Excerpt from the Book:

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"Today, for practitioners all across the field of education, it’s important to cultivate a climate of risk and resilience among the students and families we serve. But given the magnitude of negligence and abuse inflicted on our communities, this can be a daunting task for any practitioner. A climate of hyper-dysfunction, and the trans-generational post-traumatic stress that it creates, breeds an environment which is self-destructive, unsustainable, and ultimately, doomed for failure. Particularly, for students who are byproducts of families and communities that have suffered overwhelming adversity, it is imperative that we begin to take a deep-dive into the ramifications of history, and the role it has played in producing these toxic conditions among students in our educational environments. Whether it is at-risk youth who exhibit behavioral issues on a consistent basis, students who adopt a bully complex, those who struggle with depression, or even those who are vulnerable to the opioid epidemic as a coping mechanism to deal with pain - these abnormalities are a result of what can be defined as the wounds you cannot see.

In education, we see that trauma manifests itself in many ways in interactions with students. They struggle with the reality that they have to keep their academic pursuits a priority, while also grappling with the reality that their parents are undergoing a divorce, their siblings are incarcerated, their foster caretaker is abusive, or their environment is marred with substance abuse and hopelessness. And while classroom management training is a standard instructional practice in most school systems, some youth require a deeper and more substantial intervention; One that extracts the hemorrhage of trauma from the soul, and heals the internal bleeding that has been ongoing and untreated for years; we call this trauma-informed (or resilience) education."