The first weeks of school are loud. New backpacks, new schedules, the smell of floor wax and dry-erase markers. But under the noise, every classroom is quietly filling up with something we rarely name on the syllabus: nervous systems that spent the summer surviving.

Some kids came from homes where summer meant fewer meals, not more freedom. Some watched adults come apart. Some just lost the one predictable thing they had, the structure of the school day, and are now being asked to sit still and “get back on track.”

Here is the reframe I want every teacher to sit with this fall: the disruptive kid is not giving you a discipline problem. They are giving you a nervous system report.

Behavior is communication, not defiance

When a child flips a desk, shuts down, or can’t stop talking, the traditional read is that it's a choice: they chose to act out, so they receive a consequence. A trauma-informed read is that their body detected a threat and shifted into fight, flight, or freeze faster than thought could intervene.

That distinction changes everything you do next. You cannot reason a dysregulated child into calm any more than you can talk someone out of a sneeze. The body goes first. The story comes later. The lesson plan comes last of all.

The teacher who understands this stops asking “How do I make this behavior stop?” and starts asking “What does this behavior need?” Those are two entirely different jobs, and only one of them actually works.

The classroom is the intervention

You don’t need a therapist in every room. You need rooms that are safe to be in. That’s a design problem, and it’s one teachers already have the tools to solve:

• Predictability lowers threat. A visible schedule, consistent transitions, and warned changes tell a vigilant nervous system it can stand down. Surprise is a stressor for a kid who’s had too many.

• Connection before correction. The two minutes you spend greeting a student by name at the door do more for behavior than any consequence chart. Regulated adults regulate children; co-regulation is the whole game before age twelve, and most of it after.

• Repair over punishment. When a rupture happens (and it will), the trauma-informed move is to reconnect once everyone is calm, not to deliver the consequence while the storm is still overhead. Kids don’t learn from shame. They learn from feeling safe enough to try again.

• Regulate yourself first. You cannot pour calm from an empty cup. A teacher running on their own unaddressed stress will read a child’s dysregulation as a personal attack. The oxygen mask goes on the adult first.

The teacher carries wounds too

We can’t talk about trauma-informed classrooms without talking about the person at the front of the room. Teachers are absorbing more distress than any staff meeting acknowledges, and doing it on a schedule that leaves no room to recover.

A trauma-informed school protects its people the way it protects its students: with predictability, connection, and permission to be human. A burned-out teacher can’t build a safe room. Caring for the caregiver isn’t a perk. It’s infrastructure.

Where to start this week

Pick one. Not all four. One.

Greet every student by name at the door. Or post the day’s schedule where anxious eyes can find it. Or replace one consequence this week with one repair conversation. Small, consistent, predictable. That’s the entire methodology, and it’s within reach before Friday.

Want the full framework — and a credential to go with it?

If this shifted how you see the kid in the back row, my Trauma-Informed Care Certification walks you through the whole approach, step by step, and gives you a certificate you can put to work in your school or district. Start here → TraumaToolbox.com

Become a paid Trauma Champions member, and you don’t just get the newsletter — you get the whole ecosystem:

• The full Trauma Champions Accelerator bundle → TraumaChampionsAccelerator.com

• Access to the Trauma Champions Toolbox Skool community, where educators, clinicians, and leaders trade what’s actually working in real rooms

School is back in session. Let’s make the rooms our kids walk into safe enough to learn in.

Ron Huxley, LMFT

Thanks for reading Trauma Champions. If this was useful, share it with a teacher who needs it this week.

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If you’re a therapist, a nurse, a pastor, a teacher, a parent — anyone who absorbs other people’s hard days for a living — you know the feeling. You finish a heavy conversation and carry it into the next room. You run on empty by 2pm and still have more to give. You brace before a session you know is going to hurt. Sometimes you just snap.

We’re good at telling other people to slow down and breathe. We’re terrible at doing it ourselves.

That’s why I built the 90-Second Reset Deck.

What it is

It’s a small set of cards — one for each way a hard day tends to show up in your body — plus a “My Own Reset” card so you can make it yours. Each card walks you through the G.R.O.W. Method in about 90 seconds, so you can come back to yourself before you step into whatever’s next.

The five states it’s built for:

• Carrying the last session — right after a heavy conversation

• Running on empty — mid-day depletion, still more to give

• Bracing for the next one — the anxious gap before a hard session

• Snapped / dysregulated — when you’ve already been flooded

• The day is over — when you can’t put it down

Why 90 seconds

Because that’s often all you have. Ninety seconds between clients. Ninety seconds in the car before you walk inside. Ninety seconds in the bathroom at work when your nervous system is screaming, and your calendar doesn’t care.

The deck runs on the G.R.O.W. Method — the same trauma-healing framework I’ve taught to more than 30,000 people over 35 years as a trauma therapist:

• Ground — get your body back in the room. Feet on the floor, a few slow breaths, exhale longer than the inhale.

• Recognize — name what you’re actually feeling and where you feel it. No fixing yet. Just honest noticing.

• Open — soften toward it instead of bracing against it. Ask what this moment might have to teach you.

• Walk — take one small, doable step forward. Not the whole staircase. The next stair.

That’s it. You feel a hard moment land in your body; you grab the matching card and take your 90 seconds. No app, no subscription to your own healing, no 45-minute practice you’ll never actually do.

How to use it

Download the deck, print it, and cut the cards apart (they’re sized to print two per page). Keep one on your desk, one in your bag, one on your phone. When a hard moment shows up, reach for the card that matches — and give yourself a minute and a half to reset.

How to get it

The 90-Second Reset Deck is waiting for you inside our Skool community, the Trauma Champions Toolbox, in the Classroom under the GROW Method Library.

Here’s my invitation: become a paid subscriber, and I’ll open the door.

Paid members get:

• 🃏 Immediate access to the 90-Second Reset Deck in our Trauma Champions Toolbox Skool community

• 🤝 The full Trauma Champions Toolbox — grounding cards, reset menus, care templates, and a room full of people doing this work alongside you

• 🎓 A $500 value of Trauma Champions Accelerator Courses — practical trainings, downloadable resources, exclusive articles, and live coaching at traumachampionsaccelerator.com

You spend your days making sure everyone else has something to hold. Let this be the thing you hold for yourself.

👉 Become a paid subscriber below, and I’ll get you your access right away.

Subscribe now

Come grow with us.

— Ron

Picture the scene. A director nods along through an entire trauma-informed care training. Good nods. Engaged nods. Three weeks later, a new client walks up to the front desk and gets handed the same rigid intake form, the same no-exceptions script, the same rules that were there before anyone in that training had heard the word “trauma-informed.”

Nothing the director learned ever touched the form.

That gap is the whole story. A new piece in Hospital Pediatrics names it plainly: almost everyone in health care now knows what trauma-informed care means. Almost no one knows how to actually put it in place.

I’ve watched that gap up close, in church basements and clinic hallways alike. The knowing was never the hard part.

Where the Definition Breaks

The standard definition of trauma-informed care has four pieces. Know that trauma is common. Spot it when you see it. Build what you know into your rules and your daily routines. Don’t hurt people all over again.

Most organizations do the first two well. They teach the words. Then they stop, right at the threshold of the third piece, the one that asks them to change how the place actually runs. The words end up floating on top of a system that still works the old way.

The words float on top of a system that still works the old way.

I think about that image a lot. A layer of good language over an unchanged structure. It looks like progress from the outside. It rarely feels like safety from the inside.

Here’s what the research says actually moves the needle.

Leaders go first, or nothing moves. A review of 27 studies found that whether leadership is genuinely on board decides whether any of this sticks. A five-year rollout across 34 Texas health centers found the same thing this month: trainers kept hitting a wall of leadership that had never sat in the same room as the staff. Most places train the front desk and caseworkers first, then send them back to work under rules that no one in power has ever touched. That asks the person with the least authority in the building to fix the building.

Change a piece of paper. Pull your intake form. Your reporting script. Your discipline policy. Read them line by line and find where they take away a person’s choices. The same 27-study review found that loosening rigid rules is one of the strongest levers available, because rigid rules take away choice, and taking away choice is exactly how people get hurt a second time. A simple test: can someone skip a question on your form and still get help? If not, the form isn’t trauma-informed yet, no matter what the staff was taught.

Measure the building, not the mood in the room. The Texas project earned its results because it measured the organization itself, before and after, with tools built for that purpose. A feedback form at the end of a workshop tells you people had a nice day. It tells you nothing about whether anything changed.

Pay for what comes after the training. One pediatric network trained 440 people across 27 teams in one-hour sessions. A follow-up study of 286 providers paired that same hour with five months of reminders afterward. The reminders were the real work. The hour was only the start. And if your own staff are the ones teaching others, they need coaching too; the Texas trainers said openly that they didn’t feel ready to train anyone else. Nobody had prepared them for that part either.

Let people tell you where it hurt, and don’t forget your own staff. Build a real way for people to say “that part of your process was hard on me,” and make sure the report changes something, or it’s just a suggestion box collecting dust. Then turn that same attention on your own team. Up to 93% of behavioral health workers report burnout, and 62% of them report moderate or worse. No organization can offer safety to the people it serves while the people offering it are running on empty.

The Part I Keep Coming Back To

Every one of these five things requires someone with the authority to change a policy, move money, or clear space on a calendar. Not one of them can be handled by a workshop.

That’s why this keeps stalling out at the level of talk. Training is cheap, and it can be handed off to someone else. Changing how a place actually runs never is.

I don’t say that to discourage anyone nodding along in good faith. I say it because the nodding was never the missing piece. The form was.

If you lead a team, a church, or an organization that’s ready to move past training into actual practice, let’s talk it through together. Book a time to chat.

Training needs backup, but that doesn’t mean you can’t start the process for trauma-informed care. Certify your team now with the internet’s quickest, cheapest trauma-informed care certification online at http://TraumaToolbox.com

Become a paid member of this Substack and get a complete Trauma-Informed Care bundle of courses and resources https://ronhuxley.thinkific.com/bundles/traumachampionsmembership

Subscribe now

Sources: Hospital Pediatrics (Aug 2026); systematic review on barriers and enablers for TIC implementation; Frontiers in Health Services, Texas FQHC initiative (Aug 2026); Marsac et al., pediatric TIC training evaluation; Cultivating a Trauma-Informed Behavioral Health Workforce.

A clergy-only workshop at this year’s OCAMPR conference is making an argument the field needs to hear: vicarious trauma in ministry is not emotional exhaustion. It’s a spiritual injury — one that destabilizes meaning, identity, and a pastor’s relationship with God, self, and world.

Drawing on theological anthropology, pastoral theology, and trauma theory, the workshop’s premise is that prolonged exposure to suffering places clergy in what it calls a liminal space of identity reformation. The proposed path through isn’t rest. It’s renewed integration through communion, spiritual honesty, and embodied pastoral care — with “creative helplessness” and radical vulnerability named as central to the work.

WHY THE DISTINCTION MATTERS

“Compassion fatigue” is a depletion metaphor. It implies a tank that runs low and refills with time off. That framing is why the standard denominational response is a sabbatical.

And it’s why so many sabbaticals don’t work.

If the injury is to meaning-making rather than energy reserves, rest doesn’t repair it. A pastor returns from three months away with a full tank and the same unanswered question underneath: where was God in what I sat with? Nothing about the time off touched that. So the return is often followed, within a year, by an exit nobody saw coming.

THE CORROBORATION

This isn’t one workshop’s idea. Oxford’s McDonald Centre for Theology, Ethics and Public Life is running a Clergy Vicarious Trauma research project with the Mind and Soul Foundation, led by Revd Prof. Josh Hordern with Revd Will Van Der Hart and Revd Dr. Kate Middleton. The academy is treating clergy vicarious trauma as its own category — not a subtype of burnout.

Meanwhile, demand is visible at ground level. Trauma-informed church trainings are drawing pastors, ministry leaders, and healthcare workers together in small communities, and multi-session trauma-informed leadership cohorts for clergy are running through fall.

Discuss this news brief and get more tools/tips/support in our Skool Community: https://www.skool.com/trauma-champions-9057/about

THE LEADERSHIP PROBLEM

Here’s what most trauma-informed church work gets backward. It trains leaders to care for congregants and says nothing about who carries the leader.

A pastor absorbs disclosure after disclosure — abuse, addiction, betrayal, church hurt, death — and in most polities has no structural place to put any of it. Not a supervisor. Not a peer consultation group. Not clinical supervision of the kind every licensed therapist is required to have.

That’s not a self-care failure. It’s a design failure. And it has a downstream cost: a leader with nowhere to process what they absorb becomes the bottleneck on the whole congregation’s sense of safety. People read a dysregulated pastor accurately, even when they can’t name what they’re reading.

THE TAKEAWAY

If your church is building trauma-informed ministry, the first question isn’t how to serve wounded people better. It’s this: who holds the person doing the holding — and is that a role someone actually occupies, or a hope?

Three structures worth naming out loud: regular clinical supervision or consultation for anyone doing pastoral care, a peer group with confidentiality that is real rather than assumed, and a spiritual director whose job is the leader’s own meaning-making, not the church’s performance.

Sabbath is a command. It is not a trauma intervention.

Ron Huxley can assist your organization in healing from the wounds of vicarious trauma. Get more information on how he can help at http://FamilyHealer.tv. Use his TraumaInformed.church for information on trauma-informed skills for churches.

Sources: 2026 OCAMPR Clergy Workshop, Orthodox Christian Association of Medicine, Psychology, and Religion · Clergy Vicarious Trauma: Project Consultation, McDonald Centre, University of Oxford · Trauma-informed training draws faith, community leaders in Avery County, Avery Journal-Times, April 16, 2026 · Trauma-Informed Leadership for Pastors and Ministry Leaders, Transforming Engagement, fall 2026 cohort

Discuss this news brief and get more tools/tips/support in our Skool Community: https://www.skool.com/trauma-champions-9057/about

Why healing requires more than rest

A client sat across from me last week and said the thing I hear almost every day now: “I’m just so tired.”

I used to take that at face value. Sometimes it really is that simple — a bad week, a sleepless night, a body that needs eight hours instead of five. Rest fixes that kind of tired.

But there’s another kind of tired I’ve learned to listen for. It’s the exhaustion of a nervous system that’s been scanning for danger so long it forgot how to stop. It’s the fatigue of carrying memories that never got fully processed, of holding yourself together while some part of you is still living like the threat never ended.

That isn’t laziness. It isn’t weakness. And no amount of sleep touches it, because sleep was never the problem.

When You Feel Like More Than One Person

Trauma has a way of splitting us into pieces. Part of you wants to move forward. Another part is still standing guard. One part knows, logically, that you’re safe now — another reacts like it’s happening all over again.

I hear versions of this constantly: “I feel like I’m on autopilot.” “I don’t even know who I am anymore.” Nothing is wrong with you when you feel that way. Your nervous system did exactly what it was built to do. It kept you alive.

The work isn’t to erase those protective parts, as much as we might want to. It’s to sit down with them, figure out what they’ve been trying to do for you all this time, and let them know they don’t have to carry it alone anymore.

What Healing Actually Asks of Us

It’s not rest. It’s reconnection — learning to notice what’s happening inside you without immediately reaching for judgment. It’s helping your body find enough safety that it can start setting down patterns it no longer needs.

I built the G.R.O.W. Method because I kept watching people try to heal through sheer willpower, and watching that fail. Healing isn’t simple, but it does tend to move through small, repeatable steps rather than one big breakthrough.

Sarah’s Email

Here’s how it plays out. A client of mine — I’ll call her Sarah — gets a short message from her supervisor: “Can we meet this afternoon?”

Her chest tightens before she’s even finished reading it. Heart racing. Thoughts already three steps ahead: I’m in trouble. I’m going to lose my job. I’ve disappointed everyone again.

Nothing has happened yet. But her body remembers years of criticism she never fully moved past, and it doesn’t know the difference between then and now.

This time, instead of spiraling, she runs through G.R.O.W.

Ground. She puts both feet flat on the floor, takes a few slow breaths, feels the chair holding her up. I’m here. I’m safe. This is today, not the past.

Recognize. She names what’s happening instead of believing it outright. My body thinks it’s in danger. This feels familiar, but familiar isn’t the same as true.

Open. Instead of scolding herself for being anxious, she tries something gentler. Of course I’m scared — my nervous system is trying to protect me. I don’t have to fight myself on top of everything else.

Walk forward. She picks one small next step. She writes back, “Absolutely, I’ll see you this afternoon,” and takes a short walk before the meeting instead of spending four hours bracing for disaster.

The meeting turns out to be about a new project. Nothing terrible happens. But something does happen — she caught the old pattern before it ran the whole day for her. That’s what healing looks like most of the time. Not a breakthrough. A pause that worked.

Get this G.R.O.W. Method daily practice worksheet in our Trauma Champions community when you become a paid member. Use this and other healing practices and tools (over $1000 value) when you join…see you there!

Where to Start

Healing rarely shows up in dramatic moments. It shows up in the ordinary ones — when you pause instead of panic, notice instead of numb, get curious instead of critical.

That’s really all the G.R.O.W. Method is: a way to practice those ordinary moments on purpose, one at a time, until they start to add up.

A question worth sitting with: Where have you mistaken trauma for “just being tired”? What might shift if you got curious about what your nervous system is protecting, instead of blaming yourself for being worn out?

I’d love to hear what comes up for you in the comments — and if this found you at the right moment, pass it along to someone who might need to hear that healing isn’t about trying harder. It’s about learning a different way through.

Paid members can download this Daily Practice: “Transforming Trauma Tiredness” immediately! Join our Trauma Champions Community to get this G.R.O.W. practice today.

1. Go to our Skool community link or DM to be added as a member if you are a subscriber to this newsletter or the Skool community page > https://www.skool.com/trauma-champions-9057/about

2. Go to the classroom navigation on the menu.

3. Go to the Daily Practices for this tool and many others!

4. Email me if you have any problems: rehuxley@gmail.com or DM me.

Learn the G.R.O.W. Method. Get the ebook at http://FamilyHealer.tv

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When I first created the Trauma Champions Membership, it wasn’t because I wanted another subscription to manage.

It was because I wanted to build a place where people could move beyond simply learning about trauma—and begin putting trauma-informed principles into practice.

Information is everywhere.

Implementation is much harder.

That’s why I want to encour…

Read more

For more than 35 years, I’ve sat with people on some of the hardest days of their lives.

I’ve walked alongside survivors of abuse, first responders, pastors, healthcare workers, educators, parents, foster and adoptive families, and organizational leaders trying to care for people while carrying burdens of their own.

Along the way, I discovered something surprising.

The greatest obstacle to becoming trauma-informed isn’t a lack of information.

It’s knowing how to live it.

The Lesson I Had to Learn

There came a season in my own life when I realized my nervous system was trying to protect me.

For years, I had what I called an “open-door policy.” I wanted to help everyone. I believed being available was part of being compassionate.

Then, without realizing it, my open door slowly became a closed one.

I wasn’t becoming less caring.

I was becoming exhausted.

Compassion fatigue, secondary traumatic stress, and burnout were quietly reshaping the way I worked and lived. My nervous system was doing exactly what it was designed to do—it was protecting me.

That experience changed how I think about trauma-informed care forever.

Trauma-informed care isn’t just about understanding other people’s stories.

It’s also about learning how to care for ourselves, our teams, and our organizations in ways that allow us to keep showing up without losing ourselves.

The Mistake I See Everywhere

Over the years, I’ve watched our field produce incredible books, conferences, podcasts, and certifications.

Information has never been more available.

Yet many organizations still struggle to become truly trauma-informed.

Why?

Because information doesn’t automatically become implementation.

People leave inspired—but unsure what to do next.

Leaders agree with trauma-informed principles—but struggle to build them into culture.

Organizations complete training—but old habits quietly return.

That’s why Trauma Champions exists.

Welcome to Trauma Champions

This newsletter is for people who want to move beyond simply knowing about trauma.

It’s for people who want to practice it.

Together we’ll explore how to create trauma-informed lives, families, ministries, workplaces, schools, and organizations that help people heal and thrive.

Each week you’ll find practical, evidence-informed insights drawn from more than three decades of clinical work, leadership, consulting, and training.

What You’ll Find Here

The Science

Simple explanations of trauma, resilience, attachment, nervous system regulation, compassion fatigue, and post-traumatic growth.

The Practice

Practical tools you can begin using immediately with yourself, your family, clients, teams, or organization.

The Implementation

Strategies for turning trauma-informed principles into daily habits, leadership practices, organizational culture, and sustainable systems.

The Champion’s Care

Resources for preventing burnout, managing secondary traumatic stress, and learning to burn bright instead of burning out.

Field Notes

Stories, lessons, reflections, and practical wisdom gathered from 35 years of walking with people through healing and growth.

Ways We Can Work Together

If you’re beginning your trauma-informed journey
Start with the Trauma-Informed Care Certification at TraumaToolbox.com.

If you’re ready to go deeper
Join the paid Trauma Champions Membership for courses, digital resources, live trainings, and our private community.

If you’re feeling overwhelmed or burned out
Take the free Compassion Fatigue Assessment at CompassionFatigue.net and discover practical next steps.

If you’re leading a church, nonprofit, school, healthcare organization, or business
Let’s work together to implement trauma-informed practices that create lasting organizational change—not just another training event.

One Final Question

If you’re new here, I’d love to hear from you.

What is the biggest challenge you’re facing in becoming more trauma-informed?

Maybe it’s your own healing.

Maybe it’s supporting your family.

Maybe it’s preventing burnout.

Maybe it’s helping your team put these ideas into practice.

Reply to this post or send me a message.

I read every one.

Welcome to Trauma Champions.

I’m grateful you’re here.

— Ron

So trauma-informed leadership was never going to be something you learn in a single training or hang on a poster in the break room. It’s a handful of habits, repeated until they stop being technique and start being just how you lead. How you open a meeting. How you deliver hard news. How you handle a mistake.

The full guide walks through all eight habits with reflection questions for each, the kind you could use in a staff meeting or with your coffee on a quiet morning. You can grab it here:

The 8 Habits of a Trauma-Informed Leader — free guide and checklist

And if this is the kind of work you want to keep doing, not just read about once and set aside, the Trauma Champions Membership is open again. Two things you’ll find inside:

🎓 The Trauma Champions Membership Bundle: a growing library of trauma-informed courses, guides, worksheets, and practical tools to help you keep learning and growing.

💬 The Private Trauma Champions Skool Community: a place to ask questions, swap ideas, cheer each other on, and keep the conversation going after the newsletter lands in your inbox.

It’s less a resource library and more a place to not do this work alone.

People don’t usually leave bad jobs. They leave rooms that never quite felt safe. I hope yours is one people stay for.

Subscribe now

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A leader told me about a meeting she’d run a few weeks back. She’d asked her team one question. “What’s one thing we’re not talking about that we should be?”

Nobody answered right away. She said the silence went on long enough to become uncomfortable; one woman started to speak, then stopped herself. But the leader didn’t fill the space. Didn’t move to the next agenda item. She just waited. And eventually someone spoke, then someone else, and by the end of the meeting, three things had come to light that had apparently been sitting just under the surface for months.

She told me this like it was a small thing. I don’t think it was.

What she was describing wasn’t a facilitation technique. It was a room finding out, in real time, whether it was actually safe to be honest. And a body doesn’t wait for good intentions before it answers that question. It reads tone, pacing, whether the last person who spoke up paid for it later. From a Polyvagal perspective, the nervous system keeps its own quiet scorecard beneath whatever’s being said out loud, and it usually knows the answer before the person does.

I’ve said for years that leadership is a nervous system event before it’s a strategy. But I don’t think I really felt it until she told me about that pause.

Every team you lead is carrying histories you can’t see. Some people learned early that authority isn’t safe, that speaking up costs more than it’s worth, that the ground can shift without warning and the smart move is to stay quiet and watch the exits. They don’t leave that at home. It walks into the meeting with them.

So trauma-informed leadership was never going to be something you learn in a single training or hang on a poster in the break room. It’s a handful of habits, repeated until they stop being technique and start being just how you lead. How you open a meeting. How you deliver hard news. How you handle a mistake.

Thirty years of clinical work taught me something about how people learn to trust power again after it’s hurt them. It’s slow. It only happens through repetition, and only when the pattern holds up on the hard days, not just the calm ones. I started noticing the same thing showing up in boardrooms, staff meetings, and pulpits long before I had language for it. A leader who says “I don’t know yet” instead of faking confidence is doing something I recognize from the therapy room. So is a leader who protects the one quiet voice that finally spoke up, so it isn’t the last time that voice takes the risk.

There’s a prayer of Thomas Merton’s I keep returning to, the one where he admits he can’t see the road ahead of him and has no real certainty he’s even going the right way. He doesn’t resolve that. He names it honestly and asks to be led anyway. I don’t think “I don’t know yet” is weakness in a leader. Some days it’s the most regulated thing a person in authority can offer a room that’s learned not to trust confidence it can’t verify.

I pulled together eight of these habits into a guide, mostly because I kept meeting leaders who already wanted to build them into how they run things but just didn’t have the words for it yet. Safety first. Radical transparency. Sharing power, not just sentiment. Making room for the quiet voice. Getting curious about the person behind a dip in performance instead of assuming the worst. Naming a culture instead of guessing at it. Regulating yourself before you respond. And building all of it into your actual systems, not just your intentions, because good intentions rarely survive a hard quarter.

None of it costs money. All of it takes practice.

I don’t have a tidy answer for which habit matters most. It depends on where trust is thinnest on your team right now. But I’d ask you the same question that the leader asked hers. What’s one thing your team isn’t saying that they should be? And what would it actually take, this week, for someone to find out it’s safe to say it?

The full guide walks through all eight habits with reflection questions for each, the kind you could use in a staff meeting or with your coffee on a quiet morning. You can grab it here:

The 8 Habits of a Trauma-Informed Leader — free guide and checklist

And if this is the kind of work you want to keep doing, not just read about once and set aside, the Trauma Champions Membership is open again. Two things you’ll find inside:

🎓 The Trauma Champions Membership Bundle: a growing library of trauma-informed courses, guides, worksheets, and practical tools to help you keep learning and growing.

💬 The Private Trauma Champions Skool Community: a place to ask questions, swap ideas, cheer each other on, and keep the conversation going after the newsletter lands in your inbox.

It’s less a resource library and more a place to not do this work alone.

People don’t usually leave bad jobs. They leave rooms that never quite felt safe. I hope yours is one people stay for.

Subscribe now

I want to tell you about something I tried once, paused, and am now bringing back.

A small group of you signed on as paid and founding members way back when Trauma Champions was barely off the ground. You didn’t get much for it. You just believed in where it might go.

A few months in, I hit pause.

Not because I’d given up. I’d just started too soon. I was trying to build a membership and a newsletter from scratch at the same time, and something had to give. So I picked the newsletter. I wanted Trauma Champions to actually be worth reading before I asked anyone to pay for what came next.

Since then, this thing has grown in ways I didn’t expect. Hundreds of articles. Readers in more places than I imagined. New courses, new resources, a podcast that didn’t even exist when this started. And somewhere along the way, I finally got a clear picture of what this could become.

So today, I get to say it:

Paid memberships are back starting July 27th, and this time they’ve got a much sturdier foundation.

What You Get as a Paid Member

🎓 The Trauma Champions Membership Bundle A growing library of trauma-informed courses, guides, worksheets, and practical tools to help you keep learning and growing.

💬 The Private Trauma Champions Skool Community A place to ask questions, swap ideas, cheer each other on, and keep the conversation going after the newsletter lands in your inbox.

You’ll also get exclusive updates and new resources as they roll out.

And if you join and it turns out it’s not the right fit, that’s okay too. You can cancel anytime, no hard feelings.

If you’ve never been a paid member before, you’re just as welcome here. This isn’t only for the people who’ve been around since the beginning. If you’re ready to go deeper as a Trauma Champion, now’s a good time to join in.

To Our Founding Members

If you joined when this was little more than an idea in my head, thank you. Truly.

Everything that exists today exists because you believed in it first, before there was much reason to. I haven’t forgotten that, so your perks are sticking around:

• Everything in the Paid Membership

• Exclusive Founding Member webinars

• A free digital copy of every new Trauma Champions book I publish (I will be reaching out to you personally with a special thank you gift).

Your early belief in this means more than you know.

Why I’m Bringing It Back

I never wanted Trauma Champions to be just another newsletter you open once and forget.

I want it to be a place where people learn to live, lead, parent, teach, counsel, and care for others through a trauma-informed lens. Where learning turns into practice, and healing happens with other people instead of alone in your head.

A newsletter can teach you something. A membership is where you actually get to work it out, together, over time. That’s the piece I’ve been missing.

Whether you’re a free subscriber, a paid member, or one of our Founding Members, thank you for sticking around for this. I’m genuinely glad you’re here. We’re just getting started.

With gratitude, Ron Huxley, LMFT, Founder, Trauma Champions

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Last Sunday morning I sat with my coffee and reread something I wrote a year ago.

Not someone else's essay. My own. An article about the wounded healer, about those of us who entered this field to help others heal while quietly carrying our own stories. I remember writing it. I remember believing every word.

Reading it again, I noticed something strange. The article was true, but I was no longer the man who wrote it. Something had shifted in the space between then and now, and I could feel the gap on the page the way you feel a loose floorboard under your foot.

That gap, it turns out, is where growth lives. And it got me thinking about how I read.

The feed and the library

For most of my thirty years as a therapist, learning arrived in scheduled doses. A conference here. A certification there. A stack of books on the nightstand that judged me silently for months.

Then Substack happened, and suddenly some of the finest thinking in my field arrives in my inbox before breakfast. Trauma therapists writing where science meets story. Survivors narrating their own healing with a precision no textbook can match. Contemplatives and poets keeping watch over the interior life. Spiritual directors asking better questions than I ask myself.

The problem was never access. The problem was that I treated it all like a feed. I scrolled. I skimmed. I let the algorithm decide what formed me.

> A feed asks, what's new? A library asks, what are you becoming?

So I stopped scrolling and started curating. I turned my subscriptions into a personal curriculum, and I want to tell you how, because it has changed more than my reading habits. It is changing my nervous system, my writing, and my prayer life. In that order, some days. In reverse on others.

The shape of the week

My curriculum follows the three voices I try to write in: the Clinician, the Storyteller, and the Pilgrim.

Early in the week I read as a Clinician. Research-grounded writing from working therapists, the kind that keeps my practice honest and my science current. Midweek belongs to the Pilgrim, contemplative writers and spiritual directors who slow me down and remind me that formation is not the same as information. Later in the week I read as a Storyteller, sitting with lived-experience writing from survivors, because nothing protects a clinician from professional distance like listening to the people we serve tell it in their own words.

Friday I sample something new, one unfamiliar publication, so the library keeps breathing. Saturday I read only poetry and contemplative work. No trauma content at all. Call it a sabbath for my vagus nerve.

And Sunday, the practice that started all of this: I reread one of my own old articles and ask a single question.

> What would I say differently now?

If the answer is nothing, I probably haven't grown. If the answer makes me wince a little, I'm right on schedule.

One line a day

There is one small habit that holds the whole thing together. Each day, from whatever I read, I save one line. One image, one sentence, one noticed moment that snagged on something in me.

Mary Oliver said that attention is the beginning of devotion, and I have come to believe she was also describing how writers are made. That daily line goes into a running note, and that note has become the seedbed for nearly everything I publish here. When people ask how I keep writing weekly after all these years, this is the unglamorous answer. I don't generate ideas. I harvest attention.

Why this grows me

Here is the clinician in me, arriving right on cue with the science.

Our nervous systems are shaped by what we repeatedly attend to. That is not a metaphor. Attention is a physiological act, and a steady diet of doomscrolling trains the body toward vigilance the same way a steady diet of depth trains it toward presence. When I structured my reading, I noticed within weeks that I arrived at Monday sessions more regulated. Less braced. More curious.

The curriculum also fights what I've called meaning erosion, that slow leak of purpose that precedes compassion fatigue. Burnout rarely announces itself. It just quietly replaces why you do the work with how much of it there is. Reading writers who are still asking the deep questions re-anchors me in my own.

And then there is the Pilgrim's reason, which might be the truest one. Paul wrote to the Philippians that we should dwell on whatever is true, noble, and lovely. I used to hear that as moral advice. I now hear it as trauma-informed neuroscience delivered two thousand years early. What we behold, we become. A curriculum is simply beholding on purpose.

Start smaller than you think

If you want to try this, resist the urge to build something elaborate. Pick three publications: one that sharpens your craft, one that tells the truth about lived experience, and one that tends your soul. Assign them days. Save one line from each. Reread your own words once a week, whether that's a journal, a newsletter, or old case notes, and ask what has changed in you.

Then watch what happens over a season. Not to your knowledge. To you.

A question for you

I am still building my shelf, and I would genuinely love your help with it. What writer is forming you right now? Leave a name in the comments. I read every one, and Friday's slot in my curriculum is permanently open.

And if you are a helping professional who feels that meaning erosion I mentioned, the slow leak more than the crash, that is exactly what we tend together inside my 1:1 coaching at http://growheal.me. The door is open, no urgency, whenever the timing is right for you.

Until next week, keep reading like it matters. It does.

Ron

There’s a detail in the Elijah story in the Bible that I keep returning to.

He’s just had the biggest win of his ministry, fire from heaven on Mount Carmel, and within a day he’s under a broom tree in the wilderness asking God to let him die. If anyone ever needed to process, it was Elijah. And an angel shows up and doesn’t ask him a single question about it.

“Arise and eat.”

Bread. Water. Sleep. Then the angel wakes him and does the whole thing again, because the text says, the journey is too great for you. Only later, at Horeb, after the food, the rest, and the long walk, does the question finally come: What are you doing here, Elijah? And even then, the answer doesn’t show up in the wind, the earthquake, or the fire. It comes as a whisper. In stillness.

The body first. The story later. The meaning last of all.

I keep thinking about how often we get that order backward. With our clients, yes. But if I’m honest, mostly with ourselves.

The inheritance we never questioned

You and I were raised in a field born under the banner of the talking cure. That phrase goes all the way back to the beginning, and it smuggled in an assumption we mostly stopped noticing: that trauma is processed by putting it into words. Tell the story. Get it out. Catharsis as treatment.

So we ask the client to start at the beginning. What happened. What happened next. And sometimes you can feel it in the room, that it isn’t working. They’re telling the story, maybe for the hundredth time, maybe fluently, and nothing in them is moving. The words are going around the wound, not through it.

It took me years of practice to fully believe this, so I’ll just say it plainly: talking about trauma is not the same as processing it. Sometimes it’s the opposite. A story told in a dysregulated body isn’t processing. It’s rehearsal. The nervous system runs the old loop one more time and files it, again, under danger.

You already know this. Not from a textbook. You know it because you’ve done it with your own story.

What the body already knew

The research eventually caught up with what our clients had been showing us all along. Bessel van der Kolk built a career on the observation that trauma isn’t stored primarily as narrative. It lives in the body as sensation, image, fragment, impulse. In some of the early brain imaging work, when survivors were exposed to reminders of their trauma, activity in the region tied to speech production actually dropped. Van der Kolk called it speechless terror.

Sit with that finding for a second, because it changes the assignment. When we open with “tell me what happened,” we may be asking for the one capacity the trauma most disrupted. We’re requesting language from a state that is, in a real sense, pre-verbal.

From a Polyvagal perspective, this tracks. Porges’ framework (I hold it as an influential clinical model rather than settled science) describes a nervous system that has to detect safety before the higher stuff comes fully online. Whatever we end up concluding about the mechanisms, clinicians keep coming back to the theory because it names what we see every week: no felt safety, no real processing. A body in survival mode can produce words. What it can’t do yet is integrate.

Bottom-up before top-down.

Breath, rhythm, sensation, the felt experience of a settled person across the room, before insight and language and meaning. Neither direction is wrong. But sequence matters, and trauma usually asks us to start lower than we were trained to start.

Now here’s the part about you

Here’s what I really want to say in this letter, helper to helper.

You are probably the most fluent person in the room when it comes to your own pain. You’ve got the language. You can name your attachment style at a dinner party. You can narrate your childhood with clinical precision, and you’ve done it, in supervision, in your own therapy, maybe in a training where the icebreaker got too real.

And has it moved?

That’s the trap I keep watching helpers fall into, and the one I’ve fallen into myself. We turn our wounds into case presentations. We process out loud, endlessly, articulately, from the neck up, and we call it our work. Meanwhile the body that carries the actual wound never gets the bread and the sleep. It just gets more words.

Henri Nouwen gave us the phrase we all lean on, the wounded healer. But we tend to quote it as permission and forget it was a warning too. Nouwen’s point was never that wounded people automatically heal others. It’s that our wounds become a source of healing only when they’re being tended. An open wound that’s merely narrated isn’t a wellspring. It’s a leak. And a helper who is leaking will keep asking clients to talk about their trauma, because talking about trauma is the only kind of processing the helper has ever let themselves have.

Janina Fisher draws a line I think about a lot: there’s a difference between remembering something and reliving it. Only one of those heals. And the difference isn’t the content of the memory. It’s the state of the body holding it. That’s true in your office. It’s true in your own therapy too.

What processing actually is

So if it’s not recounting, what is it?

Here’s how I’ve come to think of it: processing is having a new experience while touching an old one. It’s the nervous system finishing something it couldn’t finish at the time. The old memory rises, and instead of the old collapse or the old bracing, something different happens. The body stays present. Another person stays present. The moment completes.

You can see it at the center of everything that works. EMDR keeps one foot in the memory and one firmly in the room. Somatic work lets the body complete the movement it had to abort. IFS lets a part that’s been guarding the gate finally be witnessed instead of managed. Different methods, same grammar: not tell it again, but feel it differently.

Processing is not remembering out loud. It is finishing what the body started.

Scripture knew this long before we had the vocabulary. “Be still, and know that I am God.” Look at the order of operations in that verse. Stillness first. Knowing second. The psalmist of 131 says, “I have calmed and quieted my soul, like a weaned child with its mother.” Not a child explaining. Not a child performing insight. A child who has already been fed, resting against a body unafraid.

Even Job’s friends got it right for exactly seven days, the ones they spent sitting on the ground with him saying nothing. Their malpractice started the moment they opened their mouths and began interpreting.

For Monday morning, and for you

A few things I’d invite you to let land this week.

Slow the story down in your office. When a client is racing through their history in a flat voice, the kind move usually isn’t “go on.” It’s “let’s pause here.” Regulate, then narrate. Titration isn’t avoidance. It’s dosage.

Remember that your presence is an intervention before your questions are. Co-regulation comes before self-regulation. The most trauma-informed thing in your office might not be your treatment plan. It might be your own nervous system, settled enough to lend out.

And that’s exactly why the last one matters most: you can’t lend out a nervous system you never let anyone settle. Where in your life is someone feeding you before asking you questions? Who sits with you the way Job’s friends did in their finest hour? If the honest answer is nobody, then some of your exhaustion isn’t a caseload problem. It’s a broom tree problem. You’ve been trying to walk to Horeb without the bread.

I don’t have a clean answer about when the words belong, and I don’t fully trust anyone who does. The words matter. Eventually the story matters. Our field keeps finding that a coherent narrative is part of how healing settles in for good. But the story was never the door in. The story is what becomes possible once the body believes it survived.

So here’s the question I’m leaving on your doorstep this week, and I’m asking it of myself too: where have you been asking for the story, from your clients or from yourself, before the body was ready to tell it?

How is your compassion fatigue or burnout? You can assess it free with our online assessment tool at CompassionFatigue.net

Are you ready to learn more Trauma-Informed Care skills? Take our free course at FamilyHealer.tv

Let Ron Huxley, founder of the Trauma Champions, implement your trauma work with the Survival Quotient (SQ) survey at GrowHeal.me

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Sources & Further Reading

Scripture

• 1 Kings 19:1-13 (Elijah under the broom tree; the whisper at Horeb)

• Psalm 46:10 (”Be still, and know that I am God”)

• Psalm 131:2 (the weaned child)

• Job 2:11-13 (the seven silent days)

On trauma, the body, and speechless terror

• van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Viking.

• Rauch, S. L., van der Kolk, B. A., Fisler, R. E., et al. (1996). A symptom provocation study of posttraumatic stress disorder using positron emission tomography and script-driven imagery. Archives of General Psychiatry, 53(5), 380-387. (The neuroimaging study behind “speechless terror.”)

On the nervous system and felt safety

• Porges, S. W. (2011). The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological Foundations of Emotions, Attachment, Communication, and Self-Regulation. W. W. Norton.

• Dana, D. (2018). The Polyvagal Theory in Therapy: Engaging the Rhythm of Regulation. W. W. Norton. (On co-regulation in clinical practice.)

• Grossman, P. (2023). Fundamental challenges and likely refutations of the five basic premises of the polyvagal theory. Biological Psychology, 180, 108589. (A representative scholarly critique; included so readers can weigh the ongoing debate.)

On remembering vs. reliving, and the modalities

• Fisher, J. (2017). Healing the Fragmented Selves of Trauma Survivors: Overcoming Internal Self-Alienation. Routledge.

• Shapiro, F. (2018). Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) Therapy (3rd ed.). Guilford Press.

• Levine, P. A. (2010). In an Unspoken Voice: How the Body Releases Trauma and Restores Goodness. North Atlantic Books.

• Schwartz, R. C., & Sweezy, M. (2020). Internal Family Systems Therapy (2nd ed.). Guilford Press.

On the talking cure and narrative

• Breuer, J., & Freud, S. (1895/2000). Studies on Hysteria. Basic Books. (The origin of “the talking cure.”)

• Siegel, D. J. (2012). The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are (2nd ed.). Guilford Press. (On narrative coherence and integration.)

On the wounded healer

• Nouwen, H. J. M. (1972). The Wounded Healer: Ministry in Contemporary Society. Doubleday.

Have you ever reached the end of the day and wondered where all your energy went?

You checked the boxes.
Answered the emails.
Took care of everyone else.
Maybe even smiled through the day.

But inside?

You feel exhausted.

Disconnected.

Like you’re simply surviving instead of truly living.

If that sounds familiar, you’re not alone, and you may not have a motivation problem at all.

You may have a nervous system that’s been carrying too much for too long.

When Survival Becomes Your Default

Our brains are designed to protect us.

When life becomes overwhelming through trauma, chronic stress, caregiving, grief, burnout, or years of putting everyone else first, our nervous system adapts.

It shifts into survival.

Sometimes that looks like anxiety.

Sometimes it looks like constantly staying busy.

Sometimes it looks like emotional numbness.

Other times it feels like you’ve lost yourself altogether.

The difficult part is that survival mode can become so familiar that we mistake it for our personality.

You begin saying things like:

• “This is just who I am.”

• “I’ll rest when things calm down.”

• “I don’t even know what I enjoy anymore.”

• “I should be grateful...why do I still feel empty?”

These aren’t signs of weakness.

They’re signals that your mind and body have been trying to protect you.

Healing Isn’t About Trying Harder

One of the biggest myths in personal growth is that change comes from pushing yourself harder.

Real healing usually begins the opposite way.

It begins by slowing down.

By noticing.

By becoming curious instead of critical.

Research consistently shows that awareness is one of the first steps toward lasting change. When we become aware of our thoughts, emotions, physical sensations, and patterns, we create the opportunity to respond differently rather than simply react automatically.

Healing isn’t about becoming someone new.

It’s about returning to the person you were created to be before survival became your full-time job.

Four Questions That Can Change Everything

You don’t need to answer these perfectly.

Just let them sit with you.

1. What has been keeping me in survival mode?

Not just this week.

Maybe for years.

2. What patterns keep repeating in my life?

The relationships.

The worries.

The habits.

The stories you tell yourself.

3. What would healing actually look like?

Not perfection.

Not having zero anxiety.

What would “better” look like?

4. What’s one small next step I could take this week?

Not next year.

Not someday.

Just one next step.

Growth almost always happens through small, consistent changes—not dramatic overnight transformations.

Why We Heal Better Together

Something remarkable happens when people gather in a safe space with others who are also choosing growth.

You realize you’re not the only one.

You hear your own story reflected in someone else’s.

You gain perspective.

You ask questions you never thought to ask.

And perhaps most importantly...

You stop carrying everything alone.

After more than 35 years as a therapist, one thing has become clear to me:

People don’t just need more information.

They need thoughtful conversations.

Guidance.

Encouragement.

A place where they can slow down long enough to hear themselves again.

If You’re Ready for More Than Coping...

That’s exactly why I created GROW & Heal: A Path for Personal Renewal (http://GROWHeal.me)

This is a live, four-week coaching cohort where we’ll walk through the G.R.O.W. Method together:

🌱 Ground — Calm your nervous system and rediscover safety.

🌱 Recognize — Identify the beliefs, patterns, and protective strategies shaping your life.

🌱 Open — Explore new possibilities with curiosity, compassion, and hope.

🌱 Walk — Build practical daily rhythms that help your healing continue long after the group ends.

We’ll meet live each week in a small, supportive group designed for reflection, growth, and meaningful conversation.

A Commitment Reward

Here’s something I’m especially excited about.

If you attend all four live sessions, you’ll receive a complimentary 30-minute private coaching session with me after the cohort.

During that session, we’ll take everything you’ve learned and build a personalized action plan for your next season of growth.

The coaching session is worth more than the cost of the entire cohort.

It’s my way of rewarding your commitment to your own healing.

The Details

GROW & Heal: A Path for Personal Renewal

📅 Dates: July 13, 20, 27, and August 3

🕛 Time: 12:00–1:00 PM Pacific

💲 Investment: $197

If you’ve been feeling stuck, emotionally exhausted, or simply ready for a different way of living, I’d love to walk this journey with you.

Reserve your place today at http://GrowHeal.me.

Healing doesn’t happen all at once.

It happens one intentional step at a time.

Perhaps this is yours.

DM me if you have any questions…

What Is Compassion Fatigue?

Compassion fatigue is the natural, predictable cost of caring — the gradual wearing down of empathy and energy that can happen to anyone who repeatedly shows up for other people’s pain. It is not a character flaw. It’s a nervous system running a caregiving marathon without enough recovery.

Warning Signs to Notice

• Emotional numbness or a shorter fuse than usual

• Dread about work you used to find meaningful

• Sleep that doesn’t actually leave you rested

• Intrusive thoughts about a client’s, patient’s, or student’s story

• Withdrawing from people who care about you

• Guilt about feeling any of the above

One Tool: The 4-4-6 Breath

Use this at the first sign of tension — before a hard conversation, after a hard call, or any time your fuse feels short.

• Inhale through the nose for a count of 4

• Hold gently for a count of 4

• Exhale slowly through the mouth for a count of 6

• Repeat 4 times — the longer exhale tells your nervous system it’s safe to downshift

The Science: Self-Compassion

There’s a researcher named Dr. Kristin Neff who studies self-compassion, and her work comes down to one simple shift: treat yourself the way you’d treat a colleague you loved who was struggling exactly the way you are. Not harsher. Not more forgiving than you’d be to them — just as kind as you’d be to them.

Here’s why this matters: the research shows self-compassion is linked to lower burnout — not lower accountability. Shame tends to shut people down. Compassion tends to open people back up.

So take a moment. Think of one time recently when your patience, or your warmth, felt thin. And instead of asking ‘what’s wrong with me,’ ask: ‘what would I say to a friend going through exactly this?’ You don’t need to write anything down — just notice what comes up.

One Reframe

When your patience or warmth feels thin, don’t ask “what’s wrong with me.” Ask: “What would I say to a friend going through exactly this?” Research on self-compassion links this shift to lower burnout — not lower accountability.

Take thirty seconds. On a scale of one to ten, how full is your cup right now? You don't have to tell anyone — just notice the number. And notice one reason it's that number, and not lower.

“I can care for others and still belong to myself.”

Take the Compassion Fatigue Assessment for a personalized picture in minutes.

CompassionFatigue.net

Get credentialed with the Trauma-Informed Care Certification.

TraumaToolbox.com

It’s how you open the meeting, how you speak, how you end, how you hold the room.

Because every meeting teaches people something about safety,

belonging, or whether their voice matters.

And that lesson lasts longer than the agenda ever will.

So just reach out to me at familyhealer.tv or traumachampions.com

Get more from Ron Huxley LMFT in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

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I have spent over two decades sitting with people who were convinced that what happened to them in childhood had already written the ending of their story. The ACEs research gave us language for why that feeling is so persistent — and it was a landmark gift to the field. But lately, emerging science has been whispering something I have believed in the therapy room for years: the story is not over. Not even close.

Let me tell you what the research is saying now, and then show you a practical way to use it.

The ACEs Study Changed Everything. And We Need to Change Again.

In 1998, the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) Study, conducted by Kaiser Permanente and researchers Vincent Felitti and Robert Anda, gave us one of the most important public health findings in modern history. The numbers were impossible to ignore: childhood adversity does not stay in childhood. It follows people into their adult bodies, relationships, health outcomes, and nervous systems.

If you work in trauma, parent a child, or are trying to understand your own story, you owe something to that research. It created a shared language for suffering.

But here is where I want to push us forward: knowledge of what harms does not automatically tell us what heals. We have spent the better part of three decades building a picture of the wound. We are now, finally, getting serious about the medicine.

Learn more about the ACE’s when you become Trauma-Informed Care Certified at TraumaToolbox.com

A Different Question Changes Everything

A growing body of research has begun asking a different question: not what goes wrong, but what goes right?

Researchers such as Christina Bethell, Ph.D., Ali Crandall, Ph.D., and others have identified two categories of experiences that buffer the effects of early trauma: Positive Childhood Experiences (PCEs) and Positive Adult Experiences (PAEs).

PCEs are supportive, relational, and safe experiences that occur during childhood and adolescence: feeling heard by a caregiver, having a trusted adult outside the home, and experiencing a sense of belonging.

PAEs are their adult equivalents. The ongoing relationships, communities, and opportunities in adult life that create the same conditions: connection, emotional safety, meaning, and the experience of being valued.

The research findings on PAEs are, frankly, stunning. Adults who reported higher levels of supportive relationships, belonging, and opportunities for growth showed significantly lower rates of depression and anxiety, even when they carried high ACE scores from childhood (Crandall et al., 2023). The implication is not that childhood adversity doesn’t matter. It absolutely does. The implication is that the nervous system remains responsive to healing across the entire lifespan.

Healing is not only possible for children who got the right start. It is possible for the adult who did not.

What PAEs Actually Are

The positive experiences that show up consistently in the research are not complicated, but they are easy to underestimate in a culture that tends to prioritize productivity over connection. They include:

• Having two or more people you can call when things fall apart

• Feeling emotionally safe enough to be honest with at least one person

• Experiencing a genuine sense of belonging — somewhere, to someone

• Having opportunities to contribute and help others

• Being encouraged to keep learning and growing

• Feeling valued and respected as a person

• Finding meaning and purpose in your daily life

• Participating in a community that supports you

• Maintaining hope about your future

Most of these center on one thing: relationship. Safe, consistent, reciprocal relationship. This should not surprise us. We know from decades of attachment research that the nervous system heals best inside a safe connection. What is new is the evidence that this remains true at 35, at 52, at 67. Your window of opportunity has not closed.

I will also add something the research has not yet fully measured, but that I see consistently in clinical work: time in nature, creative expression, and meaningful ritual also function as PAEs for many people. The science will catch up.

A Caution Before We Go Further

I want to name something directly.

There is a version of this message that I want no part of. The toxic-positivity version that says, “Just focus on the good things and your trauma will resolve.” That is not what this research says. That is not what I am saying.

The science on PAEs does not minimize ACEs. It does not suggest that connection alone can undo abuse, neglect, or chronic trauma exposure. Some people with significant histories of adversity will continue to struggle regardless of the support around them, for reasons we do not yet fully understand. And not everyone has equal access to the positive experiences that buffer trauma’s impact. Economic instability, systemic inequity, and social isolation make PAEs harder to access for the very people who need them most.

What the research does say is this: there is hope grounded in biology. The nervous system is not a closed system. It remains open to healing input throughout life. That is worth knowing. It is worth building toward, for ourselves and for the families and communities we serve.

The G.R.O.W. Method: A Practical Path to Creating PAEs

Knowing that positive adult experiences can buffer the effects of childhood trauma is meaningful. But knowing it and living it are two different things. Many of the people I have worked with (and many of you reading this) have nervous systems wired toward threat detection, self-protection, and isolation. The conditions that make PAEs possible (safety, trust, belonging, openness) do not come automatically when your history has taught you that people hurt you.

This is where the G.R.O.W. Method™ becomes practical.

G.R.O.W. is a four-stage trauma-informed rhythm I developed to help people move from surviving to thriving. It is not a quick fix. It is a compass you can return to whenever old wounds resurface, or stress narrows your world. And it maps directly onto what the PAE research says we need.

Here is how each stage helps you build the conditions for a positive adult experience:

G — Ground in Safety

“What does my nervous system need right now?”

You cannot build positive adult experiences on an unregulated nervous system. When your body is stuck in a chronic threat state, hypervigilant, shut down, or cycling between the two, connection feels dangerous, trust feels naive, and belonging feels like a trap.

Grounding is the non-negotiable first step. It teaches the body: That was then. This is now. Through practices like slow diaphragmatic breathing, 5-4-3-2-1 sensory grounding, feet-on-the-floor anchoring, or simply orienting your eyes to the safe details of the room around you, you begin to widen what trauma therapist Dan Siegel calls the window of tolerance: the zone where curiosity, connection, and choice become accessible again.

You cannot receive a PAE if your nervous system is too activated to register it as safe. Grounding is how you make room.

One practice: The next time you feel yourself bracing before a social situation or avoiding contact with someone who could support you, try this first: six slow breaths with the exhale longer than the inhale. Feel your feet on the floor. Name three things you can see. Now reach out.

R — Recognize the Wound

“What pattern is asking for compassionate attention?”

Many adults who experienced childhood adversity carry survival patterns that made perfect sense once, but now get in the way of the very experiences that would heal them. People-pleasing prevents an honest relationship. Hypervigilance that reads neutral faces as threatening. Numbing that keeps the connection at arm’s length. Overfunctioning makes asking for help feel unbearable.

Recognition is not self-criticism. It is becoming a curious, compassionate witness to your own patterns, asking How did this help me survive? before asking, how do I change it?

This matters enormously in the context of PAEs, because the patterns that protected you from harm are often the same patterns that block you from healing connection. When you can name the pattern and trace it to its origin, you gain some distance from it. You shift from being the pattern to having a relationship with it, and from there, you have a choice.

One practice: Use the trigger-to-need map. When you find yourself pulling away from a potential connection, ask: What am I feeling in my body? What emotion is here? What old story is running? What did I need then — and what do I need now?

O — Open to Healing

“What restorative practice, relationship, or meaning can I let in?”

Opening to healing is the stage where PAEs become possible. It is the willingness to let something good in, not because the pain is gone, but because the window is open just wide enough.

This might look like joining a group, even though groups feel risky. It might look like accepting support from someone who has repeatedly offered it, even though relying on others has historically hurt you. It might look like finding meaning in your story — not minimizing what happened, but asking, What do I refuse to pass on? What do I want to pass forward?

For some people, opening happens through therapy: EMDR, somatic work, Internal Family Systems, or other trauma-informed approaches that can help the body process what the mind alone cannot resolve. For others, opening happens through creativity, nature, spiritual practice, grief ritual, or sustained peer community. The pathway is personal. The direction is the same: from protection toward possibility.

One practice: Choose one life-giving action this week and schedule it before you feel like doing it. Motivation follows action in trauma recovery. It rarely precedes it. Walk. Call. Create. Attend. Show up.

W — Walk in Wholeness

“How do I embody healing in daily life?”

Walking in wholeness is integration. It is where positive adult experiences stop being occasional and become part of the rhythm of your life. It is where the science of PAEs — connection, belonging, meaning, safe relationship — gets woven into your daily choices rather than left as an aspiration.

This stage involves sustainable relationship investments, identity practices that contradict old trauma narratives (“My past shaped me, but it does not get the final word”), clear boundaries that allow love to remain safe, and contribution: letting your hard-won healing become something that steadies someone else.

The research tells us something powerful here: when adults experience support, safety, and belonging, they are better able to extend those things to the children and communities around them. PAEs can become PCEs. Healing passed forward. That is not a small thing.

One practice: At the end of each day, name one moment when you chose connection over isolation, wholeness over the old wound. Write it down. The brain consolidates what we name, and healing leaves a footprint in the nervous system when we notice it.

A Quick PAE Inventory

Where are you right now? Take an honest look:

• Do you have at least two people you can call when life falls apart?

• Is there at least one community where you feel like you belong?

• Are there people in your life who make you feel genuinely valued?

• Do you have meaningful rituals or traditions that anchor your week?

• Is there a creative outlet — something that gives form to what words alone cannot hold?

• Do you have a sense of what your life is for, beyond just getting through it?

If any of these feel thin or absent, that is not a character flaw. It is information. And it is actionable.

Your Next Step

The G.R.O.W. Method was built for exactly this journey — from a nervous system organized around survival toward one that can receive healing, connection, and meaning.

If you are ready to go deeper, the G.R.O.W. Method™ ebook walks you through each stage with evidence-informed tools, guided practices, and the science behind why they work. It is a first step, a compass, and a companion for the work you are already doing.

Download the G.R.O.W. Method™ ebook at FamilyHealer.tv

And if this newsletter is part of your community of belonging, I am glad you are here. That is not a small thing either.

Subscribe now

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References

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Bethell, C. D., Jones, J., Gombojav, N., Linkenbach, J., & Sege, R. (2019). Positive childhood experiences and adult mental and relational health in a statewide sample. JAMA Pediatrics, 173(11), e193007. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamapediatrics.2019.3007

Bowlby, J. (1988). A Secure Base: Parent-Child Attachment and Healthy Human Development. Basic Books.

Crandall, A., Magnusson, B. M., Barlow, M. J., Randall, H., Policky, A. L., & Hanson, C. L. (2023). Positive adult experiences as turning points for better adult mental health after childhood adversity. Frontiers in Public Health, 11, 1223953. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpubh.2023.1223953

Cunha, O., Machado, C., Braga, T., & Gonçalves, R. A. (2024). Positive childhood experiences and adult outcomes: A systematic review. Current Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-024-05755-0

Felitti, V. J., Anda, R. F., Nordenberg, D., Williamson, D. F., Spitz, A. M., Edwards, V., Koss, M. P., & Marks, J. S. (1998). Relationship of childhood abuse and household dysfunction to many of the leading causes of death in adults. American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 14(4), 245–258.

Frankl, V. E. (2006). Man’s Search for Meaning. Beacon Press. (Original work published 1946)

Hölzel, B. K., Carmody, J., Vangel, M., Congleton, C., Yerramsetti, S. M., Gard, T., & Lazar, S. W. (2011). Mindfulness practice leads to increases in regional brain gray matter density. Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging, 191(1), 36–43. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pscychresns.2010.08.006

Lieberman, M. D., Eisenberger, N. I., Crockett, M. J., Tom, S. M., Pfeifer, J. H., & Way, B. M. (2007). Putting feelings into words: Affect labeling disrupts amygdala activity in response to affective stimuli. Psychological Science, 18(5), 421–428. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2007.01916.x

Porges, S. W. (2011). The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological Foundations of Emotions, Attachment, Communication, and Self-Regulation. W. W. Norton.

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Tedeschi, R. G., & Calhoun, L. G. (1996). The Posttraumatic Growth Inventory: Measuring the positive legacy of trauma. Journal of Traumatic Stress, 9(3), 455–471.

van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Viking.

van der Kolk, B. A., Stone, L., West, J., Rhodes, A., Emerson, D., Suvak, M., & Spinazzola, J. (2014). Yoga as an adjunctive treatment for posttraumatic stress disorder: A randomized controlled trial. The Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, 75(6), e559–e565. https://doi.org/10.4088/JCP.13m08561

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If you are reading this, there is a good chance you have been giving more than you have been recovering.

You may be a therapist, teacher, nurse, pastor, parent, social worker, nonprofit leader, first responder, or caregiver. You may still care deeply about the people you serve. But caring may feel heavier than it once did. Something that used to come naturally now costs something to reach for.

This piece is not here to shame you, diagnose you, or tell you to try harder. It is here to help you pause, notice what you are carrying, and take one gentle step toward what I call compassion flow — the ability to care from a grounded, supported, and sustainable place.

Compassion flow is not endless availability. It is not emotional numbness. It is compassion that can breathe, recover, receive, and keep walking.

Why Helpers Struggle to Name What They’re Carrying

Most helpers are trained to notice others' needs before their own. That skill makes you effective in moments of crisis, care, teaching, ministry, or advocacy. Over time, though, it can also make your own depletion invisible.

When exhaustion goes unnamed, helpers tend to blame themselves. I should be stronger. I should care more. Maybe I’m no longer cut out for this work. Sometimes a major change is needed. Sometimes rest is needed. Sometimes professional help is needed. But before you can know the next right step, it helps to recognize what kind of exhaustion you are actually carrying.

That recognition is where everything else begins.

Not All Exhaustion Is the Same

Burnout is often rooted in your environment — too much to do, too little support, roles that have expanded beyond what any one person can hold. It is the exhaustion of chronic pressure and diminishing returns.

Compassion fatigue lives closer to the relational core of your work. You may still care, but the warmth has grown distant. The emotional reserve that once let you sit with someone’s pain without losing yourself — that reserve is depleted.

Secondary traumatic stress is something different again. It is what happens when another person’s trauma begins living inside your own nervous system — the images, the stories, the faces that follow you home.

These experiences can overlap, and they are not always cleanly separable. But the question worth sitting with is: What kind of exhaustion am I carrying? Because the answer shapes what kind of care you actually need.

If this sounds familiar... It may point toward... “There is too much to do, and I cannot keep up.”

Burnout or overload: “I still care, but I feel emotionally empty.”

Compassion fatigue: “Their pain follows me after the helping moment ends.”

Secondary traumatic stress: “I feel spiritually dry, distant, resentful, or numb.”

Compassion or spiritual depletion, “I cannot tell what I feel anymore.” Mixed depletion

Recognition is not self-criticism. Recognition is compassionate truth-telling.

The G.R.O.W. Path: Four Movements Toward Compassion Flow

The G.R.O.W. Method offers a simple path through depletion: Ground, Recognize, Open, Walk. You do not need to complete the whole path today. You only need to begin where you are.

Ground — From Overwhelm to Steadiness

Compassion cannot flow from a place of inner alarm. When your body is tense, your mind is racing, or your emotions feel flat or numb, you may not need a bigger plan. You may need enough steadiness to tell the truth.

Grounding is not pretending everything is fine. It is helping your body and mind experience enough present-moment safety to pause. For some people, grounding is a breath. For others, it is stepping outside, praying, feeling both feet on the floor, or placing a hand over the heart.

A 60-second grounding practice:

Place both feet on the floor. Let your eyes move gently around the room and name three things you can see. Notice one point of contact between your body and the surface beneath you. Take one slow breath in and one longer breath out. Then say, silently or aloud:

In this moment, I do not have to solve everything. I am allowed to pause. I am allowed to notice. I am allowed to begin here.

After that brief pause, ask yourself: What do I notice now that I was moving too fast to notice before?

Recognize — From Confusion to Clarity

Once you are grounded enough to look honestly, the next movement is recognition. Not judgment — recognition.

Where is the depletion actually coming from? What role, relationship, or responsibility feels heaviest? What part of yourself have you been ignoring? Naming this honestly — even in one sentence — is more useful than a page of analysis.

The free Compassion Fatigue Assessment at compassionfatigue.net was designed for this step. It takes about five minutes and gives you personalized results to help clarify your specific pattern.

Open — From Isolation to Support

Many helpers are more comfortable being needed than being supported. They know how to show up for others. They struggle to let others show up for them.

Opening does not mean telling everyone everything. It means allowing the right support, in the right way, at the right level. That might look like rest, therapy, medical care, clinical supervision, spiritual direction, peer conversation, honest boundaries, or simply admitting: I cannot keep doing this by myself.

For those who are spiritually oriented, opening may mean returning to prayer, silence, Scripture, lament, or other practices that reconnect the soul with grace and truth. A helper who never receives eventually has less to give. This is not a weakness to confess. It is a reality to work with.

One question worth sitting with: What have I been carrying alone that was never meant to be carried that way?

Walk — From Insight to Practice

The final movement is where compassion flows and becomes real in ordinary life. Not through a dramatic overhaul. Through one small step that is honest, repeatable, and protective of your capacity to care.

Depleted helpers often create plans that are too large. They decide to change everything, then feel discouraged when exhaustion returns. Walking in wholeness begins with the smaller steps found in…

Grounding: Pause for 60 seconds before entering the next helping situation.

Recognition: Name your state once a day without judging it.

Support: Ask one trusted person for one specific kind of help this week.

Boundary: Protect one block of recovery time this week.

Spiritual care: Spend five quiet minutes in prayer, silence, or honest reflection.

You do not have to choose all of them. You only have to choose one. A small step practiced consistently is more restorative than an ideal plan abandoned quickly.

Your Compassion Flow Statement

If you want to put words to where you are right now, try completing this:

In this season, I am recognizing that I may be carrying ______________________. I do not have to carry it alone. My next small step toward the flow of compassion is ______________________.

You are not failing because you are tired. You are being invited to listen, recognize, receive, and walk forward with care.

Compassion flow begins with one honest pause.

Take the free Compassion Fatigue Assessment at compassionfatigue.net — 20 questions, about five minutes, and personalized results delivered to your inbox.

If you are ready for a more structured recovery path, join our GROWHeal.me support community for free trauma healing and education.