I sincerely hope you and your family are well. While we’re all trying to cope as our world is turned upside down, it’s important that we remember all the young girls and boys who were struggling to survive and heal their shattered lives long before anyone ever heard of COVID-19. They are still out there, and they are still struggling.

In the past two weeks I’ve had to postpone Lost Voices Programs with the kids and two fundraising concerts that were scheduled to happen before the end of April. Losing the fundraising events is bad news for us as an organization, but losing those opportunities to work with the kids is just plain heartbreaking. I want to let you know that Lost Voices is not just sitting around and waiting for the crisis to be over.

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I talk with all kinds of people about what we do and the kids we work with, and I often hear something like, “Wow, it’s really great that they’ve been rescued…” While that statement is true, and perfectly well-meaning, there’s a problem with it. When you think about somebody being “rescued,” it’s tempting to also think that, now that the traumatic experience is over, the victim can live happily ever after. 

Nothing could be further from the truth.

We now know that emotional trauma can do extensive and long-lasting physical damage. To give you some idea of what I mean, here are PET scans of the brains of two children, one of whom was a victim of extreme neglect as an infant: 

The difference is dramatic, and it highlights how deeply damaging a traumatic experience can be – especially for a child.  (more…)

What’s a favorite memory from your childhood?

One of the most wonderful images in my mind is being seven years old, standing on stage with a ukulele in my hand and a full Hawaiian band behind me, staring out at what looked like an endless sea of faces in the audience. The bandleader, wearing a white dinner jacket and standing next to me, counted down the band and they started to play.

I played a couple of chords then stopped the band, explaining to the bandleader that I needed to tune my uke. He stood there patiently while I sang my tuning song – “My (G) Dog (C) Has (E) Fleas (A).” The crowd and the rest of the band roared with laughter. We made two more starts and stops, finally getting tuning perfect with the help of the piano player, then in my squeaky little voice I belted out, “You Are My Sunshine.” The audience went wild. I was a hit!

What brings all this to mind is an article from NPR I recently read, titled “Positive Childhood Experiences May Buffer Against Health Effects Of Adverse Ones.” (more…)

Christin Perry-Michalik has a BS in psychology, an MA in professional counseling, and is a Licensed Professional Counselor. For the past fifteen years, she has specialized in working with children. While she also sees adult clients, her focus is on kids ages four and up who are struggling to recover from emotional trauma. Her main tool-of-the-trade is Trauma Focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, or TFCBT. She has also been a member of the Lost Voices Board of Directors for a little over a year.

What first drew you to Lost Voices?

It’s exactly what I’m passionate about. First off, I love music. As a kid I loved singing, I was involved in a band and a youth orchestra. Then my professional passion has been working with kids who have experienced trauma, and the importance of them having a voice, being able to tell their story. It’s critical to their recovery to get the sense of validation, that sense of feeling that they are important. Lost Voices combines those two things that I really love. It was the perfect fit for me to become involved in whatever capacity I could.

You’ve watched the Lost Voices team in action. What are your thoughts about that?

When I first came to see you working with the kids, I didn’t know what that would look like exactly. What I found was that it is very similar to how kids will write their trauma narratives when they’re working with me in therapy.

Sometimes the parent, or the legal system, or whoever will focus on, “Let’s find out exactly how it happened.” They need to get the facts right and in the context of healing, that’s not really the point. The trauma narrative is about them speaking their truth. They are free to put their thoughts and emotions to their experience.

That’s exactly what I saw you guys doing, helping them find their words, their truth. It’s a process of being able to share their narrative with a trusted person. Then you wrap their personal truth in music and help them get it out into the world.

What healing is really about for these kids is being able to process the pain, being able to feel the feelings, being able to share that with somebody, then being able to get that out into the world. Whatever the actual facts are, their story is their truth. (more…)

Picture this – as of the fourth quarter of 2019, there were 2.5 billion monthly Facebook users. That’s a whole lot of people! For a nonprofit like Lost Voices, Facebook has become one of the most important communication channels we have. It gives us a powerful and inexpensive way to get our message out and communicate with our supporters on an ongoing basis.

One very cool thing about Facebook is that they provide online fundraisers. You probably remember Giving Tuesday back in December, when we raised nearly $5,000 from our generous supporters on Facebook on one day. When you include offline donations and the generous overall match of our Giving Tuesday gifts by Don Soenen, we were able to raise more than $10,000. That’s enough to cover most of the expenses for two complete sessions of hope and healing with the kids!

What you may not have paid all that much attention to is all the other Facebook fundraisers that pop up throughout the year. During 2019, the individual fundraisers people did for Lost Voices raised thousands of dollars, with $1,200 coming in from one birthday fundraiser alone. Make no mistake about it, this money makes a HUGE difference in what a charity like Lost Voices is able to accomplish.

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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. (more…)

Toby’s Song

The first thing you notice about him is his fantastic grin. The smile spreads from ear to ear and his eyes light up with an internally-generated joy, combined with a healthy dose of mischief. Of course, he’s about thirteen years old, which is probably the most prolific mischief-making time in a young boy’s life. Looking at this glowing child it’s hard to imagine that his life has been deeply marked with suffering.

I’m going to call him Toby; I don’t want to use his real name because we need to protect his privacy. He’s in foster care at the Whaley Children’s Center in downtown Flint, Michigan. He stays in a nearby group home and goes to school in a tidy, well-organized facility nestled next to a hospital, with a welcoming campus and an incredibly loving and supportive staff.  (more…)

Supporter Profile – Grant Drake

Dr. Grant Drake has spent a lifetime helping people recover from trauma. He became interested in psychology as an undergraduate, and while at Yale Medical School he decided to go into psychiatry, completing his psychiatric training at the University of Michigan. Starting his career in community mental health, Dr. Drake also spent three years working with veterans at the VA. During this time he treated many PTSD survivors, participating in new concepts of group treatment pioneered at the VA by a University of Michigan psychiatrist.

Dr. Drake has been on the Lost Voices Board of Directors for about six years. Asked about his insight into the process, he said, “Lost Voices presents a very powerful way to help troubled kids. These young boys and girls are frozen in their ability to trust anyone, even themselves. They have trouble opening up to their therapists. In the case of these kids, the traumas are so deep, multiple, and long-term that they are even more frozen. Mike and his teams harness the power of the group, fostering collaboration through music. The musicians collaborate with the kids, and the kids collaborate with each other.”   (more…)

Lost Voices and Moments of Change

By Christin Perry-Michalik

“Moments of Change”-  We feel them in different environments and recognize the feeling of things shifting when change happens.   New research in the journal Frontiers in Psychology carried out by Professor Jorg Fachner and Dr. Clemens Maidhof of Anglia Ruskin University is shedding scientific light into what therapists have felt for decades.  “Moments of Change” happen when therapist and patient are connected and they feel in sync with each other.  Light bulb moments happen, and then change occurs.  EEGs (electroencephalograms) are showing that electrical signals in the brains of music therapists and patients sync together at the same moment that both later identified as the time in the session when therapy was really working.  This new research gives tangible evidence of these moments of connection and this change that is experienced in the brain and can actually be seen in the data.   (more…)

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