How Children Process Trauma

The trauma of children is something that I feel very passionate about. But to be good at helping kids process their trauma, you first have to understand how they process information.  https://childmind.org/guide/helping-children-cope-after-a-traumatic-event/   Transcript: 0:00 you're listening to psych with mike for more episodes or to connect with the show with comments ideas or to be a 0:06 guest go to www.cyclicmike.com follow the show on twitter at psych with 0:13 mike or like the facebook page at psych with mike now here's psych with mike 0:19 welcome into the psych with mike library this is dr michael mahon and i am here today with mr brett newcomb and with 0:25 intern michael good morning good morning young man how are you doing i'm all right so this is the friday 0:34 after the horrible shooting in texas in uvalde texas and uh 0:41 i'm i feel um i feel uh i feel a certain weight on my 0:47 chest do you guys feel that do you feel a different weight because children involved and then you felt in 0:52 buffalo 10 days ago absolutely yeah yeah interesting um so i read every 0:59 word that stephen king wrote until i read pet cemetery 1:04 and pet cemetery is obviously includes a child in it 1:10 and that was something that profoundly impacted me and i and and included a 1:16 child in a way that made the child kind of evil and that was something that was really 1:23 hard for me to process and i didn't read any stephen king after that i have the same thing with anne rice and 1:30 the way that she uses claudia and interview with a vampire um the the 1:35 when you there's just something different for me there's something different about kids than 1:41 adults and you would not want to read orson scott card's book lost boys 1:47 uh no i'd like watson scott card but i probably would not read that one will make you cry your eyes out yeah tragic 1:53 tale yeah even even some of the ender's game series gets a little dicey in that 1:59 regard yeah absolutely i mean when you're when you're recruiting the children specifically for 2:07 that purpose yeah i mean and and you know that you're doing it i mean it's intentional i mean that's and we're 2:13 getting very esoteric now but but yes i feel definitely that there is a difference 2:18 between children and adults is that is that unique am i 2:24 do you guys feel that way i don't know that i've thought it 2:29 through i would just have emotional reactions i'm not sure how useful that is yeah 2:34 yeah but uh the and and so 2:41 maybe a part of why this is prescient for me is because 2:48 after 9 11 you and i were working in a group 2:53 practice at that time yes yeah okay you remember that of course and 2:58 the day that that happened the day that 9 11 happened i was sitting on the 3:06 parking lot of a computer store retail computer store because the 3:12 person who ran that office had given me permission the day before that to 3:17 actually network the office for the first time in the history of our office and so i 3:23 was there buying cable and routers and things like that to be able to create an internet network at our 3:31 office for the first time that we had ever had and i don't even remember if you remember this but i had ran cables down the walls and stuff like that 3:37 vaguely and tiger woods was in town for 3:43 a pga the pga was at belle reeve in st louis here that day uh that week for the 3:50 pga championship tiger wood was supposed to be putting on an expose he was at the height of his popularity and i was 3:57 sitting on the parking lot listening to the coverage of golf and i heard about the planes flying into 4:05 the twin trade towers and i was mortified and i came to work that day came to the office and i had clients 4:12 scheduled and i said to you i don't know if i can do this 4:18 and you said well if you can't do it that's fine but i would promote the idea to you that if 4:26 you're having a hard time then your clients are having a hard time and so i 4:31 stayed and i and i did therapy that day and i was glad that i did but 4:37 in the aftermath of that because we worked with a lot of school districts i was tasked with 4:42 putting together some kind of presentation about what the impact of this was on kids because if you remember 4:50 that day everybody wheeled vcrs and whatever i mean i don't even remember what the technology was but 4:57 wheeled uh televisions into the classrooms and they were showing this stuff and the 5:03 the the news coverage was putting this on a loop and one of the things that came out of 5:10 the research after that day was kids can't understand the difference between 5:16 this happened once 35 minutes ago and it's the same plane over and over again they were 5:22 re-traumatized every time they saw the new events and so this started a whole 5:28 investigation into how's the difference between the way that kids process 5:34 information and the way that parents process information and as adults and 5:40 especially when we ourselves are having an emotional reaction i don't think we always understand or appreciate the 5:48 differences between the way that the children process that information 5:53 and so one of the things that i'm that's why for me it's different when we talk 5:58 about kids than adults because i did a lot of that research at that time and 6:04 understand that that's different and i just feel for any child right now my son's a teacher 6:11 in and middle school and so not as young as these kids but i was talking to him 6:16 yesterday and i said you know this has just got to be devastating he said i i don't even know he said i don't know what to do we're just we're just 6:23 doing emotional first aid well you still don't know what to do in the state of missouri missouri is the fourth highest 6:30 number of gun deaths per hundred thousand state in the union it's higher than texas 6:36 uh 48 of people in missouri own guns but the state legislature has been 6:43 pushing all this year that teachers are pedophiles that we can't allow them to choose textbooks or curriculum that 6:49 they're all going to teach crt and we need to watch them like hawks now they're saying let's give them guns i 6:54 was just going to say but now they're done what's wrong with them it's you know unbelievable i hate 6:59 it yeah and they all chase their own particular will of the west solution right um 7:08 the argument i don't know there is an argument the question uh about clinicians that comes to my 7:14 mind when you say what you've just said is in a crisis if you're not calm can you do therapy 7:22 should you do therapy if you can become is it helpful to your client for you to do therapy 7:29 and i think you have to ask yourself those questions and because you you can't do the counter transplant stuff of 7:34 working out your own i was just going to say right in the room with the client right and and that's why we always 7:40 recommend that clinicians have supervision and they have other people working that they can go to in a moment 7:46 of crisis i remember working with lynelle sutherland when she found out that one of her clients had 7:52 been killed she interrupted a session of mine and pulled me out in the hall and she said i need a hug and she needed to cry 7:58 and then she needed to stabilize herself before she could go in with a client 8:04 and you have to do that you can't bring your stuff to the table it's a real challenge 8:11 but then as a human being as a parent you have to also 8:16 try to absorb the sense of loss and ask the questions 8:22 how how do we deal with children with questions right we deal with parents with questions well how do we move forward what do we 8:29 do right and and we then even broaden that beyond 8:36 just if you're a clinician every teacher in every classroom in america right now 8:43 is having to do that for themselves and their class well teachers and kids at 8:48 all level brackets are exposed to movies video games 8:55 news media whatever there's a story out this morning about 11 year old girl that survived the 9:02 shooting she laid on top of one of her friend's bodies and scooped up his blood and rubbed it all over and pretended to be 9:08 dead now at 11 she had that much self-awareness and other 9:14 awareness to try to figure out how to survive yeah but then today when she's telling the story about it she can't be 9:20 interviewed by a man so she started hyperventilating she could talk to a woman 9:27 how do kids process how do we help them process and just 9:32 your ordinary classroom teacher i mean i'm just a boy from podunk arkansas sitting in a 9:37 classroom trying to teach social studies what do i know about surviving trauma what do i know about murderers what do i 9:43 know about machine gun assaults in the room and 9:49 how am i going to help those kids right how do i do that well so the first thing is how do kids process information and 9:56 and one of the things that i think is predominantly important is that people 10:02 understand kids process information differently than adults 10:07 and while hopefully most of us as adults we have some ability to use the ducks 10:14 there i love the duck we have the ability to use some form of abstraction 10:19 right so we can understand that these events that happened happened 10:25 in texas and that's thousands of miles away kids process information black and white 10:31 they are just concrete hence the name concrete development right concrete operations and so 10:37 a kid sees something happen in a school that looks just like their school 10:44 they don't know that that school's two thousand miles away from them that could be next door that could be in the 10:50 classroom next door to them so that trauma is much more real for them 10:55 because the way that they're interpreting reality is different than the way that adults interpret reality 11:01 and one of the things that as i said before that they did in 911 was bring the the tvs into the classrooms and 11:08 people were watching it because the the adults wanted to know they were afraid 11:13 they were trying to get answers but they were leaving these things on a loop in front of the kids and every time that 11:20 plane hit a building the kids thought it was another plane hitting another building and so for them instead of two 11:26 planes or three planes hitting buildings they saw a thousand planes hit a building 11:31 you know we were pretty lucky um i i was in the first grade in 911 well there you go and uh 11:38 we they came across the intercom system and told teachers to turn off their 11:44 televisions that's a good administrator i was really very fortunate but you need that kind of leadership that knows what 11:50 to do and steps in and does it and then you need teachers that will follow the directions yes and they did they were 11:55 really really uh well done for the situation that it was so i didn't see any footage until 12:03 well after the day it happened we kept uh so we we had migration of kids from 12:09 classroom to classroom for different classes so you would go to one classroom for really first one for math yeah yeah 12:15 we i went to a fichen school or i'm sorry not a an edison school it's a 12:20 system of like magnet schools that does similar things um like montessori but 12:26 magnet and it's free um so uh they said everybody remains in the 12:33 classroom that they're in right now nobody leaves their current classroom teachers can swell teachers will swap 12:38 classrooms instead of students swapping classrooms um and my mom was a teacher in the in the 12:46 building at the time she was a teacher's assistant for a kindergarten class and she said no i'm smiling because teachers 12:52 really resist that they nest in those classrooms and they want to send the kids out and i got my stuff here my 12:57 coffee cup my picture of my kid yeah so they really they church yeah it was a challenge but 13:04 i think they did a good job with it and and what i remember from that day is 13:10 um my dad was military so he was on base their defcon won right they're on 13:16 lockdown phone calls aren't coming in or going out no no information whatsoever um my teacher asked 13:24 if i would like to call my mom because she was downstairs um and so we had a brief conversation and 13:30 mom said are you okay and i said yes that's all that that was it that was the whole conversation um 13:38 so i heard nothing more about what happened what was going on until uh the next day um dad didn't come 13:45 home that night right so he was stuck on base for well i think it was 48 hours um 13:52 and so i i do think that you know my generation was the last bastion of having tornado and 14:00 fire drills we never had school shooter drills um we were given information 14:05 about what to do in the event of an active shooter this was obviously post 14:12 columbine post columbine post colorado um post kent kent state university 14:19 um however we never had to do the drills and now kids do the drills and i wonder 14:25 about what that is like because 911 is uh is 14:31 is something that's very far away in an office building um and you are inherently removed from 14:36 it whereas an education space to me you're talking about children are sacred to me education spaces are sacred um and 14:43 that that really strikes me every time every time that happens 14:49 so let's go to our break and when we come back we'll talk about specifically what do kids need to hear 14:55 from us as adults to make them feel better 15:01 hey brett if you were going to tell somebody to check out something on the internet to 15:08 help them with their mental health what would you tell them i tell them listen to psych with mike why would you tell them that 15:14 because it's probably one of the most easily listenable experiences you can have that 15:20 will give you information that's useful for a whole spectrum of concerns that 15:26 people have i agree and i have actually been told that 15:31 by at least a dozen people several of whom were not married to me 15:36 and some of them didn't even know me that's amazing that is amazing 15:41 it's when when we get that kind of feedback from people it is so incredibly 15:48 humbling and overwhelming for me it is for both of us so we really appreciate it and as always 15:55 if it's friday it's cycling [Music] 16:01 okay we're back and you know the the research all shows that 16:07 what we need to do as adults and caregivers to help children in a 16:12 situation like this is to make sure that the children know they are safe and that 16:18 the people that are taking care of them are safe so mom and dad are safe the teachers are safe and so that's the 16:25 thing that we need to be able to help them to feel comfortable with so 16:31 you don't have to be able to explain why there are bad people in the world you don't have to be able to go through why 16:37 there are good or bad gun laws all you have to be able to do is to provide a 16:44 structural foundation for that child that lets them know that you're safe 16:49 that they're safe and that you're going to do everything to make sure that they are able to continue to be safe 16:57 you look like you're in i don't know how you do that and depending on the age of the child 17:02 first grade versus a fifth grader versus a ninth grader they're going to have different levels of awareness 17:08 and information sources most of these kids now have cell phones right 17:13 that at least offer the opportunity for news flashes and notifications to come up and how do you tell them you're going to 17:19 be safe we don't know that you know i don't know that you're going to be safe what i can tell you is we're going to do everything possible to keep 17:25 you safe but life is full of unknowns right and so there are things that 17:33 we can try to do to train and prepare you know like we try to teach you drown proofing in case you fall in the pool 17:39 how you can help yourself until somebody can get to you we we have active shooter drills we have 17:44 fire drills we have all kinds of drills hurricane drills what do you do in the circumstances to make yourself as safe 17:52 as you can we try to have leaders in place who have exposure to these drills 17:58 and trainings who themselves can't stay calm because it's not helping my classroom in 30 second graders if i'm 18:04 having a panic attack because i'm frozen and don't know what to do and what i do or what i know to do may 18:11 not be helpful may not be the solution so but i have to go through it 18:17 and help them so let me ask you a question because we are old you and i are old yeah and certainly we are older than 18:24 intern michael so intern michael's never done a nuclear bomb drill uh 18:31 but you and i have yeah and so which at the time i knew better than i knew that 18:36 if i got under my desk and hugged my knees but it wasn't going to make any nuclear bomb going on that desk is not a 18:42 little formica half inch of material not going to help me at all and i also knew that i was 20 miles from 18:47 my home and the school bus wasn't going to run if the nuclear bomb went off so how am i going at home how's somebody going to 18:53 get to me so my question is did you find that to be 18:58 ludicrous you found it to be ludicrous as a child okay okay even as a child you did not it did not give you any sense of 19:05 security didn't make me feel any better about the adults they don't know what the hell they're talking about um because my experience was exactly the 19:12 opposite my experience you're more over sucker than i am more of a sucker than you are uh and i didn't understand the 19:18 dynamics of what a nuclear bomb was or what mother was a little better informed than 19:23 the average person of my age let's just face it you're smarter than the average bear i am but 19:29 i found that to be comforting like i thought okay these these people have my back they know what they're doing and so 19:35 we're going to get under these tables and so if something happens i feel and i am going to offend you but i would say 19:42 that a lot of people who hang on to religion use it for the same reason for the same reason 19:48 and that they don't have any better information than than i have or any better predictability of the 19:53 outcomes so when republican politicians send thoughts and prayers it doesn't solve the gun problems shooting up 19:59 schools well clearly that's true i mean yes thoughts and prayers we got to get beyond that 20:06 well i mean where do we go well i'll kind of push back um i think those are different i think those are different 20:11 situations one is one where you do not have control right if we're talking about nuclear bombs nuclear 20:16 proliferation there is some degree of control at a high policy level but as an individual as a child getting 20:22 under a desk if that brings you comfort what is the sucking your thumb yeah what 20:27 is the problem in the comfort um outside well i don't know if there's a 20:34 problem right long-term resistance to policy change right if people are comforted 20:39 they won't take action right if they're not comfortable if they are uncomfortable they might take action so 20:44 to me the definition there there has to do with the immediacy of the moment if i can comfort myself enough to quiet my 20:51 anxieties then i can brace myself for the next wave whatever that is right so i don't know that it 20:57 impacts the longer term solution to the outcome and i do agree with you if 21:03 there's an immediate way to calm down someone in hysterics and help them stabilize then you can 21:09 help look for a path forward even if you don't see one you can at least be calm enough to look and if you're in the 21:15 middle of a hyperventilating panic attack you can't do that either and as an adult 21:22 i have that responsibility i take that responsibility i embrace that responsibility even if i don't know what 21:27 to do with it but when i go in that classroom just like uh police officer training has changed since columbine and 21:34 they used to say gather and wait and negotiate uh 21:39 call for resources now they say you got to go in you got to go in so now the cops don't go in they didn't go in in 21:45 texas yesterday and the police officer in charge said they could have gotten shot they could have gotten killed 21:51 that's why they didn't go in kids could have been shot kids were shot and killed my response is if i take that job and i 21:58 take the training for that job and i swear the oath what i am saying is given that situation i'll go towards the sound 22:04 of the guns and i expect them to do it they took the job they take the pay they get the retirement they take the risk 22:09 and i love them for it and god bless them and we need them but if you own up and put on the uniform get your ass in 22:15 there so going back though to my analogy of the 22:22 bomb drills that didn't help you it helped me and so when i'm saying that that we need to 22:29 find ways of being oh you got me in trouble because i wouldn't take it seriously make the children feel safe right yeah that was beneficial for me so 22:35 that was that worked for me what would happen that was just how smart i wasn't because i smarted off and got in trouble 22:41 yeah i could have figured that was going to be happening well but but is there anything in that situation that you look 22:47 back on now that you think would have been beneficial for you 22:53 um i don't know yeah because because you you rightly point out kids are different 23:00 every kid is gonna need something different to make them feel okay the bomb drills actually helped me they made 23:07 me feel more safe and so that was a good intervention for me it wasn't a good 23:14 intervention for you so you teach your children at santa claus was a lie 23:19 i don't know what you're talking about because i still think santa claus is an actual man who lives at the north pole 23:25 okay but no i did not teach them that yeah not until they came up with it on 23:31 their own yeah it's it's a question parents have to answer yeah do you buy 23:36 into this myth because it's comforting and it's pretty and it makes a nice holiday picture 23:43 or do you indulge your children's fantasies because it makes their childhood happier 23:49 yeah everybody has to have their own answer now i have my answer but as a clinician i don't impose my answer on my client 23:56 right i listen to the client and seek ways to help them define their own answer right 24:02 but you don't you you don't know of anything that would have spoken to that child that you were no so if if i had 24:08 come to you as an adult if i had come to you and and said hey little brett uh 24:14 this is about i didn't trust adults i lived in a high perspective so maybe that's the day 24:20 yeah but maybe that's the issue is that you didn't trust adults no and so you didn't see adults as an 24:28 arbiter of things that would create safety for you no and so maybe that was really the issue 24:35 if there would have been some other way not through the avenue of an adult but then 24:41 how many kids in our country don't trust adults great question probably a large and so 24:47 if the adults are the ones who are saying oh here let's make these children feel safer maybe maybe those that isn't 24:53 going to work for those children because they don't trust adults and maybe they shouldn't trust but again the conversation is partly 25:00 difficult because you're talking about a huge conclusion you have to break it down into brackets kids from one to six 25:06 from six to ten you know their exposure their life their realities are all different right their capacities are all different but 25:14 so what i would say to that is you use language that is appropriate for the age group so i would speak differently to a 25:21 six-year-old than i would speak to a 12 year old i hope so but the goal would be to make them feel safe and secure 25:30 that would be the goal if you can find a way to do it yeah but also 25:37 how do you do it yeah i i think a lot of the research that i had read in 25:42 like developmental psych classes dealt with building resilience and finding different ways to build 25:48 resilience right kenneth ginsburg is dr kenneth ginsberg is the kind of the author 25:54 in pop psych or i guess also a clinical psych that comes to mind and he talks about these seven c's of resilience 26:00 competence confidence connection character contribution coping and control and he says if you can build those 26:06 things that if you want to if you want to look at the long-term success of a child either economically or emotionally 26:13 resilience is that key and so i wonder if it's less about convincing children that they're safe 26:19 right because i agree right as well as hierarchy of needs you have to understand that you are safe it's less about convincing children they 26:25 will always be safe and more about giving them the tools to be competent 26:31 enough to find their way to safety at all times right to always know that they can rely on themselves 26:39 you can't take education away from somebody yeah so i i would then respond to that i mean because i 26:45 absolutely agree with what you're saying makes perfect sense however my opinion is that over the last 15 26:52 years we've done a major disservice to our kids by teaching that every child always wins so we don't discriminate a b 27:00 c d you know we all get a's we all get ribbons everybody wins nobody comes in second place reality is reality we have 27:07 to teach our kids about reality and we have to give them confidence to navigate the real world 27:13 so in the real world there may be a shooter if there is one here are the things that we can try to do to be safe these are 27:20 the things we'll try to do with and for you to make you safe yeah well so 27:27 but going along that line so i think that you're that what you say michael is 100 correct that that trying to increase 27:36 resilience in those kids is the answer when i say make them feel safe 27:41 i think that that's an issue that's incompetency which is the purpose of the drills right the shooter reels or the 27:46 fire drills you are competent to lead your desk row out of the building you know which way to turn when you go out 27:52 the door you know where to go absolutely yeah all those overlap there they're all 27:57 woven together in fabric that helps the child grow and survive so that comes from ultimately the relationships that 28:04 the child has with the adults and the other children around them it's that connection that it is very relational 28:10 and that is how you build that that safety net that is how you help the psychology of a child and the 28:17 mental health of a child to work through these really really big issues yeah so if there had been 28:25 a designated child to lead the classroom and the school had gone together and said oh 28:31 bret little brett seems like that he's uh pretty good at that he's got some you know stuff going on and so you had been 28:39 designated as the the the group leader for your row or 28:45 whatever to get under the desk and model that would that have been beneficial for you 28:50 would that have have helped you to feel more confident and confident 28:56 i can't speculate i have no idea yeah i wonder if that would have been because now that you're saying that i mean i 29:02 that now that actually goes back to the whole floss about to as a classroom teacher take the bully and draft them 29:09 into authority yeah and give them responsibilities so that they're not bullying but they're taken care of yeah so it's a strategy would that work for 29:16 me i mean it's equivalent of being a bullet i'm standing in the corner snarking and going you guys are suckers um maybe well but i don't know but would 29:23 you have taken it more seriously like if you had that authority i don't know it didn't happen but yeah would it i don't 29:28 know but it's the contribution piece right exactly and and and so you know i'll 29:33 include that an article about that uh with the the show notes but i think that 29:39 that really is probably what we need to try and focus on is exactly that that 29:45 resilience piece and when i say you know make them feel safe that's exactly 29:51 what i would think of however yeah as a grown-up teacher who spent 20 plus years in classrooms of 100 29:59 other teachers i'm also aware of 30:04 imbalances in capacity among the teachers yeah uh 30:11 so what if they can't do it well which is the question comes up when i mean i think i saw in the paper this 30:17 morning 32 school districts in missouri have authorized teachers to carry guns yeah i don't want a second grade teacher 30:23 taking a gun what what do she do with her gun when when little billy throws up and she has to clean it up once you do 30:29 with the gun when two kids get into a fist fight she has to go break them up right what did she do with a gun when 30:35 she squats down to teach somebody reading and somebody pats her butt or some kid sitting there goes oh i want to see your gun 30:41 and is she trying to shoot it does she know what to shoot at and how and when right i mean because if she's going to 30:47 be carrying the gun she's going to be carrying it on her it's going to be unsecured today you don't leave it in your desk drawer right if it's locked 30:53 and you're looking good right yeah i mean that's what they're going to say but those questions haven't been answered the solution is we'll arm the 30:59 teachers yeah harden the schools this school in new valley and fifty thousand dollars hardening the 31:05 school somebody left the back door on right right which always happens always happens well i think that comes back to 31:12 a very juvenile solution to the real question of neglect here right we're saying we're saying that we are 31:18 neglecting our children systematically and instead of changing the system we're going to go with the 31:24 solution of of theoretical and overlap yes yeah and so the real solution there is to you 31:31 said there are different there are differences in the capacity of teachers right there are differences in 31:36 the aptitudes of students and so what we do is we don't build better teachers we build better systems for those teachers 31:42 to exist in that would be ideally so hopefully that is helpful it 31:48 at least was helpful for us to kind of work through this ourselves um we are just human beings living in the world 31:55 the same as everybody else and we have feelings about when things like this 32:00 happen it's traumatic for us the same as it is for we don't have answers either no i mean we're just trying to do the 32:06 best that we can and that's all anybody can do uh the music that appears inside with 32:12 mike is written and performed by mr benjamin the clue we definitely invite everybody to go to apple podcast find 32:18 psych with mike and leave us a rating and a comment you can go on youtube search 32:25 site with mike find us there and definitely subscribe to the show that would be the one biggest best thing that 32:30 people could do to really help us out and as always if it's friday it's psych with 32:40 [Music] 32:48 you