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trauma healing through
spiritual formation

BoUNCE

ABSTRACT

ABSTRACT

Did you know that 2/3 of children around the world suffer a traumatic experience? Yet NO popular children's church curriculums utilize widely accepted trauma-informed educational practices?
Sometimes referred to as the silent or invisible epidemic, trauma is widespread globally and is connected to a plethora of physical and psychological ailments. Adding to this despair, children born into impoverished situations are at higher risk of experiencing trauma. Resilience has proven to mitigate trauma’s negative impact as well as incite a positive, healing response for trauma in children. This thesis explores the option of fusing the assets of social-emotional learning, trauma-informed care, and positive religious coping to improve resilience in at-risk children. Churches and faith-based organizations were shown to possess great potential to become centers of trauma healing for children. A Christian children’s curriculum built upon the strengths discovered in these assets that incorporate trauma-informed Bible lessons was determined to be a viable solution to build resilience in children at-risk of experiencing adversity. This thesis then develops and presents an outline model, called The BOUNCE Project, a sample lesson plan, and an evaluation plan to measure the impact of this proposed intervention.