58 - HOW DOES TRAUMA AFFECT CHILDREN - IT MIGHT BE MORE THAN YOU THINK - HOW TO SEE SIGNS

Children can experience various different kind of traumas. But do you, as a professional or a parent or a teacher, know what to do with them? Hi, I'm Dr. Carol Darca, author, psychologist and founder of Reconnect Trauma Treatment center in Los Angeles. I've been talking a lot about adults as survivors of childhood trauma, but today I wanted to address how to work with kids, how to understand them, what trauma does to children, children, adolescents. Right. Anyone under the age of 18. So, well, children are known to be resilient. That's the good thing. But the bad thing is because they're resilient, sometimes adults might think they're not impacted. Oh, because the child is playing the next hour, they're fine. They. Well, nothing can be further from the truth. So let's look further into what it means for children to be impacted, what it does to them. Right. So what are the traumas that children can experience? Natural disasters, witnessing domestic violence, witnessing the world problems or school shootings, unfortunately. And of course, violence in the home. Those are all can be traumatic violence and also, I should say, really neglect, because that's a very traumatic thing for a child as well. Children are supposed to be loved, they have to feel safe and they have to actually mainly focus on play. So whenever they can't do those because they're not consumed or hurt with a traumatic experience, you are going to see the impact on them. So the younger they are, the harder it is sometimes to see the trauma impact. Because a child might not come to say to you, hey, mom or dad or teacher, this is what happened to me. And I feel this way, right. The younger they are, the harder it is for them to express their emotions. So we have to look at their behaviors. So what some of the behaviors we are talking about, difficulty to sleep, eating difficulties, their play is different, they have somatic complaints. That's a very, very important one. Children, instead of saying, I feel sad or angry, they often talk. Stomach aches, headaches, and you're taking them to Dr. Nothing is happening. And they're saying over and over again, that could be a sign that something happened. A clingy separation anxiety type of behavior all of a sudden. Especially a child who had normally no problem going to school, but all of a sudden now they're not wanting to let go of a parent. They're crying when the parents are leaving, feeling helpless, irritability. That's a very good one. They're angry, they're yelling, having temper tantrum. And I mean, I'm talking about out of ordinary, not just like regular Things, but they just seem inconsolable. Right. And repetitive traumatic, what's called like a post traumatic play. Again, the younger. So watch the kids play with toys. What kind of stories? Right? Children are very creative. What kind of stories are they putting together? I, I remember this, my youngest client that I worked with, it was a three year old girl and she was not traumatized, but very stressed that her 18 year old sister had a baby. And the whole family was paying attention to the baby and not to the three year old who feels like a baby to herself. Right. So all of a sudden in our play therapy sessions, what was happening is we were doing a role play. She was the older sister and I was the little three year old sister and she was yelling at me for waking the baby up. And that gave me so much information about how she was feeling about this new change in her life, about really having this little baby around all of a sudden and what she has to do with that and how she was expressing her feelings. So there's a lot of ways to really understand kids. I want to actually talk about the importance of especially more severe traumas of what it does to children's brain. So if an incident happened once, yes, children can recover and again they're resilient and they can turn into healthy adults. But if abuse or a trauma is a chronic situation in child's life, you might unfortunately see in their adulthood difficulties with cognitive abilities, learning difficulties, mood disorders and addiction. Are you familiar with ACE studies? Adverse childhood experiences? There's a big study that was done, there's a list of questions that really address physical abuse, emotional abuse, verbal abuse, a very simple questionnaire that people fill out and at the end it tells you sort of your score of where you fall in the spectrum of trauma. And so the studies shows that first of all, almost everyone has experienced at least one trauma in their lives. And the more traumas you have experienced in your life as a child, the more likely that you will have either mental illness or physical illness as an adult. And in the mental illness I also include the addiction. So these studies really gave especially physicians a lot of great information about the importance of really the mental health in children and how the stress can cause a biological problems. So. Right. The body mind connection. So. And adolescents can be impacted in a different way where I think a lot of them often go into isolation, depression, suicidality and substance abuse. Let's talk a little bit about what to do if you're a parent, what to do if you're a professional, what to do. Of course will be different. But at first you are addressing your child again, watching them, how they're doing, if there's any signs of differences in their mood and in their behaviors, and let's say you are concerned about something. First and foremost, make your child feel safe so that they don't feel in any shape or form blamed by you. Because if they're not safe, they're not going to be able to talk about something that's going on for them, something that's traumatic or stressful. Watch the language, right? So you probe them, you ask them questions, but you don't want to just sort of aggressively go at them because any form of questioning could feel overwhelming for a child. Keep routines as much as possible. If you're seeing your child dysregulated, right? Which means they're emotionally really having a lot of difficult times. So kids thrive on the routine. So the more structure you have, the better they will feel. Because if they've experienced a traumatic situation, it was definitely very much out of ordinary. So you want to make sure to provide stability for them. That's how they will spend the time with you, and they will find a way to feel again, safe and calm in their nervous system. Give them extra support at bedtime. Lying down in a bed with your child, reading a book, or maybe talking about your day could be a really great bonding experience. When I work with adults who were abused, especially sexually or physically as children, often when I asked why you couldn't tell, why didn't you talk about it? You know, earlier, they talked about feeling really scared of their parents. They were afraid that the, the parents wouldn't believe them. They were afraid that the parents would blame them or that they were afraid that the parents would be really angry at bringing this, these kind of topics up. Because children could be abused outside of the home, right? So you want to, if you want to build that kind of a rapport where the kid feels safe, spend really quality time where talking about your day becomes a habit with your child. Be careful about exposing your kids to the news, right? Because even if they are not traumatized and they're in a healthy environment, thank God, they might be actually traumatized by witnessing really bad information. So like watching school shootings or really just a lot of sort of violent information on the media can be traumatizing for, especially for younger kids. So watch for that role model to them about sharing feelings. So if you as an adult can talk about what feelings are, how things are difficult, or if you can, even when something bad happens, you even cry Right. As opposed to bleeding. Like we should always hide from our kids because it's not their responsibility. Of course, it's not their job to take care of you, right? I'm not referring to that. But you're also human being. You want to be able to give the message to your child. As I'm a human being, I can have feelings and I can share them. But guess what? I can still take care of myself. When you role model that way, the child then will say, it's okay for me to talk about my feelings. I can trust my parents. If your child is too young and you're really suspecting something again, watch the play. Kind of the example that I gave earlier about this three year old playing, right? If you're thinking something happened to them, somebody hurt your child in any way, take little dolls people figures, dolls are the best way to do a story. And in the story, allow the child to tell you what happened. So if you're seeing, let's say your child is crying a lot recently, have the little dolls and have the play with the role of the little baby, right? And give the role to the parents of the parents to your child and say, oh, I'm crying, I don't feel good. And start expressing some things like pretending to be that child. And you can watch your child's face and really get an idea of if you're actually in tune. And, and often what I would do when I play with kids, I would say maybe half of a sentence and then I say, what else should I say? So I'll ask them, right in the role play and they say, oh, say that you are angry because your father was yelling at you. Okay, great, thank you. So I say, oh, you're yelling at me and that's why I'm angry at you. So you can see that indirectly the child expressed their feelings through these dolls that I actually was the voice if the child cannot find their voice. So it's very important to provide sort of this artistic way of expression, right? For some kids, if it's not talking, it will be drawing, painting, playing with clay, or playing with playing house or being a doctor if there's any medical trauma. But drawing pictures is a great way for kids who have a difficulty to express their words to really put their feelings onto paper. So these are things that you could do at home. And of course, if you have more suspicions about your child needing something more than what you can handle, maybe it's too painful for you to see your child that way. Take them to professional help, find a therapist that specialize working with kids. These are different people. Not everybody works with children that they have to have a setup with toys and plays. And my favorite method of therapy for children is actually either sand stray or play therapy in general. It just has a very natural way of bringing the feelings and the behaviors out into the light. And then we can help kids that way. If you suspect that your child had experienced a traumatic situation out of your care, first and foremost, take care of your feelings. Because if you're in panic or if you traumatize yourself in that moment, you might not have the right attitude to approach your child and you can actually scare them. So your child has to see that you're worried and concerned and you're a human being. But you don't want them to see you completely destroyed, right? So please take care of yourself, stay strong, stay really get support for yourself before you can approach and help your child. Adults are great role models of how emotions are regulated, how emotions are felt, and how emotions are expressed. And again, always remember, if you need professional helps, we are here to support you. We can support you as parent with giving you parenting tools, or if your child is adolescent 12 and above, we can actually work directly with your children. Thank you for watching. And remember, trauma equals disconnect. Healing equals reconnect. Stay connected.