March 21 & 22, 2018 | 9:00AM to 4:30PM
at The California Endowment 1000 N. Alameda St, Los Angeles CA 90012
About the 2018 Conference
Changing the Paradigm Conference in March of 2018 focused on the power of the human body and spirit to recover from trauma and how to generate resilience in our children. Service professionals learned about how trauma and resilience is transmitted across generations and how people can learn not only to be resilient but to also thrive despite trauma histories.
The conference opened with the much-anticipated Dr. Ken Hardy who presented on “Finding the Hero in Troubled Youth.” (He was scheduled to speak at our conference in 2017 on “Healing the Hidden Wounds of Racial Trauma” but a snowstorm prevented him from traveling.)
The preeminent scientist on the subject of intergenerational trauma and resilience, Dr. Rachel Yehuda was also a keynote. Her research on children of Holocaust survivors and children born to women pregnant during 9/11 has advanced the field of epigenetics. Our likes, dislikes and fears are programmed at a cellular level, thanks to the experiences of our parents and maybe even generations before them. We adapt to survive danger and pass those adaptations down to our children. It’s fascinating stuff! (For more, listen to this podcast.)
Dr. Monique Marrow presented “Addressing Trauma in System Involved Youth” focusing on her work in the juvenile justice system among young people of color. (Here is a video preview.)
Tonier Cain was the subject of “Healing Neen” and brought a powerful resilience message that is also a stirring challenge to service providers. (Cissy White wrote an article for ACESConnection.com about the profound impact of Tonier’s message.)
Jim Rendon literally wrote the book about post-traumatic growth. He talked about what he learned from conducting extensive interviews with top scientists in the field as well as from hearing the inspirational stories of people who have overcome life-changing trauma.
In order to be truly trauma and resiliency informed and get participants out of their seats and into their bodies, and in addition to the opportunity to hear these stand-out speakers, each day we offered workshops on “embodied resilience.” Physical work can help us not only regulate our emotions, but also rewrite old patterns of responding. Kirstie Seaborne from Embodied Parents in the UK helped us recognize patterns and learn to overwrite our conditioned responses to conflict and stress; Elaine Miller Karas taught the body-based Community Resiliency Model (CRM); Nkem Ndefo introduced The Resilience Toolkit; and Hanna Gilan, who is both an Echo trainer and yoga teacher trainer, facilitated a mini version of our trauma-informed yoga training. Lastly, Shaun Tomson – a world-class surfing champion – talked about the role of spirituality in post-traumatic growth.
Meet our Speakers
Dr. Kenneth V. Hardy is an internationally recognized clinician, author, and Trainer. He is also the Director of the Eikenberg Institute for Relationships in New York City where he maintains a private practice specializing in working with traumatized and oppressed populations. Dr. Hardy is the former Director of the Center for Children, Families, and Trauma at the Ackerman Institute in New York City, and formerly served on the faculty at Syracuse University where he held numerous positions including Director of Clinical Training and Research, as well as Chairperson of the Department of Child and Family Studies.
Rachel Yehuda, PhD, is the Director of the Traumatic Stress Studies Division at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine. Dr. Yehuda is a recognized leader in the field of traumatic stress studies. She has authored more than 250 published papers, chapters, and books in the field of traumatic stress and the neurobiology of PTSD. Her current interests include the study of risk and resilience factors, psychological and biological predictors of treatment response in PTSD, genetic and epigenetic studies of PTSD and the intergenerational transmission of trauma and PTSD.
Dr. Monique Marrow is a child clinical psychologist and serves as a training specialist for the Center on Trauma and Children. She has worked for several years in the field of juvenile justice as a clinician, administrator and national consultant. Dr. Marrow serves on National Child Traumatic Stress Network’s Steering Committee, Affiliate Advisory Board, Community Violence, Complex Trauma and Justice Consortium Committees. She is co-chair for the Juvenile Justice Treatment Sub-Committee and recently co-authored a training curriculum with members of this committee entitled “Think Trauma: A Training for Staff in Juvenile Justice and Residential Settings.”
Jim Rendon is a freelance journalist who covers business, science, design, the environment and plenty of other topics. His work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine and newspaper, Mother Jones, Marie Claire, Fortune, Men’s Journal, Rolling Stone, Outside and other publications. His newest book Upside: The New Science of Post-Traumatic Growth explores the life-changing implications of post-traumatic growth—an emerging field of psychological research that shows how the suffering caused by traumatic events can be harnessed as a force for self-improvement and success rather than destruction.
Tonier Cain was the subject of the powerful documentary “Healing Neen” and is the founder of Healing Neen, Inc. She is the former team leader for the National Center for Trauma-Informed Care, with the National Association of State Mental Health Program Directors. After surviving a childhood of unspeakable sexual abuse, unrelenting violence, and betrayal by systems that were charged with helping, Ms. Cain stands before audiences today, a testimony to the resiliency of the human spirit exemplifying the innate human instinct to survive.
