Since we started the Lost Voices journey back in 2006, we’ve known instinctively that a key to our success has been how we view the kids we work with. We understand that they have been exposed to abuse, neglect, violence, addiction, human trafficking, and other horrors that are hard to even think about. When the kids act out in ways that might otherwise be labeled as “bad,” we know that their behavior really comes from the pain they have endured. These kids are not bad, they’re wounded.
What we didn’t understand was how to package this knowledge, so that we could train other teams to carry on our work. Then, a little over a year ago, I met a woman named Michelle Munro-Kramer. From her I discovered that how we deal with the Lost Voices kids is a “thing,” and that “thing” is called Trauma Informed Care.
Dr. Munro-Kramer is one of the leaders of the CASCAID Project at the University of Michigan School of Nursing. This amazing group of professionals is dedicated to studying and understanding the physical and emotional ways trauma can affect young people, and how caregivers at all levels can help them fight back.
If this sounds like a relationship made in Heaven, it really is.
CASCAID stands for Complex ACEs, Complex Aid. In their own words, they are “a study group of nursing faculty formed to research how to redress the adverse impacts of trauma experienced by youth (adverse childhood experiences, or ACEs) by creating and studying complex interventions, in other words, complex aid. Complex ACEs are adverse childhood experiences that add up to traumatic and toxic stress that can derail development and impinge on health across the lifespan.”
During our first conversation, Dr. Munro-Kramer recognized that the Lost Voices process directly leverages the idea of trauma informed care. As I explained details of how our programs work, she was able to point out how the various aspects of the Lost Voices experience fit directly into the CASCAID model of a therapeutic intervention.
Our next step was to commission CASCAID’s Level II training for trauma-informed organizations for me, for our Lost Voices Board, and for some of the other Lost Voices artists. We learned how trauma can cause physiological changes in the brains of abused children, and about how the reactions of traumatized people are sometimes rooted in past events, rather than what is actually happening. We learned how to recognize and deal with “triggering” events, in which a seemingly harmless word or action can result in an extreme reaction from the youth.
We also talked about how to take care of ourselves and each other in the face of secondary or “vicarious” trauma. This is how we can deal with the sadness or even desperation we might feel after working so closely with the kids and having them share their stories with us.
Throughout the session, I was struck that most of the things we were talking about were familiar, while at the same time I felt like I was seeing everything in a completely new light. Over and over I found myself saying, “Yes, of course – and that’s incredible!” Since then, Dr. Munro-Kramer and her group have helped me to develop and refine a trauma-informed training program specifically for the Lost Voices teams, using the CASCAID course as a foundation. We now use this training with every Lost Voices facilitating artist, with excellent results.
We have also written a joint grant with the CASCAID Project to develop research methods that can better track the effectiveness of our work. We’ve always known that the boys and girls we work with benefit from the Lost Voices experience, but we’ve had a hard time finding ways to boil that down into hard data. Working with CASCAID, we have begun gathering and analyzing this valuable information.
Now, after thirteen years, Lost Voices is poised to take our process of hope and healing to more kids than ever before. For this we owe a huge vote of thanks to Michelle Munro-Kramer, Ph.D., CNM, FNP-BC; Michelle Pardee, DNP, FNP-BC; and the rest of the CASCAID project team.
