The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Before Their Crimes: What We’re Misunderstanding about Childhood Trauma, Youth Crime, and the Path to Healing by Wendy Smith

Episode Date: August 15, 2025

Before Their Crimes: What We're Misunderstanding about Childhood Trauma, Youth Crime, and the Path to Healing by Wendy Smith

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Opinions expressed by guests on the podcast are solely their own and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the host or the Chris Foss show. Some guests of the show may be advertising on the podcast, but it is not an endorsement or review of any kind. Tell you an amazing young lady on the show where we're talking about her book called Before Their Crimes, What Were Misunderstanding About Childhood, Trauma, Youth Crime, and the Path to Healing? And I believe this is out November 13th, 2025. Is that correct? That's correct, yes.

Yeah, you can pre-order it on the website. You can pre-order it now and be sure to be the first one to read it when it comes out. Wendy B. Smith has a lifelong interest in vulnerable youth, especially those affected by juvenile justice and child welfare systems. In her 35 years of psychotherapy practice, she has treated many survivors of child mal-treatment. She's an expert in trauma and child development. Her first book, Youth Leaving Foster Care, A Developmental Relationship-Based Approach to Practice, was a text for Social Work graduate students.

Welcome the show. How are you, Wendy? Thank you. Thank you for having me, and I'm very well. Happy to be here. Thank you for coming. We certainly appreciate it. Give us any dot coms, dot nets, whatever on the internet you want to have people find you at.

I can be found at wendy B. Smith, Ph.D. dot net, and also at LinkedIn. So give us a 30,000 overview of what the book is about. So the book is based on 20 interviews I did with individuals who served long incarceration. for crimes they committed when they were essentially kids under 18. And the book really takes a look at what circumstances and situations they were in at the time of the crime. They describe their childhoods and their crimes, and I discuss some of the contributing factors to making children vulnerable to, committing violent acts as young people. That's kind of the, I mean, basically,

juvenile crime, especially violent crime, does not just happen. There's always a story behind it. So, and you've been doing this for 35 years, I think we mentioned, right? Well, I had a psychotherapy practice for 35 years, in which I treated people with all kinds of problems. and including people who had experienced trauma and childhood. And we talk about this a lot on the show.

It seems to be the basis for a lot of different areas of our human interaction experience. But, you know, the one thing I've learned is that the things, the trauma and different things that shape us in childhood are pretty much blueprints for a lifetime unless we get help, really. That's exactly right. I mean, there was that landmark study in 1998 by Feliti and a group of researchers, and basically they were looking at the effects of trauma on physical health, which are profound, you know, so that many chronic health conditions that people develop later in life are associated with early childhood,

what he called adverse childhood experience or ACEs. Wow. Studies show a strong link between adverse child experiences and conditions like heart disease, lung disease, liver disease, and autoimmune diseases. Well, you know, we talk about this on the show too. The body keeps the score and a lot of trauma seems to, you know, people seem to internalize it somewhere in their physical body and stuff. And so impact on the immune system. Yeah, it's, you know, I've, I've dated all my life, so I've been single and I've dated a lot. you can see, you know, especially once you reach a certain age group that you're dating that's older, when you get to know them and you find out about the traumas of their childhood and then you can see the arc of the shape of their life, it's really interesting how you can see how that one event or events of their childhood shaped the whole arc of their life unless they get therapy or help for it. And, you know, most people don't. I think most people just kind of go through life and then about 50 maybe have some sort of awakening to their trauma.

You have a large enough wreckage that you've left in your wake over 50 years that you can look back and be like, yeah, there might be something my childhood caused all that. Yeah, and I think the other, well, not the only other, but one of the other important contributors is that when trauma occurs early, it affects your brain development in ways that then affect your capacity to cope with stress. You know, it isn't only how it affects your physical health later or your mental health later,

but also affects your ability to self-soothe in difficult times. It affects your ability to make good decisions because you're caught up in your stress response. that's been dysregulated really by overwhelming experiences too early. Yeah, yeah. And it's interesting, a lot of people sometimes, it seems, I used to question

when people would, you know, when they would have forgotten childhood tragic events or trauma events, and they'd be like, and suddenly I remembered and you're like, hmm, I don't know about that. But from the more experience I've seen, it seems like many times the mind or body when children

experience trauma and they can't handle it, it does bury it. It does kind of waste it for a while and then it seems to bring it back in later life when it feels it gets triggered. Yeah. It gets triggered, okay. So that's what it does it. Yeah, some experience, which could

be even the smell of something that is associated with the trauma or music that perhaps was playing at the time. There are all kinds of of sensory triggers as well as, you know, more mental triggers or behavioral triggers. But that's true.

One of the ways children cope when experiences more than they can manage is to shut it down. Yeah. And then it kind of does it, is it because it gets triggered later in life or is it, is it, does the brain kind of say, hey, I think you can handle this now? you might be grown up enough and mature enough and it brings it out or is it just the constant triggering? You know, that's hard to say. I think that really varies with the person

and the experiences. I think there are certainly, you know, in therapy, for example, you see that they can take a person a long time to get ready to really face, you know, an early trauma. And other people come in with it.

So you just, I think that's a very individual matter as to when these things surface. And for example, you know, one of the triggers for my writing this book was that I visited prisons with a group of lawyers and advocates who were informing and educating prisoners who would be eligible for new youth offender laws if they committed crimes early. in life during the mid, during 2011, 12, 13, 14, some laws were passed in California that permitted those people to have

youth offender paroles in which their youth and the circumstances at the time of the crime could be considered in granting parole. So we were doing these workshops and my role was to do what we call the insight groups

where I would sit with 15 or 20 men and talk about the need to develop insight into your crime and why you committed it and that that would be a necessity for the parole hearing the parole board commissioners to understand that if you didn't understand your crime there was no reason to think you might not do something similar once you were released. But many of these men would say to me, well, how do I, you know, isn't that just making excuses if I'm looking at my childhood?

They found the distinction between excuses and explanatory factors tough to sort out. And do you find that a lot of people that went to prison or the majority have childhood trauma, have issue? Yes. I mean, I haven't interviewed that many people, but of my admittedly small sample, in every case, there were numerous of what we would call adverse childhood experiences. Wow. Wow. Whether it was child abuse, a physical abuse, sexual abuse, sexual abuse. death of a parent at a very early age, drug abuse of a parent, you know, being bullied mercilessly in school, being expelled and suspended. All these things added up. Well, you know, we've talked about this a lot on the show. I mean, just it's amazing how much the childhood will shape the arc of a life.

Like I said, being a guy who's date on my life and I hear in stories, you know, they can talk about their trauma and you can see the arc of it. You can see it in everybody for that matter. Well, you know, and it's interesting to think about the fact that early childhood experiences also shape great success, not just problems. You know what I mean? When you look back at someone who's had remarkable success, you can also point. to some ingredients for that in their childhood. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Lack. I mean, for me, it was a lot of lack. It was growing up poor. It wasn't having what I wanted. There's a lot of trauma in my childhood, but, you know, for me, I spent most of my years trying to be successful so I could heal that wound and buy all the things that I couldn't buy. And, you know, that was kind of one of the things I was doing when I first got money and success. And I was driven to that.

driven to that because I grew up in Hollywood seeing opulence as success, but my parents were poor. And so I couldn't figure out why everyone else drove a BMW, Rolls-Royce, or Mercedes-Benz, and my dad drove a shitty fee-de-up bus. I mean, it was a beat-up old rag. But, you know, part of it was for work for delivering newspapers to the coin ops. But what would you say about role models in your life? I know the childhood blueprints are put in from fathers and mothers, if that's what you mean by role models. Well, it can be someone else, but I am asking is, you know,

given how you experience the challenges in your life as impelling you towards success, I wonder if there were people who provided some model of that, even if they were at a distance. There probably weren't some of my teens. When I was young, I would read a lot of books. You know, back then as a kid, you know, everyone was obsessed with World War II. We were in the midst of the Russian war, so you'd spend, you know, half your time underneath your desk, practicing nuclear drills. Because anybody knows that, you know, nuclear bomb can't penetrate an open-air desk.

It's a weird panacea sort of thing. It's kind of like that, it's going to see in a fight club where they're like, you know, is everyone smiling and docile on the pictures of the airplane as it's going down in flames in the brochure. And so I read a lot of Eisenhower, I read a lot of biographies. So I read biographies of the War Generals, and I love building the, I love building the models of the ships and stuff and reading about World War II battles. So I read stories about John F. Kennedy, Patton, Eisenhower, you name all the great war general I'm leaving some out for Vietnam and Korea, but McCarthy.

But so I would read those. I think those were inspirations for me. I was looking for. I didn't realize at the time, but I realized it now that I was looking for something better than what I'm experiencing. And then I suppose there were other things. I grew up in a religious cult. Me finding George Carlin was saving grace.

Me finding, I think there was a couple other voice. that had, you know, that lived in reality, and I finding out that I wasn't alone in my sanity or what I was being called is insane because I wouldn't buy into the cult. So hopefully that answers your question. Yeah. It's kind of a long answer. Definitely does. And it's also, it makes me think of one of the people in my book who in prison kind of made his,

turn to understanding himself and his experiences from also from reading about all kinds of people and most impactfully about some of the saints and the Catholic founder of an important movement that really moved him to want to live a better life and to understand his own life. You know, without good role models, maybe that's the case. I mean, I've read that a lot of our kids in the criminal system and stuff, you know, a lot of times they don't have good examples of parenthood. Sometimes they just have one parent, set of two. I hear that single parents contribute a lot to people that are in jail. I think there's...

I think actually it's maybe a little more complicated than being single or have. both parents, it's really what are the circumstances of those parents. And, you know, if you're a single parent is also a heroin addict, you're kind of screwed, right? Yeah. I mean, that's where it makes a difference. When that, even, you know, when your single parent isn't really able to be there for you. Yeah. anything we would call, you know, a good childhood, not just in the sense of parenting,

but in the sense of experiences, you know, of enjoyable, educational, you know, enriching experiences, which we all want children to have. So that's another important piece also, I think, is the role of schools that could be much more supportive. to children. It would take more investment on our part in schools, but that's where kids show up every day. That's where somebody's going to see if they're struggling, you know, but a lot of times kids who are struggling get suspended or expelled, and that starts them on a trajectory that's pretty downhill. Yeah, yeah, it's, it's interesting. So with the book, what do you hope people accomplish when they read it and

kind of see the stories that you put in there? I think I hope that people understand that, as I say, juvenile crime does not occur in a vacuum, but that there are reasons behind it that bear understanding. I think

I hope people will come to have a broader understanding of the fact that everything that happens to us, in childhood makes a difference. It is not like kids forget or aren't affected. Everything stays with us, just as you were saying earlier, until you unpack it. It's part of you. You're carrying it.

And much of what happens to children in the early years has profound effects to the good and to the ill. And so I guess I would love to see our society. have a greater appreciation for the importance of experience in childhood. Yeah. I've often said that, and of course I don't get to make the rules, otherwise I wouldn't make the rules. But I've often said that people really need to, if they want to have kids, they should be forced to go to college first for a couple years to learn how to be good parents,

resolve any childhood traumas. And, you know, really, I mean, it's just kind of astounding how people take on raising children. Just like, fuck it. Let's just fuck this person up with all of our bullshit. Well, people probably don't intend to do that. Yeah, well, I mean, no one intends to do anything wrong or bad. But we learn it from our own experience. If you had a terrible experience, that's what you've got to go on.

Or you try to do the opposite. Yeah. And usually people do the opposite overcomposate, I think, as well. Very often. Yeah, very often. So tell us about your journey. Why did you get in psychology? What motivated you get into psychology?

And I don't know if you want to give a plug out to your other book, too, as well. So my other book is really a textbook, so not exactly beachside or bedtime reading. But for those who are students of the foster care system, it's called youth leaving foster care. And, you know, I think it gives you a good all-round picture of policy programs and also early development. But you won't be surprised to know that my interest also evolved from childhood trauma. I mean, it's not, you know, shocking because that's probably true of most people who become healers and therapists, right? cheaper. You know, it's funny, anytime I meet somebody who's a psychologist, especially a woman, I'm like, what happened to your childhood? Yeah. And it's basically, it seems like you correct

me wrong, but it basically seems like the psychology is it's cheaper to become a psychiatrist and try and fix myself than to hire one. Well, I did both. So, yeah. Is there any future works coming on? Any future books maybe you might be working on? No, I'm thinking about something, but it's not fully baked. So I'll probably do a little bit of, you know, short piece writing, maybe some blogs, that kind of thing for the next few months while I incubate this idea. So on your website, is there anything we need to promote there? Is any services consulting you do, telemedicine, things like that?

No, at this point I'm retired from practice and really devoting my time. I work with a lot of youth serving nonprofits and writing and my five grandchildren. Well, five grandchildren will definitely keep you busy there. Well, Wendy, give us your final pitch out as we go out. Tell people where they can order your book and dot nets, et cetera, set up. Thank you. You can go to Wendy B.Smith Ph.D.net, where you can pre-order from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Bloomsbury. And as I say, I hope that people will find the book and learn about what really drives juvenile crime because it's not hard to understand once you really hear in the voices of the people themselves what their childhoods were like and what led them to these very critical moments.

Well, thank you very much, Wendy, for coming on the show. really appreciate it. Thank you, Chris. It has. And order per book, wherever fine books are sold. You can pre-order now, folks, out November 13, 2025, entitled Before Their Crimes, What Were Misunderstanding About Childhood Trauma, Youth Crime, and the Path to Healing. Thanks for hours for tuning. Go to Goodreads.com, Forteouss, Chris Voss, LinkedIn.com, Fortezs, Chris Foss, Chris Voss, 1 on the TikTok, and all this crazy place to the internet. Be good at each other. Stay safe. We'll see you guys next time.

And I should say that I would say,