Therapy for Traumatized Children
Children who have experienced significant or sudden changes and transitions in their lives or who have survived traumatic events need to express and understand their feelings and may not know how to do this on their own.
Whether something is traumatic for a child (much like for adults) isn’t objectively measurable, but instead the focus is on whether something is being experienced as traumatic by the child. It is important to validate a child’s emotional experience even if it doesn’t align with a parent’s objective recollection of an event or their own emotional experience.
This is where parents can struggle with guilt or shame for being unable to protect their child from the experience of trauma; but they can still show up for their child as a strong support to work through deep emotions with, and this is what protects children from longterm symptoms.
A dysregulated or traumatized child may not be able to tell you what they’re feeling, what’s happened, or what they need, and often will communicate instead through behaviors that can be confusing or distressing to parents or caregivers.
This might look like:
Aggressive or physical behaviors like rough play
Sudden emergence of intense emotions without a clear cause
Difficulty sleeping, maintaining bathing & grooming behaviors, concentrating, or eating
Bed wetting
Regressive behavior
Fear & being easily startled
Dissocation, withdrawal, daydreaming, or shut down
School refusal
Excessive shyness, anger, worry, sadness, shame, or guilt
Low self esteem
Preoccupation with sexual behavior
Physical/stomatic symptoms like headaches, stomach aches, or skin issues with no clear medical cause
Trauma affects development in children.
Depending on the developmental age of the child at the onset of trauma, symptoms and signs will look different and may be more difficult to interpret. Trauma is always difficult to process verbally, and particularly in children this is difficult given the impact of the trauma on their development and likely a lack of awareness of the trauma. Children look to others around them to know how to process emotions and respond to distress, and if they don’t have examples that align with their experiences they may become overwhelmed and turn inward or shut themselves off entirely. Play therapy is a way for children to express and work through their experiences and emotions at whatever level of consciousness they present. Play therapy also reinforces the child’s control over their own narrative and agency and choice in what is shared which can inherently be healing.
Our Approach
We utilize a reflective, relational approach meaning that rather than doing therapy “to” or “at” you, we are engaging in relationship with you in a way that allows patterns and themes interjecting from the past to enact themselves in the room with us in the present.
Rather than only utilizing a “top down” approach where we analyze and engage cognitively, or only utilizing a “bottom up” approach where we would only pay attention to the somatic and emotional experience, we combine these in order to engage all parts of the person in front of us. We believe that this “wholeness” is the natural human state, and this is what trauma often takes from us by fragmenting and dissociating parts of our humanity from us.
Complex trauma survivors often do not have complete memories or verbal narratives to call from, but their traumatic experiences are still stored in their bodies and find ways to speak to them. But engaging fully in the somatic and experiential is not healing without being in connection with other parts of the self, the present moment, and in relationship with a trusted other. The people who we work with have often been harmed in relationship, so it is through relationship that we work towards healing.
There is not a single step-by-step process to this type of work, because every individual has different wounds and has different needs to be met in order to heal those wounds. We firmly believe that while we may be experts in how to hold space for our clients and track the process of their healing, our clients are the experts on themselves and their experience, and it’s crucial to reinforce their agency in the process of their healing.
Our approach is one of reflection, curiosity, engagement, patience, and pacing. We work to build a safe, secure, and consistent relationship to process things within and through, and this is something that takes time in order to do well. We value inquiry for the sake of inquiry, and hold self-reflection and narrative building as inherently healing.
We believe that human wellness is linked to human connection, not just environmental stress or biology.