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from Natural Life magazine,
September/October 2009 Healing Trauma and School Disease David: Not to be undone, not four months after my wife’s episode came to a close, I suffered a major heart attack, died and came back. Pinch me, I’m still here! We are both survivors, for which we are thankful, and doing fine (it’s all relative), but we’d both by lying if we asserted that these traumatic experiences did not exact a serious toll on our psyches. There is so much trauma in the world. There is trauma of war and that bred by war and of civil strife. There is trauma born of poverty and starvation. There is trauma of disease, some of it striking quickly and some of it slowly debilitating. There are natural and, sometimes, not-so-natural disasters – those that are exacerbated by unthinking human action. There are tsunamis and tornados and flash floods and earthquakes that arrive without any warning, with dire impacts on towns, cities and nations. There are other such disasters in the making, such as hurricanes or melting ice floes on the Red River, that we get to watch approach with dread days or weeks in advance. If we are fortunate enough to have avoided these, there is often trauma closer to home. There is the death of loved ones – grandparents, parents, uncles and aunts, siblings, close friends or even, for some, just beloved pets. Dear friends move away or we find ourselves in such circumstances that we are forced to move. We lose jobs, income status changes, access to health care becomes tenuous. Houses are foreclosed upon. Around us, there is domestic violence, alcohol or drug abuse, or just the plain witness of degradation in the way once-loving couples sometimes speak to or of each other.
There are totally unexpected automobile accidents, sometimes our fault and sometimes not, and in addition to our injuries or those of others, we find ourselves ridden with guilt, shame and/or anger, not in any particular order. And then there is the long slide of ageing. Most of these are also experienced by children, either directly or indirectly. It is estimated that roughly forty percent of U.S. children will have at least one potentially traumatizing experience by age eighteen – the death of a parent or sibling, ongoing physical abuse and/or neglect, sexual abuse or the experience of a serious accident, natural disaster or domestic violence or other violent crime. At any given time, it is estimated that more than eight million U.S. children suffer from serious diagnosable, trauma-related psychiatric problems. It is a testimony to the resilience of the human spirit that so many of us, children and adults alike, manage to weather the storms, though often with significant scarring. It has sometimes crossed my mind that our society’s inability to deal creatively with major social issues – from war to poverty to ecological devastation – stems from our collective incapacity to think straight because of the impacts of past injuries and insults to . . . To read the rest of this article, subscribe to Natural Life's digital edition, which includes access to this and other back issues. David Albert is a homeschooling father, writer and speaker. He is the author of a number of books, including “And the Skylark Sings with Me,” “Homeschooling and the Voyage of Self-Discovery” and “Have Fun. Learn Stuff. Grow. Homeschooling and the Curriculum of Love.” He lives, works and writes in Olympia, Washington. Visit David’s website and purchase his books at www.skylarksings.com. Joyce Reed is the parent of five successful home educated college grads. She served for 14 years as Associate Dean of The College at Brown University where she reached out to homeschooled teens. After retiring, she began consulting with primarily international and homeschooling families seeking to attend college. Visit her website at www.CollegeGoals.com. |
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