Trauma-Informed Leadership and Workplace Culture Insights

A clear trauma-informed guide to fight, flight, freeze, and fawn—workplace signs, what helps, what makes it worse, and how leaders can respond skillfully.

The institutions that hope to repair the damage of structural violence are often the same ones that cause it. I began listening to the...

May is foster care awareness month, and this year, I'd like to increase awareness about the foster care system and how it ties into other social issues we hope to heal from. Foster Care Awareness Month is traditionally a time dedicated to highlighting the needs and challenges within the foster care system. This year at Chefalo Consulting, we're going to do something a little different. My goal is to broaden the conversation. In this article, we'll explore how the foster care

Emotional intelligence is a superpower in today's workforce. And, leaders need to prioritize their social-emotional skills if they hope...

What does healing look like? We often think the answer will be sold to us in pretty packaging, but the truth is that healing requires...

In honor of Women’s History Month, we’re highlighting women who have made—and are making—history. Foster care is associated with many negative outcomes. Yet, there are so many resilient girls who not only survived foster care but grew into empowered women. Here are 12 of them. We know that experiences in foster care are associated with negative outcomes. Since the 90s, we’ve understood that trauma has a lasting effect on peoples’ lives, especially when that trauma happens at

Trauma-informed change is a revolutionary approach that acknowledges the far-reaching impact of trauma on individuals, communities,...

Attachment styles can help us understand how our trauma impacts our relationships—and what we can do about it. I work with many...

People are always asking me: what do I do to heal my trauma? And people are always disappointed when I tell them the answer. Why? Because...

This blog discusses self-harm and suicide, which can be sensitive topics to many readers. Please establish your safety before reading, including your mental, psychological, emotional, and safety. Self-harm is a topic that's often discussed in hushed tones, if at all. When we talk about this common warning sign for crisis (which often goes hand in hand with passive or active suicidal ideation), many people’s minds immediately jump to the more extreme forms of self-destructive

If you need access to a crisis helpline right now, call 800-273-8255, the 24-hour National Suicide Prevention Lifeline. Trigger Warning:...

Since the release of Garbage Bag Suitcase, I have had some interesting human encounters. I have traveled around the country and even into...

I have never really been good at relationships. Intimacy scares me, and trust is something that is earned. When I travel now, speaking...

I make no bones about it, as a foster child, I don’t think I was an easy person to get along with and I certainly wasn’t trying to make...

Shenandoah Chefalo was abused and neglected as a child by her mother and step-father. At the age of 13, she was abandoned so she...

I have attended several funerals during my lifetime. At one, when I was still in high school, I remember watching the mother of a friend...

For over twenty years, I said nothing. I hid my status as a foster care survivor from almost everyone I knew. The label “foster kid” had...

Did you know that we have over 400,000 children in the foster care system each day in the United States? It's appalling and most States are seeing spikes in the number of referrals they are getting this year, and it is estimated that by the end of the year 2015 we will have close to half a million children living in foster care. What perhaps is even more astonishing than the pure volume of children living in care are the atrocious outcomes that face them once they age out of

LESSONS FROM THE ROAD, A FOSTER CARE MEMOIR Garbage Bag Suitcase is my forthcoming memoir of my wholly dysfunctional journey through a...