Originally published in TEACH Magazine, April 2026 Issue
By Lesley Machon
As a teacher, when a fifteen-second video clip makes your students lean forward in their seats, listening intently with bright eyes and bated breath, you don’t take that kind of attentiveness for granted. In my case, that’s what happened when I first showed one of Dr. Christine Gibson’s enlightening TikTok videos.
It was an explanation of the nervous system and how somatic techniques can help us attend to our well-being. Easy to understand and digest, without inaccessible jargon, Dr. Gibson’s content cut through the social media clutter to reach my students, meeting them where they were in the vernacular of a generation accustomed to screens.
Engaging with Trauma
When I first began teaching a psychology elective course two years ago, my goal was to cultivate a learning environment that invited students into meaningful engagement with all kinds of personal challenges—from mental health diagnoses and neurodivergence to traumatic experiences and everyday stress. I wanted my classroom to be a space my students could, however briefly, put down all the heaviness they carry with them every day.
Aside from my work in education, I’ve also spent the last several years training and serving as an interfaith chaplain in hospitals, hospices, and addiction centers across my city. I sit with youth and adults in their most tender hours, in the blue glow of ICU monitors, in twilight rooms where their breath becomes laboured. Together, we wade into the quiet that follows confession, hurt, and grief.
I am no stranger to unresolved trauma, caused by anything from environmental catastrophe to personal loss, and how it can transform into a series of sleepless nights, hands that won’t stop moving, or a winter fog of the mind that hangs heavy, enduring. I’ve seen the same thing in my classroom, have watched students become disengaged and disconnected from themselves, from each other, and from the world around them; so many carrying pain that seemed illegible to the systems meant to support them.
Although I have witnessed and felt, at the deepest level, how our inner worlds and outer crises are braided together, I didn’t yet know how to work that knowledge into my classroom in a way that would be meaningful to my students.
Then, I came across Dr. Christine Gibson’s content on TikTok.
A New Way to Reach Students
Dr. Gibson is a family physician who addresses trauma and toxic stress. Her TikTok presence (@tiktoktraumadoc) caught my attention because it discussed trauma in safe, accessible ways, and offered a sense of connection at the same time. It served as a reminder that all of us are struggling and that we can learn new ways to express this struggle.
The first thing that came to my mind after watching a few of Dr. Gibson’s videos was, I should show this to my students. Not only did her content embody a sense of psychological safety, it also presented practical skills in a way that kids could relate to. Her framework honoured the intelligence of young people, rather than talking down to them, and it offered a language with which to make sense of and connect to their nervous systems.
These days, the reality is that plenty of young people are learning about mental health online. It’s astonishing how many of them use TikTok for online searches. A UBC qualitative study uncovered that kids find TikTok easy to access, that it gives a sense of connection (and validation) and provides skills to cope with their challenges.
If this was the material my students related to, why not incorporate it into my teaching?
The initial positive reaction from my students after I showed them one of Dr. Gibson’s videos told me I was on the right track. So I took things one step further and tried designing a few lessons based on her book The Modern Trauma Toolkit. It provided just what I needed.
Those lessons were met with such enthusiasm from my students that I pulled apart my entire curriculum (activities, lesson plans, and all) and recreated it. Since then, I’ve had students showing up at lunch, after school, and even waiting outside my door before class begins. Their eagerness speaks to the success of this new approach, and I look forward to continuing on this path.
The River of Life
We started with water. The “River of Life” project, which came from the opening chapter of Dr. Gibson’s book, invited students to trace their life journeys—or those of an ancestor, character, or another figure whom they felt safe to explore.
Students gathered objects from nature to represent obstacles, turning points, supports, and joys, while also naming the larger forces that influenced their lives, such as racism, poverty, culture, or care. As they mapped obstacles and supports by placing their chosen physical objects along hand-drawn river maps, students recognized that these items were not necessarily aberrations, but rather the very realities that enhanced the drama of the landscape.
Alongside Dr. Gibson’s book, students read eco-focused authors Sophie Strand and Bayo Akomolafe and reflected on how water moves. Seeping, soaking, overflowing. Irrigating, evaporating, sustaining. Following ancient basins, carving new terrain.
With water as our guide, we realized ways that our stories and emotions, like rivers, change course and shape-shift as they flow through space and time. At the heart of this project was a pedagogy of social ecology and land-based learning: we discovered our own interconnectedness and found parallels between ourselves and the natural world.
Nervous System Science
In another lesson, students focused on the physical vessels of their bodies. They learned from Dr. Gibson about the vagus nerve, and built pipe cleaner models that tracked its path from the brainstem through the face, chest, and gut. They used their models to explain how the vagus nerve shapes facial expression, tone of voice, digestion, and stress responses.
These dazzling vagus nerves, adorned with names like “Taylor Shift: In Her Regulated Era,” caught the attention of curious peers, who wandered into the room to learn about mental health from their psychology student classmates.
Students then constructed polyvagal ladders out of dowels, binding the rungs with colourful tape. Each rung represented a different nervous system state—from calm and connected (ventral vagal), to activated and anxious (sympathetic), to shut down and frozen (dorsal vagal).
Next, students tied six envelopes to their ladders, each one containing a different type of strategy for moving back toward regulation: a somatic practice, a calming thought, a creative outlet, a relationship, a land-based support, a symbolic or ancestral reminder. These ladders were both personal and practical. Students chose strategies from Dr. Gibson’s work as well as from their own cultures and lived experience.
Building on these projects, we turned to Dr. Gibson’s chapter on the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). Students came to see that this cornerstone of psychiatric classification was shaped as much by social power and exclusion as by scientific evidence. Instead of dwelling on critique, however, they created. Each student chose a diagnosis and transformed its clinical, even disparaging, descriptions into poetry.
One student reframed Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). Where the DSM spoke of being “inconsistent with developmental level, and failing to match the criteria,” her poem imagined infinite possibility. She envisioned utopian futures, limitless ways to get there, and the birth of new stars.
Another student reframed depression, taking words like “melancholic,” “irritable,” and “impairment” and shaping them into a rhythm of darkness and return: “Even the moon, after disappearing, reawakens as a sliver of her old self.”
After that, we got our hands dirty. We considered trauma through the lens of soil, thinking about how soil’s networks are layered, full of restless microbes and dormant bulbs waiting for spring, ever-engaged in a continuous process of death and decay, composting and nourishing new life. We talked about how the plant and animal life that emerges from the soil can only come after winter’s layer of frost has thawed or fallen leaves have turned to mulch.
Just like the soil, we too are an extended, complex system of rhythmic life and decay, firing synapses, nerves sending signals to one another, memories and emotions all tangled together. As with the soil, in order to heal we must start by facing and composting our experiences, breaking them down so that we might grow and transform.
Work That Matters
When nervous-system science and trauma literacy are taught in accessible ways, students gain confidence in understanding themselves and others. They discover a shared vocabulary for states, practice concrete strategies, and apply their learning beyond the classroom. They relate to stress in radically different ways, and from there, can make meaningful sense of themselves and their experiences.
Teaching students the basics of their nervous systems is like handing them an owner’s manual for their own body and mind. By learning to regulate their own systems, they build the inner resources that support them in facing the onslaught of outer challenges with agency and hope. They also begin to see their adaptations not as failures but as intelligent responses, evidence of their survival, their resilience.
My student Zahra wrote in her reflective feedback that my course had moved her to pursue psychology at university:
The projects we worked on and the topics we explored, through Dr. Gibson’s book, helped me see how psychology can impact real lives, from understanding different mental illnesses to learning how people think, feel, and respond in various situations. Being part of that collaborative classroom community inspired me to continue studying psychology in university so I can keep exploring how the field can make a meaningful difference in people’s lives.
As a teacher, seeing your students find personal, life-orienting resonance with what we do in the classroom is all you can ask for. It is an honour to bring Dr. Gibson’s extensive knowledge to my students, and it is a rare joy to see them put these lessons into practice with astute care, gentleness, and empathy.
Working Together
During this experience, I was actually able to connect with Dr. Gibson directly. After I reached out by email, she invited me to meet with her when she returned from speaking internationally. Over tea and a homemade haskap square at her kitchen table, we brainstormed and began creating a variety of classroom activities based around Dr. Gibson’s work—a collaboration that has continued ever since.
She has been extraordinarily generous with her research, time, and expertise, always in service of making this knowledge accessible to young people who need it most. Thanks to her, my classroom is becoming the sanctuary I have always wanted it to be.
If you’re a teacher feeling the weight of what your students carry, if you’re watching them disengage and wondering how to reach them, this is an invitation. Start with water and where it wants to go. Try a variation of the Japanese art of Kintsugi, repairing broken pottery and filling the cracks in with gold. Write a poem that takes the language of pathology and gives students the chance to reclaim their experiences by finding a new self-representational language.
Let them get soil underneath their fingernails as they learn about composting, breaking down, and enduring. Notice when they lean forward, breath held and attentive, because that’s what hope looks like.
Advice from Dr. Gibson
Discussing mental health topics with adolescents can be complex and depends on your dynamic with them. I always say we need to move at the “speed of trust.” So, it may be helpful to begin with general topics and themes to see how they respond—careful of either flooding (feeling overwhelmed) or freezing (feeling dissociated).
I make sure not to ask for any personal disclosures in a public space, but to let them know that I’m open to these conversations at any time. Sometimes the most helpful ways to discuss it is to give them language—naming their emotions, describing the processes, or validating their experiences—because confusion and misunderstanding lead to stigma and shame.
Lesley Machon loves literature and the humanities and is passionate about bringing stories and ideas to life for students. She also serves her community as an interfaith chaplain at several hospitals and hospices. At the intersection of education and spiritual care, Lesley is deeply committed to helping people explore meaning and mine the depth of the human experience.
