09:00] you get older and you have opportunities to ask for help and to connect with other people, but you are still holding on to that old adaptation. So that's when we shift and say, is this one you want to keep or is this one you want to let go of? Or is this one you want to just do a little bit less of? Maybe that work ethic was really good, but you've used it to the exception of other ways of coping, other adaptations.

Chris: And to me that makes me think of the idea of compartmentalization and you start out your book, Adverse and Protective Childhood Experiences with a quote by Maya Angelou that kind of speaks to this.

She says, "You're the sum total of everything you've seen, heard, eaten, smelled, been told, forgot." Which I think that's interesting. "It's all there." So, talk a little bit more about the accumulation of events that define us for better or worse. 

Amanda: I think what we've learned in the last two decades is that our biology is is [00:10:00] affected and is ongoing in terms of what we're experiencing in our environments, in our context.

And we've learned a lot about brain development and neuroscience and how the brain is wired, what fires together, wires together. So our experiences. Are actively shaping how our brain is structurally developing and then also functionally how we are responding to what's going on in our environment and also our genetics.

We might talk about epigenetics in a minute. Jennifer has a really great explanation of that, , that I think is, easy for people to understand. But even the way that our genes respond to our environment is changing. Day to day, experience by experience. And so even from an infant mental health perspective, I know you know about this, Christine, that we are talking about what happens early on in life, which you may not have conscious memory of, but your body remembers it. Your brain has developed in that context and so it's there, [00:11:00] it's within us, it's making us who we are. And that's not to say the good side of that is that yes, we're the sum of all of our experiences, but. But what is the other side of that is that we can change, we can change our biology, we can change how our genes are expressed, we can change the way our brains are wired and functioning.

And that is through PACEs, through these positive experiences, through relationships, through resources, through supports. And so, it's two sides of it. But a lot of this is what we've learned over the last two decades about how the body develops and how we develop in context. 

Jennifer: One of the ways we learned this was working with families here in Tulsa. I think you know that we're both longtime fans of Family & Children's Services and what you guys do. And, I first became aware back in 2008 when we worked together on the Tulsa Children's Project. And on that project, we were working with families at Educare who had experienced themselves [00:12:00] often horrific, terrible, forms of abuse, neglect, adversity, poverty.

And yet, we're really hopeful for their children and had enrolled them in Educare, which is just, in my opinion, one of the world's best programs for early childhood development. And we were working with the parents to help them achieve better success themselves at caring for their families and, making a living, and many of them really struggled.

And they struggled with basic things like remembering things. They were in classes to get degrees degrees and they were just failing, over and over and it was really frustrating for them. It was frustrating for us. This was a program we invested a lot of money in. The George Kaiser Family Foundation supported this.

And we discovered ACEs. This is back in 2008, 2009, and we discovered that one of the things ACEs was hypothesized by its founders to affect was cognitive [00:13:00] development, emotional development, social development, because it affects the brain, because it affects the genetic balance of ways we respond to stress and cope biologically.

And we thought, what can we do for this? We're attacking the wrong things. We're focusing on helping them make more money and get degrees. And we really should be focused on helping them rewire their brains. And we said, how can we do that? Well, it turns out there are ways to do that. Amanda mentioned PACEs, which we'll define shortly.

But it turns out there are lots of ways you rewire your brain. One of them was mindful meditation. Sitting still. For a few minutes every day and letting ugly thoughts, whatever thoughts, come into your head without judgment and then letting them float away. We found research from Harvard showing that people who spent 15 minutes a day for eight weeks doing this literally rewired their [00:14:00] brains in the ways that are helpful, ways that connect your emotion centers in the brain with your thinking centers, which often don't communicate very well, especially if you've had trauma, you may just shut down. That fight, flight, or freeze response really interferes with higher cognitive thinking.

So we shifted what we were doing in the Tulsa Children's Project. We then turned that into a parenting program at Educare that Amanda led, Super Parents. We published data on this. So we know, going back 15 years in our own research, that it's never too late that parents, adults, who've had a history of trauma in their early childhoods, can recover and move on and help their children in the process.

Amanda: And I just want to add, there is a model that Jennifer came up with and I said, who came up with this model? And she said, I did. And it's what we call the iceberg model. And so in an iceberg model, you can think [00:15:00] of ACEs as being on the top. And many of our intervention programs are focused on the top of the iceberg and they don't go below the line.

And to go below the line, to think about how do we fix our bodies. How do we fix our brains? How do we fix, you know, what is going on within our genetics? A lot of that's done through body work and through really what Jennifer's talking about mindfulness, but also different exercises that we can do, different ways of getting in touch with That subconscious that below the line iceberg. And so I do think that , as we're talking about this and what's exciting is when Rob Anda did come to Tulsa, he talked about he was actually in Oklahoma city. That they've hypothesized in the ACEs model that the reason that ACEs affected our physical and mental health were through these developmental processes, through cognitive development, through impairments and effects on our biology and our brain, [00:16:00] but there wasn't the data to really support that.

But since that original study done in the nineties, we have so much more research that's been done on genetics that's been done in neuroscience that is showing that link to definitely be there. There is strong evidence for that and the implications of that. And what we're excited about is it's been really focused more on the ACEs side, and we want to talk about the strength side about PACEs. And I know you all talk about that too, but now that we know this is happening, what do we do about it? 

Christine: Absolutely. Because you give that perfect example of you can have some great adaptations and you can look and feel that you function really well in certain areas. And then you still don't in others And it's a mystery and people may even look at you or parents may look at their child and think they do so well in this, so there's nothing wrong.

And yet, there is that under the iceberg that's still going on and that may come out [00:17:00] later and it's going back and tuning it all up and connecting those things so that they can feel good in a lot of areas and about themselves ultimately instead of, in various achievements that come and go and they still don't feel OK. So I think it's wonderful to look at that and think it's not about just education or just sports or just getting somebody, a better job. It's everything underneath

Chris: I want to talk about , a concept, adversity. So adversity is a dynamic term. it evolves, it has evolved over the years, it means something different today than it meant, even a decade ago. How are researchers and clinicians redefining adversity to address, the rapidly changing culture that's growing so diverse today?

Jennifer: I think to look at The concept of adversity, it helps to look at the history of the ACEs measure itself because it came about kind of by accident. So a doctor named [00:18:00] Vincent Faletti was running this preventive medicine clinic in San Diego, which developed one of the most successful weight loss programs we know of, he was helping people who needed to lose weight for medical reasons, maybe a hundred pounds or more. And they had hundreds of, of successful patients. And, some of them, though, would lose all this weight and gain it back and never come again. And he, as a clinician, wondered what has happened. And so he started interviewing them. And in these interviews, he discovered by accident that many of them had a history of child abuse. And when they lost all this weight, guess what? They became more attractive. And people would comment or make advances, you know, or even just say a nice, what they thought was a compliment, whoo hoo, don't you look great.

And it would trigger a memory that had been long buried about childhood sexual abuse. The [00:19:00] very first patient this happened with told him she began gaining weight when she was, I think she was five or six years old, when her grandfather started abusing her. And the weight made her safe. He stopped abusing her when she became, obese, and it also made her feel better to eat.

It comforted her. And Vince Faletti, to this day, will often say, what we thought of as the problem was her solution. So he first identified the hole in the bridge. And then I began looking. To make a long story short, he presented his research at an obesity conference and nobody was interested because they were interested in, in diet and exercise and not sexual abuse.

But there was somebody at the conference who was from the Centers for Disease Control who linked up Dr. Faletti with Dr. Rob Anda, who was a cardiovascular epidemiologist studying at that time the link between depression and heart disease. And they thought, Oh, you're going to find this interesting [00:20:00] because there's something going on here.

So they spent the next several years combing through the literature to find any kind of childhood experience that had a negative effect on health. And they came up with a whole bunch of questions. The original ACEs study had a survey that was 55 pages long. OK. Fortunately, we don't use that one anymore.

They've identified it now as 10 categories, of dysfunctional families and child abuse and neglect. So that became our definition then for a while, was the 10 measures on ACEs. Physical, emotional, sexual abuse, emotional neglect on one hand, and then the family dysfunction. Parents, mental illness, parents drug abuse or substance abuse , alcohol problems, domestic violence, divorce and separation.

And what's the last one? 

Amanda: Incarceration. 

Jennifer: Incarceration, thank you. So, those ten became the ones that we focused [00:21:00] on, and it was life changing for many of us because we always knew each of these by themselves could be damaging. But nobody had ever looked at what the cumulative effect

Chris: Mm-hmm.

Jennifer: was and that they do in fact tend to co-occur. Mm-Hmm. You can see how they would occur. together. If mom is depressed and nearly suicidal and dad is substance abusing, the kids are going to be either neglected or harmed in some other ways. And they discovered that these harms add up. Like, a dose of arsenic, you might survive a tiny dose, but if you get four hits of that same tiny dose, you're going to be sick.

You're going to feel the effects. So abuse, neglect, and family dysfunction are forms of adversity. But now we also know from more recent research, across the world and in the United States, that there are other things that are just as harmful, things that come up frequently in other studies are like peer bullying, being bullied at school, having [00:22:00] neighborhood that's full of crime and violence, knowing people that have been killed by gangs, or being afraid to go out of your house.

Amanda: Discrimination.

Jennifer: Discrimination.

Amanda: Children who have experienced war and violence. I want to just add, this is a great story to tell about how all this came about, but I want to acknowledge that today that we are experiencing a lot of adversity in our world, a lot of our children and families, and we have learned that over the last few decades that ACEs are worldwide and that many of the findings that were in the original study have been replicated worldwide and that ACEs are even higher in certain communities.

And I was at a talk, last week by Margaret Beale Spencer in Chicago, and she talked about how all humans are vulnerable and it may be a rural white male who is struggling in his community to feel like he fits in or , maybe that person is dealing with addiction or a substance use [00:23:00] problem, it doesn't always have to be seen As like you were saying victims in certain ways, it's any of us as humans we are vulnerable and adversity affects all of us. It's part of life. It's part of being human. And so I think that we recognize that we don't think it's just in certain communities or certain individuals. And we recognize that it may be more pervasive in other places But that the role of culture and the role of historical trauma and that many places that have a lot of adversity, people are still thriving and functioning in some ways that we may not completely understand.

And that's part of what we're trying to do is understand sort of how people are making it through these experiences, but still recognizing the tragedy of what many are facing on a day to day basis. 

Jennifer: And we're not advocating a world without any adversity, certainly. I mean, anybody who's trying to build muscle knows that you need some resistance in your [00:24:00] training program, right? You need to have something to push against. Our children should not be coddled and wrapped in cotton wool all their lives. We want to gain the strengths that you gain from fighting against hardship. Yep. But not too much. I mean, it is a balancing act, And so I think the adversity that we're talking about is the adversity that strips you of a feeling of security or safety, because you don't know that you can count on the people who you should be counting on. Or it's the adversity that causes a level of stress that is physiologically harmful and psychologically damaging. So, you know, parents, I think, sometimes go to the other extreme, especially when they've had a childhood full of adversity. Well, my child is never going to experience what I had. And certainly that's a laudable goal. But at the same time, you don't want your children to not learn to walk because you don't want them to fall and skin their knees. 

Christine: Exactly. And I [00:25:00] think a lot of what we are talking about, we can get caught in, you know, again, how it's not going to be OK. We don't want these people to suffer the way we have, or our family, or our friends, or whatnot. But what do we do about it? In that exact example of, we do face adversity and in a lot of ways our humanism has improved because of it. And so no, we don't want to all experience trauma so that we can improve. But it's such an adverse experience. So, what are the PACEs and what do we do?

Jennifer: Oh, I'm so glad you asked. The PACEs if you use our skinned knee example, a child learning to walk needs to have a safe place to learn to walk. They don't need to be on a busy freeway or on a sidewalk with other people rushing past who don't even see them at that level. What we need to do is provide the environmental supports that we can. And the people, the relationships that protect, kind of like you would put on shin splints if you're also [00:26:00] learning to roller skate. Or you would have someone holding your hand when you learn to walk across the street. So, the story of PACEs, I think Amanda should tell you the story of PACEs and where it came about.

Amanda: OK. Well, PACEs stand for Protective and Compensatory Experiences. And, when Jennifer and I went to one of the first ACEs conferences in Philadelphia in 2013, we were really taken aback by the amount of amazing data that was presented by public health researchers, the medical profession, but we also noticed a lack of data, a lack of a discussion about the strengths based, the resilience literature that came from developmental psychology.

And so I kept saying, well, we know about emotion regulation, about coping, we know about resilience, we know about the importance of family and parents, and nobody's talking about that. It's all just this one side of it. And so, shortly after that, we had Ann Mastin, who is a resilience researcher from the University of Minnesota, who has [00:27:00] written a lot on this topic and studied it for quite some time.

And we talked about, why are they not talking about resilience when they're talking about ACEs? And of course, she knew about the study and she said, well, I bet you could come up with 10 things, from the developmental literature, from the resilience literature that counteracts ACEs. And so, , Jennifer and I sat in her office and we did just that.

And, when we came up with those things, and it was definitely based on science, and just like ACEs, we recognize there are other Protective and Compensatory Experiences that we may not have on our list of 10, but we also have realized that PACEs are lifespan. So we, at the time, when we said Protective and Compensatory Experiences, we didn't say protective and positive childhood experiences. We said, we didn't have the word childhood in it. And it turns out that PACE is, we can talk about that at some point, but PACEs a lot of those core things are universal across different age ranges, and they look different at different ages, but that those Protective and Compensatory [00:28:00] Experiences are lifelong. And there are things that we want to try to think about and facilitate for healing in adolescence and adulthood and early childhood and even as we age. So do you want to list the PACEs? 

Jennifer: Yeah. So we were determined to come up with the list from our knowledge because we've been studying this ourselves for years. And so academicians, how we are, we want to go do a lit search. And so Amanda and I decided we're going to come up with what we remember from the literature, what really made an impact when we read it, and then check it out to see if there's data to support it. I think there's only one thing that was on our original list that didn't make it because there wasn't at that time, 15 years ago, enough data to support it. 10 years ago. And that was pets. And I think there's accumulating enough literature now that we might even be able to add that as a bonus PACE. But when we came up with this list, and I want to emphasize [00:29:00] this, this list came from 60 years of research on why some children do well in spite of their circumstances.

Children who've experienced poverty, neglect, abuse, other kinds of trauma, have been studied at least the ones we knew in English speaking countries. So in England, in America, in Australia, and New Zealand. We really drew from, literally, 60 years, hundreds of studies. And these five things are five relationship kinds of experiences and five environmental or resource type experiences.

On the relationship side, there's nothing more important than unconditional love of the caregiver. If you have that, you can survive almost anything because you've generally internalized that unconditional love for yourself. That no matter what you do, you are worth loving. You are worthwhile. So you have hope.

You never give up. The second one that we found support for is having someone outside of the [00:30:00] family who you can turn to for advice and emotional support. We might call it a mentor as we're adults, but in childhood it might be someone outside the immediate family. It might be a grandparent, aunt or uncle, or it might be a teacher, a coach, another community member.

The third one is having a best friend. Having a best friend is really powerful. Not only do you get that support from someone, but you're often exposed to their family situations and you see, oh, there are different ways to be. And you can rely on their parents also sometimes for support.

So having a best friend is great. You're less likely to be bullied at school if you have a best friend. The fourth one is 

Amanda: Volunteering.

Jennifer: I was going to say something else

Amanda: Being part of a group. 

Jennifer: Yeah, volunteering is always when I use last. OK, but to a group. Yeah, it's kind of the extension of a best friend. You know, when you're part of a group, you kind of have to negotiate a little bit more , advocate for yourself, but you also get a sense [00:31:00] of belonging that you're part of this group. So, things like Girl Scouts, Boy Scouts, Campfire Girls. Faith based groups are often very helpful for children who are experiencing problems at home.

And then the last one on the relationship, which I didn't know about, Amanda contributed. Her knowledge of this literature is volunteering. Being part of a community by giving back to it as opposed to receiving from it is powerful, especially when parents participate with children in doing for others. You want to talk about the resource side? 

Amanda: Sure, so the resources. really do get at these environmental supports. And I want to also add that we wanted to think about PACEs not just from the scientific literature that showed that individual characteristics, things like attractiveness or extroversion or IQ, we know that those things do help promote resilience, but you can't change those things.

So we focused on the 10 things that we thought were malleable. And so, certainly, [00:32:00] especially the relationship side, when children are in a home where there is abuse and neglect, being able to be in that space. Child care environment or that positive experience outside of the home is really important to you.

So that's something else we thought about. But, the resources. So, being physically active is something that, you know, physical activity. It helps our bodies deal with stress. It also can be what Jennifer and I call PACE hacking. So you can be part of a group and have physical activity. So, you know, get two for one. Also, having regular routines and having, you know, rituals and routines. And that's really important for children and even as adults. It helps us to have predictability in our lives, to have a lack of chaos, to have structure. and then having basic needs met. So being with children and even with adults having our food that we need, the shelter that we need.

It's really important from a Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs perspective that we have to have our basic needs met before we [00:33:00] can really, start to heal and to start to, thrive in the world in which we live. and then having

Jennifer: a good school

Amanda: good school, and it's not just school, it's opportunities to learn.

And so, as adults, we want to have things to learn through whether it's formal training or through our work environment, , we also, think that, homeschooling is fine. It's not just a good school, but it's having opportunities and resources to learn, and we know that getting a good education is one of the best equalizers, and even investing in early childhood education has a return on investment for us. Anywhere from seven to one to even higher. And then the last one is hobbies. Oh, this is one of our favorites, and it's one of Jennifer's favorites, too, because Jennifer loves to play the piano, and it's something that we really leaned into. the role of art and identity development is really important, during adolescence, but we really leaned into this during the pandemic and we started thinking about PACEs a little bit differently when we were realizing that the whole world was going through [00:34:00] this shared adversity together. And we thought we probably need to, to do these PACEs ourselves, make sure that we're, and the hobbies was one that we kind of, you could always kind of put off, right? 

Jennifer: So I bought a piano during the pandemic, and I started playing the piano again, and it really was helpful because we both thought back to when we were going through bad times in our childhood. What was helpful to us? What could we move forward into adulthood? And this kind of takes us to the next thing we want to talk about, which is it's never too late. We knew this intuitively, but we both rediscovered it during the pandemic when everyone was struggling and times were stressful and so we started doing some more research on it and recently have, accumulated some data showing that the PACEs you do as an adult may be more important for your current mental health.

Your anxiety, depression, emotional problems. than the PACEs you had as a child. [00:35:00] So we encourage people to look at our list of PACEs and to think, how often am I doing these now? The past month, the past year, and which ones are calling to me to be reenacted, to be part of our lives again? Because it's never too late.

To recover and in our latest book on raising a resilient child, we really focus on how if you want to help your children be resilient, you not only build PACEs into their lives, but you build PACEs into your family lives. You do it along with your children, because not only are you modeling, Appropriate behavior for them. You're showing them, yes, we make time for our friends. Yes, we make time to do good things in the community. Yes, we make time to exercise and eat healthy food and have a dinnertime routine. But you're also helping to recover your mental health. Not even recover to basic levels, but to help thrive, help be your best [00:36:00] person, or as we like to say, live your best life.

Amanda: Yeah, and I think it's really important to also talk about the importance of understanding your own history. And your own intergenerational transmission of not only adversity, but also protective experiences. And so, we , really encourage parents and any caregivers who are working with children to think about how their own experiences affect their day to day interactions with kids. And think about how they can pass down not just some of the negative side of their own ideas about, how relationships are formed and how people interact, but also the positive side of that. That's where hobbies often comes in. When we talk to people, they talk about, Oh, my family's always gardened, or they've always been into sewing or art or something of that nature or music.

And so it's really nice to talk about that side of it too, the intergenerational transmission of PACEs. 

Jennifer: So PACEs seem so simple. It's hard to make a case to do something like [00:37:00] joining a choir or taking a walk every day after dinner. But we know they're powerful, and that I think we're all kind of yearning for low tech, simple solutions to problems as opposed to high tech, high falutin, expensive kinds of problems that were being sold on social media every time we open , our phones. These things work. We like to say they're simple, but not always easy. Because they involve making some changes in your routines. 

Chris: And it seems like you can do them. preemptively. You don't have to sit around and wait for ACEs to occur. You can just jump on the PACEs and get ahead of the ball a little bit.

Jennifer: If you need to rescue somebody from the river, you're going to want to be a good swimmer before that happens. 

Amanda: Right. And I think, you know, building the capacity for resilience. is important because adversity is going to happen to all of us in one way or another in our life. And so building that capacity, building the routines, really focusing on the relationship side of our lives.

This is the way to live a good [00:38:00] life. 

Jennifer: I have no data on this yet, but I hope to at some point, I'm convinced that the reason we have 60 years of data showing that these PACEs build resilience is because they build character strengths in us. PACEs aren't just something you get, that you have, they're something you do.

They're relationships that you are in. In that you experience, they are things that you are accountable for also, because you're making this hobby, you're doing it, you're learning self control, you're learning, to apply yourself, you're learning how to connect with other people. And those skills become internalized, they become part of you.

And so you learn compassion, you learn gratitude, you learn self discipline, and they're always there for you. That's why you're resilient, because you're not going to pretend to be strong. You have these strengths. They are you. And the more we help our children [00:39:00] develop them, the more prepared they are for whatever life will throw at them.

But the more we prepare ourselves, that's, all we can do, really. 

Chris: Yeah. Well, I love this concept of PACEs, and as we're sitting here talking about it, I'm thinking about my kids and me, and, I just love the, the optimism of PACEs. And so In light of that, , we wrap up all of our podcast episodes by posing a question to our guests and that is what gives you hope with the two of you and your work, your research, your classrooms and life, , from where you're coming from, what gives you hope?

Jennifer: I see people everywhere wanting to connect, wanting to learn, wanting to be better. Everywhere I go, people ask me, what do you do? And I tell them. I tell them about my research. My husband tells people why he is a stay at home housewife. He says, I am so proud to be a housewife. My husband is a retired ship captain who took [00:40:00] gigantic ships around the world. And he's so proud because this is sacred. What we do gives people hope. We see. Everywhere we go, someone will tell us, whether it's at a hotel when we're checking in or a waitress, Oh, I had this problem. I had these problems when I was a child, but I had this, I had that, I had a pace, I had this. And I've learned, I can recover, I'm OK. And I'm helping my children recover. So I see it all around us.

Amanda: I love this question. For me, what gives me hope are my students And I think training the next group of mental health professionals, of researchers, and seeing their excitement around PACEs and positive experiences is really, really important. enthralling and it really makes a difference to see their enthusiasm and that they want to pass this on. And also my children give me hope. I definitely, my [00:41:00] children are young adults now, and I feel hope for this generation that there's so much good in kids these days that I think so many times we're focusing on the negative side of childhood and adolescence and that generations that are, going to be taking over for us at some point soon. , and I think that we all have positive things that we can bring to the table. And that brings me hope, focusing on that positive strength based side of people. 

Chris: Well, thank you both so much for being here with us today and for sharing your insights with us It's been so interesting and inspiring and Christine, thank you for being a part of this, too 

Christine: This has been so fun. I love it.

Jennifer: We appreciate all you do at Family & Children's Services.

Amanda: It's a real gift to Tulsa and Oklahoma. 

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