According to Dr. Chan Hellman, Ph.D., Founder and Director of the OU Hope Research Center, “hope is the belief that tomorrow will be better than today, and that you have the power to make it so.”
This is a transcription of a short clip in which Dr. Hellman shares more behind his research on Hope, including as it applies to well-being and Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACES). You can watch the video here.
My name is Chan Hellman. I’m a professor at the University of Oklahoma. I’m a psychologist by training and I’ve been doing hope work for about 12 years now. My work is primarily in the context of trauma and adversity but before I get started talking about hope and introducing the language of hope, the first thing that I want to say is that hope is good for everybody. The power of hope works really well for children, for adolescents, for adult. There’s over 2,000 published research studies on hope that show that hope is one of the single best predictors of our ability to thrive. I’ve focused all of my work on high trauma children and adults and specifically looking at how nurturing hope can help children overcome adversity to achieve a future and a capacity to thrive.
So as a little bit of an introduction, I do want to want to again repeat that hope is good for everybody. It’s not just for trauma exposed kids so with that being said, I’ll go ahead and get started.
Historically, as a psychologist I basically was trained with this framework of trying to understand what is wrong with people. So whenever I would work with a child or an adult, I would start with this framework whether I asked the question or not but it was from this idea of “What is wrong with you?” and that well-being or that our ability to thrive was based upon this idea that if I could reduce what is wrong with you then that must be well-being. What I learned is I began to discover hope is that the reduction of what’s wrong with you is not well-being at all. The reduction of depression is not happiness and it’s not well-being. It is simply the reduction of what’s wrong with you.
As I think most of you are familiar with adverse childhood experiences and sort of how that’s emerging in our state as one of the more well-known and recognized frameworks for understanding adversity and trauma, it is really shifting the question that we have from what’s wrong with you to a better understanding of what happened to you.
I’m going on the assumption that most of you are familiar with the adverse childhood framework. It’s based upon this idea that if you’ve experienced one or more of these 10 adversities in your childhood it has significant repercussions across the lifespan and the basic pattern is that an increase in these adversities lead to an increased prevalence of risk behaviors. Drinking, smoking, sexual activity, etc. which ultimately leads to these adverse health consequences long term. The idea is that you look at each of these categories, these 10 items, and simply if you have experienced this adversity, you get a score of 1. If you did not, you get a score of 0. A score ranges from 0 to 10. The higher the score the higher level of adversity.
I really want to couch this adversity and all of the research that we know about adverse childhood experiences is really based upon this national prevalence. The Center for Disease Control does a national scan in the United States every few years. This is from the 2016 data studying about 70,000 adults across the U.S. A couple of real quick takeaways from this: first of all, about 36 percent of the population has a score of zero. What that really means is that most of the people in our communities, two-thirds of the adults, have an a score of one or higher. The other thing is that the adverse childhood experiences produce what’s referred to as a dosage effect. The higher the number of adversities, the higher prevalence of these adverse outcomes. The average score nationally is a 1.61 out of 10.
What I want to talk about is the research that I’ve been doing and thinking about the children in your school systems. For instance, the national average is a 1.61. I do the national research on children exposed to domestic violence and we study about 2,000 children every summer and these children have an average a score of over a 4. The average age of these kids is 10 years old. So very young children, very high trauma, so our framework has always been based upon the idea of what does a rage-filled youth become? We have to find strategies to interrupt that process. The adjudicated youth average a score of over a four. Foster youth in our state I again I get to do the research for our foster youth who are aging out so what I want to highlight is that while the national average shows that a score of a 1.61 the children in our schools are increasingly becoming a much higher rate of adversity.
That has led us to a better emerging framework of trauma-informed practice and trauma-informed care. The only reason I want to really bring this up, before we transition is, because what I want to highlight is that, oftentimes, we think about trauma-informed care from the framework of the students being served or clients being served. But when we think about trauma-informed care, it also includes faculty and staff who are providing services to high trauma youth so trauma informed care is about taking care of both clients as well as service providers.
Hope Rising SEL’s curriculum is based on Dr. Chan Hellman’s definition of Hope, and it is making a difference in many schools and communities across the country.
If your school isn’t using My Best Me yet, we would love to help you bring Hope to your school. Our sales team is ready to answer your questions and demo My Best Me for you. Contact us to start spreading Hope in your school.