SCH 089 Did You Know the Body Keeps the Score of Emotional Trauma?

The body keeps the score of emotional trauma, physcal trauma, and mental trauma where it festers into body toxicity. Which makes us sick.

I’d never heard of selective mutism until I read Torey Hayden’s book, One Child: The True Story of a Tormented Six-Year-Old and the Brilliant Teacher Who Reached Out. But for decades I figured Hayden’s experience was an isolated event. After all, no one ever talked about child abuse, incest, or trauma in children. But just because society doesn’t talk about something doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Sadly, childhood abuse and trauma have gone on for centuries, and when we don’t experience healing from our trauma, we can pass the effects of it on to our children.

I work at a school where a majority of students have experienced high levels of trauma, and their behavior, test scores, and academic failures reflected their reality. Once I started to understand the reality of our students’ ‘Swiss-cheese education’ (my term for kids who have great gaps in their education, which prevents them from succeeding in school), I knew we had to do something different to help them. Hiring more special education teachers wouldn’t solve the problem. The principal agreed. Now our school has two full-time licensed clinical counselors on staff.

Our students have started to close the academic gap with their peers across the nation. It takes a trauma-informed staff to work as a community to help our students thrive and heal.

I recently read Bessel van der Kolk’s book, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma, and my study of his book inspired today’s podcast. What do you find the most surprising about childhood trauma?

You can the Adverse Childhood Experience (ACE) quiz here.

Additional factors in childhood trauma can be found here.

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