The Impact of Compassion

Can you imagine living in a home with strangers? The adults aren’t your parents, the other kids you have to share a bathroom with aren’t your siblings. It’s difficult to understand what will happen next and much of the time life feels confusing and lonely. This is the reality of many youth in the foster care system and in many instances experiences like this contribute to youth feeling abandoned, neglected and unloved.

Katrina was a participant at PlayWrite and knows the reality of foster care first hand. She is a young woman who attended Portland Community College and holds down two jobs. Katrina also spends her time volunteering. Through the Chaffee Educational Grant, Oregon Opportunity Grant, and Federal Work-Study funding, Katrina was able to attend PlayWrite’s workshop and share her story about her experiences as a youth in foster care. She is a bright individual who has survived a horrible experience.

”Twelve out of 19 years living in foster care has taken its toll. I developed abandonment issues, I had trouble relating to people, and I didn’t fit in at school. PlayWrite really opened my mind to learning. When I first saw my play performed, it was so intense. The experience has been a really good way to release all that is inside me, to write about it, and have it presented… it was a fantastic, creative experience.”

At PlayWrite, Katrina shared her story through characters she created, directed a play with professional actors and had the compassionate, but firm guidance of a personal coach. Research studies demonstrate that when people write about significant emotional events in their lives, positive changes occur in both physical health and behavior. A recent study by Keith J. Petrie and his colleagues elegantly demonstrates how these benefits are enhanced when expression is manifested through writing combined with movement. This is something the PlayWrite program takes into careful consideration. As Stanford physician David Spiegel pointed out in the Journal of the American Medical Association, if there were “…similar outcome evidence about a new drug, it likely would be in widespread use within a short time.”

Beyond positive changes in health, there may be intergenerational effects on future behaviors as well. The cycle of abuse and neglect can be broken. Mary Main and her colleagues have shown that people who are able to construct a coherent narrative of their childhood are likely to form secure and healthy attachments with their own children, even if they suffered childhood trauma such as abuse and/or neglect. These individuals are also less prone to develop psychopathology such as antisocial personality disorders and other disorders that may lead to violent behavior.

PlayWrite addresses two critical issues in our community. First, we work with young people who likely have no other avenues for healthy self-expression. They are disadvantaged, marginalized and at risk of repeating their childhood experiences in their adult lives. The opportunity to access artistic outlets may otherwise be unobtainable, especially with the one on one attention they receive in PlayWrite’s workshops.

Writing a play demands writing about feelings. The author must be able to see events unfolding from different points of view, and to honestly inhabit those opposing points of view. PlayWrite workshops require the writer to use their own emotional experiences to build characters, understand the history of those characters’ relationship, and explore emotional conflict. The playwright creates a dramatic narrative, utilizing their own life experiences, that works through emotional conflict and crisis toward resolution. These efforts work in harmony with PlayWrite’s primary objective: supporting and challenging young people in the process of creating original art.

In Oregon, records show 14 out of 1,000 children are abused each year. The fourth National Incidence Study of Child Abuse and Neglect reports that approximately 3,000,000 children in the United States, roughly 1 out of every 25, are abused or neglected. Multnomah County, for example, has a higher rate of child abuse and neglect than the state of Oregon – 14.6 children per 1,000 versus 13.8 per 1,000 statewide. The impact that trauma has on an already vulnerable population like youth is staggering. The futures of the kids that live with this kind of trauma are unpredictable.

The Adverse Childhood Experiences Study shows the dramatic link between exposure to physical, emotional, or sexual abuse, physical or emotional neglect and behavioral outcomes later in life. Foster care, poverty, and single-parent households are associated with a multiplied risk that two or more of these adverse childhood experiences will be present.

The financial impact on society’s resources to correct the toll of abuse costs taxpayers around $65,000/year. Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health researchers found the costs associated with child abuse exceeded $9 billion in 2015 alone. Researchers tracked this figure from data associated with health care costs, special education and child welfare as well as through violence and crime, suicide and survivor organizations. The hardship is generational and encompasses mental, emotional and psychosocial aspects of well-being. However, to date, there are still no adequate or reliable records for tracking the impact of emotional neglect, which is now known to be as damaging to the developing mind as physical abuse.

Developmentally, adolescence is a period of profound transition, second only in magnitude to infancy. While this period of extensive transition brings increased vulnerability for problems, it is a window of opportunity for positive change through intervention. This opportunity for growth may be especially important among individuals placed at risk during childhood; they are more likely to engage in risky or unhealthy behaviors if problems go unresolved during their transition into adulthood. Adolescence is a developmental crossroad, when effective intervention can have a significant positive influence on their developmental trajectory.

This is why PlayWrite’s focus is in helping youth at the edge during such a remarkably malleable time in their lives. We are dedicated to addressing this history of exposure to trauma so they may become stable and capable adults. PlayWrite works to help transform the lives of youth by holding workshops in which youth forge from within themselves the emotional and intellectual tools that facilitate resilience and overall well-being. Anecdotal reports from PlayWrite workshop participants, their teachers and counselors reveal dramatic positive shifts in behavior. Therapists at residential treatment centers where we work report significant changes in many of their youth following their PlayWrite experience.

The crux of our work at PlayWrite is in the relationship between coach and writer. PlayWrite workshops embody profound trust and acceptance, which co-operates with attuned challenge. Each coach has an unshakable belief in the strength and creative power of the writer and offers the writer a space to feel into their difficult stories and cultivate a work of art unique to them. Participation in a PlayWrite workshop changes a young person’s life in profound, long-lasting ways because it utilizes emotional writing exercises and explores emotions through movement and sound. This may be a mechanism for unblocking communication between the hippocampus - where memories are stored, and the neocortex- the part of the brain that uses analytical thinking. But it may also work to modulate the activation of the amygdala, the emotional center of the brain. So, when traumatic memories are retrieved the individual is more capable of sitting with and moving through the emotional experience of those memories with more resilience.

While we may not always be able to avoid traumatic events, we can learn healthier ways of coping, communicating and overcoming the effects of trauma. PlayWrite is dedicated to helping to make this possible.