Mid-Michigan Trauma Collaborative

Do you know how many emotions a human being can experience? It is somewhere around 34,000. Who would know when we use about 3 of them to describe how we are feeling. Growing our emotional intelligence is a way to both deepen our personal understanding of our inner life and more accurately help us deal with the true emotion we may be experiencing. The Feeling Wheel was developed by Dr. Gloria Wilcox from the Gottman Institute. The wheel is a wonderful way to either help clients or use for ourselves to begin to identify feelings and dig deeper to understand what might actually be behind or underneath some of the ways we may be experiencing a particular day, hour, or moment. (Please see Feeling Wheel Below) The inner wheel is created with six basic emotions; mad, scared, joyful, powerful, peaceful and sad. From these six, we can move further out to explore other emotions that may be underlying the more general feelings we may be experiencing. We can then move one more rung out to another ...

I used to really enjoy mowing the lawn and attending to the landscape. I would weed whip and rake and water. I don’t know why or when it happened, but I lost the will to meticulously manicure a yard. Don’t get me wrong; the yard still looked good because as a perfectionist, I can only let things go so far. I had not bought flowers for the landscaping in probably two years. If they are going to survive, flowers have to be watered and tended to almost daily. I’ve lost many a flower pot because I fell down on my watering and pruning duties. That all changed this summer with the pandemic. I took a new look and liking to manicuring and shaping up the yard and landscaping. It started one day in late April on a trip to Kroger. Masked up and feeling uncomfortable, as I walked in, they had some really beautiful flowers, and it stopped me. I looked them over and chose two healthy Geraniums. It felt like a commitment to buy these living things with the realization I had to take care of them if th...

What is the Collaborative? The Trauma Collaborative is a collective effort to build the capacity in Clinton, Eaton and Ingham Counties to provide Trauma informed care to children, youth and adults. We work to assess the needs of the community and provide trauma training for service providers and the greater community at large. The Collaborative has also been engaged in efforts to bring the “Handle with Care” model to schools in the three county areas. This program is a collaborative effort between Law Enforcement and local school districts to identify and respond in a supportive way to children who have experienced trauma and may be dealing with the aftermath of a tragic event. Trauma Coordinator J. Munley is the Trauma Coordinator for the Mid-Michigan Collaborative. J. worked with youth who experienced foster care at Lansing Community College by Life Skill Coaching and creating opportunities to expand life experiences while attempting to navigate the college experience and succeed in ...