Child centered play therapy (CCPT) is a therapeutic intervention that provides the environment for children to work through and heal from difficult experiences through expression of play and therapeutic relationship. It has been demonstrated effective with multiple types of disruptive behaviors. I conducted single-case research to explore CCPT's influence on children who had four or more adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and provided analysis of data collected from one assessment administered weekly and one assessment at pre-, mid-, and post-intervention: the Strength and Difficulties Questionnaire and the Trauma Symptoms Checklist for Young Children. The two participants (one 8-year-old White American male and one 9-year-old White American female) demonstrated significant improvement in total difficulties and prosocial behaviors. The study revealed potential therapeutic benefits for utilizing CCPT with children who had four or more ACEs. Encompassed in discussion of study results are implications for practice, suggestions for future research, and limitations.

The #MeToo movement was established as a grassroots initiative in Brooklyn by Tarana Burke, as a way to bring awareness to the commonality of sexual violence towards African American women. Despite the awareness brought by the movement, it was virtually not inclusive of men who have experienced sexual violence. This study intends to provide educators an understanding of this phenomenon, as well as provide practitioners, scholars, and organizations supporting gay male rape survivors a qualitative perspective beneficial to enhance support systems in order to foster post-traumatic growth. This study answered questions of how participants described their experience of having been raped; how learning revealed itself during the participants’ journey towards post-traumatic growth; and what factors participants described that helped and/or hindered their ability to manage the experience, learn, and develop towards post-traumatic growth. Six individual in-depth cases are presented; each participating in a two-hour interview. Using Lifelines and Nohl’s (2015) five phase analysis of the unfolding of deep learning over time, this study demonstrated that Transformative Learning revealed itself throughout each of these cases. As described by O’Sullivan et al. (2002), Transformative learning is “[an] experiencing [of] a deep, structural shift in the basic premises of thought, feeling, and actions. It is a shift of consciousness that dramatically and permanently alters our way of being in the world. Such a shift involves our understanding of ourselves and our self-locations; our relationships with other humans and with the natural world; our understanding of relations of power in interlocking structures of class, race, and gender; our body-awareness; our visions of alternative approaches to living; and our sense of the possibilities for social justice and peace and personal joy.” The study provides insight into the various systems and social relationships that help and/or hinder the interviewees’ learning experience, as well as how they managed their lives along the way. Moreover, this study demonstrates that Transformative Learning can take over 20-years, as well as that the process requires recalibration after encountering obstacles as learners journeyed towards post-traumatic growth.

This collection of poems explores memory, trauma, personal relationships, and the natural world. It is a study of the themes that arise from experience and the patterns of language that living creates within an individual. Particular attention to sound, syntax (conveying physical experience and recall), and pacing (representative of natural and biological rhythms) are central to this collection.

When authors write fiction about real, traumatic events, they face ethical challenges about how to portray trauma and its impacts. This dissertation employs methods of close reading and application of theory to investigate authorial choices. I argue that authors writing fiction about trauma often make aesthetic choices that blur the line between figurative and literal language in order to portray bodily experiences. This dissertation takes as its subject novels from sub-Saharan Africa that depict traumas caused directly and indirectly by colonialism. Authors including David Diop (1966-) and Birago Diop (1906-1989) have used these techniques to write about tirailleurs sénégalais, West African men conscripted to serve France’s military in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I bring these authors together with Boris Boubacar Diop (1946-) and Véronique Tadjo (1955-), who wrote books about the Rwandan genocide, because they also perform this translation for the body, asking readers to approach these works with a sensitivity to the ways the body endures trauma. The effect of these choices is a humanizing and integrated portrayal of trauma as a phenomenon that challenges the mind-body separation of cartesian influence and complicates human experience of time as linear. These works create space to think about trauma and recovery as individual as well as communal, to map similarities of human responses to trauma without pathologizing it. Ultimately, these works point to the conclusion that living through/with trauma is possible when the trauma can be incorporated into a new conception of the self.

Human faces provide a rich source of behavioral data. Following acute, potentially traumatic events, manual and automated coding systems of facial behavior may help identify individuals at risk for developing psychopathology. In the present study, OpenFace, an automated system, and FACS, a manual method, were compared as predictors of long-term functioning using facial behavioral data from clinical interviews collected one-month after a potentially traumatic event that brought participants into the emergency department of a Level-1 Trauma Center in New York City. We evaluated similarities and differences in facial emotions identified by FACS and OpenFace to determine their predictive accuracy in capturing Depression and PTSD 6-months and 12-months later. The findings suggest OpenFace is a more sensitive and precise measure of facial behavior than FACS.

Child sexual abuse (CSA) is estimated to affect 1 in 4 girls and 1 in 6 boys before the age of 18 (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2005). Despite the prevalence of sexual abuse and frequent negative outcomes for child victims as well as adult survivors, little is known about CSA from the perspective of the child. To date, the vast majority of research has targeted adults. Studies conducted on children are mostly quantitative and have explored the effectiveness of various treatment interventions. To address the gap in the research literature, the present study investigated the perspectives of children on sexual abuse through thematic analysis of trauma narratives, which were written by children as a therapeutic intervention and described life prior to, during, and following sexual abuse. Analysis of 21 trauma narratives selected through purposive sampling revealed one metatheme, which was titled Fear and Safety. Children's descriptions of past and current fears as well as concerns about their safety and the safety of others were evident throughout all sections of the narratives. Three themes also emerged from the analysis: (1) Memories of the Abuse, (2) The Disclosure and Subsequent Events, and (3) The Healing Journey. The first theme, Memories of the Abuse, included three subthemes: descriptions of the sexual abuse, details about the perpetrators, and children's thoughts and feelings about the abuse. The second theme, The Disclosure and Subsequent Events, included three subthemes: perceptions of the abuse disclosure, experiences during the investigation, and experiences with the justice system. The third theme, The Healing Journey, also resulted in three subthemes: experiences in counseling, how life had changed, and future hopes and dreams. The themes are discussed, and ramifications for prevention efforts, treatment of child victims of sexual abuse, and counselor preparation are iv explored. Additionally, implications of the present study for counselors and community members are delineated. Finally, recommendations are made for future research with child victims of sexual abuse.

This dissertation is an exploration of trauma in the secondary English classroom. It examines what trauma is and the ways in which English classrooms can center healing through rhizomatic explorations of fiction in order to reassemble experiences with trauma and create hope. The heart of this work is a young adult novel embodying a rhizomatic exploration of trauma. In exploring trauma in fiction in a rhizomatic epistemology, the novel uses multiple genres and non-linear storytelling to examine the roots of trauma that are nomadic and non-binary. This writing to heal invites teachers and students to follow the rhizomatic roots necessary for their own healing and allows teachers to think differently about the purpose of the English classroom and what healing-centered practices can look like.

Given the public health crisis of Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) in childhood and adolescence, and the potential lifelong repercussions, this study sought to identify significant predictors of a high self-rating for having experienced ACEs in childhood/adolescence with Hispanic/Latinx adults (n=292) with 55.8% female and 81.5% U.S. born with a mean age of 33 years. Some 52.5% presented moderately high to extremely high levels of race-related stress due to being Hispanic/Latinx; 63.6% experienced moderate to very severe toxic stress in childhood/adolescence and, 66.1% in the past year; 82.6% reported depression, 87% anxiety, and 86.2% trauma during childhood/adolescence; and, 83.1% reported depression, 89.7% anxiety, and 81.1% trauma for the past year. The study introduced the Knowledge of Adverse Childhood Experiences Survey (KACES-20) finding a moderate level of knowledge with deficits regarding how ACEs in childhood/adolescence can place individuals at risk later in life for type 2 diabetes, cancer, and high blood pressure. An ACEs video was included in the study with over 90% recommending the KACES-20 and ACEs video to others; and, together these brief online e-health interventions were associated with significant increases in knowledge of ACEs and self-efficacy for the ability to recognize ACEs in children/adolescents. After taking the KACES-20 and watching the ACEsvideo, 94.6% revealed experiencing ACEs during childhood/adolescence. Having more severe experiences of ACEs was significantly predicted by male gender, higher race-related stress due to being Hispanic/Latinx, higher toxic stress in childhood/adolescence, higher mental distress in childhood/adolescence and the past year, and a higher KACES-20 score. Findings highlight the value of the KACES-20 and ACEs video as brief online e-health interventions, and the important contribution of a new methodology for investigating experiences of ACEs in childhood/adolescence without causing discomfort or re-traumatization. These findings have particular value as contributions to the literature, while focusing on the neglected Hispanic/Latinx population, especially at this historic time of a pandemic and post-pandemic era when ACEs have risen; and, there is an urgent need for tools for prevention and intervention. This study has provided evidence for using the KACES-20 and ACEs video, as well as the study measures for prevention and future research.

As third-year medical students transition from the classroom to the high-stakes, high-stress environment of the emergency department (ED), they confront a unique set of challenges that result in significant personal trauma. The literature offers limited insight into the trauma experienced specifically during the shift to emergency medicine (EM) as medical students’ first clinical rotation. The purpose of this study was to bridge this gap by examining the interplay between students’ perceived psychological safety of their ED teams and their own self-efficacy on the trauma they experienced as learners when working in this unique learning environment. This mixed-methods study included interviews with 17 third-year medical students who immediately completed the EM clerkship at an urban, academic ED. The study addressed four main questions: 1) What types of trauma do students experience in the EM clerkship as they transition from the classroom into the clinical learning environment for the first time in their training? What are the factors of the learning environment that trigger trauma? 2) In what ways, if any, do students’ intersectional demographics affect their experiences of trauma during the EM clerkship? 3) To what extent does general self-efficacy predict medical students’ perceptions of the psychological safety afforded by their clinical team during the EM clerkship? 4) How are students’ experiences of trauma associated, if at all, with perceived psychological safety? What factors in the clinical learning environment contribute to psychological safety or its lack? This study utilized several data collection methods: (a) a pre-interview questionnaire soliciting information on student demographics and responses to items on the General Self-Efficacy Scale, (b) in-depth interviews using the critical incident technique, and (c) responses to items from the Team Psychological Safety Questionnaire. Several key findings emerged. A substantial amount of trauma that students experienced was rooted in a lack of peer support and student empowerment. Various triggers for trauma were identified that transcended different types of trauma. Demographic factors, such as race/ethnicity and gender, influenced the prevalence and nature of these traumatic experiences, with students from underrepresented backgrounds reporting deeper emotional connections with patients. While student self-efficacy was generally high, it did not correlate with the perceived psychological safety provided by their clinical teams. Furthermore, the perception of psychological safety within ED teams correlated with the nature of trauma experienced; those with lower safety scores reported trauma connected to peer support or issues related to cultural, historical, and gender considerations. Lastly, the opportunity for students to safely take risks or learn from mistakes, coupled with their own medical knowledge limitations, emerged as central to their perception of psychological safety within the team dynamic. Deeper insights into the data were revealed through a cross-interview analysis, and several analytical categories were used to further synthesize and interpret the data. Six conclusions were drawn from the study’s findings and analysis: 1) Medical students experience different types of primary trauma when immersed in the ED. 2) Several forces that are intrinsic to the ED workplace influence the trauma students experience. 3) Clerkship leadership must be aware of the unique experiences underrepresented students have in the EM clerkship. 4) The psychological safety provided to students by their teams impacts their experiences of trauma in the ED. 5) Self-efficacy offers a lens to understand students’ experiences of trauma in the ED, but it is insufficient. 6) Clerkship-specific interventions exist to amplify the team psychological safety afforded to medical students.

Title from first page of PDF document. Includes bibliographical references (p. 49-51).