🌿🌿Learn.Empathize.Grow.Overcome.Laugh.Inspire.Fulfillment.Encourage.🌿🌿

Welcome to the MIU IV Social Work team's education and wellness series! Spring brings new growth and is a reminder of how beautiful change can truly be. In the Spring Edition, we wanted to focus on connection, growth, and wellness. Take the time to read through the Smore, check out the resources, and utilize some of the tools we will be providing. Need more? Get ahold of us - we'd be happy to help!

• We are wired for connection, it's our biology.
• The connectedness we experience in our relationships impacts the way our brain develops and performs.
  
• "Even our most routine encounters act as regulators in the brain, priming our emotions, some desirable, others not."
• The more strongly connected we are with someone emotionally, the greater the mutual force.
• In a technology-crazed world, we've confused being communicative with feeling connected.

Post-traumatic growth involves a positive change in someone’s thinking or behavior as a result of an adverse experience, or trauma. The idea of post traumatic growth evolved from the belief that people can emerge from any traumatic event or life crisis with a new world view and resilience, thus feeling changed in unexpected and positive ways. Rather than a direct result from trauma, this process occurs as people cope with the trauma.

Tedeschi and Calhoun developed the Posttraumatic Growth Inventory for evaluating personal growth that follows a stressful encounter. The inventory are related to the follow five factors:

• Personal Strength
• New Possibilities
• Improved Relationships
• Spiritual Growth
• Appreciation for Life

Coined by Carol Dweck, Professor of Psychology at Stanford University, a growth mindset refers to the belief that your abilities can improve with effort and learning. People with a growth mindset see challenges as opportunities to grow and are willing to try new things.

A growth mindset is the belief that you can get better at things over time with practice

A fixed mindset is the belief that practice doesn't change things and there is no use in trying

• Normalize struggles
• Encourage engagement with challenges
• Embrace the word "yet"
• Promote the idea that the brain can be developed
• View mistakes as learning opportunities
• Set goals
• Cooperative exercises
• Provide challenges
• Praise Effort

According to the APA, "mindfulness is awareness of one’s internal states and surroundings. Mindfulness can help people avoid destructive or automatic habits and responses by learning to observe their thoughts, emotions, and other present-moment experiences without judging or reacting to them."

Our pre-frontal cortex enables us to observe what is going on, predict what will happen if you take a certain action, and make a conscious choice.

Being able to hover calmly and objectively over our thoughts, feelings, and emotions (an ability called mindfulness) and then take our time to respond allows the executive brain to inhibit, organize, and modulate the hardwired automatic reactions preprogrammed into the emotional brain.

This capacity is crucial for preserving our relationships with others. As long as our frontal lobes are working properly, we’re unlikely to lose our temper when we feel inconvenienced, for example.(Information taken from "The Body Keeps the Score" by Bessel van der Kolk)

Children are uniquely suited to benefit from mindfulness practice. Habits formed early

in life will inform behaviors in adulthood, and with mindfulness, we have the opportunity to give our children the habit of being peaceful, kind and accepting.

Part of the reason why mindfulness is so effective for children can be explained by the way the brain develops. While our brains are constantly developing throughout our lives, connections in the prefrontal circuits are created at their fastest rate during childhood. Mindfulness, which promotes skills that are controlled in the prefrontal cortex, like focus and cognitive control, can therefore have a particular impact on the development of skills including self-regulation, judgment and patience during childhood.

Here are resources that include mindfulness activities:

If you are interested in more information or resources, please contact the MIU IV School Social Work team at:

Bryda Drumm, LSW, H&SV

Jennifer Guthrie, LCSW, CSSW

Sara Joseph, MSW, LSW

Email: socialwork@miu4.org