Push Past It! by Angela Searcy

Author:Angela Searcy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gryphon House Inc.
Published: 2019-02-27T20:23:56+00:00

Chapter 6

Understanding the Role of Trauma in Behavior

Have you (or has a child you know) ever squirted out the entire contents of a tube of toothpaste? What happened when someone tried to put the toothpaste back into the tube? You likely discovered that it was impossible to get everything back in—and even if some toothpaste made it back, it was not the same as before. Similar things happen to children who experience trauma. In their book The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog, and Other Stories from a Child Psychiatrist’s Notebook, Bruce Perry and Maia Szalavitz make this observation about the effects of trauma on children and their behavior:

“Because new situations are inherently stressful, and because youth who have been through trauma often come from homes in which chaos and unpredictability appear

‘normal’ to them, they may respond with fear to what is actually a calm and safe situation. Attempting to take control of what they believe is the inevitable return of chaos, they appear to ‘provoke’ it in order to make things feel more comfortable and predictable. . . . As one family therapist famously put it, we tend to prefer the ‘certainty of misery to the misery of uncertainty.’”

Sometimes the meaning behind a behavior is more than what you can observe in a classroom. Just as you needed to process your own background to understand where you are coming from, now we need to process the backgrounds of children with challenging behaviors. Many of these children have experienced trauma. Once we understand where they are coming from, we can determine how to help them.

Defining Trauma

The Center for Substance Abuse Treatment compares living with trauma to perpetually living as a character inside a scary, suspenseful movie. If simply watching a two-hour film can leave us jumpy and unable to sleep for days on end, imagine the intense physiological arousal that lingers in a child after trauma. She experiences life anxiously sitting on the edge of her seat, clutching the arm of the person next to her while nervously waiting for something to happen.

This analogy explains why ordinary interactions and everyday items, smells, touches, and sounds can trigger challenging behaviors. For children who have been exposed to trauma, these seemingly benign occurrences are reminders of intense fear or sadness. In the face of such terror, survival instinct takes over and often manifests itself as challenging behaviors.

We’ll discuss this connection in a moment. First, we need to examine what trauma looks like for

young children.

What Is Trauma?

When I first heard the term post-traumatic stress disorder, I initially thought of veterans returning home from war-torn countries. After all, the word trauma itself typically conjures images of suffering a serious injury, being abused for years, witnessing a horrific event, or having a similarly devastating experience. But to a young child, trauma encompasses more than you might expect.

To better understand trauma and its implications, let’s revisit the work of renowned trauma expert Bruce Perry. In his report Stress, Trauma, and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorders in Children:

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