What it's like to Advocate for Children

As a teacher, Matt King has always been an advocate for children of all backgrounds. But when he fostered an 11-year-old boy who had endured trauma, his perspective changed. In this episode, Matt describes the common mistakes that schools make in dealing with victims of abuse, and questions some models of discipline. For example, if somebody is acting out, it can be best to bring them in rather than kick them out. Matt explains that much of what is defined as “bad behavior” among adolescents is a result of trauma, and that people’s first experience with violence is almost always as the victim. 

Matt creates his classroom to be an example of one that he would like to see in schools across the United States, full of empathy and acceptance. 

Now as a parent--having adopted that same 11-year-old boy--Matt shares what can be done to enhance inclusivity and better understand children who have endured trauma.

• What sparked Matt's interest in being an advocate for children of abuse (1:15)
• What is trauma? (6:00)
• How Matt advocates for children (14:00)
• What services are currently available for youth with trauma (17:35)
• Societal issues around trauma and neglect (23:30)
• The dynamics of an abusive relationship (30:50)
• Why Matt became a foster and then an adoptive parent (33:11)
• What can be done to help this issue on a larger scale (38:12)

Want to know more about Matt?

• Read his essays:  https://traumainformedteacher.substack.com/?sort=top 
• Find him on Instagram: trauma_informed_teacher
• Tweet him:  @matthewmatika
• Follow him on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100076463205008 Send him an email: matthewmkingcoaching@gmail.com

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Transcript

Matt: With kids who've experienced some early childhood trauma, when a personality and an identity is really in the development stages, that trauma gets internalized and kids blame themselves for it. In order to be able to confront adversity and overcome it, you have to have a sense of yourself as being a worthwhile person.

Otherwise, why would you try?

Elizabeth: If you have kids, know kids, or care about kids, which pretty much covers all of us, you're going to wanna listen to this episode of The Experience Podcast. I'm Elizabeth Pearson Garr, and my guest today is a remarkable man named Matt King. Matt began advocating for kids as a high school teacher, but as you'll learn, his knowledge, the scope of his work and his heart grew enormously when he fostered and then adopted an adolescent boy who had suffered early childhood trauma.

Hi, Matt. I'm really excited to have you here on the podcast. It's such an interesting topic, and I feel like I have a lot to learn from you. So thank you for joining me.

Matt: Yeah. Thank you so much for having me.

Elizabeth: I'd like to really learn about the origins of your interest in this topic and how you got into it, because I know professionally you're a teacher.

Is that what sort of spurred your interest in becoming an advocate for children of abuse and neglect?

Matt: Yeah, I would say actually the turning point for me was becoming a parent. I'd been teaching for about 10 years at the time that I became a foster parent originally, and then I ended up fostering only one child who I then adopted later on when he was 11 years old.

And as I began to advocate for him within the school setting, and as I also began to learn, I mean, I guess the first thing that I learned upon becoming his parent was that wow, to understand him and to advocate for him and to parent him successfully, I'm gonna have to learn a lot about childhood trauma.

That was clear immediately, and as I began to learn in research and then also began to advocate for him in school, I realized, Oh my goodness. We're doing almost everything wrong when it comes to setting up school for kids who have these kind of early childhood traumatic experiences. And then that really caused me to kind of see my teaching practice in a new way entirely and see a lot of my students in a new way entirely as well.

So that was the turning point. I mean, before he came into my life, I think I would've told you that I was a, uh, teacher who tried to advocate for and, and work with students and families, but becoming his parents changed my perspective in a way I hadn't anticipated before.

Elizabeth: Probably like anything else, once we see something up close, we just understand it in a fully different manner.

Matt: Yeah.

Elizabeth: Can you go into some of that detail? Like you said, we're kind of doing everything wrong. What are some of those examples of, if you could change how we were doing things in schools, in sort of our legislative system, what are some things you would ideally change?

Matt: When you think about both the school system and the juvenile justice or criminal justice system, the systems are set up based on the idea that unwelcome behavior, behavior that's injurious somehow to the community, is solely the product of individual choice, and the best way to correct it is through consequences or punishments, whatever term you want to use, that ultimately result in more and more isolation. It could ultimately take the students or the person away from the community further and further.

And that's problematic for two reasons. One, in a school setting we can use early childhood trauma data to predict with a stunning accuracy, which students are going to fail more classes, which students are gonna get behavioral referrals, which students are gonna get suspended and expelled. So that really complicates the idea that these unwelcome behaviors are solely the product of individual choice, right? If they track so closely with trauma, obviously what is going on is much more complex than a kid shows up at school and decides, Hey, I'm gonna be bad today.

Elizabeth: I'm having a bad day, I'm in a mood. I'm feeling angry.

Matt: Right? And, then the more and more you read the research, the most powerful intervention that schools have for sure, and the very best intervention for healing and recovering from trauma is actually to be welcomed and held more safely in the community rather than pushed away from it and isolated from it. Isolation actually exacerbates the brain impacts of trauma, whereas relationships of reciprocity, to use a term from Bessel Van Der Kolk, being held in a community where you feel that there are other people who understand you as you understand yourself and accept you as you accept yourself, that's actually healing.

And that healing is going to eventually down the line, produce more socially appropriate behaviors, and it's also going to produce all of the brain readiness that one needs to learn effectively in a school setting. So in short, in schools the model has always been we take the students who have the most trauma, and then when they act out their trauma, when that trauma manifests, we try to intervene in ways that actually exacerbate the trauma, and so it becomes this vicious cycle In education we talk about the phrase school to prison pipeline. And that's kind of how it happens right there.

Elizabeth: Can you go back a little and sort of define what some of these traumas might have been? And is it usually in a very early age, or could it be at any point in childhood? 

Matt: Yeah. 

Elizabeth: And also what it does to the developing brain. 

Matt: Yeah, that's a great question. Especially because now, at least in education, trauma is so overused that the meaning of it tends to be a little bit diluted. Trauma, first of all, has more to do with a person's interpretation of in response to an event moving forward, than it has to do with the event itself. So two people could be in the same car accident, one of them could have lingering effects from that car accident, trauma responses that ripple across their life and the other person could more or less walk away and get on with it fine. So kind of a good way to understand trauma, I use this as an example: So I had a student a couple years ago who wrote an essay about when he was a little kid, he got injured, had to go to the emergency room, had to get his shots. The idea of having a needle go into his body, he freaked out, and for years and years and years and years he couldn't get his shots. That's an example kind of of how trauma works. We all know that getting shots are safe as parents, I mean, you get a shot, hurts for a minute, you go on. But the interpretation of that event is oh my goodness here's this thing that's entering my body and threatening my safety somehow.

And then that has ripple effects across his life for the next 7 or 8 or 10 years or however long he actually physically couldn't get his shots. Now, not being able to get shots, I mean, it's important to get our vaccines obviously, as we know, but if that's the only impact you're experiencing once every couple years when you go to the doctor, it's hard to get your shots, that's not a major life impact. But, if you have an impact, for example, with an abuser who was a man, and you generalize that to all men or certain types of men. If you're a victim of sexual assault presented in a certain situation in a bathroom, and you generalize that to all bathrooms, right? A lot of these experiences occur so early that the generalizations of the mind makes are very hard to predict.

And now, That all of a sudden starts impacting normal life activities. It's really tough to be in a public situation, a school situation where certain types of men are present, where they might be in positions of authority. It's really tough to have to go use a bathroom. It's really tough to do all of these different things.

And then you put on top of that other ways trauma might manifest in sleeplessness, nightmares, can interfere with your just breathing normally or eating normally, things like that.

Elizabeth: And self-confidence and being able to just move forward and feel like a effective person in the world.

Matt: Yeah, absolutely, very significant impacts. And then the second part of your question about when it occurs in early childhood, I think it's fair to say that trauma can manifest any time across a lifespan. But there are two life periods in which the neuroplasticity of the brain is much greater than in other periods. One is early infancy and one is the adolescent years, and that's wonderful if you're learning something. But when it comes to traumas that occur during those periods, they tend to be extremely impactful. They become kind of lodged into the brain in a way that might be more deeply imprinted than they they would at other periods of the lifespan. And then I guess the final part of that question, how does it affect the brain?

Just really oversimplified neuroscience, our brain develops from the time we're in the womb through our lifespan. Our brain basically develops from the bottom up, from the brain stem up and all of the brain functions that control what we would think of as behaviors and skills that are associated with living productively and meaningfully in the adult world, those are controlled by the top part of the brain. What Daniel Siegel, who's a prominent brain researcher, would call the upstairs brain, all of the fight or flight survival type behaviors are controlled by the downstairs brain. The lower part of the brain getting close to the brain stem. What happens when you have a trauma and that brain is developing is that trauma disrupts that brain development, and when you get triggered, You are going to reverse to behaviors that are controlled by the part of the brain that is essentially below where the trauma is impacted.

So, in education we hear a lot about kids throwing desks across the room or, or having freakouts like that, that require the teacher to evacuate the whole classroom. Almost always we're talking about there was something in the environment that that child perceived as a threat, as triggering, and then they went straight to that reptilian part of the brain.

The my safety and my life is at stake here, and so I need to engage in behavior. I mean, it's not this rational, right, it's much quicker.

Elizabeth: Right. Right. It's instantaneous. It’s just a reaction.

Matt: It's just a fight or flight. It's the way any of us respond. Those of us who have more accurate threat assessment systems in our brain, we would still respond that way if we're actually threatened.

Well, that's an oversimplified version of how the brain develops, but that's kind of the basics of it. 

Elizabeth: I think the problem with, with so many things is misunderstanding. I have people in my life who have anxiety, and those who don't have anxiety think, well, just don't be anxious about that. Yeah. It's just a fire alarm or it's just a high building, or it's just this or this.

Unless you have that actual anxiety, it doesn't mean anything to you. Your brain isn't thinking that way. A traumatized person's brain thinks differently, and so I think there's a lot of presumptions made about people. Our brains have been made to develop differently by the circumstances, and so like you said, a school system or an institution cannot be made just one size fits all, unfortunately, because everyone is different. Something that you said that I watched prior to this interview that I thought was really jarring and sobering is almost everyone would be quite empathetic towards a cute little child who had been abused. And then you see maybe a teenager who's sullen and in a hoodie and is, you know, maybe a troubled teen and people aren't as empathetic towards that person.

And yet that could be the same person just having grown up. Can you talk about that thread that connects them?

Matt: Yeah. I'm an English teacher by trade, so I, I teach rhetoric, so I think a lot about how we use language and the terms that we apply to, especially children in a school system or, or anybody within a society, and how we respond to abuse victims is very dependent on who gets to identify themselves as an abuse victim, but the reality is we just don't recognize abuse victims when they present themselves to us, sometimes in very obvious ways in our society. As an example here, if you drive by our alternative high school here in town, at lunchtime, you will see several dozen kids who are off school property, out on a corner, smoking.

And the way that we talk about those students in our community, the way we talk about them within our school system, among professionals even is basically a problem that needs to be solved. And we kind of tell them they need to make better choices. We think of them as a lazy or pot smokers or whatever, but the reality is I don't have the data, but I would guess every single one of them is an abuse victim.

We just don't look at them that way because their trauma presents in that way. Almost never is a person's first experience of violence as the perpetrator. Almost always a person's first experience of violence is, is as the victim of violence victim. Yeah. And we just don't recognize that all of these things that we have been conditioned societally to think of as bad behavior are very, very often signs of trauma, signs of abuse, or signs of neglect. 

Elizabeth: And that also speaks to the cyclic nature of the whole thing. 

Matt: Yeah, absolutely. 

Elizabeth: So in your work, your full-time job is as a teacher, but then you advocate for children and you help counsel families going through this, and what does that look like? What are you doing? Is it, is it just kind of helping them through a lot of bureaucratic work, or are you helping give a shoulder to cry on or, or what are you doing as an advocate?

Matt: Yeah, so that's a good question. I kind of look at my advocacy work in well, I guess four different ways almost. One, I can advocate as a teacher, right? I can make my own classroom a place that is much closer to the type of classroom that I would like to see all across schools in the United States. So that's one. Two, I can do a lot of work within my professional life. You know, when you're a teacher, especially, I've been at it for 15 years in the same school, you get invited to sit on a lot of committees, and I'm on one right now, for example, that's talking about how can we give teachers more tools to minimize unwelcome behavior and then deal with unwelcome behavior in their classroom before kids get referred into the formal disciplinary system, which tends to be a one way ticket out of the school system. So I get to do that as well. And when I work with families specifically, I get to do it as somebody who has insider knowledge of how, at least our school system works. And then fourth, sometimes I'm just advocating for my own child.

So in all of those four kind of lanes, I, I get to do some things when I'm working with, specifically with families, I think there's two things. One, yes, it is dealing with a lot of bureaucracy and I think it's mostly one, using my knowledge as somebody who works within the somewhat dysfunctional bureaucracy, sometimes very dysfunctional bureaucracy.

How to, one, maybe manipulate that to your advantage because that's a big part of it. And two, how to not waste your time because it is easy to waste a lot of time. Essentially screaming at a brick wall. And then, I think the other part of it is just in terms of personal self care and then relationship with child who might be in crisis.

A lot of that is kind of shoulder to cry on, person to talk through things with, but also maybe kind of offering some advice and strategies for how to not make things worse, honestly, because. It's very easy when you have a child in crisis and your needs aren't getting met as parent to act in ways that feel completely justified, but ultimately are going to make the situation worse in the long run. Ultimately, they're gonna deteriorate the relationship with your kid and then leave you completely out of energy and over extended weeks or months down the line.

Elizabeth: It's a marathon. It's not a sprint.

Matt: And, and in some cases a whole life marathon. You know, I mean, acute crises might resolve themselves in a lot of ways, but it's another misconception about trauma we have that if we just get kids the right support, that they will get back on the conventional path.

Elizabeth: Yeah. Because if you really think about it, even people who have not had acute trauma, everyone has issues in their lives. You know everyone has things from childhood that they're dealing with. Things from their life that they're dealing with that triggers them, that keep coming up through life. And so if you magnify that by people who have had like really significant issues, That's a lot to carry.

Matt: Yeah. And, and that brings up something too. If we are user imagination a little bit, it's not that hard for most of us to find something within our own personal experience that we can actually use as kind of a basis for empathy. All of us have times where we're not completely in control of our own behavior. It, it shouldn't be that hard for us to imagine what that experience is like.

Elizabeth: What are some of the services that exist that are really helpful? Do most cities or communities that you know of have like privately funded facilities that are helpful? 

Matt: There are not that many, unfortunately. I think the ones that are helpful that do exist exist in big cities for the most part.

My own experience with residential treatment centers is that, and this is both, uh, residential treatment centers that are devoted to mental health and also residential treatment centers that are devoted to treating substance use disorder is that the system is pretty rough. If you do end up having to send your child there, it is not easy, but sometimes it might be the best of really bad options.

I think we are starting to see some really good things emerge. And the very best supports are supports that keep kids within their own community, that are able to get kids the support they need while not removing them from their own community. Because being removed from your own home, being removed from your parents, your family, even if those relationships are abusive, being removed from them is a trauma, being removed from the people you love is a trauma.

And then if you're struggling with PTSD, or OCD, or substance use disorder, and then you go in an institution where every other Person living there is struggling with something similar, and there is crisis after crisis after crisis. And it's chaos, chaos, chaos. And the feeling of the place is very prison-like.

That's not a recipe for healthy living. So I am a huge advocate of a couple things. One, there's a program called Roots of Empathy that works out of schools that does a really good job of offering supports that can help transform school cultures in such a way that school itself is a more welcoming place, not just for kids who've undergone trauma, but for everybody.

Making schools a place that are much more focused on cultivating relationships. And working in a school, we say that a lot, we talk about relationships all the time, but in terms of actually developing really rigorous and systematic programs that actually guarantee kids, Pro-social interaction and abundance of pro-social interactions that they get to be on the receiving end of, regardless of what their behavior is like every day we're, we're pretty slow at making that happen, but that's really what it takes in a school setting. For example, I'm a huge advocate for restorative of justice, and that's a movement that started more in the criminal justice system and now has spread out to school and community based systems and then, another movement that started really in the drug using community principles of harm reduction. First of all, extremely powerful for people who, who are using drugs, but at the same time, the whole general philosophy of harm reduction, specifically that any positive change is worth celebrating is a really helpful one.

I, I think those three things, creating really rich relational environments. Having a restorative justice framework for when there is a behavior that causes injury, and then really celebrating any positive change as opposed to saying, here's the standard, however unrealistic it is, you have to get to it. We're gonna make you feel bad for yourself. Those are kind of the three approaches that I would would advocate most, and then I would add to that. If we could normalize and make therapy available to basically every single teenager, if not every single person in the United States. Uh, that would, that would be a huge help too.

Elizabeth: There's such a shortage anyway, and then I, it seems like with the pandemic, the need for mental health services probably among the whole population, but certainly among teenagers, is just skyrocketed. And you can't find any providers? 

Matt: No, in fact, when I'm talking with families, I talked with one last week. I had a daughter who just doesn't get out of bed right now, and I'm sure there's some clinical depression, but I can't even say, I mean, I can say like, yeah, get her on a, try to get on a waiting list as quick as you can, but that waiting list in our town right now can be four months, five months. I mean, it can be…

I got a random call from a, a provider the other day who's following up, cuz I put my son on their waiting list. I don't even remember when, I mean It might have been eight months ago. So yeah. That's the reality of…

Elizabeth: But that could be a really important period of time. Yeah. For some person, those four months could be critical.

Matt: Oh yeah, absolutely. And, and the reality is most of us, even in the adult world, But especially if, if you are parenting a kid's in crisis, you're on the brink of crisis before you really start seeking supports. So the situation will probably have blown up completely in those four months. It's a problem in the residential treatment industry too. You go to seek a bed for your kid and. First of all, you already have to be in complete crisis. Your kid's use has to be out of control to get a bed at a residential facility for substance use disorder. And then if there's a two month waiting list, well if your kid's use is already out of control, what do those next two months look like? And especially on the case of my kiddo, the first time he went to residential treatment, well, once he got on the waiting list, he knew he was going to residential treatment. So then there's no motivation to try to become more stable or engage in any type of treatment. It's like, I know I'm gone as soon as a bed opens up, so I might as well have fun until then. And yeah, it, it gets to be really, really stressful. 

Elizabeth: Yeah, I'm sure. So it's hard to think about how to get to the root of the problem. The problem exists, so a lot more money could be, used for services, but the root of the problem is if the abuse didn't even happen. But we can't sort of stop the cycle yet because it is so cyclical.

Matt: Yeah, and it's another thing that culturally, both school, you know, I think society-wide, we tend to think of how to react once the problem is being experienced, we tend to think less about, okay, what are the social conditions in which abuse and neglect occurs and how can we put efforts and resources and time and energy into impacting those social conditions?

We like to think of abusers, child abusers as monsters. We like to demonize them completely and that feels emotionally justified for sure. I'm not sure it's useful. We like to demonize child abusers because it helps us think that could never be me. That could never be me, that could never be me. The reality is that abuse and neglect tend to be cultivated amidst certain social conditions, and if we really wanted to have an impact on rates of abuse and neglect, we would think really, really hard about how we could first of all, make sure that every child who's born has stable housing, that they have food security, that they have parents or caretakers or whomever who can be home with them and spend quality time with them and aren't having to work 60 or 70 hours a week. We would have a much more effective substance use treatment system because, Many parents want to be good parents, but their addiction is interfering with that, and it doesn't do the child any good to have those parents thrown in prison or to be taken out of the home and be placed into a foster care system. That's its own set of traumas as well. I mean, sometimes those things are necessary for sure, if a situation is really unsafe. But if we're looking society wide, the much healthier thing would be to make sure that we put resources in education. We call this an upstream intervention. Right? Put resources upstream to minimize the occurrences of those things happening.

Elizabeth: Can you explain about the ACE study, what it kind of represents and how it's an important indicator for… 

Matt: Yeah. Yeah. So the ACE study is kind of the first piece of research that that kind of created this whole field of trauma and neuroscience, and studying how trauma affects the brain. It was developed by a team of researchers from the CDC and then Kaiser Permanente in the early 90s.

The Kaiser Permanente folks, I think were mostly interested in seeing if there was a link between adverse childhood experiences and obesity later in life, and they found that yes, there is, and that there's also a link between adverse childhood experiences and I mean almost every negative outcome that we can think of.

Inability to hold jobs, substance use, smoking, COPD, heart disease, diabetes, mental health diagnoses, early death, broken bones, all of these things. And so that really got the attention of a lot of mostly pediatricians in in the 1990s. But that's really the thing that I think started to create this awareness society wide, and the ACE quiz is just a 10 question quiz.

You know, if, if you go and Google it, you can go take the quiz. It takes about three minutes and it's just 10 questions that are yes or no questions, all around experiences that. You either have or haven't had as a child. Questions like, did you ever feel like your parents were too high or drunk to take you to the doctor when you needed to?

Did your mom ever get hit by your dad or stepfather or some other man in your presence? So on and so forth. Did you ever lose a parent to divorce or death or prison? Did you ever live with somebody who had a mental illness? You ever live with somebody who had addiction? 

Questions like that, and there's 10 of them. And what they found is people who answer yes to one of the 10 questions on the ACE quiz have an elevated risk level. People that answer yes to two or more haven't even high elevated and three or more even higher. And then the highest risk group is those who answer yes to four more. So I think in terms of making the switch to recognizing that, oh my goodness, all of these things that we have always conventionally thought of as just bad behavior or bad choices are actually You know, manifestations of something.

Elizabeth: Mm-hmm. I love your writing. You're, you're a beautiful writer. And one of the things that you wrote, really talk to the, the range of human emotions and how so many schools emphasize the positive. You can do, just stay positive, which is wonderful. You know, we wanna make our kids feel good, but you wrote that it's also important to allow kids to experience the full range of emotion and to grieve and to feel sad some days.

Matt: Yeah. On the one hand, it is absolutely true that self-talk is really, really important. There's a lot of different forms of therapy, CBT and DBT, that really help a person identify the story they're telling themselves about the situation and question that story and say a better story.

Look, that's really, really important. But I think in school especially, and especially with kids who've experienced some early childhood trauma, if that's happened in early childhood, infancy, toddler years, young childhood, when a personality and an identity is really in the development stages, that trauma gets internalized and kids blame themselves for it.

In order to be able to confront adversity and overcome it, you have to have a sense of yourself as being a worthwhile person. Otherwise, why would you try? You have to believe that your life is worth something if you're gonna overcome an obstacle. And where do we get that sense that we are worthwhile people? Well, for the most part, we have parents or caretakers in early childhood who attend to our needs and communicate to us implicitly that we are worthwhile and valuable people. That's where that comes from. And if you didn't have that or if that was disrupted early on, you're going through your whole school experience having people tell you, you can do it. 

Yes, you can do it. And the message that gets interpreted by a lot of kids, I think, is they're not talking to believing that they can do it. They feel like they aren't heard. They feel like nobody is understanding how hard this actually feels for me. And that experience of not being heard is just more isolating.

You just more and more and more experience school as a place where you don't belong. That's not for you. It belongs to other kids who can do things, but that's not me. And so I think it's exceptionally important that we find more and more ways to give kids a space to express those things.

Elizabeth: That helps explain some to me because I've always been a little curious why kids whose parents get divorced will blame themselves. Somehow, this was my fault. Something that gets triggered in their brains.

Matt: It, it has to do too with how egocentric, just developmentally childhood is, if there's a rupture in that relationship, children have very limited ability to see that and understand it. They probably seem to fight about me a lot because if relationship is not great, adding a child into it is gonna create a lot of stress.

Right. So it's really easy for that narrative to get constructed, even though from the adult perspective, we all recognize that that's never the case. 

Elizabeth: And does that carry through often to trauma? Do a lot of kids sort of blame themselves for the trauma that they've incurred?

Matt: Yeah. You know, the dynamics of, of a really abusive relationship are that the abuser is constantly saying things like, you are the one who's making me do this. If you could just behave differently, I wouldn't have to do this. There's a constant like misplacing of who's responsible for whose behavior in an abusive relationship. And I think again, another thing that's difficult for us as adults to conceptualize is that those boundaries, Where myself ends and another human being begin, and who's responsible for my behavior and how other people own their behavior.

Those are learned boundaries. And again, where do we learn them? Where do we internalize them? Almost always from having good, attentive parents who honor our own boundaries and who model appropriate boundaries and so on and so forth. But if your abuser is also your caretaker, the person on whom you are physically dependent for a living and the message is, I am hitting you or I am spanking you, or I am not paying attention to you, or you can't eat because you did this, well that gets internalized over and over and over and over to the point where, you know, I see it in my son sometimes in ways that almost would present as humorous if I didn't recognize where the roots of the behavior comes from. But you know, we'll be riding in a car, I remember this when he was about 12,  I was driving down the road and somebody cut us off in traffic and he shouted at them and clearly emitted this instinctual response that I could recognize as having been modeled for him.

And then when we talked about it, I was like, well, Sometimes I cut people off in traffic too, and it's not because I'm trying to be a jerk to them, it's because, you know, I've got a lot of things on my mind and I'm not being as attentive as I could be, and so on and so forth. And yeah, that person probably just had a lot on their minds and they should have been more careful.

But everybody's okay. You know, we didn't crash. And I could see him actually taking that in that perspective that I modeled for him had never absolutely occurred to him at all before. I think it is, again, very difficult as an adult to understand how deeply that worldview gets internalized in a young child.

Most of us rarely think that critically at any time in our lifespan about that level of conditioning that exists in us. And if we have conditioning that's helpful for us It's not a problem. But if you have a conditioning that is not it, it becomes a problem.

Elizabeth: What led you personally to wanna become a foster parent and then an adoptive parent?

Matt: Yeah, that's a great question. Uh, I'm a pretty rational and analytical person, but it's not at all, it was not at all a rational or analytical decision. Um, it's something that I first thought about wanting to do when I was in my early twenties, maybe even late teens. I just remember having a thought that, yeah, I'd like to do that someday, maybe. And then when I turned 30, you know, around the time a lot of people start really taking stock of what they want their adult life to be, I still wanted to do it. I found myself thinking about it even more, and I kind of just thought, you know what? I'll go take the initial classes. I'm sure I'll be scared away by the horror stories, but then I'll at least know that I explored it. So I went and took the initial classes. I heard all the horror stories. I was not scared away by them. In fact, I kind of wanted to do it more. And so then I just thought, well, I'll take the steps one at a time. And if it keeps feeling good, it keeps feeling good. And it's not an irrevocable decision until you actually have a child in front of you. So there, there's still many places to opt out and I actually knew I wanted to adopt.

Luckily for me, it worked out. So I got certified. I have some limitations. I'm, I'm single. I have a full-time job, that eliminates a lot of kids in the foster care system. I mean, there's a lot of kids who have very intense special needs, or even kids who are too young. And I remember we're getting one call one day, he said, we've got a three year old who's not potty trained who's sitting here in the office. We need a place by the end of the day. And that was like on my five minute break in between classes at school. And I said, Unless he's got a preschool he can go to tomorrow, answer's gotta be no. Cause I have to go to work.

Elizabeth: I can't be home all day. Yeah.

Matt: Right. I mean, I think I said no to 13 or 14 kids before this caseworker called and said, listen, I have an 11 year old, he loves basketball , I was coaching basketball at the time and he just needs a place for a month. And I said, well, anybody can do anything for a month? And I said, yes.

And uh, you know, lo and behold, that month has now been. I mean, he was in foster care for a month and then he went back to live with his mom and then came back about two months later and that's, that's, that's been five years ago now.

Elizabeth: Wow. I mean, that's incredible. What a story for you. What a life change.

Matt: Yeah. Yeah. I would say

Elizabeth: to be a dad of an adolescent all of a sudden. Most of us grow with our children. Like we sort of learn how to parent along with the way, you just dove right in. 

Matt: Yeah. Yeah. Well, and it's, you know, it's interesting too because you know, when he came at 11, and this is another thing I've learned, kids who don't have their very intense developmental needs met In infancy or toddler or early childhood, if they're fortunate enough to find, and I hate to use that word fortunate. I don't think of my son as lucky. I think every kid deserves, you know, deserves a stable parent. But if they find a stable attachment with the parents later in life, there's a lot of going back.

There's a lot of kind of regressive behavior, the purpose of which is to go back and get those developmental needs met. So he came at 11, but in a lot of ways it felt like we did all of childhood in just a very short time. You know, I mean, felt like he went all the way back developmentally. And then in five years now he is a pretty normal teenager.

He's just, I mean, I shouldn't say normal, but he's a normal teenager in a lot of ways. You know, he is pretty intolerable to live with and can't pick up and stuff, and. Constantly nagging him to get outside and get some fresh air or something. But, but yeah, it was, uh, in a lot of ways it felt like a full childhood in a very, very short span of time.

I mean, I know every parent says childhood goes fast, but his went really, really fast.

Elizabeth: You're obviously a remarkable person to do that. I mean, to, to take that on and to deal with that, all of that, that's really commendable.

Matt: Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. I think it was mostly just foolhardiness and believing that I could do whatever, you know, at the time.

Elizabeth: What are your hopes for your son and and other kids who are abuse and neglect survivors? As they move into the world through childhood and, and moving forward.

Matt: Uh, that's actually a pretty easy question for me to answer. And, and it's easiest to answer for my son because I want for him what I want for, you know, any kid who's experienced similar things.

I want him to take his place in a community that he feels safely holds him and values him, and in which he also safely holds other people and values them. And I think there's a lot that goes with that. I think it means that he'll find a meaningful work in the world that contributes to that community.

And I think it means he'll find relationships that are fulfilling in which he's able to receive love and give love in ways that feel fulfilling and meaningful to him, regardless of whether that's with friends or with a, a spouse or an intimate companion or, or whatever. But yeah, I think that is, uh, my biggest hope for him moving forward.

Elizabeth: If you had a magic wand and could change things right now, like maybe on a national level, what would you do? Would you just throw a lot of money at this issue or?

Matt: yeah. I mean, I would throw a lot of money at this issue, but I'd throw it at proactive things. I’d throw it at expanding the social safety net, I'd throw it at affordable housing. I'd throw it at better schools, but I think even before, in conjunction with a lot more money, I guess this is another moment that sticks out to me in my life journey on my way to becoming a person who, who values this type of work. I remember 15 years ago, I, uh, Saw Sister Helen Prejean speak, and I remember she said something that has stuck with me ever since.

Two things really. One, she said, if we wanna make an impact in people's lives, we need to look not just at the in individual, we need to look at the underlying structures that either are or not supporting the individual. So the idea that iInfrastructure, that changing social structures, that the structures that exist either are or not supporting people, that became important to me, but two, she also said, if we wanna make changes in the world, the first thing we have to do is transform consciousness. And it was one of those things that really stuck with me because it made sense. All of a sudden, everybody is living in the world that they believe exists, if that makes sense. Everybody is living within their own understanding of the world. And they're acting, they're voting, they're working, they're conducting their family life within that world. And if we want them to act differently, we first have to shift their understanding of the world, right? We first have to help 'em, them question their own experience, and I think that's a huge part of it for kids who have been traumatized, we need to have a wholesale shift and, and it's a shift that I think is taking place in many parts of our societies. Not nearly as quickly as I would like, but I think the conversations are out there and I think people doing some really good work are out there, but it'd be a massive shift in how we understand a lot of behaviors and a lot of, of ways of living that right now carry a lot of stigma. 

Elizabeth: Yeah, I think you're right. I think it's a little more awareness, but it still has a long way to go.

Matt: Yeah, and I think that's what's really tough because a lot of that work, it's gotta be done person to person. I mean, the commonalities there are actually personal experience and hearing another individual's story, the power of narrative and the power of storytelling, and it's really helpful to have professional athletes and whatnot who can stand up and normalize talking about social issues in a certain way. But I think to really shift perspectives, it's a lot of person to person work. 

Elizabeth: Well, I really appreciate your talking about your story and all of your important work and sharing that with me and with our listeners cuz it's opened my eyes and taught me a lot so thank you so much, Matt.

Matt: Yeah. Thank you so much. I'm, I'm honored that you'd have me. I really enjoyed it.

Elizabeth: I'm always grateful when I meet someone who expands my worldview and Matt King did just that. I think so much of what I learned from him can be applied to all of our lives. Here are some of my takeaways from our conversation.

1. Don't make presumptions about people when we don't know their background experiences, or circumstances. 
2. Isolation makes things worse. Relationships make things better. Let's hold people close, even when they make mistakes. 
3. Celebrate positive changes, however, large or small they may be.
4. Allow people to express themselves in all their emotions. Someone may feel isolated if they don't feel they're being heard unless they're being positive.
5. Think about what you'd like for the kids in your life as they move forward in the world. I love Matt's hopes for his son to be in a community that safely holds and values him, and where he safely holds and values others.

I'd like to thank Matt King for sharing his insights and thoughts with me. You can learn more about Matt's work and find links to some of his writing at our website, the Experience podcast.net. While you're there, you can also sign up for our newsletter, find out how to follow us on social media and search all of our past episodes.

And if you're enjoying this podcast, please tell a few friends about it. I'm Elizabeth Pearson Garr. Thanks for joining the experience.