"Once in a while, a piece of old business surfaces; some item on life's agenda you thought you'd dealt with years ago.
"Suddenly, it's there again at the top of the page, competing for your attention, despite the fact that you're completely unprepared for it."
- Sue Grafton, O is for Outlaw
Showing posts with label healing process. Show all posts
Showing posts with label healing process. Show all posts
Tuesday, October 23, 2007
Monday, October 08, 2007
Wise words from an Ohio foster care alumna
"If I'm ever gonna get over it,
first, I've got to get it out."
Kudos to the courage of this young person facing her past and working through difficulties!
first, I've got to get it out."
Kudos to the courage of this young person facing her past and working through difficulties!
Friday, October 05, 2007
Quotes from Torey Hayden book "Twilight Children"
A friend of mine was sexually abused as a child, and she has never talked about it. She doesn't want anyone to know. She has been reunified with her mother after a stint in foster care, but doesn't trust her mother to be able to handle the knowledge.
Her counselor is ready, willing and able to help her -- but she finds it difficult to open up her mouth and speak about what happened.
After a traumatic experience, when you discuss these things, it is painful, because you find yourself reliving it all over again. The violation. The fear. The feelings of powerless.
This is because traumatic experiences encode themselves in the brain via images and emotions, not words. We remember the taste, the touch, the sight, the sound...
But it is by giving them words, verbalizing the experience, that we are able to lasso these huge, powerful, scary experiences and get them under control.
After our phone conversation, I sent this young woman the following quote by Torey Hayden, from her book Twilight Children. Torey is talking with a young girl named Cassandra, and she says:
"What's wrong with you is inside of you. So, wherever you go, your trouble goes inside of you...
"Some really awful things have happened to you. Things children shouldn't have to experience... (Now) you are just trying to protect that troubled place inside of you, because it hurts so much, and you don't want it to get hurt again."
Torey continues:
"Unfortunately, there is a really big problem in doing this. And the problem is: You've protected your troubled place so well that you've ended up taking its side."
"Our minds are kind of funny things. When something big happens to us, it tends to stay really big in our minds and won't become a proper memory unless we talk about it. Our minds, on our own, don't seem to be able to get big events sorted out enough to squish them down to size with our other memories. We need to talk about it.
"Talking helps our minds to organize what happened... It lets us put away things that have happened to us, so they aren't in the way every time we are thinking.
"We talk about them until our mind gets organized about what happened. Then, they're not such a big deal anymore. Finally, they start to feel like ordinary memories and we can stop thinking about them all the time.
"We don't forget them, (but) they stop taking up all our thinking... (so) we can get on with what's happening now in our lives and not worry any more about it."
"BUT just the opposite happens if we have to keep something big a secret. First of all, we have to create a special place in our minds to keep it... chock full of all the stuff we can't tell...
"You have to lock it up really tight, so even you can't get there very easily. And if you don't, then you don't have any room in your mind for other thinking."
"When you first do it, first create a Troubled Place and manage to get it locked up, it's easy to think you've made it go away.
"But the fact is... just the opposite is true... Everything you put in there, it keeps really fresh, like its just happened. So, if you accidentally crack open the door... everything will hurt horribly all over again."
"What happened to you... didn't happen to you because you are a bad person. It didn't make you a bad person because it happened. It just happened.
"And now it's time for it to be OVER. It's time to open the door on the troubled place and clean all that junk out. Not to throw it away, because those memories are a part of your memories, part of what makes you 'you.'
"But it's time to make them ordinary. To talk about them until you understand how you felt, what you feel did, what other people did.
"To talk about them until there aren't any secrets left in your Troubled Place to stay fresh and scary, to talk until you're bored with them. That will turn them into ordinary memories, like all the rest of memories in your life."
Her counselor is ready, willing and able to help her -- but she finds it difficult to open up her mouth and speak about what happened.
After a traumatic experience, when you discuss these things, it is painful, because you find yourself reliving it all over again. The violation. The fear. The feelings of powerless.
This is because traumatic experiences encode themselves in the brain via images and emotions, not words. We remember the taste, the touch, the sight, the sound...
But it is by giving them words, verbalizing the experience, that we are able to lasso these huge, powerful, scary experiences and get them under control.
After our phone conversation, I sent this young woman the following quote by Torey Hayden, from her book Twilight Children. Torey is talking with a young girl named Cassandra, and she says:
"What's wrong with you is inside of you. So, wherever you go, your trouble goes inside of you...
"Some really awful things have happened to you. Things children shouldn't have to experience... (Now) you are just trying to protect that troubled place inside of you, because it hurts so much, and you don't want it to get hurt again."
Torey continues:
"Unfortunately, there is a really big problem in doing this. And the problem is: You've protected your troubled place so well that you've ended up taking its side."
"Our minds are kind of funny things. When something big happens to us, it tends to stay really big in our minds and won't become a proper memory unless we talk about it. Our minds, on our own, don't seem to be able to get big events sorted out enough to squish them down to size with our other memories. We need to talk about it.
"Talking helps our minds to organize what happened... It lets us put away things that have happened to us, so they aren't in the way every time we are thinking.
"We talk about them until our mind gets organized about what happened. Then, they're not such a big deal anymore. Finally, they start to feel like ordinary memories and we can stop thinking about them all the time.
"We don't forget them, (but) they stop taking up all our thinking... (so) we can get on with what's happening now in our lives and not worry any more about it."
"BUT just the opposite happens if we have to keep something big a secret. First of all, we have to create a special place in our minds to keep it... chock full of all the stuff we can't tell...
"You have to lock it up really tight, so even you can't get there very easily. And if you don't, then you don't have any room in your mind for other thinking."
"When you first do it, first create a Troubled Place and manage to get it locked up, it's easy to think you've made it go away.
"But the fact is... just the opposite is true... Everything you put in there, it keeps really fresh, like its just happened. So, if you accidentally crack open the door... everything will hurt horribly all over again."
"What happened to you... didn't happen to you because you are a bad person. It didn't make you a bad person because it happened. It just happened.
"And now it's time for it to be OVER. It's time to open the door on the troubled place and clean all that junk out. Not to throw it away, because those memories are a part of your memories, part of what makes you 'you.'
"But it's time to make them ordinary. To talk about them until you understand how you felt, what you feel did, what other people did.
"To talk about them until there aren't any secrets left in your Troubled Place to stay fresh and scary, to talk until you're bored with them. That will turn them into ordinary memories, like all the rest of memories in your life."
Wednesday, September 19, 2007
Sunday, September 02, 2007
More Quotes from The Unsayable
- "At first, words are babbling stream of sound. And though very young children play with words and sounds in turn-taking rhythms with others, they don't use language with the purpose of communicating.
"But as a child begins to see that words can make things happen, can call forth specific response from others, she is able to make what Lacan calls 'a demand.' This is a request for recognition of what she means and for a response that affirms she is loved."
- "Provided with food and warmth, yet without recognition or any evidence of love, a child will become lethargic, stop growing and even die. The capacity to ask for something, and make herself understood, is crucial to a child's sense of being loved. But making a demand requires a risk; the other person may not understand, or may understand and say no."
Source: The Unsayable by Annie G. Rogers, PhD
"But as a child begins to see that words can make things happen, can call forth specific response from others, she is able to make what Lacan calls 'a demand.' This is a request for recognition of what she means and for a response that affirms she is loved."
- "Provided with food and warmth, yet without recognition or any evidence of love, a child will become lethargic, stop growing and even die. The capacity to ask for something, and make herself understood, is crucial to a child's sense of being loved. But making a demand requires a risk; the other person may not understand, or may understand and say no."
Source: The Unsayable by Annie G. Rogers, PhD
Quotes from The Unsayable
"Although some see me as an 'expert' on trauma, I'm not. Trauma is bigger than expertise of any sort - it's in our midst, in our language, our wars, even the ways we try to love, repeating, repeating. No one is an expert on trauma."
"Even then I had a reputation for reaching 'unreachable' children... If a child is suffering, in that quiet invisible way that children really do suffer, I am drawn to find that child and make contact. Maybe I am going back to myself as a child... I simply won't be turned away."
"In my practice I want to hear children in a way that invites them to say more, to find words for the unsayable - and this necessarily means listening to the unconscious."
"I gradually learned that trauma follows a different logic, a condensed psychological logic that is associative, layered, nonlinear, and highly metaphoric."
"Trauma is a letter written on the body in vanishing ink.... a message emerges that demands to be read, to be known."
Source: The Unsayable by Annie G. Rogers, PhD
"Even then I had a reputation for reaching 'unreachable' children... If a child is suffering, in that quiet invisible way that children really do suffer, I am drawn to find that child and make contact. Maybe I am going back to myself as a child... I simply won't be turned away."
"In my practice I want to hear children in a way that invites them to say more, to find words for the unsayable - and this necessarily means listening to the unconscious."
"I gradually learned that trauma follows a different logic, a condensed psychological logic that is associative, layered, nonlinear, and highly metaphoric."
"Trauma is a letter written on the body in vanishing ink.... a message emerges that demands to be read, to be known."
Source: The Unsayable by Annie G. Rogers, PhD
Sunday, August 19, 2007
The Myth of Child Resiliency
Bruce Perry has made it his life's work to understand how trauma affects children, and to develop innovative ways to help them cope with it. In 1996, he founded the Child Trauma Academy, since research demonstrates that the impact of PTSD is far greater on on children than it is on adults.
Children can recover from unspeakable trauma -- but adults' responses to children during and after traumatic events can greatly affect their chances of recovery.
Quotes from The Boy Who Was Raised As A Dog:
- "It's hard to imagine today, but when I was in medical school in the early 1980's, researchers didn't pay much attention to the lasting damage that psychological trauma can produce. Even less consideration was given to how trauma mgiht harm children. It wasn't considered relevant. Children were believed to be naturally "resilient" with an innate ability to "bounce back."
- "The brain is a historical organ. It stores our personal narrative. Our life experiences shape who we become by creating our brain's catalog of template memories, which guide our behavior, sometimes in ways we can consciously recognize, more often via processes beyond our awareness."
- "if anything, children are more vulnerable to trauma than adults... Resilient children are made, not born. The developing brain is most malleable and sensitive to experiences - both good and bad - early in life."
- "Children become resilient as a result of the patterns of stress and nurturing that they experience early on in life... we are rapidly and easily transformed by trauma when we are young. Though its effects may not always be visible to the untrained eye, when you know what trauma can do to children, sadly, you begin to see its aftermath everywhere."
- "Ultimately, what determines how children survive trauma, physically, emotionally , or psychologically, is whether the people around them - particularly the adults they should be able to trust and rely upon - stand by them with love, support and encouragement."
The story in this book that most deeply affected me as a reader was one about a three-year-old girl named Sandy who witnessed her mother's murder, and almost died herself.
Yet, her CPS caseworker did not believe that she needed to see a mental health professional. For nine months, Sandy was moved from foster home to foster home, with no counseling whatsoever -- and the details of her life were not shared with any of her foster parents because she was in hiding from the murderer.
Children can recover from unspeakable trauma -- but adults' responses to children during and after traumatic events can greatly affect their chances of recovery.
Quotes from The Boy Who Was Raised As A Dog:
- "It's hard to imagine today, but when I was in medical school in the early 1980's, researchers didn't pay much attention to the lasting damage that psychological trauma can produce. Even less consideration was given to how trauma mgiht harm children. It wasn't considered relevant. Children were believed to be naturally "resilient" with an innate ability to "bounce back."
- "The brain is a historical organ. It stores our personal narrative. Our life experiences shape who we become by creating our brain's catalog of template memories, which guide our behavior, sometimes in ways we can consciously recognize, more often via processes beyond our awareness."
- "if anything, children are more vulnerable to trauma than adults... Resilient children are made, not born. The developing brain is most malleable and sensitive to experiences - both good and bad - early in life."
- "Children become resilient as a result of the patterns of stress and nurturing that they experience early on in life... we are rapidly and easily transformed by trauma when we are young. Though its effects may not always be visible to the untrained eye, when you know what trauma can do to children, sadly, you begin to see its aftermath everywhere."
- "Ultimately, what determines how children survive trauma, physically, emotionally , or psychologically, is whether the people around them - particularly the adults they should be able to trust and rely upon - stand by them with love, support and encouragement."
The story in this book that most deeply affected me as a reader was one about a three-year-old girl named Sandy who witnessed her mother's murder, and almost died herself.
Yet, her CPS caseworker did not believe that she needed to see a mental health professional. For nine months, Sandy was moved from foster home to foster home, with no counseling whatsoever -- and the details of her life were not shared with any of her foster parents because she was in hiding from the murderer.
Saturday, July 07, 2007
Helping Traumatized Children Learn
The Massachusetts Advocates for Children has released a report and policy agenda to help ensure that children traumatized by family violence succeed in school.
The report sets forth an education and policy agenda to help schools become more supportive environments where traumatized children can focus, behave appropriately, and learn.
http://www.massadvocates.org/helping_traumatized_children_learn
The Massachusetts Advocates for Children has released a report and policy agenda to help ensure that children traumatized by family violence succeed in school.
The report sets forth an education and policy agenda to help schools become more supportive environments where traumatized children can focus, behave appropriately, and learn.
http://www.massadvocates.org/helping_traumatized_children_learn
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