The Traumatic Stress Studies Group is proud to join the Colorado Coalition against Sexual Assault as well as survivors, allies, and providers from near and far for Denim Day 2023! Our team wears denim to show our commitment to using research to raise awareness and take action. Will you join us? After all, a worldContinue reading “Denim Day 2023”
Category Archives: For Fun
The History of Hysteria in Women’s Lives
We’ve probably all heard it before: A woman expresses rage or grief and gets called hysterical. Another discloses sexual harassment or assault, and she gets labeled hysterical. The tendency to write off women’s emotions and experiences as hysterical isn’t an accident of history, as I explored in Every 90 Seconds: Our Common Cause Ending Violence against Women. Since it’s Women’s HistoryContinue reading “The History of Hysteria in Women’s Lives”
Talking about Violence against Women this Holiday Season
A conversation about intimate violence. A giftwrapped book on violence against women. These may not seem like the best holiday ideas, but just hear me out before you decide. For generations, talking about intimate violence has been taboo. That pattern started to shift with the Women’s Movement of the 1960s and 70s, and kept changingContinue reading “Talking about Violence against Women this Holiday Season”
Understanding Betrayal and Changing the World
Professors talk a lot. With students and colleagues. In classes and communities. No matter one’s career stage, there’s a whole lot of talking. Well, with one exception: Professors don’t get to say much at all on the day that they retire. That’s because there’s a tradition in academia of giving lectures or publishing a bookContinue reading “Understanding Betrayal and Changing the World”
An Unwavering Belief in a Future We’ve Never Known
I sat down in the aging office chair and regarded the towering shelf of books. A good shake and we’d surely be buried in decades of psychology texts. From the other side of a large desk, the world-renowned professor I’d just met asked, “How do you stay so optimistic?” This wasn’t the question I wasContinue reading “An Unwavering Belief in a Future We’ve Never Known”
This DVAM, Sharing Observations from Every 90 Seconds
October is Domestic Violence Awareness Month — and a great time to correct misconceptions that violence against women is a special interest or women’s issue. Instead, it’s each of our issue. To illustrate our shared interest in moving from awareness to action, I’m sharing observations from Every 90 Seconds: Our Common Cause Ending Violence againstContinue reading “This DVAM, Sharing Observations from Every 90 Seconds”
Awareness to Action: Book Club Edition
I hurried out the door on Wednesday to drive across town to a book club at the home of someone I’d never met to spend the evening with people I didn’t know. After a few mishaps (read: I forgot my own copy of the book and had to circle home), I found myself in someone’sContinue reading “Awareness to Action: Book Club Edition”
Hope and the Radical Acknowledgment of the World As It Is
I woke up on that last Friday of June with to-do lists and half-memorized remarks running through my head. I was facing down a morning packed with meetings ahead of attending the Rose Andom Center‘s Summer Connections Gala where I was to receive their Building Hope Award. I’d been working on my remarks all week.Continue reading “Hope and the Radical Acknowledgment of the World As It Is”
A Rideshare on the Road to Change
The four of us left the restaurant together, having celebrated a friend’s birthday. Laughing and carrying on, we made our way to the Lyft that idled across the street. A woman smiled warmly at us from the driver’s seat. As she drove us through Portland’s nighttime streets, our banter turned to the kinds of conversationsContinue reading “A Rideshare on the Road to Change”
Since You’re Here: From Impostor to Action
I’ve always tended towards anxious thoughts. They hit a particularly fevered pitch in my first year of graduate school, many moons ago. I’d just uprooted and moved from the east coast to Oregon to join a dozen first year graduate students at the University of Oregon. Each of them seemed better prepared, smarter, more [fillContinue reading “Since You’re Here: From Impostor to Action”
Trauma Research Notes 