The Stories We Carry: Understanding Story. Changing Their Tomorrow. (Available Fall of 2026)

Every child walks in carrying something you cannot see. Anger. Silence. Defiance. Perfect grades and constant apologies.

We call it behavior. We write it down. Sometimes what we write follows a child for years. Kevin D. McNeil spent his career as a Special Victims Unit Detective sitting across from children in interview rooms, learning, slowly and not always in time, that the calmest child in the room is often the one carrying the most.

The Stories We Carry is the working companion to his keynote: a field-tested guide for the people who show up for children when almost no one else does.

Inside you'll find:

• Why the human brain is built for story, and how to use that in a hearing, a classroom, or an interview room.

• What the research reveals about how juries actually decide, and why the order you tell it in changes the outcome.

• Five behaviors this work sees every week and what each one is really serving.

• The CARRY Framework, five moves for reading behaviors as story.

• How to find the account trauma left behind, in schools, in siblings, in the people who knew a child before.

• A full section for investigators and multidisciplinary teams, including the interview that broke an eight-victim case.

• Nearly thirty exercises, a court-report structure, an MDT case review protocol, and a facilitator's guide.

Our job is not to change the narrative. It is to give it a place to land.