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Your 83-year-old grandmother is walking on uneven ground past a park. Instead of stopping to observe the park, she continues walking while her attention is drawn to the children playing on a swing set. Your grandmother, who has significant visual and hearing impairments, suddenly finds herself losing her balance and falling to the ground. Imagine yourself in that same situation, would you have fallen? Most likely, you would have carried out the two tasks (i.e., walking and maintaining balance)…

There are few wounds that cut as deep as racial oppression. Compassionate activism may allow us to fight for change while consciously considering these wounds of the past. In our contentious debates about race relations, we have failed to pay adequate attention to what the last 25 years of research tells us about how racial discrimination can be addressed. Processing present day racial oppression through the lens of trauma psychology allows us to see that compassionate activism can address the…

We’ve all been there. You are standing on a bus, all the seats are taken, so you hold on for dear life. At the next stop, an older adult boards the bus, and sadly no one is willing to give up their seat for them. You start giving the sitters some passive-aggressive stares in the hopes that they catch on and step up (quite literally) to the occasion. But why is it so important for them to sacrifice their pleasurable sitting experience for the older individual?