| This research focuses on the psychobiology of an arts based, trauma-informed program for practitioners working with at-risk children, adolescents, and young adults. The researcher's experience teaching the skills of art and music contributed to the development of a staged exercise protocol for professionals working with development trauma. The exercises in the training manual draw from epidemiological and neuroscientific research on trauma recovery and the creative process. Research in neuroscience has focused on how developmental trauma produces fragmentation in the structure and function of brain areas involved in emotional regulation, memory, and learning. The design for this cross-modal creative arts approach is founded upon the concept that an effective therapeutic intervention for childhood trauma must be neurodevelopmentally sensitive and must access and unify those brain areas and the functions that are disrupted by adverse childhood events. Neuroscience also informs us about the impact of creative states on brain structure and function. Creative immersion appears to activate a bi-lateral synchronization of brain hemispheres which supports the extinction of maladaptive behaviors. The training manual serves a dual purpose. The first purpose is to introduce practitioners in education and mental health to the relevance of cross-modal creativity on brain function, emotion regulation, and behavior modification. The premise of cross-modal creativity is that the audio, visual, and kinesthetic modes of intelligence can access the non-verbal material associated with the unconscious and thereby bypass the old ineffective cognitive schema. Through the repetition of cross-modal activity and neuroplasticity, these exercises may rebuild the decreased neural density of the corpus callosum, the functional link between emotional and rational processes in the two brain hemispheres. The cross-modal approach promotes inter-hemispheric or translateral communication necessary for emotion regulation, behavioral modification, and mindfulness. The professionals train in these exercises to gain facility in creatively applying these exercises to themselves, to experience increased mindfulness, emotion regulation under stress, and in order to work more effectively with their at-risk populations. The second and most important use of the training manual is for professionals to creatively adapt these arts-based strategies to the specific needs of their at-risk populations. This series of exercises can be integrated into a curriculum within a residential mental health program for at-risk children, adolescents, and young adults or into an educational setting that is challenged with the needs of these at-risk populations. |
