Building Lifelong Resilience

Teresa: I’m Teresa Huizar, your host of One in Ten. In today’s episode, Building Lifelong Resilience, I speak with Dr. Sherry Hamby, renowned researcher and author of Stronger Than You Think. As child abuse professionals, we have an eyewitness view into the resilience of child victims and adult survivors of abuse, yet so much research and public discourse focuses on adversity that even we may misunderstand what resilience is really about.

In her book, Sherry set out to dispel myths such as, “What Doesn’t Kill You Will Make You Stronger,” my least favorite saying ever, and also to lay out a practical roadmap for building lifelong resilience. Now, I love this book. When I read it, I immediately wanted to pass it around to friends and colleagues, for while survivors will find it immensely helpful, so too will all of us.

In our lives and in our work, virtually everyone will face some adversity in our lifetime. How, then, do we ensure we’ll have the resources to face what comes our way? This book offers a hopeful and practical answer to that very question. Get the book, and in the meantime, please enjoy this conversation.

Hi, welcome back to One in Ten.

Sherry: Hi, Teresa. It’s great to be here.

Teresa: All right. So, I was so excited to see that you were writing this book. You’ve been publishing about resilience for a long, long time now. Why did you decide to write a book, which is a very arduous undertaking?

Sherry: Yes, it was a very arduous undertaking.

That’s a great question. I really feel that even back when I was in graduate school, people used to talk all the time about how we needed to get our work out of the ivory tower and not just be talking to each other, which sounded really great to me. But now here it is, some 30 years later, and if you go to conferences or meetings, you’re like, “Well, we need to get this work out of the ivory tower.”

But I think that’s turned out to be a pretty hard task, and I did not just write a book, but I really worked on writing a book for a general audience, which honestly involved a lot more learning than I thought it was going to involve. It’s been a great experience, but it has definitely felt like learning to play the piano or something, just starting from scratch despite all the other writing that I’ve done.

But I think what we know about resilience and trauma has changed so much, even in the last 10 or 15 years. And I just meet so many people, not just, you know, the general population, but even therapists and healthcare providers and other psychology professors who still have this very 20th-century lens on trauma and resilience.

And so, I wrote the book to really try to make it easier for them to figure out what we know now, which is really quite different than what I was taught when I was in grad school.

Teresa: I love the title of it, Stronger Than You Think. It really sets the tone. But, you know, at the beginning of the book, you start by outlining some very common misperceptions about resilience and trauma, for that matter.

And I just want to address those upfront because I thought that was really important. In particular, the idea that resilience not really being about emotional toughness and grit. Can you talk a little about that? Because I think that is a very common misperception and can send us down the wrong paths in our thinking about this.

Sherry: Yeah. That really came, at least as far as the ideas about it in psychology per se, from some mistakes early on from some of the first researchers who did notice that some people were doing better than expected. Norman Garmezy, one of the first researchers in this field, noticed that some victims of child maltreatment were doing better than you would expect if all you knew about them was that they had been abused by their family.

So that was the key resilience insight, and that was a genius insight because back then, almost anybody would’ve told you that the difference between those kids is that probably these ones over here just didn’t get beat up as badly as the ones over here or neglected as badly or whatever. But he realized that wasn’t entirely the explanation, and that some of the kids who’d been exposed to quite a lot of maltreatment still seemed like they were doing okay in terms of, you know, doing okay in school, meeting developmental milestones, things like that.

But unfortunately, as genius as that insight was, he followed it up with a mistake, and the mistake was that he decided that there just must be some sort of inherent characteristic about that, maybe some genetic feature, and that these kids were somehow little superheroes. He called them invulnerable Which of course is a crazy word to describe any child.

Honestly, I don’t know how any of them said that out loud and didn’t realize that that couldn’t be right. But people started pushing back on it almost right away. People like Michael Rutter, the British psychiatrist, were like, “I don’t think they’re invulnerable.” But I think it turned out to be a very sticky concept.

And, uh, you know, in U.S. culture, we have that cowboy mentality. We’re all about rugged individualism, and so somehow just kind of toughing it out just seemed like this really awesome thing to be able to do. And it has taken us a long time to move past that. I mean, still I hear that from people all the time. They’re like, “Well, I was told suck it up,” or “Get tough or die,” or, you know.

There are a million different ways that people communicate that to each other. But I mean, I think it’s pretty obvious if you think about it even for a minute, that it’s got to be wrong, that there have to be other things involved with being able to put together the pieces of a good life after you’ve been exposed to trauma.

And, of course, there are. There are relationships, there’s getting help, there’s finding some sense of purpose in life. There are lots of other things that we need besides toughness.

Teresa: Yes, and we’re going to get into those in just a minute, but I wanted to talk also about a related mistaken idea about grit and toughness, which is that phrase that’s never helped anyone, but people still say it anyway, which is like, “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”

Yeah. And I was glad you took that on, because I can’t imagine a situation in which hearing that would actually help a person. But I loved your explanation about why it’s so wrong. So, for our listeners, can you talk about the sort of dose response issue with trauma, and also with resilience for that matter?

Sherry: Right. So again, going back to the 20th century, or what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, that’s Nietzsche, that’s all the way back in the 19th century. But, you know, it was an idea. It was a guess. Uh, he really suffered from a lot of serious psychological challenges himself, and so I don’t think it even described him, much less any of the rest of us.

But again, like you said, it’s been this very sticky concept, and people I think they just don’t scratch the surface of it because it’s such a culturally resonant concept. But of course, what that would mean is that the more bad things that happen to you, the stronger you become. And we have literally thousands, if not tens of thousands of studies that show exactly the opposite, and that’s the dose-response relationship that you’re talking about, that the more bad things that happen to you, no big surprise, then the harder things are for you, the more likely you’re going to develop PTSD or depression.

And not just psychological problems, but we now know from all the work on adverse childhood experiences and other related studies that you’re also at higher risk for heart disease, for cancer, for diabetes, for a whole host of different kinds of medical problems, too. So, it turns out that it’s exactly the opposite of what that hypothesis is, if you think about it as a hypothesis and not just a, you know, guide for living.

The good news, as you suggested, is that we now know that there’s also a dose-response relationship on the positive side, too, and that the more good stuff that you can bring into your life, you can counter even really high doses of trauma. And again, not just in terms of helping to avoid depression or PTSD or alleviate those kinds of symptoms, but even in terms of reducing the sort of physiological harms that are contributing to higher rates of heart disease and cancer.

So really, the current state of science is a very optimistic state that just suggests there’s so much we can do to counterbalance whatever we’ve been through.

Teresa: So, we’ve talked about the misconceptions about resilience. How do you think that the average person should think about resilience?

Based on all the science, all the research that now exists about it, how should we think about it?

Sherry: I think what I like to say is that we’re not born resilient, we become resilient. And so, what I hope that the average person would think is that they can get better at resilience at any time in their life, because you can add assets and resources and any kind of good thing at all to your life.

And anytime you do that, you are making it easier to withstand or overcome the bad things that have happened to you. So, I think it’s a very optimistic and very hopeful message that there’s a lot more we can do than we previously understood.

Teresa: In the book, you introduce the idea of having a resilience portfolio.

Mm. Can you talk about that a little bit? What is it? What does it consist of? You know, again, how should we think about it?

Sherry: Sure. When I started writing the book, one of my main motivations, as we’ve already been talking about, was to counter some of the misinformation that’s out there and Some of its well-meaning, some of it I don’t think is actually all that well-meaning. There is there’s some really toxic advice about some extreme regimens or diets or whatever, and these, you know, really outlandish promises about how great those are going to make you feel in a week or a day or whatever.

But, uh, but I started to realize once I got into this field more and I started reading more of the book-length literature on resilience and wellness, and I think part of the problem is that there’s too much good advice out there, too. And I’m sure probably all of your listeners have seen these articles or books where it’s like, “50 things you can do to improve your well-being.”

And sometimes that list of 50 things is a perfectly good list. Like, I don’t necessarily object to any of the 50 choices. They’re probably, a lot of them, the kind of thing I recommend in the book. But there’s never any sense of being able to prioritize or sift through them, because obviously none of us are going to add 50 new things to our life.

We’re not going to start 50 new exercise regimens, or we’re not going to start 50 new mindfulness practices or whatever. And so, we need to be able to pick and choose. That’s what we hope that the resilience portfolio will help people with. So instead of just saying that there’s all these different good things out there, we try to provide people this framework, and it has four elements, or domains, as we call them.

So, there’s meaning-making, which is connecting to something larger than yourself, finding some kind of role or mission that you can commit to. There’s regulation, because it’s not just grit or even mostly grit, but you do have to manage your emotions and behaviors. I mean, that’s a challenge that we all face, so we do still need skills for doing that.

Interpersonal relationships, and then the physical environment, our contact with the natural world, as well as what our human-built environments look like. And what I hope people will be able to do with the resilience portfolio model is understand that they need a little bit of something in each of these four domains, but they don’t have to do every single possible thing in all of those domains.

And then when they’ve got a little bit of something in each of those domains, that maybe they can just, you know, relax a little bit and not feel like they keep having to add more and more wellness practices to their life.

Teresa: I thought you added in the book some really great question sets and checklists.

And so, listeners, I hope you get the book, read it, pass it along to friends and family, and go through the questions, ’cause I think they’re insightful whether or not you have a big trauma history or not. But I also thought that the name of the book should’ve been The Good Life, because these ingredients that you’re talking about are not just about resilience in the face of overwhelming trauma with a big T, but I think they’re also just the ingredients for having a happy, healthy life in general probably.

So, I want to start with meaning-making because you spent quite a bit of time on that actually in the book. And what I thought about it was how many survivors talk about things that they do or seek to partner with or speak out about their abuse or volunteer someplace or do something else that’s really about this, and I think it speaks to the importance of it as an element here.

And it doesn’t have to be those things, but I just am thinking about all the adult survivors that I’ve known who have been like, “I wanted to give back. I wanted to help somebody else not go through this. I wanted to advocate. I wanted to volunteer. I wanted to be a scout leader, so I knew kids were safe in our scout club,” or whatever.

So, talk a little bit about why they’re all important, these domains, but-

Sherry: Hmm…

Teresa: Why is this one so resonant?

Sherry: Sure. So, when we started off the process of trying to identify what strengths matter the most, I really expected this to be an incredibly challenging task because as we’ve already talked about, there’s this, the kind of grit, toughness, impulse control camp.

There’re the social support people. There are people who care about attachment. There are all these different groups within the broader field of psychology that are often very invested in one particular strength, and I really thought it was going to be very hard to compare and contrast them and sort out which ones might be most important.

But that turned out not to be the case at all. And in fact, the meaning-making strengths have consistently stood out. We’ve done a lot of research at this point. We have more than 20 datasets that have involved more than 30,000 participants in 10 countries, and so we’ve done quite a lot of research. And over and over again, the meaning-making strengths are the ones that come out to be most important.

And I think it’s great that this is something that you talk about with survivors because I think it is an element that’s missing from a lot of conventional therapies. A lot of traditional cognitive behavioral therapy really focuses a lot more on problem-solving and coping and emotion regulation and things like that, and not very much about thinking about how do you want to give back?

Like, what do you want your contribution to the world to be? But that does seem to be the key thing that people need to find, and that’s why I’m in the field. My mission to reduce the global burden of trauma is definitely tied to my own experiences, which I talk about in the book of growing up in a home with parents who really struggled with alcoholism and depression and that kind of cascading into a whole bunch of other problems as it so often does.

But I think that a sense of purpose, some kind of reason for hope, I mean, these are the things that really help people get into that truly thriving category. In terms of whether or not there are things that are specific to trauma survivors, that’s kind of complicated. I do think many more of us are trauma survivors than we used to recognize.

I mean, that’s the big insight from the work on adverse childhood experiences and polyvictimization and complex trauma and all of that. It’s probably at least 70 or 80% of the US population, uh, just looking at victimization alone and not even thinking about environmental disasters or other forms of trauma.

And it’s similar around the world, more similar than you might think around the world because some of these things are just such common experiences. It does depend on the dose, but I do think that for the most part, the things that make people who have trauma histories feel better are the things that make other people feel better, and maybe they just need a little bit more of some of those things to get themselves into the truly thriving category, especially if their dose is at the higher end of the range.

And there are probably a few things that are more specific. So, in the meaning-making category, probably the main one is just finding a safe space to tell your story. I do think that is really an essential part of the healing process. I don’t know anybody who has really overcome their trauma who hasn’t, at some point in time, told their whole story to somebody that they trusted And I’m not sure if you need to do that if you don’t have a trauma history or have a really minimal trauma exposure.

Teresa: I think one of the things you said, which I think is key, is that there are things, even in the resilience portfolio, that are sort of about recovering from what you’ve experienced, right? Then there’s the part that’s beyond recovery, right? We work with kids, so I’m just talking when I say we about that. We don’t want kids to just not have trauma symptoms.

That’s the foundation, right? We want them to go on and thrive. So, it’s the base of that, and you may have to have some of those things in place in order then, but we’re more than just a collection of trauma symptoms too, right? So, there’s this piece about, you know, yes, regulating your emotions and behaviors and some of this other stuff, which if you don’t do that, you probably won’t thrive.

But then there’s this piece about it, about what would it take to thrive. And I do think even with children, it’s very interesting. Some CACs will ask kids to write like a piece of advice or a word of encouragement to other kids who might come through the center. Mm-hmm. And I’ve seen some of those stuck up on the wall.

It’s so interesting. Not that they’re just like in any way coerced or anything else. It’s just an option. “If you’d like to, you can leave a message for the next person.” They’re so sweet, Sherry, these words of encouragement, and I do think it gets at this meaning-making part, right? Mm-hmm. Because they’re trying to make it a little easier for the next person.

So, they’re often very reassuring, “This is a safe place,” or “It’s okay to tell what happened to you,” or whatever. And I think it’s really rooted deep in us, this need to not just have sort of inexplicable suffering, but that there’s something that we have this internal urge to try to understand it, but also to do something for someone else.

And I just think that’s hopeful, actually, about us and the human condition.

Sherry: Yeah, I couldn’t agree more. I think that is, you know, so beautiful, and what a lovely practice to, you know, to offer those children to participate in. I think that’s really wonderful. And a long time ago, this idea of generativity, it’s an idea from Erik Erikson’s theory, the mid-20th-century psychologist, and he thought that it was something that happened in middle age.

But- Oh… we have found, and not just our work, but I think people have started to realize, and by generativity, I mean, like, the generation or teaching other people your skills, even if they’re more age peers. And he thought that was something that kind of happened, like, after you got a career and a marriage.

Oh. I mean, he was very mid-20th century traditional. But I think that’s actually something that happens so young, and you can see in programs where, you know, the fifth graders become big buddies to the kindergartners, or sometimes even in a preschool, like the four-year-olds will help the two-year-olds show the ropes around.

And-

Teresa: Yeah…

Sherry: So, as much incredibly younger ages than we’ve really appreciated. I think people are trying to contribute to their community and trying to help others in their community in a way that is very much meaning-making. And, I mean, other elements you can see is when you see, like, a five or six-year-old that, “I want to be a vet,” or, “I wanna be a teacher or a firefighter.” I mean, those are the kind of early meaning-making processes too, that they’re trying on these different identities on for size and seeing how they feel. And so I think that even by the age of four or five, that’s a much more important part of people’s lives than we often think it is.

Teresa: As you were talking, I was thinking about in the first CAC that I led, we had a detective whose name was Rusty, and after all the intervention was over with the kiddos, they would get to pick a stuffed animal if they wanted to take it home.

I can’t tell you how many of them named that stuffed animal Rusty after this detective, and they would take Rusty to court with them or whatever. And it just, I think it ties back to the sense of not just that they found that comforting, but also this sort of like They wanted to be a little like him.

You know what I mean? Because they had been treated well by him. And so I think there’s also that part of it. As we get older, we think about it in terms of purpose in life or mission or those kinds of things. But for very young children, it’s even just helping or recognizing helpers or other things.

And I was also at a convening of the Children and Youth Advocacy Centers in Canada, and they have a great… I can’t remember what they call their youth advisory panel, so apologies to my Canadian friends that I’m not remembering the exact title. But they have this young adult advisory panel whose members had been through Children’s Advocacy Centers there as kids, and they’re now advising on programmatic issues, advising on policy, advising on research as a way of giving back.

And listening to them talk and listening to their input at this convening, which involved a lot of professionals, et cetera, I was just so struck by how committed they were to making the process better for the next set of kids that would go through the Child and Youth Advocacy Centers in Canada, and it was a wonderful experience to see and hear that

Sherry: Yeah, I think all of that stuff is so fantastic, and I couldn’t agree more that the kids who are much younger than you might think are really capable of giving very thoughtful input about that and are really already wanting to take on roles in whatever community they belong to where they feel like they’re making a contribution.

And I think in a lot of cultures, they’re much better at encouraging that at early ages than we can be in mainstream U.S. culture and in mainstream U.S. schools. And so whatever people can do to help promote that, I think is so important for children.

Teresa: We talked a minute ago just briefly about regulatory strengths and the fact that you have to be able to manage your own emotions and behaviors to some degree in order to thrive.

And I feel like this also ties into interpersonal and relational strengths in that forming really positive relationships. Often part of that is if you have work you need to do on regulatory strengths, you will have healthier relationships if you do that work, I think sometimes.

But can you talk a little bit about this relational piece? Because I think this is where especially survivors of child sexual abuse, I think often feel very alone. They don’t realize there are other survivors out there. They don’t realize that other children have had this experience. And so until they really connect to a survivor community, often there’s a trust deficit for one thing.

They’ve had their trust violated. They’ve been betrayed. And so I think this is an area where especially they may need some encouragement and support around this domain. So can you just talk a little bit more about how would somebody build up this sort of relational health and interpersonal strength that they are finding that’s an area that they’re struggling with?

Sherry: I totally agree with what you’re saying about the importance of relationships, and that can take a lot of different forms. So with kids, certainly one area that’s a little bit more on the individual end of the spectrum and maybe the kind of thing that’s covered more often in traditional therapy are social skills.

So they do need basic social skills about how to initiate potential relationships, how to maintain them, how to exit them if they need to be exited, or if they’re, or even if a friend of theirs is moving away or whatever. I mean, sometimes even we have to end our relationships, uh, whether we want to or not.

So it certainly can be helpful to help people develop those social skills. It’s also important to encourage help-seeking and to teach them how to ask for social support, and one of my most giant pet peeves in that area is the idea that we should teach kids not to talk to strangers. I think that is such terrible advice because, uh, I don’t know if you’ve ever- Well, it won’t protect them in the first place, you know?

I mean, that’s-

Teresa: That’s a key problem with it, too, right?

Sherry: I don’t know if you’ve ever heard Elizabeth Smart’s story about that. Oh. But the woman who was kidnapped in Utah some years ago and held for several months, is that there was one day when Her offender took her to a library so he could access the internet, and the librarian actually recognized her and was like, “I think that might be Elizabeth Smart.”

And then they approached her and asked her, “Are you Elizabeth? Are you the girl that they’ve been looking for?” But she’d been taught not to talk to strangers, and so she didn’t tell them. And I think that what we need to do instead is we need to give people information about understanding whom they should approach if they need help, how to tell if somebody is a trustworthy adult, and give them social skills for interacting with adults too.

And so sure, obviously they shouldn’t get in a strange person’s car or something like that, and they should certainly be talked to about those kinds of things. But I think that confident young people with social skills are the ones who are much better at avoiding victimization. But to go back to what we were talking about earlier at the beginning, I think a lot of that stuff is still more focused on dealing with the victimization and looking backward and what happened or what might happen.

And what we really need is to also help people look forward and to visualize what kind of life they want, even with kids. And so we need to help them start developing their social networks. And I think sometimes in therapy, we try to do too much to try to be the social network for a child or for a family. Or we want the support group for other kids to, like, be their social network, but they need social networks that are not just about the services that they’re receiving and I don’t think that sometimes we spend enough time working with them to think about, like, who are their friends and who might they like to be friends with or, you know, you mentioned scouting.

I am a huge fan of scouting or sports or, um, you know, band or theater or the, you know, I mean, there’s just so many different ways that they could start to connect with other kids their own age. And I think it should be a much more central part of our services for kids who are likely to have been isolated by their victimization or by the challenges that their family is experiencing and to make sure that they have these social networks outside of whatever services they’re seeing

Teresa: Out in the community, right? Part of what you’re talking about is the optimism of what you want your life to be future-focused, which is both, I think, exciting, right? To think about how you might craft a life that is quite different from one you’ve had and plan toward that. And I just appreciated the sort of things in the book that were just great questions to ask about how you might connect in your community.

You know? What might you try? Let’s talk a little bit about the physical environment and nature, that sort of thing. Because honestly, it’s so interesting, like all of these other domains, I feel like they may not have been talked about enough, but they’ve popped up in the literature here or there. And not that we haven’t heard anything about this before, but making this an explicit connection I thought was very interesting about both people’s surrounding physical environment, right?

So that kind of thing. But also just their exposure to the natural world. Why is this so important?

Sherry: You know, I have to admit that even our original version of the resilience portfolio model only had the first three domains that we’ve talked about, and it took us a long time to realize, like, hey, we’re missing the physical environment.

I am trained as a clinical psychologist, and I think You can get into that lens of your professional discipline and not even realize that what you’re missing, you know? And I think that it is very easy for us not to think about that, but it turns out that contact with the natural world especially, so what they s- call green or blue spaces, such as forests, parks, oceans, or lakes or anything like that, has an incredible healing effect on us.

Uh, actually, just a few weeks ago, even since the book came out earlier this summer, a very large synthesis of more than 3,000 different studies with 10 million participants came out on nature-based interventions, and they found really strong impacts on both positive and negative measures of how people are doing.

So, by negative I mean, symptoms of depression or anxiety, and often also more positive measures of well-being or things like that, and also even physiological measures. And the size of the effects of those interventions match or beat a lot of traditional psychotherapy out there.

And a colleague of mine posted it on LinkedIn and said, “Well, if all else fails,” and I’m like, “Why would you wait until all else fails?” Like, this should be, like, the first thing that you’re doing is just getting outside and spending some time outside. And there’s just some really exciting work. This is not the kind of work that I do, but there’s some really exciting work about how that is just helping to regulate our biome.

Probably most of your listeners now know how important it is for us to regulate our gut microbiome because there’s all these little bacteria living inside of us. And if they’re not inside of us, we get sick. I mean, we get really sick. Like, we need those, those little critters for our own health and well-being.

And by spending more time in the natural world, some of the things that we’re getting are just more contact with those healthy bacteria. We’re getting more exposure to something called phytoncides, which are… It’s just the compounds that make, like, pine trees smell like pine trees and rosemary smell like rosemary.

And we co-evolved in those spaces when we were around that stuff all the time. So it’s not just helping us with our mood, although of course, for most people, pleasant to spend the day on a trail or at the beach or something like that. But it’s also helping to, you know, put our physiology back where it needs to be.

And even things like the sound of the waves are helping to regulate our brainwaves, which, of course, share the same name, perhaps not by coincidence. And so I think it’s really incredibly powerful, and so many people are living in fairly nature-starved environments, and that is something that probably almost anybody could do almost immediately that would make a much bigger contribution to their health and well-being than they realize.

Teresa: Well, and it’s so interesting in thinking about how this relates to kids, who spend so much time on screens, right, and indoors. Mm-hmm. Those kinds of- Yeah… this is something that all of us as child abuse professionals could also be encouraging. Yes, you know, you need to do X, Y, and Z, but also how much time are you spending outside?

You know, how much time are you spending… And it, that could be through an organized sport, but it also could be in lots of other ways as you’re describing it. And also, it can give caregivers something constructive they can do to contribute to their child’s healing, ’cause I think a lot of caregivers feel just at a loss.

They want to be deeply supportive. They show up for therapy or take their child to therapy, but then they feel, “Beyond that, what can I do?” It’s like, well, one thing you could do, take your child for a walk in the park. Mm-hmm. You know, do these other things that you’re describing, and these are also positive contributions to their overall healing.

Sherry: Yeah. Gardening, you know, bird watching, set up a bird feeder in your yard. Yeah. And it’s all simple, and maybe it even sounds like too simple, but it all has, like, such powerful impacts. And again, you know, thinking about what kind of life you wanna live and, like, what you visualize for the future. And I mean, I don’t think this is as well documented, but I do think that it has certainly happened at the same time that the less time we have spent outside, the higher rates of anxiety and depression and other kinds of problems that have been rising in childhood. And, you know, and a lot of times people think it’s about the content of what they’re seeing on TV or what’s in their video games and stuff, and some of that stuff is not so great. But I think that we don’t realize how much we might just be missing in terms of just getting out there and mixing with the kind of bacteria that we need to be mixing with. There was a conference I went to recently where they were talking about how that’s one of the underappreciated benefits of pets because they’re a little bit dirty. Yes. And that’s actually really good for us because they’re walking with their bare paws on the ground when you take them for a walk outside or whatever, and they’re bringing some of that stuff back in the house, and that’s

I’m a huge dog lover and that’s probably one of the benefits that I’ve been underappreciating of my dogs, is the way they’re tracking a little bit of dirt into the house.

Teresa: I’m going to admit, I’ve maybe underappreciated that in the past as well. well, Sherry, I’m just curious. You wrote this book for a lay audience, but I think it’s also very helpful for child abuse professionals, not only because there is some overlap between survivorship and the career professionals that do this work, but also because I think it can be such a helpful roadmap in terms of thinking through with families what might be helpful.

So how are you hoping it’s going to be used?

Sherry: Yeah, it has. Folks who are in the field have shown a ton of interest in the book, and even when I have gone to bookstores and book festivals and things like that, a lot of the people who have approached me are doing some sort of human services work. They’re lawyers or they’re nurses.

And I do think that one of the things that has surprised me a little bit about it, you know, I’ve just learned so much from this process myself, like way more than I was expecting, is that I really thought that child abuse professionals or any of these other teachers and other people working in human or social services, that they would be mostly reading it so they would get ideas, as you just said, to like what they could do with their clients or their students or whatever population they’re working with.

But the main thing that I have heard from a lot of these people is that, “Wow, this like gives some ideas about what I can do to help manage all the stress of doing- Yeah… this kind of work.” And of course, we now know that secondary trauma is also a major factor in people’s lifetime trauma dosage. It’s even, for some years now, been a formal part of the diagnostic manual that the exposure that first responders get of all different types.

So, whether you’re on a crisis hotline or you work in an emergency room or you’re an EMT or just like, you know, any of these people who are doing this work, and of course, just from hearing the stories of the families you work with if you’re connected to a CAC in any way, that those are all trauma burdens on us, too.

And more similar to getting directly assaulted or mistreated ourselves than we used to think because our bodily responses are more similar than we were really giving credit for before. And so one of the things that I have been really happy to see is that all of these providers are seeing this as like a roadmap that I could use, and I think they like it because it’s very positive and it is future-oriented, and it’s not just kind of starting at the basics with problem-solving and coping because hopefully most of them know how to do that.

If they’re in the field. But ways that they can sustain doing this career over the decades which, of course, many of us do manage to do that and some of the biggest insights I’ve learned has been from delving into that literature much more than I had previously. But I think we need to do more to support The people who are doing this work too, and that this approach is really a great approach for thinking about how to do that.

Teresa: Well, I so appreciate the fact that you invested in writing the book, and I completely agree and hope that our listeners will get a copy of it and read it and use it to their own benefit and the benefit of those around them. So thank you so much for coming on One in Ten again, and come back anytime.

Sherry: Oh, well, thanks so much for having me.

I really enjoyed having our conversation. Thank you

Teresa: Thanks for joining us on One in Ten. Today, we hope you’ll help us spread the word about the podcast. If you’re a fan of the show, please rate us in the app wherever you listen or like the episode on YouTube, and please share the episode with a friend or on social. For more information on this or any of our other podcast episodes, please visit our podcast website at oneinentenpodcast.org.