New Perspectives, Inc.

Psychological trauma is a type of damage to the psyche that occurs as a result of a traumatic event. When that trauma leads to posttraumatic stress disorder, damage may involve physical changes inside the brain and to brain chemistry, which changes the person's response to future stress. A traumatic event involves a single experience, or an enduring or repeating event or events, that completely overwhelm the individual's ability to cope or integrate the ideas and emotions involved with that experience. The sense of being overwhelmed can be delayed by weeks, years or even decades, as the person struggles to cope with the immediate circumstances. Psychological trauma can lead to serious long-term negative consequences that are often overlooked even by mental health professionals: If clinicians fail to look through a trauma lens and to conceptualize client problems as related possibly to current or past trauma, they may fail to see that trauma victims, young and old, organize much...

Three….Two….One….Happy New Year!!!! The joys of celebrating the New Year echo in eternity. I can remember as a kid going outside and banging on pots and pans to celebrate the passing of a year. It’s a wonderful time filled with laughter and fun. Sadly, this joyous occasion often gets marred by the news of injured or even dead revelers who decided to drink and drive. Although Thanksgiving is the deadliest night for alcohol related driving fatalities, New Years Eve comes in at a close second. In 2008, nearly 16,000 US citizens were killed in Drunk Driving accidents with almost 500,000 injuries. A person is killed every one half hour due to drunk driving and every other minute a person is injured due to an alcohol related accident. Over 40% of fatal automobile accidents are alcohol related and nearly 30% of all Americans will be in an accident involving alcohol in some way. I do not want to preach to everyone, nor do I want to destroy any plans for you for your New Year’s...