Parenting Children of Trauma: The Foster-Adoption Guide to Understanding Attachment Disorder by Marcy Pusey

Author:Marcy Pusey [Pusey, Marcy]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781948283083
Publisher: Miramare Ponte Press
Published: 2019-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

Primary Trauma

Sometimes our exposure to children of trauma leads to direct trauma in our own lives. The ways our children manifest the brokenness of their experiences often causes ongoing traumatic events in the homes of their families. This is a move beyond vicarious or STS, where you're primarily affected because of your burnout on caring. This is actual first hand trauma in response to your children. I know, it sounds crazy. Kids can traumatize us? Yes! Not because they intend to, but because their survival skills are so harmful that we get obliterated in the wake of their actions. Some parents have been hit, kicked, spit on, cussed out, threatened, punched, accused, and degraded. For some families, Child Protective Services has come out to respond to false allegations, which can feel terrifying!

We've been judged and condemned. Ostracized. Isolated. I often think of us as the woman in an abusive marriage who just keeps staying. Except we're in an abusive relationship with our kids, and how do we leave them? Cue the triggers for trauma: helplessness and threat to life. Both are often present when we are raising children with AD. We can't keep ourselves safe, our kids with AD safe, the other kids in the home safe, the neighbors safe, the classmates safe... No one. And when we ourselves get stuck in the Freeze cycle, we begin to operate from the same hijacked amygdala as our kids. And remember, this is not where our best thinking or decision-making happens.

Yet it's real. It's so real. I honestly didn't realize the full extent to which we were living in trauma until we had no more kids with AD living in our house. The door would open and suddenly I'd experience the physical response I'd been dealing with for years but had never recognized—a quickened heart rate, a cold sweat, hypervigilance. And then suddenly, I'd realize that all of this was happening in my body and that I no longer had to be afraid of what would happen once the door closed. This is actually where direct trauma becomes Complex PTSD, which I'll talk about next.

Suffice it to say, sometimes our experiences with the children we love is so extreme we don't even realize the ways we are getting stuck in trauma. Everything I did to deal with STS was effective here as well:

Having therapeutic support to help me process through the trauma so it could move out of my amygdala and into a healthy part of my brain so I could function from my frontal cortex.

Playing music that calmed me and reminded me of my identity.

Friends who listened.

Online support groups where parents shared my same story but with different names in different homes.

I also took a course on trauma (and specifically, helping others heal from it). This became as beneficial to my own personal journey as it is to anyone I work with therapeutically. Find someone who has training in trauma and get their assistance in healing.

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