helping troubled young people rebuild their lives community youth services scott and our c e o scott welcome thank you so is that right is that what you're doing you help troubled young people well we try not to call them troubled because it implies there's something wrong with them and what we know is that they've had lots of traumatic experiences which we'll talk about in a little bit that impact it impact them in certain predictable kind of ways your community your services so what is that organization we're going to put the web site up on the screen by the way throughout the show community services is a social service agency that's based in olympia washington we cover with about twenty three or twenty four different programs most of southwest washington in terms of working with youth and family in children and young people who have experience complex trauma there seem to be an awful lot of things that we can only talk about a couple of them but let's talk about physical abuse emotional neglect and domestic violence is ok so everybody knows that physical abuse is traumatizing to young people you know if people have children are being abused in their families that c p s comes in and removes those children but we also know is if those children are removed that doesn't necessarily mean that the trauma is over it's not  solution just to remove those children from their home line up because a lot of the impact that a complex trauma has on them is that they internalize that trauma so if they move into one of our foster homes for example they generalize the trauma to to those foster families you know if their birth family if dad was the perpetrator of the domestic the physical abuse then the assumption is men tend to be abusers or if the mom in the birth family was somebody who  didn't protect that young person from the abuse then that generalization is that moms and women don't protect kids so physical abuse is bad we all know that absolutely emotional like can be even worse though can't there searches the long term impact of emotional and physical neglect on kids is way worse than physical abuse and the reason is because neglect can be chronic and can happen one hundred percent of the time twenty four hours a day seven days a week where nobody could be physically abusive and how long have you worked in helping at risk youth i think i'm in my forty third year can tell by their behavior we can tell by the quality of their relationships we can tell by how they function at school we know how complex trauma impacts people's ability to learn their ability to form relationships their bill we also know even more importantly how it affects people's neurology and their brain and we're going to get to that but but then we've got this one more that we're going to focus on from a complex problem that's domestic violence this isn't physical abuse and emotional neglect part of domestic violence it can be perpetrators of domestic violence have certain characteristics and those characteristics are that they don't take responsibility for what they do they project the blame of their their mistreatment onto other people so you know family where the father is the perpetrator of domestic abuse and he comes home in mistreats the mom and the kid see that and later he says to the mom i'm sorry but i really had a bad day at work and i just lost my temper that's an example of not taking responsibility he's blaming his boss or he's blaming his work perpetrators of domestic violence also tend to minimize the impact of their trauma but it wasn't that bad i didn't hit you that much or what they do is they blame the victim what we know is that those are traits that young people who grew up in those families tend to learn those characteristics so they come into you know treatment or they come into therapeutic foster care and take on some of those characteristics well let's move on then to the reactions to trauma because one of the reactions i've already heard you talk about it  you know domestic violence is a learned behavior and so if you if you experience it as a youth are you likely to be a perpetrator yourself you can be oftentimes in domestic violence situations victims of domestic violence become perpetrators of domestic violence as they get older and develop their reactions to trauma we've got a lot of things on the slide but one of them is excessive worry and eggs i mean you know some people say well that's just part of life  so it's the excessive part that makes a difference everybody struggles with anxiety or depression periodically in their lives but what we know is that what the research tells us is that complex trauma tends to impact people in pretty dramatic ways in three areas depression anxiety and externalizing behavior meaning anger and frustration and escalating kind of behavior problems you know i mean i'm like like anybody else i watch the news and too often i am seeing where someone typically  young male finds a gun and goes and shoots people yes is that what we're talking about is what we're talking about and i think in the media there's lots of discussion about you know is that a mental health issue and we're kind of splitting hairs there because i don't know that it's necessarily a mental health issue but it oftentimes is the result of complex trauma and people acting out in certain kind of escalated ways yes you can identify if families if you know counselors if people who are working without risk young people pay attention to some of the symptoms and some of the symptoms symptoms are on that slide that they have very low frustration tolerance for example that if they're given a task that they tend to give up on that task very easily so when they sit in a classroom you know twenty five kids they can see other people other students doing the school work but they give up very easily got you seem like you have to know an awful lot let's find out a little bit more about you who is scott how or how come you're take a good forty three years of your life and i started it in the mid seventy's as a residential treatment counselor at children some society of washington here in seattle and it was a job that i was going to do for a bike a year or two and get to get a real job but what i found was that i really loved it and so over the years i went back to graduate school i'm trained as a therapist but i'm not necessarily a fan of traditional kind of therapy for people who have experienced complex trauma  become the c e o of community use services which i think is the best job in the world because we have about thirty twenty three to thirty different programs that actually work with young people who are considered at risk and we get to see those young people change every single day you said traditional therapy so it's traditional therapy bringing in an at risk youth coming in to see me this old white guy and saying i'm here to help you tell me what's wrong with you what that traditional therapy that is that and what we know is that young people sitting in their office one on one with somebody just talking about their problems is there's not a lot of evidence that that works less than talk about understanding the reality because i think that's something again that it seems like you have to understand as well the prefrontal cortex the limbic system of this isn't something i thought i was going to be talking about with the counseling and things that we know about trauma is that it impacts the makeup of the brain the prefrontal cortex part of the brain is the part of the brain where executive functioning is our critical thinking our ability it's the intellectual part of the brain where we can decide what are good decisions the limbic system part of the brain is the complex part of the brain and essentially it's where trauma is stored and it's where fight flight or freeze that that that notion of being overwhelmed by emotions is stored what we know about people who have experience comparable plex trauma is that the limbic system is is more loaded  cortex part of the brain the good thing about the brain is that it's plastic re can we can rewire it one of the things that's great about c y s and what's a great thing about my work is that we get to see people over a period of time and how their brains have have complex trauma simple trauma is like a traumatic brain injury and there's something that's going to happen once or maybe twice in your life or if you were in a house fire or an earthquake what we're talking about in complex trauma is the kind of trauma that is recurrent it happens over and over and over again and that's that can be emotional neglect yes it can be emotional isn't the kind of trauma that you deal with more often than not some kind of emotional difficulty as opposed to being hit on the head yes in fact there is a lot of statistics in the state of washington the child abuse and neglect incidence and referrals to c p s is going up exponentially i think in july there was ten thousand referrals in the state of washington for child abuse in the glock to children's protective services most of those are because of emotional or physical neglect not abuse but that comes from parents that doesn't it does come from parents so are we living in a society of bad parents  i think we're living in a society where people experience extraordinary stressors and those stressors can be things by poverty or lack of transportation we actually look at what are stressors for people and it's pretty predictable what people say when we asked them what are stressors and not lives it's things like money it's transportation it's relationships it's it's poverty and those kinds of things their reactions to stress with parents who don't have good coping mechanisms is child abuse and neglect unfortunately by things that we know even about young people who are removed from their birth family that when they go into foster care they go into a group home treatment center that they're loyal loyalty in their allegiance to their birth family is almost unshakable really no matter how bad they've been treated by those those birth parents the allegiance is still very high so when i first started in this work we used to separate kids from their birth families thinking that it was the birth family or the parents that created those problems and that wasn't necessarily wrong but we felt like the more distance that we could keep those kids from their birth family the better off they would be and what we're fin is exactly the opposite is happening you know but if you go to if you've got a problem the birth family then as soon as the young person is released they go back to that problem and we know that they'll go back to that problem we have a therapeutic foster care program a community youth services which works with the most at risk youth in all of the foster care system they only represent about eight percent of the kids and all of foster care on average those kids have been in more than ten placements before they were referred to our program so what that means is that not only were those young people traumatized in their birth family but the system also traumatized them if you can imagine being ten or eleven or twelve years old and having to live in ten different family so we're better off a treaty the entirety of the family and working with the birth parents knowing that that allegiance and that loyalty is pretty well if stress is the big bad monster and all of this  mean i guess how can you overcome the stress of what's already there so a lot of what we know about stress is a mitigated stress is is basically it is a killer toxic stress causes heart disease it causes increases in substance abuse it causes increases in mental health issues i mean these are things that cost all of us so it's a lifelong problem it is like trauma what we want to do is to mitigate the impact of that trauma on young people and if we can with their parents a lot of times what we found too is that young people as they get older they become adolescents and if the platform for parenting in their birth family wasn't very solid  that pretty soon those youth become more powerful than their parents and we find a lot of parents who were there their teenagers are literally out of their control and then what happens then they come to us and we try to get  them get those parents to get their kids back into control or if they don't come to you oftentimes they end up being somehow wards of the state they do become wards of the state or those are those are young people who are at most risk to become delinquent or had to have extraordinary mental health problems or to drop out of school these are often times the young people who are sitting next to your kids in their classrooms the difference is our kids have those kind of disabilities but you can't see m i would almost be easier if they had polio or if they were blind because you could see their disability so we have to kind of figure that out and work with in a multi systemic way with schools with parents with probation officers which is many people as we can so that we come up with a unified plan for those kids down to me like what you're actually doing is reducing the cost to society of those who are at risk and right or wrong our society seems to want to put a cost on everything and you've got to get the cost of trauma going to put this up on the screen i mean my massive numbers they are the cost of mental illness just here in the united states yes three hundred seventeen billion dollars just domestic violence eight point three child abuse and neglect now there are twenty four million foster and group care at c y s sixty six thousand dollars per year per year per year per youth that's a lot less than some of these others though it is a lot less and what we're always looking at in our work is how do we know if what we're doing is having an impact on kids one of  therapy programs that we have that's us it's called multi systemic therapy and it works with the highest risk anti social behavior kids in our community so these are kids that are you know have had frequent problems with the link lynsey getting kicked out of school a physical aggression multi systemic therapy works with the entire family and the outcomes from that are remarkable in terms of reducing substance abuse delinquent reducing reducing or increasing the ability of kids to stay in  school you're not an employee of the state you guys are an independent nonprofit agency where so people who donate to you they want to know that what you're doing works yes so what does work does what does work what does work is for us to identify what our target populations are in utilize practices that we know are going to have outcomes evidence based practices are similar to like chemotherapy if one has a certain kind of if one has a certain kind of cancer you want to go to a doctor where you know that their outcomes are that the treatment is going to lead to certain kind of outcomes we're building programs that c y s that we can identify that have certain outcomes based on the practices that we use sharing one trauma or a narrative with their peers what i'm hearing though is that you've got several at your school at risk youth together yes and there are trauma may be very similar would it be helped at all to be with kids who have lots experience yes that's a good question it's tremendously helpful in what we know is that you know complex trauma is a very isolating kind of thing and if you think about domestic violence people at c y s other young people their peers have had similar kinds of exams similar kinds of experiences so what we want to do is to to broaden the peer impact so that you young people can tell their narrative and then  about just coming together as a human being engaged in is critical for our kids i mean that they've they've most of them have been in traditional kinds of therapies most of them have been have been given medications or been tutoring and those kinds of things and what we know is that that's not nearly as effective as engagement in the first step of engagement is acceptance meaning we're going to accept that almost no matter what we don't have to accept their behavior but we do have to accept them if kids don't find acceptance in their own home they're go find it somewhere else in oftentimes that's on the streets we've worked with young people see why yes we do work with young people that c y s who are gang involved and they don't join a gang to purposely get into trouble they join a gang for acceptance and they will do all sorts of negative things to gain that acceptance here in just a matter we're going to be talking with a member of your staff yes who is involved with a program called the bridge but as we get to that it seems that what you're trying to work within the bridge is resiliency and the other word for resilience is probably coping yes resiliency is is what we're trying to achieve for young people who have experienced trauma  they don't have people generally people who've experienced trauma don't have a lot of coping skills so that we can identify what some of those coping skills are one of them is hope for if you ask a bunch of ten twelve year old kids what what they want to be when they grow up they oftentimes will say i want to be a fireman or a policeman are you know an athlete or i want to do what my parents have that oftentimes when we ask young people who have experienced trauma what they want to be with they grow up they can answer it and that's a worry for us because they have a very difficult time projecting themselves into the future so you know one of the strategies that we use is to ask young people future oriented questions as much as we can what are you going to do when you grow up but also just what are you going to do do after enter today and that's  reasons one is that we want to instill we want to get young people to think about the future the other thing that by asking that question where we're kind of forcing them to use the prefrontal cortex part of their brain whether they answer it or not they actually have to think about it we use so like could scale or the zero to ten scale and we're asking foster parents we're asking our staff to to rate children based on those those competencies of resilience like hope like sociability like ability to use good judgment and those kinds of things so that what we can see over a period of time like if if they use comes into one of our foster homes and it's pretty much a one on the ability to have any kind of hope for their future over time we want to see what that progress is you know what it indicates over time when you're a real important programs that you've got is called the bridge and we mentioned just a moment ago in community believe in youth to give us just a little bit about that and then we share we believe that what c y s does is to impact not only the young people that that we work with and their families but that it impacts the community were hoping over time that southwest washington where we're mostly based becomes a trauma informed community can be williams is a staff person and a community is services and he's a staff in our  therapeutic a case manager in our therapeutic foster care program is that he's kind of a renowned hip hop artist in southwest washington and he started to write lyrics with young people and we asked them can you can you do that more and w designed it c y s is to move our resources away from more traditional kinds of interventions for kids like individual therapy and group therapy in tutoring and put more of those resources into pro social activities like bobby's brit program artist are you a counselor i would say i am about to say i'm a hip hop artist and a counselor i found a way to make the two worlds combine somewhat of what he was saying in the writing about your experiences sharing your experiences is really empowering music is empowering it builds community it's important for a lot of people and so what we're doing is we're having youth write about you know what their life their story and i think just sharing your story the process of just putting to paper and sharing it with the world that makes a difference that's empowering one of our main ones is we do a week writing workshop and we have youth from all over our community we get referrals from social workers from probation officers from our biggest referral is just young people referring their friends to us we have a mission at the end of eight weeks we're going to the studio to record and we're holding a performance showcase and so we do a lot of team builders and things to unite the group and then we'll start with around maybe fifteen youth and then break into four groups and they work on collaboration's collaborative songs together and so it's real goal oriented we're trying to get across certain goals  values so a lot of it's about teamwork it's about communication working together to get a project done you know it's a big task for a lot of people it's it's not easy to write a wrapper record and perform it the goal is  little bit of that car really at risk youth and we don't really like to put a label on it at all you know words matter a lot of times they're writing about their experiences what they've been through they're telling their story or their express and who they are but they're trying to put out who they are to the world and so a lot of times they're writing just about tough circumstances they've had to deal with or trying to fight to overcome things that they've experienced if you found that it's difficult for many of these kids to talk about their problems otherwise but they can actually express it through writing lyrics i think writing's it's a safe space for you to do that so this is a place where it's encouraged to be free to get personal with it and if anyone has good content to write about it's the youth that we work with they have a story to tell why i was in the bridge program because i needed i needed an outlet honestly and he's a creative outlet because i had a lot of anger that was just kind of built up inside of me i didn't really know how to release it without and in a positive way something that would benefit me and not be so angry towards others while you were angry about i was a injury that like i couldn't find a stable place stay like being in the foster care system i moved a lot and that was due to my actions and my anger about just things that happen to me in my life you know your birth  know how many different foster homes have you been in i don't know an exact number and he was around around ten at least what would you experience when you would go from foster system or foster home to foster home is just like a big change like i had to change schools you change your house which means like you change who you're living with like the biggest thing and you don't really get to meet them or anything are you angry that i was a very at the people who had adopted me because they didn't and stay with them and you went from this person says i we can't do that to my time shot i realized that i could do it and i don't know i just wanted to see how much further i could go with it you know like you know it's just something that i wanted to build on you know you talked about difficult circumstances that you came from did you write about them yeah why because it was just kind of bottled up inside of me and that to write it and turn it into something like it helped it was like i released it in a didn't have to tow it onto it when the question was asked of you where do you want to do when you're older what do you want to do when you're thirty what would you have said at the beginning i don't know exactly what i want to say i don't know i don't know why was that because i didn't really think towards the future and just turn to like ok i'm here i mean i'm going to end up doing something whether it's a job working at mcdonald's or i've become the c e o of some big business which one of those would you rather be now i'd rather be the o i mean would it be fair to say that you really didn't have hope before then you have hope now that right was a hope for that hope is for a good future i want to be able to grow with the bridge program to how does the bridge program help others besides you it's a creative outlet do you see a lot of people who need to deal with their problems that maybe aren't in the bridge program could help yet but now for you for sure well where you go you said it's your time to shine and it's my time to time and ever want to say specifically where i'm going because i don't know specifically where i'm going i know