Fired Up

Youth treatment’s highest calling is to make itself unnecessary. We believe practitioners around the world are ready to answer that call.

The work you dreamed of doing when you first stepped foot onto a treatment or correctional milieu is finally possible, all the tools are here, will you reach out and use them?

The world of science is rapidly changing. In the past few decades, researchers have learned that emotions aren’t simply the result, but the origin of behavior; that youth who have experienced adversity aren’t simply maladapted instead they are specialized for the environment they have experienced; and that emotions are wildly contagious. Collectively, these findings have important ramifications for the human services, treatment, and corrections continuum. It is a foundational shift, as each of those revolutionary findings were in their respective fields of science. It’s our turn now. Are you ready?

Let’s do this good work together.

Practitioners, researchers, educators, frontline staff and administration in facilities around the world have a duty to change course using this research for the health and safety of ourselves and those in our care.

If we implement this rigorous interdisciplinary vanguard research, we have a chance to heal trauma at the root, to prepare our youth to leave our facilities and change their environment so that their traumatic experiences are not passed on to the next generation, to change the way we work so that we are excited to come to work and revitalized when we leave for the day.

We owe it to ourselves and those we serve to make this shift so that the youth who are working desperately to change the trajectory of their family aren’t driven to bang their head against the wall, and the staff and administration who do good work don’t leave after 20 years feeling depleted and defeated.

In the not too distant future, programs that resist integrating the science of survival and continue to treat youth’s behaviors as maladaptive or undesirable consequences of thinking errors, will struggle to compete against programs that employ this vital research in day-today application; even those that identify themselves as trauma-informed, trauma-responsive, and cutting edge.

“Our ultimate goal in the human service-treatment continuum is to make the vital work we do now, unnecessary in the future.”

The work being done by treatment staff all over the world is vital. When we do our job well, that impact is felt across generations. Frontline work offers a front-row seat to the impact public policy and practice have on our youth and families. Applying this knowledge can transform the system as we know it.