Today’s episode of the Children First Family Law podcast launches a powerful four-part series on adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), trauma, and resilience. Krista records this conversation with Dr. Kathleen McNamara, the day after the Evergreen High School shooting in Jefferson County, Colorado, and the assassination of Charlie Kirk in Utah. Both tragedies underscore how deeply trauma ripples through families and communities.
Dr. McNamara, a psychologist and national leader in trauma-informed family law, explains the origins of the ACEs study and the direct connection between early childhood adversity and long-term outcomes such as chronic health issues, depression, and even shortened life expectancy. Together, she and Krista explore how high-conflict divorce can become an ACE, why early intervention is critical, and how functional co-parenting reduces harm.
This urgent conversation also expands the ACEs discussion to modern realities—school shootings, bullying, discrimination, and the lingering effects of COVID-19—and introduces resilience factors that can alter a child’s trajectory. Safe caregivers, coping strategies, social connections, and trauma-informed practices can help children heal and thrive, even after experiencing hardship.
As the first installment in the ACEs series, this episode sets the stage for Parts 2 and 3, featuring the story of a Columbine survivor who endured multiple ACEs, and Part 4, where Krista shares practical guidance for parents and professionals on protecting children’s mental health during divorce.
In this episode, you will hear:
- ACEs disrupt brain development and long-term health
- High-conflict divorce as a significant ACE risk factor
- Modern ACEs, including school shootings, discrimination, and COVID-19
- Early intervention reduces harm and improves outcomes
- Safe caregivers, social support, and coping strategies build resilience
- Trauma-informed practices in family law protecting children
Resources from this Episode
www.cdc.gov/aces/about/index.html
my.clevelandclinic.org/health/symptoms/24875-adverse-childhood-experiences-ace
www.apaf.org/our-programs/justice/free-resources/what-are-aces
www.samhsa.gov/resource/sptac/adverse-childhood-experiences-role-substance-misuse-prevention
www.childrenfirstfamilylaw.com
All states have different laws; be sure you are checking out your state laws specifically surrounding divorce. Krista is a licensed attorney in Colorado and Wyoming but is not providing through this podcast legal advice. Please be sure to seek independent legal counsel in your area for your specific situation.
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ACEs, Trauma, and Hope: Understanding Childhood Pain and Building Resilience Podcast Transcript
Intro/Outro 00:01
Welcome to the Children First Family Law podcast. Our host, Krista Nash, is an attorney, mediator, a parenting coordinator, and child advocate with a heart to facilitate conversations about how to help children flourish amidst the broken area of family law. As a child advocate in demand for her expertise throughout Colorado and as a speaker on these issues at a national level, Krista is passionate about facilitating and creatively finding solutions to approach family law matters in a way that truly focuses on the best interests of kids. Please remember this podcast is provided to you for information purposes only. No one on this podcast is representing you or giving you legal advice. As always, please enjoy this episode and be sure to , subscribe and share the podcast with others you think would benefit from this content.
Krista Nash 00:51
Welcome back to The Children First Family Law podcast. Today’s episode is one that feels especially urgent. We recorded this conversation the day after the Evergreen high school shooting in Jefferson County, Colorado, and the assassination of Charlie Kirk in Utah, two tragedies that remind us how deeply pain and trauma can ripple through a community and affect children. This is the first in a four part series about adverse childhood experiences, which we also refer to as ACEs, and how they shape children’s lives long after childhood ends. My guest today is Dr Kathleen McNamara, a repeat guest on the show. She’s a psychologist, Vice President of the Association of Family and Conciliation Courts, and a person with whom I work very closely on very difficult cases in Colorado. She is a leader in bringing a trauma-informed psychological focus to family law training lawyers, judges, and other mental health professionals across the country to do this essential work. In this episode, Dr. McNamara helps us understand what ACEs are, why they are so dangerous to a child’s developing brain and how experiencing high conflict divorce can increase a child’s risk for poor outcomes later in life, from chronic health issues to violence, but the conversation is not without hope. Dr. McNamara also shares the resilience factors that can make a world of difference even in the fACE of adversity. Be sure you then tune in the next three weeks for the additional episodes in this powerful series, parts two and three will be with a person who survived a multitude of ACEs, child abuse, toxic divorce and being right in the middle of the Columbine High School massacre, and how he dealt with those adverse childhood experiences, and through resilience, built a flourishing life. And then I will wrap up the series with part four, with the perspective from me, an attorney and child advocate, as to how we can actively help kids of divorce have better outcomes, whether you’re in the midst of divorce, the child of divorced parents, or someone who wants to better understand how the trauma of childhood connects to the problems we see in our society today. I hope this series is for you. Let’s get started with the exceptional psychologist, Dr. McNamara.
Kathleen McNamara 05:58
Thank you, Krista, pleasure to be here.
Krista Nash 06:00
I have multiple times now, because we can’t really get away from this topic in family law when we’re dealing with these really challenging cases that these kids, and often their parents, have gone through, a multitude of experiences that we would say, and studies have shown, impact them in the adverse experiences impact them long term in a lot of really serious ways, divorce being one of those among many. And so I thought it was just time to get somebody to come in and really explain this from a higher level psychology point of view, and not just throw it around, so that parents and attorneys and mental health professionals can really get a grip on how important this topic is. So I know we only have an hour. I know that we could talk about it for months, because there’s so much to it. But why don’t you just give us an overall introduction of what are the ACEs and what’s the initial study that kicked this off?
Kathleen McNamara 06:55
So ACEs is an acronym for adverse childhood experiences, and this term comes from a study that was conducted back in the 90s, the late 90s, 1997 it was a Kaiser Permanente study. It consisted of about 17,000 subjects who were volunteers, who were actually part of a weight loss study. It was something completely different, but they asked these individuals a number of questions about their life experiences, their childhood experiences. These were middle class people with health insurance. Since that study was conducted, there have been literally hundreds of studies related to ACEs or adverse childhood experiences, which have essentially replicated the original study. So we talk about the original study, but there are many, many, many current and recent studies that are basically informing us of the same thing. And the original ACE study asked people 10 questions, just 10 questions about their childhood experiences. And these questions had to do with child abuse, child neglect, dysfunction in the home and in family relationships, substance use, whether people had been victims of violence and things that 10 questions about one of the questions was if they were a child of divorce, that was one of the questions of the 10 questions. So only 10 questions in that original study, and that study found that 11% of the people who answered the survey endorsed that they had been emotionally abused in childhood. 30% indicated they had been physically abused in childhood. Almost 20% endorsed that they had been sexually abused in some way. Almost 24% 23 and a half percent were exposed to alcohol abuse in their homes. Almost 19% were exposed to mental illness in their homes, and 12 and a half percent had been exposed to the battering of a mother. So these were very significant findings. Those are large percentages of people endorsing things that we consider to be, oh, it happens, but it doesn’t happen that often. It actually happens more often than we think. And what was particularly remarkable about the study was the impact it had on people’s functioning. So for example, if people endorse two of the 10 questions, these were yes/no questions. Have you ever been exposed to this yes or no when people endorsed a yes to any of the 10 questions and so two ACE factors, they were one and a half times more likely to smoke. And we know smoking is associated with poor health outcomes. They were two and a half times more likely to be depressed. For two or more weeks during a year, they were three times more likely to have attempted suicide. And there were many other findings. And if they had four ACE factors, if they said yes to four of the 10 questions, the likelihood of those poor outcomes almost doubled and remember, these things have been replicated with there have been many other studies and other kinds of adverse experiences that are essentially finding the same thing. Individuals with six ACE factors who said yes to six were found, on average, to have a life expectancy of 20 years less than an individual without any childhood adverse childhood experiences, and the average pediatrician in this country sees two to four children a day with a score of four or higher. So all of this tells us adverse childhood experiences are common. They’re way more common than we think most people have them, or many, many people have them. I don’t know what most do, but many people have them, and depending on how many you have, there is this accumulated sort of effect of these factors. The more of them you have, the more likely to be associated with, with outcomes. This isn’t true for all people. There can be some mitigating factors, there can be some individual differences, and that you’re not inevitably going to have poor outcomes, but you’re at risk. You’re at elevated risk when you have a history. So now pediatricians and other teachers, other professionals, mental health professionals, screen very commonly, very routinely, for adverse childhood experiences, because it gives you important information about this individual’s vulnerabilities, possibly to poor health outcomes, you’re going to be much more attentive to their to how they’re functioning, how they’re doing, because they’re at elevated risk, and you want to get that risk down. So this became a big deal. It really hit in the late 90s, and it has gone nowhere, except that we are becoming much more sophisticated, and there’s many more studies that have been done and with different populations and measured in different ways. There were many adverse experiences that weren’t measured in that initial study. For example, the death of a parent was not one of the items. Being the victim of a school shooting was not one of the items. Lots of things, being in a car accident and severely injured was not one of the items. But yet, we know those are very traumatic experiences for people, and would be considered an adverse childhood experience today.
Krista Nash 12:40
So there’s a lot more than just 10. Obviously, I know that you mentioned too, are there places people can go look at? In our prep you mentioned that there’s a list of these replication studies. It’s at SAMSHA, right?
Kathleen McNamara 12:54
It’s called the SAM so it’s a website, it’s substance abuse and mental health. It’s a public website, and maybe you can put it in your resources.
Krista Nash 13:03
I’ll put that in the show notes for people.
Kathleen McNamara 13:07
You can actually go to the research and look at it yourself, because in a 32nd spot here, I’m giving you a real quick and dirty overview, but you can look at, if you’re interested in the research, you can actually go to that site and see the replicated studies.
Krista Nash 13:18
So suffice it to say that, we’re all becoming so much more aware over these decades of how serious these bad experiences are. I’m sure people always have thought these kinds of bad experiences are bad, and injure a person, right? But it’s so interesting and so really kind of earth shattering to see the actual correlation between the outcomes, behaviorally, and the way it affects depression, suicide, lifespan, illness, smoking, and all those different things, right? What was kind of radical about it was that it actually linked those things to bad outcomes.
Kathleen McNamara 13:53
It did. It contributed to the development of what’s called the ACEs pyramid, where at the bottom are the adverse childhood experiences, which are believed the mechanisms by which it leads to poor health. The idea was that these adverse childhood experiences happen when the brain is developing in childhood, and that it affects brain development, the architecture of the brain, the neuro circuitry of the brain that affects people’s growth and development in early childhood, depending on the severity, the number of experiences, how the child experiences them, and it depends on a number of things, but it can disrupt neurodevelopment. And then when neurodevelopment is disrupted, even if it’s a matter of your nervous system being over activated. Now you go to preschool, you go to elementary school, and maybe you have some behavioral problems, or maybe you’re lacking social skills, and this results in your social development, and it relates to your emotional development, and how you cope with emotion, and how you cope with conflict, and how you cope with difficulties and discomforts in life. So now you see some social, emotional impairment and maybe cognitive impairments. You’re not doing so well in school, and you’re not getting along with teachers and peers, and that leads to you beginning to adopt risky behaviors. Maybe you act out, you’re the class clown, or maybe you withdraw, or maybe you try to be cool, and you do some risky things, or you’re trying to be accepted. So you engage in some very risky sexual behaviors, for example. And all of this puts you at elevated risk for health problems. And so this can put you at risk for disease, it can put you at risk for disability. It can put you at risk for all kinds of social problems. And ultimately that can lead to early death. That’s kind of the basic ACE pyramid. And then later, research has really explored and some of this needs to be looked at in terms of intergenerational trauma. That some people have a whole family history of trauma. It goes back generations, and this is particularly true with marginalized groups who have long intergenerational histories of trauma. And so you come into the world with the trauma that has been carried by the previous generations, which puts you sort of at a disadvantage to begin with. You’re sort of coming in so there’s been talk and research and writing about intergenerational transmission of trauma. So it’s become more elaborate, and there’s just many, as you said, we could talk for months about this, or other experts could weigh in on this, far beyond my level of expertise.
Krista Nash 16:35
So I think it’s interesting too to go to talk a little bit about what you mentioned before, but the additional ACEs for children. I know that there are some, and I’m looking at a PowerPoint presentation that Dr. McNamara did in one of her many, many presentations. She does a lot of speaking all over the place to try to help people understand all sorts of things in family law and family dynamics better. But maybe I’ll just run through these, because you mentioned a couple of them, but I think it’s interesting. I think it’s interesting for parents and professionals to know some others that have been part of those. I can see that, and then maybe you can, maybe we can talk about this. We ironically, are talking and recording this the day after Charlie Kirk was shot and killed in Utah, and on that same day, there was a shooting that led and led to, I don’t know, I haven’t seen the news this morning, but at least the death of one person at Evergreen High School, which is in Jefferson County, which is where I live and work, and is the same county where Columbine high school shootings occurred that really are, I think, historically, one of the most well known school shootings from, gosh, I guess that was in mid 90s. And I would also just promo that I have coming on the show in the next two episodes after this one that we’re going to run with. Dr. McNamara. I have a survivor of the Columbine shooting coming on to talk about his life the way that shooting affected him and his parents. He had a lot of different ACEs in his own life, with divorce and abuse and all sorts of things that had occurred well before he was involved in that shooting, which obviously dramatically impacted him. And so he talks a lot, and we’re going to get in today to talk about resiliency and how he’s survived through all of those things. So I just want to make sure you all know that that’s coming. But getting back to this list, we’ve got additional ACEs for children being violence in the neighborhood, school or community, including school shootings. So I would like to get, why don’t we just pause right there? Let’s talk about that a little bit. Since I just discussed that, the timing of us having this, what insight can you give us about what we see in those kinds of situations, any tendencies of anything about school shooters themselves or the dynamics of ACEs in that community violence?
Kathleen McNamara 18:48
Well, obviously community violence, including school shootings, in addition to family violence, things that are happening in the home, these are obviously highly traumatic experiences, and we’re seeing more and more of this in Colorado, the leading cause of death for children between the ages of 10 and 14 is suicide. It’s unclear exactly why that is. Is it related to the availability of firearms? Lots of people have different opinions about the availability of firearms, but guns are a huge risk factor, and they’re very available, and they’re very available for the use of violence against others and for suicidal intent. So it’s clearly a traumatic experience. It’s not one of the original ACE studies, but it’s certainly one that everyone is looking at and considering as school shootings have become more prevalent, there is more information coming out about what can we say about people who commit these kinds of crimes? I’m not an expert on that, but I will say from my reading that very commonly these young people are children of divorce and who have had childhood adverse experiences of various kinds, including divorce, often they were raised in single parent homes. And so I mean, not that that’s necessarily I mean lots of kids are raised in single parent homes who don’t grow up to be violent people. So we want to really be careful about what we’re saying here, but we also want to be appreciative of the fact that we want to intervene early when there are these cumulative childhood experiences, so that we can promote healthy functioning and resiliency and avoid these worst kinds of outcomes.
Krista Nash 20:41
It’s heavy on everybody’s hearts today, everything that’s just just been going on. It’s just, in Colorado, where we both practice primarily,it’s just, there’s so many, we have so many shootings. We had the shooting at the grocery store. We had the Aurora movie theater shooting I actually was involved in. I spoke about it on an episode earlier on the show with Judge Michael Haggerty, who with whom I clerked in federal court, and we did the settlement of the civil case of the Aurora victims of the Aurora shooter from the Batman movie and their civil claims. There were two cases, one was state and one was federal, but we had the federal case against the movie theater for failing to protect them, and these people paraded in with all of their attorneys, and we had, we’d use the courtroom actually for even just to house them, to have these settlement conversations, because there were so many of them, and we individually spoke with them about their stories and their injuries and and we ended up getting a settlement there that day. But they were so damaged by it, and they talked about other ACEs that they’ve had in their lives too. Colorado has just been so ripe with the shooting and the trauma that has come from all of that. So the fact that some of that could be prevented by better handling, maybe, of forecasting and resiliency, pieces of how to try to help these people’s outcomes get better, right? I mean, that’s shocking data. I’m sure more studies will be done in that arena as to the sort of profiling of shooters and what has affected them. I think that’s all just very, very sobering today for us. You mentioned that another ACE is discrimination. You talked about something different. I don’t know how you phrase this, but we’ve got discrimination or made to feel inferior due to ethnicity, gender identity, sexual orientation, religion, learning differences or disabilities, and so, sometimes I think that’s been involved in some of these shootings too, right? Where people have felt that kind of discrimination, and then we saw that kind of outcome as well, but that, in and of itself, can become an ACE right?
Kathleen McNamara 22:47
Analyzing groups in our society, that’s a risk factor for other kinds of issues and problems, and doesn’t guarantee anything. It’s a risk factor. It’s something to be mindful of, because we do have data that shows when you’re a member of a marginalized group, and that’s measured in different ways, it can be defined in different ways, you’re at elevated risk of discrimination, poor treatment, mistreatment, and that elevates risk. So again, it becomes one of these things when we’re talking with children, or we’re talking to adults about their childhoods. We’re trying to understand what their lived experience has been, and we’re trying to track what have their traumatic and adverse experiences been, and how has it shaped how they see the world, how they see themselves, how they cope, how they relate to other people, what their occupational trajectory has been as a result of their lived and life experiences, the choices that they have made. It makes for a much richer and deeper understanding of a family and an individual and why they’re doing what they’re doing now, when we understand this rich history and appreciate the impact or the potential impact of these adverse experiences, and whether or not there was intervention or support or scaffolding to help them recover, because we all know people who have been through incredible adversity and who have come through it as shining stars, and we’re very interested in, how did they do that, what made for the positive outcome? What is post traumatic growth? What is post traumatic resiliency? What is that? What does that look like? What encourages that? Because that’s really, really where we want to focus, is we don’t want to overlook these experiences, and we also over focus on them. We want to focus on helping people move forward in recovery. And what does that look like, especially in families who are conflicted oftentimes about the meaning and impact of experiences that their kids have had?
Krista Nash 24:55
Well, let me zip through some of these additional ACEs, and then we can get sort of just a divorce part of this since, hopefully people just need to be aware of some of these other ones. But then we can focus on that one. I’ve got on your list: separation from parents due to foster care or immigration, experiences of bullying, loss of a relative or friend due to suicide, being arrested or police involvement, running away from home. I think this one’s interesting, excessive violent video gaming. I find that interesting that that’s on the list. Use of drugs or alcohol. And then this other one’s interesting to me too, use of phone or other devices during sleeping hours. I’m interested in that one. And then I also found it interesting that you included that there are some COVID ACEs, which I think is just really interesting new information as we see this area of research evolve and grow and the impact of remote schooling on kids, social isolation, disruptions in routines, social structure and engagement. And then people, of course, passing away from covid, job loss, things like that. Are there different studies that talk about these experiences, these impacts ACEs on, I guess it wouldn’t be called ACEs on parents, on adults.
Kathleen McNamara 26:04
You mean the ACEs that their children have, or their own ACEs?
Krista Nash 26:08
These things can all impact us differently as children because of the developing brain. Is that correct? Okay, so while as an adult, this might affect you, COVID affects you. It’s different, because it might not lead to the same bad outcomes because it’s neurological. Is that right?
Kathleen McNamara 26:27
So with adults, with parents, when I’m talking to parents, I’m also interested in what was their upbringing , what was their life like? Life history is important if you want to understand somebody, and you want to understand how they parent, why they parent the way they do, why they function the way they do, you do need to know a bit about their history. And they may know these things were very aversive. They may know these things weren’t good for them, but they may not be aware of how these things sort of had a stepwise impact on the choices and life decisions that they made and how they’re functioning currently, and that can be certainly part of a therapeutic focus is coming to terms with how these things have affected them and what takeaways need to be corrected now from those experiences. So also, we want to remember that with the families we’re dealing with their court involved. They’re going through stressful, high conflict, divorces, lots of things are going on. Maybe they’re in violent situations now, and they were in violent situations earlier in their life. So we have a really complicated situation, and being in the court system itself is highly stressful and can be quite triggering of these earlier traumatic experiences. And so there’s a lot of talk now about how the family court system should be trauma informed, recognizing that it is very common for people to have histories that include traumatic experiences that get triggered. This court system goes and treats people with respect and dignity, giving people breaks, trying to be sensitive and responsive to how they may be reacting. We often say it’s important to ask not what is the matter with you when somebody is behaving poorly or unexpectedly, but rather, what has happened to you that what would explain why you’re doing what you’re doing, or what you’re doing, help me understand what what’s going on for you right now, and frequently, it is a very activated nervous system, reactions that are embedded in loss of trust for institutions, for authority, for protection, for each other, certainly for each other. So this is kind of going on with parents, and then we have children who are possibly, experiencing bullying at school that nobody’s necessarily even aware of, or kids who are experiencing violence at home that they haven’t really disclosed to anybody, or they’re dealing with the stress of substance use in the home by their parents, or the distraction of their parents due to the divorce trauma and turmoil, or many other things that may be happening that are affecting how the child is functioning at school, academically, socially, their school attendance, how they relate to other people. So this whole issue of childhood experiences, ACEs and traumatic experiences are really important if we’re trying to understand families in distress and families in conflict, and we’re trying to help them reach resolutions to their divorce issues, this is part of the picture that we need to be looking at.
Krista Nash 29:36
So when you think about sort of going more deeply into this, this piece about divorce as is, that is what I’m hoping we can help parents and professionals have some impact on to be able to do this better. How would you describe the importance of the family in a person’s life or in society, just sort of as a bedrock?
Kathleen McNamara 29:58
I think that’s a good word. It’s sort of the bedrock of our nation, of our society. It’s the bedrock of our communities. Is the family unit defined in many different ways? Families can be defined in different ways, but it’s the heart. It’s sort of the heart of our society. And I think as a general statement, people thrive in the protection of their families. We hold that very dear that we want to support the ability of parents and families to provide that protective mechanism for children. And all that we know about healthy family functioning is good for our communities, for our society, for the safety of everyone, not just the safety of people within an individual family unit, but healthy families and healthy children creates healthy societies. And so this matters to everyone. This matters to everyone how families function. We should all be worried about families that aren’t functioning well, because those are the families that interrelate to us and interrelate with our children, and increase or decrease our safety in our community. So I do think that thinking about the interconnection of children and families and each other broadly is an important part of this conversation.
Krista Nash 31:18
And so when that gets disrupted, when we go into I mean, obviously there’s such societal impact. We talked about the school shootings and about so many areas of trauma that are pretty much always, I think we can say related to ACEs of some sort, that lead to that kind of behavior. What when we get into the heart of a family, one family, and now it’s breaking down, right? It may have been breaking down for years, but now we have divorce going on, or the breakup of the family unit, whether they were ever married in the first place, and we have often highly court involved families, because, you and I, we see the worst of the worst. We see the highest conflict, the two of us, probably together, see the highest conflict we get cases that nobody else wants to touch. And know when I say cases, I mean families that no one else wants to touch and no one else has any hope for. And we are trying to find resolutions that get to the heart of what is happening so we can make some impact to make this better for children, which is really we talk a lot about what success looks like . It isn’t necessarily what everybody has. Sometimes the outcomes are not as great as we would hope, but it’s still successful when we start getting into conversations about parents who are maybe listening, who are getting divorced. What do we know about how divorce itself in that family affects children when it comes to ACEs?
Kathleen McNamara 32:41
So first of all, it’s very important to recognize that when we talk about the impact of divorce, there are general findings about the impact of divorce. It is a general risk factor when parents go through a divorce, it’s a general risk factor for children, but the vast majority of families go through that transition, and there are not lasting negative impacts on their kids. It’s not the divorce itself. And in fact, in some families, the divorce is the best thing that could happen for the family and for the children. It’s a relief for the children because of what’s going on in that relationship between the parents or the kids, they just simply know this relationship is not working, and the healthiest modeling for the children recognize that and move on and live their separate lives. So I always want to say that that divorce is not always this big, terrible, awful thing for a family, but it is almost always a very stressful transition period for families and then for a subsection, I don’t know, 20% difference, 15% 20% something that, they remain stuck in conflict. And I’m using the word conflict very broadly defined. These might be families that when I say conflict, we’re talking about families with violence, coercively controlling dynamics, very serious things that are going on that are very toxic and problematic and unsafe. I’m using that as an umbrella term and other kinds of forms of conflict, and it can affect people emotionally, socially. It affects their jobs. It affects their cognitive functioning. It affects them financially. It affects their health. It affects them spiritually. I mean, it’s a very broad kind of impact when you’re in this situation that is so frequently feeling out of one’s control, and so much is at stake, and your kids are in the midst of it. So it can be, in those cases, a truly, significantly traumatic experience or adverse experience, and it can go on for a very long time. For some of these families, you and I have seen families where we’re coming into these cases so far downstream, so much has happened. If we had gotten in so much earlier, we might have been able to have a bigger impact that now we’re really trying to triage and figure out, where can I get some help? Where can I get something growing here, and we’re dealing with incredible constraints and limitations, it can be very, very challenging to try to help families move forward when there’s been so much destruction.
Krista Nash 35:13
So for kids in those scenarios, I think it’s so important that you said, for the vast majority, it isn’t divorce that is causing the trauma, and sometimes divorce is helping the trauma, helping avoid trauma that’s existing in the family. I think the story that we’ll have on the upcoming episodes with the person I mentioned before, Chris Markham, is part of that, his parents needed to not be in the same family, in the same household, maybe they needed a divorce sooner because of abuse and various things happening. So it isn’t divorce itself. If you got a parent in front of you earlier in a case, and you get those all the time, you get them later. What advice can you give to parents or to attorneys and mental health professionals who are really those first responders who are seeing these people come to them and get to help determine what those next steps are going to be in terms of how the process moves forward. What do you think people need to be aware of about how those choices or the approach can influence the ACEs for their children?
Kathleen McNamara 36:17
So when parents seek help earlier, rather than later, and professionals can get involved and intervene sooner rather than later. They’re able to do so much what I call psycho education, helping parents understand things they might not otherwise understand, helping them sort of recognize some things that may be going on in their family, a child that’s struggling with something that they may not fully recognize, for whatever reason, something they’re struggling with, trying to match whatever services they may need with whatever their particular needs are, results in earlier service, earlier remedying of the problems, less intensive And long term and expensive treatments. Sometimes the intervention isn’t necessarily something a big, major therapeutic intervention. It might be, let’s get your kids involved in some activities that are healthy and wholesome for them, that help them cultivate resiliency and master some skills and feel good about themselves. And I mean, I can talk about these resiliency factors, and that’s one of them, or let’s get them involved in a group at school where they’re talking with other kids about families going through divorce transition. Let’s get some ADHD assessment going on here, because your child may be struggling with an issue that isn’t just a behavior problem. Your child has some condition that needs to be addressed. Those are the beauties of early interventions. There are much more scaled down interventions that can be implemented that parents are like, wow. I so often have parents say, Gosh, I wish we had done this so much sooner.
Krista Nash 37:58
I mean I get this pretty much in every case. I mean, just for people who haven’t listened to a lot of these episodes. I get appointed as a Child Legal Representative, and then I drag Dr. McNamara into the case, or someone like her. There are very few therapeutic resources that do the job as well as you do and as carefully as you do. And so we only have, and that’s a whole nother set of problems that there’s just not enough therapeutic resources to know how to handle these high conflict court involved families that they make more injury than benefit, which is actually one of the things you and I talked about in our very first podcast. You were one of my very first guests, which I really appreciate, almost over a year ago now. And we talked a lot about how, typical therapy school doesn’t teach you really how to handle these kind of cases, and so we end up getting, actually, some damage done from unintentional, well-meaning therapists, who end up using their typical approaches and adding fuel to fire, and sometimes in the way that we end up the kind of work that we have to do, but it is almost 100% of the time that people will say by why weren’t these resources available to me earlier? We could have saved so much pain and trauma for ourselves and our kids if we had this kind of help earlier. I’m an attorney, you’re a psychologist, what we are providing, I think, is, I think, less about the law and psychology as it is about peacemaking and co-parenting, and it involves law and psychology, but it’s really just being somebody who can, and that’s why I have the podcast. Honestly, it’s just trying to beg people to be rational and pause and not just run to court all the time, and not to just get the co- parenting help. I’m a broken record, please go get these co-parent resources. I’ve had dozens of people now on the show who offer these co-parenting resources that are so important. I mean, wouldn’t you say that is one of the keys.
Kathleen McNamara 39:51
I absolutely think if we can get parents figuring out this whole co parenting thing, what does that mean? How do you parent? How do you co-parent? When do you do one or the other? What is the difference? What is the blurry line, or what is the hard line between? I mean, people get so confused about these things, but there are very good online psycho educational programs. I think you had Karey O’Hara on your podcast. And New Beginnings is a good one. Onlineparentingprograms.com. It has a whole host of Children in Between courses. Don Gordon’s program is very evidence based and very good. There are local resources in Colorado where people do co-parenting classes with the parents jointly together, where they teach communication skills based co-parenting classes, but they learn some of the things that avert making mistakes. It’s just not that easy to co-parent.
Krista Nash 40:52
Are you still offering your co-parenting class?
Kathleen McNamara 40:55
I am. I have to tell you, I don’t really have a lot of people take that class. I don’t highly advertise it and promote it, and I only teach it every other month, because I think there are less expensive options that people are opting into. And that’s fine. It’s a different kind of class. It’s a class where the parents actually work together to communicate, to be able to communicate about their kids. So many parents are raising their kids kind of through an app these days, TalkingParents or Our Family Wizard, but they don’t talk to each other directly. So people come into that class we haven’t spoken to each other in years. They don’t talk, and their kids are kind of falling through the cracks because they’re not coordinating, and they’ve got to figure out a way to do that. So for those kinds of cases, the class is helpful.
Krista Nash 41:40
I actually will promote this more later, but I think I shared with you already that I actually am having a couple people on my team – I’m bringing on another piece of my practice that’s going to be taking on the BeH20 program here in Colorado, so my team is currently training, and we’ll be offering some interesting and pretty intensive, multi-week programs for some co-parenting, because I just don’t think we have enough resources. There are some that Jill Reiter and Shelley Bresnik do. They’ve been on the show. So maybe that’ll pivot us into the really important piece about these resiliency factors. And it seems to me that good co-parenting would be a natural antidote to ACEs, right? I’m encouraged to hear from you that there are things that parents can do. Some of it is just how the child is wired, how a child ends up turning out, and how these adverse childhood experiences affect a particular person. So maybe talk about that, the dynamic of what is inherent to a person and what can be mutable.
Kathleen McNamara 42:50
So just one more comment on co parenting. When the co-parenting relationship is functional, that doesn’t mean it has to be friendly, and it doesn’t have to mean that it has to be highly engaged, but it’s adequate. They can make arrangements. They can make decisions. They can exchange information. They can talk about their kids’ needs. When something significant is going on with a kiddo, those kinds of basic things, when that’s foundational and working and functional, that benefits kids because it reduces conflict and toxicity and it’s just a better situation for kids overall. So that is just good for kids well being, and that’s what all these co-parent education programs are all about when it comes to the factors that promote resilience from adverse experiences, so exposure to violence in the home, outside the home, and many of these other things, we know that there are many factors that are associated with post traumatic growth and resiliency. Resiliency sort of implies bouncing back. And post-traumatic growth is more than bouncing back. Post-traumatic growth is actually gaining something from the adversity that you wouldn’t have had, had you not been through the adversity. And kids, sometimes who have been through very messy divorces in childhood, talk about this. They talk about but I really learned the value of resolving conflict, and I really learned the value of considering different perspectives, and I really learned, I really learned that both of my parents had their own problems, and they become more compassionate. I mean, there are these positive outcomes that come from adversity. It’s making meaning out of the adversity that can be incredibly helpful in terms of growth beyond trauma. And many, many people who come through traumatic experiences talk about that meaning-making and more than resiliency, it’s actual growth and positive outcomes. But in terms of what can we do to help kids who are dealing with trauma and adversity, we want to be sure at the very least, the children have at least – one at least – reliable, nurturing caregiver, and that that relationship is protected. It may be a parent, it may be someone else, maybe a grandparent, but who in this child’s life is the most reliable, nurturing caregiver? I mean, you and I have seen some of these cases where the family system is so problematic that at least for some period of time, we need to be thinking about another place for this child to be in order to have reliable, nurturing caregiving. So that’s sort of number one is we need to stabilize the situation and make sure this child is getting safe at nurturing caregiving. In other cases, it’s a matter of enough time in safe and stable environments. So think about kids who live in violent neighborhoods, but they go to daycare that it’s safe, it’s trauma informed, they learn all kinds of wonderful skills about kindness and patience and cooperation, and they may only be there six hours, seven hours a day, and then they go right back into that violent and where their shootings going on outside their windows, and they’re scared for their life, but enough time in those safe and stable environments helps children acquire all kinds of skills and mindsets that help them cope with the adversity that they’re dealing with. Internal factors – some kids are just naturally more flexible, resilient, hearty. They just naturally have more grit than, say, another child who’s just we all know kids are born with temperaments and dispositions, and one child may be more vulnerable than another child. We often wonder, why is one sibling doing so well and the other isn’t so internal factors are part of it, and we have to take that into account that what might work for one child might not be the same for another. Another factor is, does this child have enough opportunity to develop effective coping strategies? So is this child in an environment that is teaching the child, how do you deal with bullies? How do you deal with what’s going on in social media? How do you deal with the fact that you’re in a school where these are all these high achieving kids, and you’re an average achieving kid, and that’s taking a hit on your self esteem. How do you talk to yourself about that? Who is helping that child develop effective coping skills? And it’s not just parents, it’s teachers, it’s coaches, it’s neighbors, it’s mentors, it’s so who in the child’s life is promoting coping strategies to get through discomfort. We all have to deal with discomfort. We can’t just keep kids comfortable. We need to have them cope with discomfort. Do they have enough opportunity for social connection? Because if you’re socially connected to enough healthy people, it builds resilience. Vigorous exercise, there really is something to get outside, particularly outdoor exercise has been found to help with depression, to help with anxiety, to help with a lot of things. So early intervention is better than later intervention. That’s another factor that will promote resiliency. So there’s a handful of them that when we’re thinking about how to help a family, things we should be thinking about when we’re thinking about, Okay, we got a lot of adversity here. What are we going to do to mitigate it? These are the kinds of things for an individual family we want to be thinking about interventions to address.
Krista Nash 48:21
It’s not always therapists that are going to be the ones creating that? There can be a wide variety of places where you can obtain these things. Right?
Kathleen McNamara 48:31
That is exactly right. And I think that oftentimes gets overlooked because we’re dealing with families with so many issues and complexities that we do need highly trained professionals to work with these families. But if you’re not in that particular category, but you’re headed in that direction, are you taking advantage of the resources that you have in your school, in your community, in your spiritual communities, whatever that might be, what other resources do you have in your neighborhood? With your social network, what can you be doing to help promote an environment that’s going to help your child sort of cope with the adversity that they’ve had and that that is going to be needed above and beyond therapy anyway. Now, therapy is an add on, but let’s face it, some families don’t have insurance. They don’t have the resources, they can’t find the providers, and so they’re not getting those services. So these are things that are backstops, and that many families only have these things to rely on. Therapy is an added value.
Krista Nash 49:34
This might put you on the spot. I don’t mean to do that, so you can push back if this is too hard to just come up with on the fly, but would there be an example you might be able to give of some hypothetical family, we’re getting divorced resources. We’re modest means, maybe not at an indigent level, but we’re paying our bills, but it’s not that we don’t have, we’re not flush with a ton of money. Our kids are struggling. Maybe we have a middle schooler, and, in some scenarios, what would this look like where the rubber meets the road for a family? What does that mean to find social connection for them?
Kathleen McNamara 50:12
I will mention that most of the families I see, especially by the time they come to me, one of the first things we’re grappling with is, okay, we’ve got a strained parent child relationship. We have a strained co-parenting relationship. We have some sibling problems going on. We have a vulnerable child who’s struggling. Help us. You’re the family therapist, do something. Help us. And there, maybe there’s been no PR. So I don’t have anybody who’s done a comprehensive evaluation, who can give me a lot of information about everybody who’s collected a lot of gathered a lot of information. I may have some information. I may have, oftentimes, I have pretty much what the families have told me, or what you have told me. So what do you do in those cases? So one of the first things you do is, well, what are the resources that the family has at their fingertips? A lot of this is sort of triaging the issues in the family. What is the highest priority? The highest priority might be to work on that co-parenting relationship. But let’s say there’s a protection order. You can’t even get the parents together so, but what you can do is you can get them into some good parent education. You can get them into some good individual therapy that maybe their insurance will cover. You can give them a lot of direct advice and feedback, do’s and don’ts. I mean, really pretty nuts and bolts kinds of things about what helps what doesn’t help. Are your children in activities? How are they doing at school? Does the school know what’s going on with this child, and do they have resources that they can offer that would assist the child? What about the pediatrician or the family doctor? Is that professional aware of what’s happening? Has the child had a health care checkup? Is this child in good health? Does the child need good things? Parents can do that maybe they haven’t thought of, what does your child enjoy, or what would your child enjoy? I might recommend a parent and a child go do an activity together. It might be an art activity that they do every week. It might be martial arts. It might be something else. It’s a positive experience that builds relationships, and they have a mentor and somebody there and helping them learn skills and discipline. These are things that are interventions that a mental health professional may be giving the family in the way of directing them outside of the therapy room to do things that are going to help them get stable.
Krista Nash 52:40
I’ve seen things with animals lately that have been interesting. One parent got a dog, and that has really helped. Another one got a horse and does equine therapy, which I feel I had a eureka moment, talking to the equine therapist about why this is actually helping a teenager and a parent have why, how it’s working. It doesn’t always have to be therapy. I mean, I’m always telling parents that too, let’s find some things you can go do with your child, or you’re not just sitting across the dinner table at a restaurant and a standoff, and finding ways to go get your child to and I love the idea of using resources that you have or, if you get creative about how we can actually help. What this presumes, though, is that the parents are starting to look toward solutions and not toward blaming and being so caught up in the war, that’s another common problem we see, is that we can’t even move parents to problem solving because they’re just so caught up in the drama of their own divorce that we just don’t even get there. Do you see? You see that a lot too obviously.
Kathleen McNamara 53:48
That’s what becomes the very complex nature of the work that we do, that these relatively simpler interventions are sometimes very complicated by the fact of, well, that won’t work, or we have conflict, or we can’t do that, or or people dismiss it and minimize it as not it’s just too minimal, underestimating the power of these kinds of normal kinds of things that could be significantly helpful. It’s sort of when you go to the doctor, and the doctors advise you some good basics: watch your diet, watch your sleep. We underestimate the importance of diet, exercise, sleep, things like that. We want some major thing to just make my symptoms go away. And our families are the same way. Actually, some of the solutions to this are some fairly fundamental kinds of things that are not that easy sometimes to stick to. It takes some focus and attention, and you’re right when the conflict is ratcheted up and they’re very focused on who’s to blame, and they have their own theory about what the fundamental core issue is. They’re not open to this kind of feedback, and kids just don’t get these needs met. In those cases.
Krista Nash 55:00
Well I know we’re running out of time, so we’ll have to have you back on maybe, I think it might be helpful to end with this idea that you’ve shown me before about the type of interventions that foster healthy outcomes for kids, and this idea that we can reduce, mitigate or reverse these ACEs. So maybe let’s end with that and talk just through those things, that are sort of this triad of approaches to do those three things when we’re talking about ACEs.
Kathleen McNamara 55:28
Well, okay, so if I’m understanding your question, I do think psycho education is sort of one whole kind of bucket of level of intervention. Getting educated is the key to so many solutions, getting parents educated and getting the helpers who are helping them get educated. I think we need to do a better job of getting professionals educated about really many things that we deal with, with these families, within the legal system, within the mental health system, within the community system. So there’s psycho education, there are legal interventions that sometimes are necessary. Legal interventions are all of the things that the court system can do to protect children and to protect parents and to ensure that their needs get met, the appointment of the Child’s Legal Representative might be the best intervention here of all, because they don’t have money for the PRE, and they don’t have money for anything, and at least a CLR can go in, take a look at the whole thing and start sort of doing that triage of what interventions here are realistic for this family. And you can think creatively and you can think simply and complexly. So legal interventions are a whole host of different things that can happen in the legal arena. And then there are mental health interventions. So these would be all of the things, from simple individual psychotherapy for children or adults to family therapy, which can be quite complex, and it might involve teams of professionals. It might be an integrated model, where you have individual therapists and family therapists who are working with different combinations of family members, working on the family relationships in addition to the internal dynamics. So I would say education, legal interventions, mental health interventions are kind of the big three buckets.
Krista Nash 57:22
I like the idea too, that in some here, that there, one, we have to be aware of this and how damaging this is to children. Two, we have to have some hope, right? We can and that there is some control over this, right? It’s not , oh, I’m getting divorced, so my children are going to have less long lives and are going to have shorter lives, right? No, it’s the idea is you have the power and attorneys should be taking, and mental health professionals should be taking, and judges and court systems should be taking more seriously the opportunity to impact, the ability to reduce the negative impact by the way that we handle these families, and the way we role model for them conflict resolution and the way that we navigate cases in a way that does less harm. I fight with clients a lot. I get my own clients who are parents, where we’re representing them, not where I’m not in the middle of representing the children, but I’m representing the parent. And I have to fight these parents a lot. I’m like , no, no, we don’t need to do that. We don’t have to do that. And I would make so much more money if I just did what they want, right? I mean, there’s almost no incentive for professionals to stop the fighting unless you’re trying to do what’s right. And so , that’s part of my big platform here is to beg professionals to please, try to take that seriously and say, let’s do the least harm. Let’s do the least litigation. All day long, I’m on the phone with attorneys and parents saying, Well, you could file for contempt, but why? Why are we going to do that? This is not going to help the situation, right? It’s just this broken record, because the system is set up to fail in a lot of ways. It’s set up to harm children. So that’s the only real reason I do the podcast is for people, professionals and parents, to hopefully listen to wise people like you who can say, look, there is hope. You can reduce it. If you’ve already created a situation that is bad, or your co parent has you can mitigate it, and you can help try to reverse it later. Or if you’re a child who’s gone through this, or you’re an adult who went through this as a child, there’s probably still ways to help reverse it. I mean, maybe not neurologically, right, but you can still figure out ways to try to get better, right, and not have intergenerational trauma.
Kathleen McNamara 59:36
In my dream world, attorneys would be really trained a lot in mental health, sort of science, and kind of what we know and how to collaborate, in addition to the adversarial system in which in which they work, and that there would be more collaboration between the mental health community and the legal community, lawyers, judges, coaches, mental health professionals, we kind of need to work collaboratively as teams with these families, even within the mental health community, we have our own people see things different ways and believe different things are important, and they’re coming from different perspectives and different kinds of areas of training. And this doesn’t serve families when we don’t have our act together in terms of best practices. So we’re always working very hard to try to elevate that level.
Krista Nash 1:00:26
And I really like this idea that that should be our job, and our goal is to serve families. People say, oh, you’re a divorce attorney. I’m , like, no, I’m a family defense attorney. That’s what I’m doing. That’s what we really need to be, because you’re still a family. And the cost of not doing that is so high. I see it all the time. All right, well, we could go all day.
Kathleen McNamara 1:00:48
Thank you for your time today. Thank you for having me. We’ll have you back on again. I think. Thank you for all you do. Krista, you’re amazing.
Krista Nash 1:00:56
You too. I appreciate you so much. Kate. Take care
Intro/Outro 1:00:59
Krista is licensed in Colorado and Wyoming. So if you are in those states and seek legal services, please feel free to reach out via ChildrenFirstFamilylaw.com that is our website where everyone can find additional resources to help navigate family law as always, be sure to like, subscribe, and share the podcast with others you think would benefit from this content.