Treating Trauma in Children

I just recently began reading the book, Treating-Traumatic-Stress-Children-Adolescents.  The authors take the reader through the effects of how a child that is raised in an abusive or neglectful home does not develop healthy skills or attach to others appropriately.  It explains that children are resilient and will adapt to the environment they are raised in but may develop unhealthy coping or relational skills to receive their basic needs.  

Lets say there are three children and a single mother that dwell in an urban home in a poverished neighborhood.  One can already identify some challenges with just that scenario.  This already may cause the child to manipulate one parent over the other or to fight her siblings over basic needs.  The families recources could be limited and attachments to one or both parent's could be compromised. Now throw into the mix the mother's alcohol dependency, lack of employment, and her paramour that is physically abusive to her.  Sexual abuse is commonplace with the pre-adolescent and physical abuse with the two younder children.

What do the three children think about love, concern, hope, parenting, their feelings of anger, sex, friendships, etc.?  Children who are raised in the above environment will respond to the world differently than those who are raised in a healthier family context (Kids that are raised in a good home with caring parent's struggle enough to adapt to the world as it is).  The author suggests that "Our skills grow in response to the input our environment gives us, so that we can negaotiate that environment successfully.  In this sense, all of development can be considered adaptive (Blaustein & Kinniburgh).  Emotional arousal will increase as a childs needs are not met; they must adapt.  This is where acting out, throwing fits, aggression becomes a learned behavior as to meet a need.  A parent will meet the need of the child throwing a fit as a response to the fit.  Thus, a child learns how to get cereal, candy, or even a drink of water.  This becomes the child's reality or worldview as he/she grows up (acting out = needs/wants).

There needs to be some kind of change in the young person's environment (mother rehabilitates, foster care, treatment, group home, religious experience, college, etc.) if he/she is to react to the world differently as an older adolescent or an adult.  The Attachment, Self-Regulation, and Competency (ARC) is a treatment, as explained in the book, that helps to identify warning signs and asists with building competencies by working with the caregivers and the child that's experiencing the traumatic stress.

Tony Nichols

   --I find joy in helping other's experience hope and peace in their life.