If you’ve been involved with Lost Voices for any length of time, you have probably heard about Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs). The kids we work with have all experienced ACEs, such as physical, emotional, or sexual abuse, neglect, or household dysfunction. Left alone, these traumas can lead to a lifetime of mental and physical problems. The good news, and the main reason the Lost Voices experience can be so important to the kids, is that damage from ACEs can actually be mitigated or reversed by Positive Childhood Experiences, or PCEs.
The positive psychological effects of PCEs have been thoroughly explored and documented by a number of mental health experts. Generally speaking, PCEs involve situations in which a young person feels able to freely express their feelings with people they trust. They feel a sense of belonging and community. They feel supported by peers. They have non-parent adults who take a genuine, non-transactional interest in them. They receive authentic positive reinforcement for their accomplishments.
Sound familiar? It should. All of these elements are core principles of the Lost Voices process.
In a perfect world, every child would have PCEs every day of their life, with strongly supportive families and friends. Unfortunately, it’s not a perfect world. Most of the kids we see have lacked the supportive and nurturing network that would provide them with the tools to heal from their trauma. In many cases, the damage has compounded on itself, to the extent that the kids are not able to thrive in the outside world, and they wind up in residential placement.
We partner with residential facilities who work hard to provide the kind of support that can help the kids heal, and Lost Voices interventions are powerful tools in that process. The time we spend with the kids is intense and often emotional, but it’s always kind and non-judgemental. The sessions involve peer collaboration and mutual support on multiple levels. The goal of writing and performing their own work on stage seems out of reach for the kids, right up until the moment when they reach it. Then they get warm and enthusiastic applause for their performance.
Best of all, the whole process involves music, which is the universal – and universally healing – language.
For the Lost Voices teams, there’s a wonderful side-effect to all this. Kids can be pretty transparent, so we get to see the joy in their faces after they pour their hearts out to an accepting audience. We get to hear the many ways they thank us for bringing the experience to them. And we can tell that our time with them has planted a seed of resilience that can continue to grow for a lifetime.
