After he got back from the war, Mark Lauro couldn’t pick up his young son without thinking about that night in Iraq. He was an Army National Guard sergeant with a company deployed in 2007 to provide security for military supply convoys. Lauro was in an armored vehicle running reconnaissance a few kilometers ahead of the others, keeping an eye out for trouble and choosing the best route to follow. As he often did, Lauro led the group against traffic on a divided highway to lessen the chance of an IED attack, clearing oncoming civilian vehicles off the road until the convoy had passed.

Among the vehicles he encountered that night was an ambulance, which continued to advance slowly despite Lauro’s commands to stop. Intelligence reports had been warning against possible attacks from emergency vehicles filled with explosives, and Lauro began to run down the rules of engagement checklist: verbal commands, flashing lights, warning shots. The ambulance finally stopped, but a man climbed out and continued to approach on foot, carrying something in his arms. Lauro was preparing to exercise his final, lethal option when he saw that the man was weeping, carrying his badly wounded son, in a desperate search for help. Lauro waved the ambulance on its way and radioed back to the convoy for medical help. The boy died, Lauro later learned.

Months later Lauro returned home to his family in Virginia, but he continued to be troubled by the incident, especially by the way he’d nearly shot another man who was simply trying to save his son.

The STAR program and the war that Mark Lauro helped fight in Iraq can both trace their origins to the terrorist attacks in the United States on September 11, 2001. They were very different responses by very different institutions to unprecedented traumas in modern American history. More than a decade after the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan began, public concern is growing about the psychological cost of those conflicts on American soldiers. In early 2013, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs reported that 22 veterans commit suicide every day. As a result, the STAR program has increasingly looked for ways to work with veterans still struggling on the home front.

One of those closely involved with the issue is Beverly Prestwood-Taylor, executive director of the Brookfield Institute, a Massachusetts-based organization that promotes trauma-healing and peacebuilding. She was familiar with EMU’s Center for Justice and Peacebuilding by way of graduate classes she’d taken while pursuing a doctorate at Hartford Seminary. Seeking ways to prepare church congregations and veterans’ families to support soldiers after their return home, Prestwood-Taylor took the week-long STAR training at EMU and began to incorporate its methodology into her work.

The result: a program called the Journey Home From War, a specialized STAR workshop designed for veterans and people in their families, communities or congregations looking for ways to support them. Prestwood-Taylor led the first Journey Home from War workshop in 2009, and has since spun off a variety of similarly designed programs aimed at specific audiences like the clergy and women veterans.

More recently, the Brookfield Institute has also provided trauma-healing and resilience training to a group of United Church of Christ congregations in Massachusetts that were looking for ways to support returning veterans. The participating churches have since launched their own programs, including several support groups and a yoga class for veterans.

Not long after his return to Virginia, Lauro enrolled in the Adult Degree Completion Program at EMU to earn a degree in management and organizational development. Among his final assignments was a paper about his difficulty readjusting to life back home. The style of discipline Sergeant Lauro used for 20-year-old Army privates in Iraq didn’t translate well to a household with two young children. One night, driving to Washington D.C. for a getaway with his wife, a pair of approaching headlights on the interstate triggered a flashback to his reconnaissance patrols in Iraq.

The professor who read Lauro’s paper told him about the STAR program and connected him with STAR director Elaine Zook Barge, who was looking for ways to reach out to veterans. Barge invited Lauro to a STAR training, and in 2011, he went, intending to do nothing more than provide her with feedback from a veteran’s perspective. To his surprise, the experience became intensely personal. He talked about the night he met the ambulance, and in doing so, explored the grief and remorse he’d held ever since.

“I felt free of that burden I’d been carrying.” Lauro says STAR has brought considerable healing to his life, though he still deals occasionally with the effects of his experiences in combat.

In November 2012, Lauro returned to STAR as a speaker at a Journey Home From War workshop led by Prestwood-Taylor on EMU’s campus.

“What STAR offered that we didn’t receive from the military was an explanation of the trauma process. It helped me to understand the technical side of trauma, to understand its actual dynamics, and how these can affect the different parts of the brain,” says Lauro, who works in human resources for the Virginia Department of Transportation. “It wasn’t just theory and concepts. It was science.”

Prestwood-Taylor says STAR is unique in integrating a physiological understanding of trauma with a broader view of its impact on one’s spiritual and social health.

“When most programs look at post-traumatic stress disorder, they deal with body-brain dysfunction and try to help the veteran manage that,” says Prestwood-Taylor. “But there are other aspects of healing that are crucial to finding wholeness.”

She also notes that the majority of veterans who commit suicide today have been home for years (69% are over 50 years old, according to the Department of Veterans Affairs), meaning programs like Journey Home from War need to take a long view.

“The need for the community to reach out to veterans and provide support isn’t a short-term need,” Prestwood-Taylor says. “My hope is that there will be something sustainable for 10 years from now, 20 years from now, when it is needed just as much as it is today.”

I found the application for STAR – – while surfing the net late at night. I was searching for some type of retreat or renewal, something that would help me sort through the grief of my grandmother’s death and the early stages of burnout in my church. My wife was surprised that the STAR description caught my attention. I had not been a victim of trauma. Trauma was not something I had talked about. I wasn’t even sure what the connection was, but I was drawn to the training.

After completing the STAR workshops, I tried to figure out how to adapt my STAR experience to my ministry with youth. Along the way I had an epiphany. The description of trauma victims seemed closely linked to the psychological issues and difficult experiences of adolescence.  I started to reorient my middle-school youth ministry. I treated both the youth and parents, who were living in a time of constant change and upheaval, as people who were experiencing trauma. I provided resources and I asked questions that reframed their perspective. The results were positive.

From there I created “Chi Rho Seminar,” a middle-school youth ministry program. During the five-day seminar, youth heard presentations about substance abuse from state educators, visited homeless shelters, and learned about rehab programs. We went to an abuse shelter and listened to the stories of families starting over. We explored the “drug court” process for nonviolent offenders. We listened to the stories of teen addicts living in a halfway house.

At the end, we gathered together to put all the people we met on the STAR victim and offender cycles model, including ourselves. It was quite a powerful exercise. The youth could see the how the cycles of violence and trauma responses connected to those they met and to themselves. They realized the issues they face are often symptoms of bigger problems. Yet they could see that we each have the choice to break from a cycle of violence and pursue a path of trauma healing. The youth discovered that they are not alone.

I am thankful that STAR taught me to reframe questions as I think about the needs and brokenness of others, alongside my own pain and blame. I am thankful for a new worldview that continues to shape my life and ministry.

[Lee Yates, a Christian education curriculum writer and former youth pastor, took STAR levels I and II, and helped shape the Youth STAR curriculum. Lee lives in Indiana with his wife and two children.]

If you live or work with young people, it’s likely that you’ve felt their enthusiasm when a good idea catches their imagination, or listened to their laughter and banter as they hang out with friends.

But you may also observe behaviors that concern you: irritability, anger, aggressiveness, withdrawal, feeling sad, substance abuse, cutting, or getting in trouble with the law.

The root of distress in young people can be trauma, the result of experiencing or witnessing something that involves a threat to survival. Or the trauma can be from growing up in an unsafe environment where layers of trauma are undercurrents that can explode on a daily basis.

Viewing young people’s experiences and behaviors through a trauma lens provides a way of understanding them, and of knowing how to reach out in supportive ways.

Big T and little t traumatic events

We tend to think of traumatic events as the dramatic Big Traumas,” ongoing events such as war, or living under occupation or in a violent community or with an abusive parent; and one-time happenings like an accident where someone dies, or being raped, or seeing a murder.

But young people are also impacted by “little t traumas,” events that are often not recognized as threatening or traumatic by adults. These might include:

• Dad angrily belittling mom as the teenager listens helplessly from the bedroom
• A teacher publicly making comments that shame or humiliate the young person, or watching her do it to others
• Painful medical or dental procedures, especially those in which the persons is immobilized or feels trapped
• Intense pressure to do well in school, get into a good university, contribute to the family income, or live up to rigid societal expectations

The common denominator of traumatic experiences, whether big or small, is that they are experienced as an overwhelming threat to survival of our bodies, minds or spirits. One feels powerless and alone.

Acting in and acting out behaviors

It is not news that hurting people hurt people. Sometimes we hurt others, but the person we hurt may be our self, too. This is true for adults as well as young people.

Here are some examples of behaviors that we see in young people who are living with unaddressed trauma, especially if trauma is an ongoing part of their lives.

We can’t prevent youth from having traumatic events; trauma is part of the human experience. But we can reduce the chances that they will be traumatized by providing ingredients that build resilience:

• Education that normalizes what they are experiencing
• Tools to deal with the physiological overwhelm trauma induces in the body and brain
• Safe spaces to voice troubling thoughts and questions
• Conflict transformation skills to counter powerlessness

These interventions break the isolation that makes traumatic experiences so disorienting. We let our youth them know that we care, and that they are not alone. Life will always bring challenges, but the isolating hurt can be broken and laugher and enthusiasm return.

Energy, exhaustion and excitement filled my body, brain and spirit as I returned home last Friday afternoon after a week-long training on the campus at ��ݮ����.

The excitement was from finishing another successful training and hearing the action plans of the participants that morning outlining how they planned to use the STAR materials in their particular context. A Ugandan participant commented as she left, “This is the first program I’ve found that gives people the opportunity to learn from their own stories and experience – it is usually all based on theories.” Her dream is to integrate STAR into the pre-service and in-service trainings for Peace Corps volunteers in East Africa, particularly those working in post-conflict countries.

The exhaustion was due to the additional stress of a head cold while training as well as the fact that this was the third STAR II training I had facilitated in less than five months – one in Spanish in Bolivia, one in Creole in Haiti and one in English at EMU. Training in Creole via an interpreter was an additional stressor. Nevertheless, it really felt worth it when a Haitian participant told us one night at dinner that “many resources have been flown into Haiti since the earthquake a year ago, but most just flow on out. STAR came and it will stay here.”

The energy comes from all the STAR groups I have the opportunity to work with and witnessing the personal change that happens in a short period of time. It is equally energizing to hear their aspirations for using this training to change society. A Bolivian participant recently explained, “Processing trauma has a lot to do with conflict transformation. The existence of trauma often leads us to paint the ’other’ as the enemy and keeps us from advancing. Look at the collective traumas of the Bolivian people and how we view each ’other.’ The model we’ve learned in STAR will be very important in our work of intervention in specific conflict situations here.”

Excitement, exhaustion, and energy… The journey continues to break cycles of violence and build resilience in individuals and communities!