Dr. Danisha Keating

I lived it. Then I studied it. Then I taught it.

Three things I do, for three different people. Find yourself below.

The child, the sibling, the one raising everybody, and eventually the legal guardian. I did not study trauma and then go looking for a subject. I lived it first, and went back for the language afterward.

Foster youth. The chaos of abuse. Homeless at eighteen, and for six years after that. Raising my siblings before anyone was raising me, and their legal guardian by twenty four. My bachelor’s took eight years, because that is what it takes when you are raising people while you are still being raised.

Then I kept going. A master’s in leadership and organizational studies. A PhD in general psychology, cognition and instruction, finished in three and a half years while I was raising my youngest brother and working a full time job.

My dissertation asked what actually helps foster youth make it through community college. It was published in Advances in Applied Sociology in 2022.

Then I spent a decade teaching it.

Developmental and child and adolescent psychology. Human growth and development. Crisis counseling and interventions. Psychopharmacology. Personality theory. Social psychology. Research methods, qualitative methods, and tests and measurements.

From 2021 to 2025 I was an assistant professor, a dissertation chair, and a committee member at a large university, working with about 20 doctoral students a year. Before that, and alongside it, I trained staff and faculty at more than 30 institutions on how to actually work with the students in front of them.

So when I say trauma informed, I do not mean I read a book about it. I lived it, studied it, taught it, and then built RESPOND™ out of all three.