Having come from a broken family with lots of history of drug and alcohol problems, I found this weeks information very encouraging. My favorite article came from the additional readings in the instructors notes: Trauma, Brain and Relationship: Helping Children Heal.
I was shocked that trauma can come from so many places including events that happen in the womb, trauma can be caused by intentional abuse or neglect, but may also be unintentional. This topic interests me mostly because I would love to see the trauma cycle broken in my family and others. B. Bryan Post, PhD, LCSW states "98% of parents of traumatized children have been traumatized as well". "It is essential to treat the entire family when healing trauma in children."
The good news is, Dr Daniel Siegel tells us that traumatized children can be healed. If a child has had at least one secure relationship, the child will have a seed of resilience and has the potential to do well in the future. He goes on to say "What's shareable is bearable. When a person can bring the trauma out and share it with another it becomes more bearable". This statement reminded me of my niece. Shortly after she moved in with us 4 years ago we brought her to a counselor, she didn't like to go, she didn't want to be "different" than the other kids. Upon further investigation of why she didn't want to go she looked at me and said, "Counseling is like ripping off a band-aid". I didn't really understand this analogy at first, so we decided we would try going back one more time. We got to counseling and I advised the counselor of what my niece had said about the band-aid. She said, "That is a great analogy! It is uncomfortable because just when you think the wound is all covered up and hidden you have to remove the band-aid to redress it". The counselor explained to my niece in more medical terms saying if you have a big gash in your arm you would clean the cut (uncomfortable) before you cover it up, then you would uncover it to clean it again. If you don't clean the wound it would fester and become infected, if we don't share our feelings and hold them in they will fester and become "infected".
I am really encouraged that children can be healed and can have positive bright futures! From this article I learned that we should all be present, patient, kind, sensitive, comforting, supportive, and encouraging to a child as we may be their one person.
“The good news is, Dr Daniel Siegel tells us that traumatized children can be healed. If a child has had at least one secure relationship, the child will have a seed of resilience and has the potential to do well in the future.”
ReplyDeleteThe band aid reference is interesting to me because it plays with the idea that like you said, you almost have to re-visit certain emotions or instances that you were unable to properly process in the time of its encounter. It makes me wonder that dependent on the severity of the trauma, how far you have to regress in order to apply a healthy application of care and support.
If a child was never given the chance to form strong positive relationships in the face of adversity, perhaps they have to revert back to the simplest forms of emotional accounting. Recognizing and using others emotions with social referencing is strictly spoken in the development of infants, but perhaps a particular incident would imply a need for simple social cues, as having someone to rely on for interpretation of unknown events. How am I supposed to react? What is the right thing to do? Not having that positive influence to relate to it could be difficult to answer those questions.
Maybe some children in the face of severe emotional trauma have to go as far as to have to rebuild basic emotional regulation skills, and internal working models (expectations of availability and responsiveness of a positive role model) to for their first time create a sense of attachment, trust, and security.
Of course I'm thinking in extremes, and your particular instance didn't seem the case. (I suggested what would happen if a child would be locked in a closet with little to no exposure to its environment in it's early development years in my original post, and ask the question, what would happen?) But even without the extremes, they are similar in their approach.
“Ripping off the band-aid” does in fact allow one to revisit all these negative experiences and put them under the light of a positive influence. It's just up to the counselor, (and the patient) how far you would need to dig.