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Like a Butterfly

Paducah-based nonprofit fills need for families living with trauma

Emily Hargrove remembers her parents telling her that doctors didn’t think she would make it through high school with her diagnosis of fetal alcohol syndrome. Years later, she’s now pursuing a Ph.D. and publishing research in peer-reviewed publications.

Fetal alcohol spectrum disorders affect 1 in 100 babies, according to the National Organization on Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, yet it doesn’t receive the same attention as other disorders. Hargrove has made it her life mission to educate people about the disorder, raise awareness, and conduct research. 

“So, when I received that diagnosis, my parents didn’t have any kind of support,” she says. “It was just kind of like, ‘Well, here you go. Here’s an answer.’”

Her parents helped her overcome fetal alcohol syndrome through putting her into activities that strengthened her neural connections and helped her to rewire her brain. Still, she struggled with ADHD, memory issues, sleeping problems, and an inability to read social cues.

“And so, it was all of these negative prognoses everywhere,” Hargrove says. “It’s not always a negative prognosis, and I think accommodations are key to that.”

Hargrove shares her story so that she can give hope to other families who face a diagnosis of a fetal alcohol spectrum disorder. She will join the staff of the new Papillion Center as an advocate to help families like her parents better understand and work with children who have received this diagnosis.

The Papillion Center, 130 John Robinson Drive, provides therapies and services to families, children, teens, and couples who have been affected by trauma, fetal alcohol spectrum disorders, neonatal abstinence syndrome, and attachment issues. The center uses techniques from Trust-Based Relational Intervention and The Connected Child by Dr. Karyn Purvis.

Treatment is offered for Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder, adoption, anxiety, attachment, autism, behavior dysregulation, depression, family conflict, fetal alcohol spectrum disorders, neonatal abstinence syndrome, self-harm, and trauma. Therapies offered include emotion-focused therapy, equine therapy, sand tray therapy, trauma-based relational intervention, and trauma-focused cognitive behavioral therapy.

Erin Goodman works as a therapist at the Papillion Center in Paducah. She discovered first-hand the lack of therapy services in far Western Kentucky when she and her husband, Jeremy, adopted two children from the Congo and experienced issues getting them home. Once the children arrived in the United States, she realized that they had experienced trauma in their homeland.

“The typical thing that I heard and even said to myself at the time was, ‘They won’t remember it,’” Goodman says. “And the thing that I learned was that the brain never forgets. And trauma actually changes the formation of the brain, even from the time of conception.”

Goodman was so focused on getting her children home and settled in safely that she didn’t realize what they might have experienced could have had longer lasting effects on their brain. She began attending an adoption support group and met Chris Troutt, a Christian family therapist who founded the Papillion Center in 2010 in Tennessee. Troutt came to Paducah once a month to help families who were dealing with early childhood trauma, attachment disorders, and fetal alcohol spectrum disorders.

Goodman learned about trauma-based relational intervention, conceptualized by the late Dr. Karen Purvis.

“She developed this way of thinking based on the way that Christ deals with the disciples we see in the scriptures,” Goodman says. “So, when they do something that is outside of what He would have directed them to do in the first place, instead of sending them away, He connects with them. And He says, ‘Come closer, let me teach you.’

“So, this entire parenting perspective, or just this way of looking at trauma, taught me and my husband how to draw our family and our kids closer so that we could start to rebuild. And so that we can start to heal from the trauma and heal from some of the stuff that my kids were dealing with.”

As Goodman and her family learned how to heal and become healthier, she realized that services for family counseling were scarce in Western Kentucky. She returned to school to earn a master’s degree in clinical social work from Campbellsville University and had plans to open a center on her own. She reconnected with Troutt, who suggested that the Tennessee center could expand to Paducah because of the need. Families from Western Kentucky were driving to Gallatin, where the center is located.

“We know that TBIR works,” Goodman says.

And since it worked for her family, Goodman hopes that the Papillon Center in Paducah will open doors for other families who are struggling with issues such as trauma, attachment issues, fetal alcohol spectrum disorders, and more.

“We really believe that God is going to meet the needs that we may have at this center,” she says. “I would say that probably we have one referral or a person call for services every single day. People have needed services for so long and haven’t had them.”

The need illustrates itself through Goodman’s daily interactions. She recalls meeting a woman at a yard sale who asked what she was buying. Goodman mentioned the center. “She said that someone close to her had passed away several years ago, and she said she had been looking for services for the child for three years. Her child was five. And for three years, she had been looking for somebody to provide counseling to that child and was not able to find anybody in this whole town.”

Goodman anticipates the center will grow because of the need. She has already hired another therapist, an office manager, and an advocate—Emily Hargrove.

The center runs as a nonprofit agency. To help raise money, Goodman says the center is planning to sell $20 shares so that people can “have a little bit more ownership themselves in the center.”

“What they’ll receive in return is not a monetary multiplication for themselves. They’re not going to get money back like that would have been invested in the stock market,” she says. “But they’re going to have an investment emotionally and financially in our town and our community so that they can then receive dividends on that emotional part.”

The center derived its name from the Papillon Butterfly. Their website details a story about a man who found a butterfly cocoon and watched it every day until a small opening appeared. The butterfly struggled to force its way out and then seemed to stop. The man snipped the cocoon open to free the butterfly, but it was swollen with shriveled wings.

“The fact that the Papillon Center speaks about the butterfly in the cocoon, and how the cocoon is part of the reason why the butterfly gains its strength,” Hargrove says, “and even though it looks like it’s struggling trying to break out of the cocoon, we want to help it. If we help it break out of the cocoon too early, it won’t have the strength in its wings to actually fly. And I think that connects so well to anyone struggling, or any child, or for adults from a hard place.”

Hargrove said she often relates the butterfly story when she talks about the issues people like herself have faced. 

“I always tell people it’s the struggle that can be beautiful,” she said. “And it’s the purpose and the struggle that we have to discover what it is. And it’s through that that we build our strength, and we find our strength. It’s just a path, and their purpose is far more beautiful than we may ever realize. And I’ve always said that it’s in our weakness that our strength is perfected. And I think that ties beautifully back to the butterfly example.”

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