Trauma-Informed Care

The Impact of Trauma

Traumatic childhood experiences have been linked to issues that can negatively impact an entire life:

Emotional Problems
Behavioral Problems
Poor socialization
Risky behaviors
Substance abuse
Homelessness
Unemployment
Criminal behavior, and
Long-term mental health issues

Many of the youth who come to Nexus have experienced horrific trauma, including physical abuse, sexual abuse, emotional abuse, neglect, abandonment, and witness to violence.

This trauma impacts brain development and often results in challenging behaviors in these youth, such as excessive crying, pushing away, tuning out, withdrawing, not eating, inappropriate sexual acting out, or outbursts of anger.

Trauma-Informed Care

All Nexus staff, educators, and foster parents are trained in trauma-informed care to provide safe and effective behavior management techniques for the youth in our care. We also train a select group of therapists in Trauma-Focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (TF-CBT) so we can provide intensive trauma-specific treatment to the youth who need it.

Nexus trauma-informed care strives to create an environment that

contains trauma reactions,
understands that behavior is the result of trauma,
and reacts positively to trauma symptoms.

We also teach youth and families to manage challenging behaviors at home by understanding and reshaping trauma-reactive behaviors.

The State of America’s Children2014 Report. Children’s Defense Fund.
http://www.childrensdefense.org/library/state-of-americas-children/2014-soac.pdf?utm_source=2014-SOAC-PDF&utm_medium=link&utm_cam¬paign=2014-SOAC

Complex Trauma in Children and Adolescents. White Paper from the National Child Traumatic Stress Network Complex Trauma Task Force. 2003.
http://www.nctsnet.org/nctsn_assets/pdfs/edu_materials/Complex-Trauma_All.pdf

Prior Trauma Exposure for Youth in Treatment Foster Care. Copeland, Keeler, Angold, & Costello, 2007; Finkelhor, Turner, Ormrod, & Hamby, 2009.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3667554/