PARENTING PLUS:Stories of suffering and loss have an impact
OVER RECENT weeks my attention has been captured by the tragic stories of children who have been made orphans by the earthquake in Haiti.
I read Dr Unni Krishnan, a disaster response expert with children’s charity Plan International, describing the nightmares experienced by children in the aftermath of the earthquake.
The stories of suffering and loss are terrible, and are undoubtedly traumatic for all those children.
The analogy I use to understand the emotional impact of trauma on children is to think about the way white light gets dispersed by a prism. The traumatic experience (white light) gets absorbed into the child’s inner world (prism) and is altered and processed to an extent according to the child’s previous experiences, coping abilities and the levels of emotional support that child receives from others (dispersion).
Consequently, the emotional response to a trauma is not a linear function of the experience itself. The nature of how we can disperse, blunt and alter our feelings means that we don’t necessarily express an accurate indication of our true feelings following a traumatic event.
One such psychological process is our ability to dissociate (or to disconnect from our feelings). For example, we can immerse ourselves in work, sports, watching TV and so on. In the short term, this is a useful, protective tool. It allows us a break from the pressure of the traumatic event.
If we were faced, psychologically, with the true extent of the horror of the trauma all of the time, we would be overwhelmed and unable to function. So it is as if our brains switch off from the feeling, and indeed the experience.
Ideally, as time passes, we allow ourselves to feel the true feelings associated with the traumatic event and we can begin to process and deal with those feelings. This is the point where other people become very important as a source of shared understanding and empathy.
Typically, adults help children to make sense of their feelings by identifying the feelings they think the children are having and naming them for the children. So saying things like, “I guess you feel so sad about missing your mum”, or “you are probably really angry that nobody could save her”, or “you might sometimes even feel guilty that you are still alive when so many others have died”, will help children to recognise and accept some of the real feelings they have.
Inevitably, the real feelings in the aftermath of a trauma are very intense, weighty and hard to bear. Often, then, we adults and children alike can try to continue to run and to hide from the feelings rather than bear them. We can turn to things such as aggression, alcohol, drugs, self-harm or eating disorders as ways of trying to continue to dissociate, block out or numb ourselves from the real feelings that we don’t want to feel.
Adults have a responsibility to help children to come to terms with the emotional impact of a trauma. Whether the trauma is an earthquake, physical or sexual abuse, neglect, death of someone close, a robbery, bullying or any of the many other traumas that occur to children or those around them, you and I have the power to help those children rebuild.
Next week I will cover, in more detail, the tools of the trade that every parent needs to know to help their children to cope with these kinds of strong feelings, whatever the source.’