THE POWER OF RESILIENCE
Every day, Ken Ginsburg sees the results of childhood trauma: the young woman who can't recall much of her childhood-except for the time she was thrown down the stairs. The boy who watched a drug addict die on the street, surrounded by onlookers snapping photos on their cell phones. The girl who got pregnant at 14 because she wanted so desperately to love.
Ginsburg, a pediatrician at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and a nationally known expert on resilience, wants you to know one thing about these young people: They are not broken.
In fact, the adolescents he sees at CHOP and as medical director at Covenant House, Pennsylvania, a care system for homeless and marginalized youth, are often brimming with compassion, ambition and a longing to transform the world.
The best way to help them, Ginsburg said at May's National Summit on Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs), is to face them with openness and love.
"All I do," he said, "is listen for the stories that nobody else hears...My Covenant House kids are the gang members, the ones who have been sexually exploited, the ones who have been in and out of prison. They want to be teachers, social workers, doctors, forensic psychologists. They want to be healers. They come to the world with a different kind of credential. When we pity them and see them as broken, we take away the power they have.
"We need to help youth know how much they matter."
Ginsburg urged the audience-nearly 200 physicians, social workers, child advocates and policy makers-to remember that adolescence is not too late to heal from childhood trauma. In fact, he said, it is the ideal time to help youth cultivate the qualities that will not only repair their own spirits, but contribute to the world: grit, creativity, collaboration, generosity and empathy.
Ginsburg described resilience as a mindset. "When something bad happens to you, do you see it as a catastrophe or an opportunity?" Adolescents need help in learning to distinguish "real tigers"-true threats to life or well-being that demand immediate reaction-from "paper tigers," the daily challenges and stresses that might call for problem-solving, reflection or a request for help.
A key ingredient of resilience, he said, is the presence of a caring adult-a relative, clergy member, coach, teacher or health care provider-who "believes in them unconditionally and who holds them to high expectations." That doesn't mean condoning destructive behavior, but helping youth understand their ways of coping and guiding them toward healthier strategies.
When a girl etches her arm with a razor blade, when a boy uses marijuana to numb his sorrow, when kids seek connection through sex outside of a loving relationship, they are trying to manage stress, Ginsburg said.
"Any one of the marginalized groups I've talked about has an attitude, a defensive posture that says, 'I have been hurt by you.' How do we meet that attitude? With love and with respect."
At Covenant House, when residents present cases to him, Ginsburg requires them to say more than, "This is a 16-year-old girl who presents with alcohol abuse and post-traumatic stress disorder." The resident must add, "And I love her because..."
To be effective in working with youth who have suffered adversity, Ginsburg said, providers must look honestly at themselves. "When we work with trauma, we begin 'othering,'" he said. "We all have mechanisms to make us think, 'This won't happen to me.' In the long term, we lose the capacity to love.
"But there is no 'other.' There is only us."
