Anyone who has experienced a traumatic event knows that it is only one part of life and that the sum of one’s life is much more than the event itself. Fortunately, in the first weeks and months after a trauma or loss most children and adolescents gradually recover and the event becomes less emotionally disruptive over time. But for others, painful memories of the traumatic event become a habitual way of reacting to life and tenacious feelings of anxiety, sadness, or even terror and posttraumatic stress disorder may take hold. On a daily basis these youngsters revisit worries and hurts, appear withdrawn, and are unable to enjoy normal activities with friends and family.
Currently, many helping professionals use verbal cognitive-behavioral techniques (CBT) to address trauma reactions. However, just talking to traumatized children and adolescents to change the way they think about themselves and their lives post-trauma will often be heard by them from a negative perspective, even though what is said is factual. TLC founder, Dr. William Steele, says, “Imagine saying to a traumatized adolescent, ‘Joey, what happened to you is horrendous. I can’t imagine what it’s all been like for you. What you need to tell yourself is that trauma is only one part of your life, there are many parts who make you who you are and trauma is just one part of your life.’
Listening to these words, traumatized Joey will hear, ‘Don’t be so upset, just move on.’ He is likely to be experiencing you as someone who is minimizing his experience, even frustrated by his being ‘stuck’ in it. However, if you present Joey with a sensory activity that engages the right brain and parts of the brain that tap the senses, he can begin to implicitly change his experience. By doing so, Joey sees himself differently than he would through cognitive attempts to help him reframe that experience.”
What Bill Steele is saying sounds simple, but it is a concept that many helping professionals miss when trying to address the needs of a traumatized child or adolescent. How we successfully recover from trauma is not by insight, but through our sensory experience of it because the body remembers it as a physical reaction, not just a narrative account. By using the senses to help young people reframe their experiences, there is a greater likelihood that they will be able to communicate the hurts, worries, and terrors. They also will start to view themselves as resilient and empowered individuals and survivors, not as victims.
Bill offers the following activity taught in TLC workshops to demonstrate how to facilitate cognitive understanding by including sensory experiences. This activity is adaptable to a variety of ages ranging from school age children to adolescents.
Many Parts Make Me Who I Am
Materials: 8” x 11” plain paper, pencil
1) Draw a line from the middle top of the page to middle bottom. Draw another line from upper left hand corner to lower right hand corner, then another line from upper right corner to lower left corner, and finally one more line from the middle of the left hand side of the paper to the middle right edge of the paper. The paper now has eight sections.
2) Now briefly recall a trauma in your life and choose a word or phrase that reflects that trauma. For example, for a car fatality you could use the word “car,” or death of a father, the word “dad.”
3) Write that word or phrase in one of the eight sections, any section.
4) Using the same process. think about the neat things that have happened in your life and write the word or phrase that reflects that neat thing in another section and do this until the remaining seven sections contain “neat” memories.
5) Now simply look quietly at what you just created. What thoughts now emerge about you and the trauma?
The two most common responses are, “There are more neat things than bad things,” and “trauma is only one part of my life.” These responses may seem obvious, yet the power of this simple activity is that you, the helping professional, have created a sensory “prop” that gives the child a visual (iconic) view of himself and his life. Now the youngster, with your help, can more easily cognitively reframe the belief that, “Trauma is only one part of life. “ Through sensory activities, children and teens can experience that there are many parts of life that make them who they are; with the help of the therapist or counselor, they can also begin to integrate the experience of trauma into other parts of life.
Sensory interventions can change the way we think about and perceive traumatic events; they can also eventually moderate how our bodies react to traumatic memories, reminders of loss, and other negative experiences. When those sensory activities are designed to address and alter major trauma reactions, “victim thinking” can be replaced by “survivor thinking,” followed by more resilient behavior.
All TLC intervention programs capitalize on sensory-based experiences and have undergone evidence-based research and evaluation documenting their value as a structured approach to reducing counterproductive trauma reactions and other mental health symptoms. The activity described in this post –and additional activities– can be found in Trauma Informed Practice and At Risk Adjudicated Adolescent Program at the TLC Online Bookstore or seminars. For training and/or additional information, be sure to visit www.starrtraining.org/tlc.
Be well,
Cathy Malchiodi, PhD, LPCC, LPAT
Follow TLC’s Twitter at http://twitter.com/TLCchildtrauma
Become a Fan of the National Institute for Trauma and Loss in Children– join our Facebook Fan Page today!
If you are a trauma specialist, you may have heard the terms “compassion fatigue,” “secondary posttraumatic stress” and “vicarious victimization.” Most commonly, practitioners speak of “burnout” and the majority who work with traumatized individuals have experienced one or all of these conditions from time to time.
traumainformedtherapy 