Project ACE

A quarter of former foster youth meet the criteria for PTSD — nearly double the rate measured in returning war veterans.

The Casey alumni study found 25.2% of former foster youth met criteria for PTSD in the previous twelve months. At the time, that was nearly double the rate measured in returning war veterans. Over half met criteria for at least one mental-health disorder.

We send people home from war and — rightly — build them programs, funding, and public understanding. We send kids out of foster care at eighteen and tell them good luck.

Same injury category. Wildly different response.

If a young adult in your life is struggling and you know they were in care, that's context worth holding.

Share this so somebody reads their behavior differently tomorrow.

Source: Casey Family Programs Northwest Alumni Study.

We spoke with a group of youth in Foster Care last week for Foster Youth Voices Month.

Our founder opened by asking if any of the youth had ever been called resilient- and was shocked to find that none of the teens had ever heard the word resilient before.

Here’s why that is shocking- every single child that was in that room IS RESILIENT. Every child in that room has come back from traumatic things out of their control and continued smiling, finding joy, and growing even in the hardships of foster care.

We shared with them what resilience means. We chose this version of the definition on purpose- because youth in foster care and youth exposed to ACE’s have experienced extreme, toxic strain on their young brains. And then had to figure out how to cope with those strains.

Compressive, repeated stress changes our brains. But the most important part of that fact is that being AWARE of how stress and ACE’s change our brains wiring is the first step to rewiring our brains ON OUR OWN TERMS.

🚨 According to Research about our Brain:

This is for the person who chose gentleness when hardness was easier and more available.

Who has been through enough to justify the closing. Who has the specific and personal evidence, accumulated across enough genuine experiences of what the world and the people in it can do, that a more defended and less open orientation would be a reasonable and perhaps even intelligent response to the available data.

Who has looked at that data and made a different choice. Not because the data is wrong. Not from the innocence of someone who has not yet been tested. From the specific and deliberate decision of someone who has been tested and has found, in themselves, a specific refusal to allow the testing to produce the version of themselves that the testing was oriented toward creating.

Who has remained soft in the specific and chosen sense of someone who has the scar tissue and the intelligence to be otherwise and who has decided that the otherwise is not the version of themselves they are willing to become.

Neuroscientist Richard Davidson at the University of Wisconsin, whose research on the neural basis of compassion and its maintenance found that the sustained extension of genuine warmth and openness in people who have experienced significant personal pain required the continuous and active engagement of the prefrontal cortex's regulatory systems to override the amygdala's learned threat responses, found the biological cost of what this person is doing.

The sustained gentleness after genuine hurt, Davidson found, is not a passive state. It is an active and metabolically costly choice that requires the ongoing engagement of the neural systems most associated with prosocial behavior against the pull of the systems that were calibrated toward self-protection by the experiences the person has been through.

Researcher Dacher Keltner at the University of California Berkeley confirmed that the neural systems most associated with genuine warmth and openness required active daily maintenance in people whose threat responses had been significantly activated by personal experience and that the maintenance constituted genuine neural work regardless of how effortless the gentleness appeared from the outside.

The softness is not weakness.
It is not naivety.
It is the most specific and most demanding form of strength available to a person who has enough information to be otherwise.

And the daily choosing of it, against the pull of everything that the experience has calibrated the nervous system toward, is a form of courage that does not announce itself because it wears the face of ordinary warmth.
But it costs what it costs.
Every single day.
And it deserves to be recognized as exactly the demanding and deliberate and specific form of strength it actually is.

It's World Mental Health Day.

Learn more about how Adverse Childhood Experiences can have life long health effects by taking our ACE Quiz today. The first step to healing is awareness.

https://www.theprojectace.org/ace-quiz

80% of youth who have experienced the foster care system will develop serious mental health issues in their lives, like PTSD, anxiety, depression, BPD, and the behavioral problems that can come with these diagnoses.

This is compared to 20% of the general population. Mental health matters for everyone, but these statistics speak for themselves. Youth in foster care and those who have been affected by the system need our support.

We are so proud of Ms. Kate and all she does for her students at Memorial Elementary School! The team at Worthy & Known loves walking alongside the staff here at MES:) Go Patriots!

Why is it so damn hard to forgive myself for a completely natural reaction to an immense amount of trauma?