Childhood maltreatment has had a damaging effect on many people in our society. The abuser strips the victim's innocence and leaves him or her to maneuver through a lifetime of harmful residue. Creating a healthy societal awareness and offering effective counselling solutions are necessary to minimize the damage of maltreatment.

In this article, my approach to grief tending for the adult survivor of childhood trauma is to integrate a practice of poetic inquiry into one's evolving relationship with oneself. As has been well documented by trauma theory, arts-based practices, here working strictly with poetry, are capable of embracing the often non-linear and multi-layered…

When individuals are exposed an adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), they can be impacted in a variety of ways including health risks, threats to safety, and community-level adverse experiences. The authors have combed recent research to explore what new evidence is available in understanding the nature of adversity that children face and the…

Adults with unresolved Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) present a unique opportunity for universities to support students as they strive toward positive change. As marginalized students seek to improve their lives, they often utilize higher education as their means. Traditionally, this path has not been easy to for students to navigate, nor…

Too many parents who find themselves involved with child welfare agencies have had lives threaded with deeply traumatic events. As adults, their childhood histories manifest themselves in substance abuse, domestic violence, relational problems, risk-taking behaviors, emotional lability, self-harming, anxiety, and depression. To successfully…

Providing treatment to survivors of human trafficking requires mental health professionals to understand complex layers of multiple traumas. These layers include an understanding of how trafficking occurs; what gender, ages, sexual orientations, life circumstances, and ethnicities are most at risk to be trafficked; the lasting impact of…

The polarized nature of the ongoing controversies surrounding the genesis and validity of dissociative identity disorder pit advocates who see and work with dissociative identity disorder sufferers against skeptics who claim it to be an artificial iatrogenically produced phenomenon. This paper suggests that such a dichotomy is unwarranted and…

Vida Bath was the only girl of six children born into a chronically poor family. Her birth certificate lists her father as a "general labourer." Her family travelled around New South Wales and southern Queensland, going wherever there might be work. She remembered being scared when her father had been drinking, especially on Friday…

In this article, Mark Freado and Howard Bath present the case of an 11 year boy who had been arrested and charged with the murder of his two-year-old cousin. Because of the severity of the criminal charge against this boy, and despite his age, a transfer hearing was set to determine whether he would be tried as a juvenile or an adult. Such…

This article describes the story of resilience of a mother who achieved multiple successes despite challenges that included child abuse and homelessness. The factors that contributed to her success included consistent support from a team of staff of the family Assertive Community Treatment (FACT) Program. This agency serves mothers from 18 to 25…

Although the issue of dissociative amnesia in adult survivors of child sexual abuse has been contentious, many research studies have shown that there is a subset of child sexual abuse survivors who have forgotten their abuse and later remembered it. Child sexual abuse survivors with dissociative amnesia histories have different formative and…

The stress of a spelling bee or a challenging science project can enhance a student's focus and promote learning. But the stress of a dysfunctional or unstable home life can poison a child's cognitive ability for a lifetime, according to new research. Those studies show that stress forms the link between childhood adversity and poor academic…

Because most research on military families has focused on children who are old enough to go to school, we know the least about the youngest and perhaps most vulnerable children in these families. Some of what we do know, however, is worrisome--for example, multiple deployments, which many families have experienced during the wars in Iraq and…

Responses to traumatic stress during the earliest years of life can change quickly and can be difficult to identify because of the young child's rapid rate of development. The symptoms of traumatic stress will depend on the child's developmental level and individual coping styles, as well as the quality and nature of the child's most important…

The Canadian young adult novel "The Maestro" by Tim Wynne-Jones foregrounds the relationship between imagination and subjective agency. While Burl uses his imagination at the beginning to protect himself from his abusive father, his fantasies become dress rehearsals for small performances that allow him to try on new identities and exercise…