PDTCA 2022

Welcome address by President Munton.

We are pleased to offer parts of this Opening Address in French with a special thank you to our Past President and Board member Veronica Doyle.

Our collective and personal well-being has been deeply impacted by recent world events. There is a need for a proactive approach to ensuring our people are well equipped to face the unparallel stress, unrest, and uncertainty that are becoming more common. To maintain excellence in all areas of one’s life knowing how to stress wisely and recover is key.
In this keynote, Dr. Robyne Hanley-Dafoe explores how to use a multi-dimensional approach to wellness that promotes moving theory into committed action through the five principles of stressing wisely, including signature strength activation, emotional regulation, and creative release and recovery.
By building awareness and personal accountability, participants will be able to implement personal wellness care systems that are sustainable, realistic, and time efficient. And, by doing so, enhance personal and professional performance and satisfaction.
“This keynote speaker was generously sponsored by Morgex Insurance.”

Throughout this fast-paced, story-filled presentation, Dr. Ungar will show that resilience is much more than just personal ruggedness in the face of adversity. It is instead a reflection of how well individuals, families, institutions and employers work together to create opportunities for us to find our way to the resources we need for well-being while making those resources available in ways that we experience as meaningful. Based on Dr. Ungar’s research around the world and his clinical practice, this presentation uses examples from his new book Change Your World to explore how those who help others can avoid burnout and maintain their own resilience when stressors pile up on the job and at home. Building on recent advances to the science of resilience, 12 factors that make us more resilient as adults will be discussed, along with practical tools participants can use to find the resources they need to cope successfully in culturally and contextually relevant ways (even during a pandemic). Finally,  Dr. Ungar will talk about vicarious resilience, the positive impact we experience as helpers when we nurture resilience in others.

For millennia, Indigenous people sustained thriving, living cultures and societies on the back of the Turtle. We wove our histories into intricate and beautiful stories to keep our truths alive, generation upon generation upon generation. Then those ships sailed armed with a colonial toolkit filled with the necessary implements to commence a course of systematic impoverishment among Indigenous peoples. With clear intention they sought dispossession through law and policy, the creation of dependency and ultimately near total oppression of what had been self-determining forever. One of those implements was the strategy to dismember Indigenous families, and thus communities and nations, by taking the children. There is the colonizer’s account of that. We see it in the history books. And then there is ours. Creating and holding space for Indigenous people to correct history; to impart the truth, is a necessary pre-requisite to reconciliation. Let us, together, light a dialogue fire and keep the flame burning until the truth overturns the colonial lie.

Les avancées dans le domaine des neurosciences affectives et sociales, c’est à dire les domaines de recherche qui nous permettent de mieux comprendre la vie émotionnelle et comportementale des individus, nous permettent désormais de mieux comprendre quels sont les facteurs favorisant ou compliquant le développement neuropsychologique des enfants et des ados, dont ceux qui favorisent leur disponibilité aux apprentissages scolaires. Si un diagnostic offre une lecture ponctuelle des défis des élèves, il cible rarement les forces sur lesquelles les parents et les équipes écoles peuvent s’appuyer pour soutenir la maturation progressive du cerveau et, surtout, pour mettre en place les conditions de vie idéales pour atteindre les objectifs partagés. On sait, par exemple, que le cerveau des jeunes va créer quelque 300 millions de synapses tous les jours si et seulement si le jeune se sent en sécurité, apprécié et reconnu. Même la résilience peut difficilement se mettre en place sans ce contexte éducatif soutenant. En d’autres mots, l’enfant et l’ado peuvent s’adapter, mais pas dans n’importe lesquelles des conditions. Cette conférence se veut une invitation à créer les conditions idéales pour favoriser autant la persévérance scolaire que leur résilience nécessaire pour que les jeunes déploient leur potentiel humain.

Delegates will register on The Wisdom of Trauma site to access the Documentary after clicking on the video link in Sched.
Zoom and pre-recorded video links will not be active until Wednesday afternoon February 23rd. So if you want to register before that please use this link. You will be asked if you want to make a donation, but you do not need to make a donation to register, so only do so if you want to. https://watch.showandtell.film/watch/wot-pdtca-24022022 You will receive an email with the link to the film. You can watch a trailer using that link for now. The film will only be available during convention starting at 1:00 pm on Thursday February 24th.

The interconnected epidemics of anxiety, chronic illness and substance abuse are, according to Dr Gabor Maté, normal. But not in the way you might think.

One in five Americans are diagnosed with mental illness in any given year [1]. Suicide is the second most common cause of death in the US for youth aged 15-24 [2], and kills over 800,000 people a year globally [3] and 48,300 in the USA [4]. Drug overdose kills 81,000 in the USA annually [5]. The autoimmunity epidemic affects 24 million people in the USA [6]. What is going on?

In The Wisdom of Trauma, we travel alongside physician, bestselling author and Order of Canada recipient Dr. Gabor Maté to explore why our western society is facing such epidemics. This is a journey with a man who has dedicated his life to understanding the connection between illness, addiction, trauma and society.

“Trauma is not what happens to you.
Trauma is what happens inside you,
as a result of what happens to you.”
— Gabor Maté

Trauma is the invisible force that shapes our lives. It shapes the way we live, the way we love and the way we make sense of the world. It is the root of our deepest wounds. Dr. Maté gives us a new vision: a trauma-informed society in which parents, teachers, physicians, policy-makers and legal personnel are not concerned with fixing behaviors, making diagnoses, suppressing symptoms and judging, but seek instead to understand the sources from which troubling behaviors and diseases spring in the wounded human soul.

As this movie is about Trauma, it does include discussion around potential trauma inducing situations. We acknowledge that this content may be difficult for some viewers and we also encourage you to care for your safety and well-being. Should you need to process what you have seen here please connect with the Calgary Distress Center https://www.distresscentre.com/ or call 403.266.HELP (4357).

The attached Screening & Discussion Guide is being shared as a courtesy to professionals who would like to bring together a group of colleagues to discuss the movie that they watch. We are not setting up a formal discussion session, this will need to be organized by individuals of small groups if this is desired.

Bringing the comedy and entertainment of Youtube influencer to our very own PDTCA delegates.

JUST CLICK ON THE WORDS WATCH ON VIMEO AND YOU WILL BE PROMPTED FOR THE PASSWORD.

Jann Arden is a multi-platinum, award-winning singer, songwriter, actor and author. Arden has released 14 albums with 19 top ten singles. Her most recent project, Hits & Other Gems was released in September 2020 and features Arden’s hit songs “Could I Be Your Girl,” “I Would Die For You,” and a special live recording of her break-out international hit “Insensitive.”
Arden’s accolades include 8 JUNO Awards including Female Artist of the Year and Songwriter of the Year, 10 SOCAN Awards and 4 Western Canadian Music Awards to name a few. In 2020, she was announced as an inductee into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame joining the ranks of Canadian music icons including Alanis Morisette, Bryan Adams, Barenaked Ladies, Bachman Turner Overdrive, Joni Mitchell, Shania Twain and many more. Arden has also been inducted into the Canadian Association of Broadcasters Hall of Fame, has a Star on Canada’s Walk of Fame and has been awarded the Order of Canada.
Arden has written five books, the most recent being her new memoir IF I KNEW THEN: Finding Wisdom in Failure and Power in Aging, released October 2020. IF I KNEW THEN follows Arden’s 2017 Canadian best-seller, FEEDING MY MOTHER: Comfort and Laughter in the Kitchen as My Mom Lives with Memory Loss, which spent a combined 44 weeks on The Globe and Mail bestseller lists.
Season 2 of Arden’s CTV hit original comedy series JANN premiered in September 2020. With Arden serving as co-creator and star of the show where she plays a fictionalized version of herself, Season 1 of JANN was the most-watched new Canadian comedy series of the 2018-19 broadcast season. The third season of JANN is set to air on CTV in the Fall of 2021.
Whether she is captivating audiences with her heartfelt music, entertaining them with her quick wit or sharing her written word in a boldly honest voice – Arden is a Canadian original – a brilliant multi-dimensional talent.