Wounds You Can Not See: A Guide to Cultivating Risk and Resilience Among At-Risk Youth

By Rodney Walker

Wounds You Can Not See is a premiere resource for trauma-informed education and mentorship and is the educator's guide for nurturing post-traumatic growth in students with high ACE scores. Through a unique blend of social emotional learning (SEL) principles and entrepreneurship education, practitioners in the field will be empowered to reach studen

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ascension Programs & Publishing
• Release date: Jul 15, 2020
• ISBN: 9781953217011

Book preview

Introduction

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

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

To reiterate, what’s more important than the manifestation of trauma is the social, emotional, and psychological processes that have developed as a result of this toxic stress. In the past, school systems have taken a punitive approach to social and behavioral dysfunction, such as detention, suspension, or social isolation within school settings. While these measures produce seemingly effective results in the short-term, long-term studies in research have shown that the diversion and misdiagnosis of deep-rooted trauma has only created a breeding ground for this dysfunction to manifest in the most egregious ways. It reveals itself as mass school shootings, an increase in youth suicide rates, or an increase in substance abuse rates, to name a few.

Recognizing this disparity in dealing with social emotional decline, this book seeks to offer a critical assessment and a trauma-informed approach to helping students self-diagnose, understand, and, with facilitation and mentorship, heal from these wounds. At the core, this book posits that the best way to work with youth who experience high adverse challenges is through comprehensive social, emotional, and entrepreneurial mindset education. Although there are various ways to institute this type of intervention, and the nature of the programming depends on various dynamics of the student population, the principles and activities described herein can be applicable to any population of students. The research and strategies outlined in this book are defined and informed by my experiences and study of the ACE Tech Ambassadors program in Chicago, Illinois, my entrepreneurship education and research from the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship, extensive research from my work with professors on risk and resilience at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, my work with over two dozen inner-city and rural school districts across the United States, and more personally, my experienced socio-emotional growth and resilience as nurtured and developed through these initiatives.

The trauma-informed approach described in this book consults on 5 elements of student transformation:

How to get students to recognize, acknowledge, and empathize with their moment(s) of impact; the critical events or circumstances in their life that represent their most life-shattering experiences, and is at the root of their social, emotional, and psychological dysfunction.

Getting students to be proactive in thinking and creating a positive and constructive blueprint for their life.

To reinvent and establish a new family for students through a fellowship process.

To engender an ownership and leadership mindset within students through entrepreneurship education.

Getting students to adopt critical values that are essential for maintaining resilience through adversity.

Working toward these objectives, in a calculated and highly-efficient manner, will surely cultivate a positive, constructive, and productive environment; one that will inspire students to re-establish a new narrative for their lives, and empower them to take practical steps toward that vision. For educators and advocates, fostering strong relationships with youth is the key to helping students maintain their motivation to thrive in a broken world. This book seeks to help them do that.

Prologue

While social emotional trauma looks different from one student, family, or community to the next, this book posits that in each story, there are core similarities. John Filetti’s ACE study ¹ outlines crucial life experiences that are common among individuals with detrimental life outcomes, and each person has been through a journey that can be told in many different ways while leading to the same result.

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My mother gave birth to me at Cook County Hospital in Chicago, Illinois. I was my mother’s sixth child, born under unstable and dysfunctional circumstances. My mother represents one of thousands of young women raised in poverty and social failure on the South and West sides of Chicago. A byproduct of teen pregnancy, child negligence, sexual abuse, and a widespread gang culture, my mother, and the generation that preceded her, were the subjects of public policy experiments gone terribly wrong. Particularly in the city of Chicago, but in many other inner cities that experienced an influx of black migrants from the South, budget constraints and the demand to conserve the city’s depleting financial infrastructure, led to the political leadership making polarizing decisions. Additionally, racial tension led to a divided city, which led to more spending on infrastructure to support white residents’ demand for separation, and in turn, a more compromised budget.

When the time came to make the inevitable city-wide infrastructural investments (and disinvestments), political leaders chose to compromise the quality care and management of these government-funded neighborhoods. This was the most convenient decision to make given that our city council didn’t encompass the racial diversity and representation that our city reflected. With no adequate political representation from the city’s most vulnerable population, the existing political leaders were allowed to leave black and brown residents in the shadows as they were making tough decisions. The trauma and despair that rose in the wake of these decisions, and the climate that encompassed them, would go on to create a post-traumatic stress and dysfunction that would ripple across generations.

Neighborhoods starved of resources, care, and financial support, created a vulnerable situation that made residents liable to do anything to survive. Already prevalent in Chicago’s narrative was the power and impact of gangs, and their ability to create opportunity, protection, and an overwhelming advantage. Looking for a way out, black residents turned to the streets when legitimate business and opportunity failed to meet them where they were. They became students of the Mafia and other organized crime syndicates, and aimed to understand how to create the empires that seemed to ensure their survival in the world. Consequently, this led to public housing units becoming incubators of a violent street culture, and cities like Chicago became major ports for illegal contraband to accommodate the chronic stress and demand for quick and powerful coping mechanisms to deal with the pain, neglect, and hopelessness.

The black market carried a culture and lifestyle that was inevitably adopted by those who chose to participate. For many, it was their first taste of true power and control, and it often came to them as early as 13 years old. This power often produced greed and adverse character development. Mothers were put in compromising positions given the fact that some couldn’t physically control their hyper-tenacious boys and girls who recently hit the peak of their puberty, and couldn’t convince them against bringing in income that was so desperately needed for their survival.

Parents and children alike understood firsthand how education alone didn’t rid the society of the subversive racial discrimination by teachers in school settings, or redlining policies throughout the city, or the denial of job opportunities despite education credentials. Moreover, education, and whatever benefits it may have brought, didn’t come fast enough to meet the demand for immediate survival, and that was also commonly understood by residents in public housing.

Therefore, mothers were left powerless to prevent their children from joining the street life and all that came with it; sex, alcohol, drugs, violence, and the threat of incarceration or death. It didn’t take long for this possibility to materialize. Thousands of children in Chicago’s public housing began dealing, drinking, extorting, racketeering, and even became parents; all as early as 12 years old. What’s more, is that the demand for drugs, alcohol, sex, and guns didn’t go away, so long as the pain, stress, and deprival persisted. That demand over time created the vacuum that saw countless youth thrown into the vortex, risking their lives for the possibility of survival.

Chicago’s Police Department, being extremely active, vigilant, and responsive to the alarming rates of illegal activity across the city, went on to incarcerate hundreds of offenders by the week. These offenders were predominantly male teens and young adults; many of whom served as the primary contributors for their families. Losing these young men to incarceration, or death, had extreme implications on the onset of post-traumatic stress in their family. Many of these men left behind their children, mother, siblings, and friends; many of whom knew nothing about the lifestyle they were living prior to death or incarceration. These dramatic events often spark a sense of curiosity that motivates their children or siblings to explore and engage in that lifestyle. That engagement starts the cycle of self-destruction all over again.

As the drug epidemic and it’s violent social and political climate tore across cities like Chicago in the early 80’s, it would only further metabolize in the 90’s. On Chicago’s south and west sides, victims of drug and gang-related deaths reached record numbers, and the impact of the raging war had detrimental implications on the young and old. My parents were directly in the line of fire, having grown up without fathers or a stable family infrastructure, in two of Chicago’s most notorious public housing projects; the Cabrini Green and Harold Ickies Homes. By the time my parents were born, these housing units had changed from ecosystems of upward mobility to incubators of poverty, racial abandonment, and violence. Both sides of my family adopted the gang culture, despite what it became overtime. In the absence of the love, safety and security that my family desperately needed, they adopted the streets, which provided a false relief and sense of belonging. Overtime, most of my family learned this, and in the aftermath of the violence, poverty, and social decline that continued to persist, they turned to drugs as the only immediate and sensible coping mechanism from a world that seemed to have no resolve.

This social emotional trauma tricked down, and had explosive implications for my upbringing in Chicago. In my educational memoir, A New Day One: Trauma, Grace, and a Young Man’s Journey from Foster Care to Yale , I discuss my experiences growing up in foster care after my mother lost her parental rights from drug abuse and my father incarcerated for drug-related offenses. After being separated from my family, my life became confusing and unstable, to say the least. From