In light of Oprah’s 60 Minutes piece on trauma-informed care that ran on PBS March 11, 2018 (which I highly recommend), I wanted to share my family’s somewhat untypical experience with trauma, mental illness and the Collaborative Problem Solving (CPS) model. Childhood trauma such as sexual abuse or sudden death of a parent can increase a person’s vulnerability to mental illnesses such as anxiety and depression. After our first pediatric psychiatric hospital admission, social workers and therapists searched diligently inside the family for such experiences and we searched outside. The soccer coach? Something on the computer? Uncle at the lake house? Nothing came to light. As the years go by and our struggles continue to reverberate into their adulthood, coping with mental illness itself seems to be the trauma.
Early on in school and community, we ran into exactly what Oprah describes on 60 Minutes: a lot of “What’s wrong with your kids?” and not a whole lot of “What’s happening to your kids?” I started to feel gaslighted. Why were my kids the only ones struggling? Was I unconsciously disregarding evidence of something really sinister? Was I the problem? Our household descended into chaos and our children refused to go to school. They could not sleep at night, they started to self-injure. I was desperate.
To my extreme good fortune, I was able to participate in a group parent therapy program at Think:kids in Boston, MA. I credit the CPS concepts and skills I learned there with saving my marriage and keeping my family largely intact. The key is empathy. It is impossible to overstate. Empathy. Empathy. Empathy. If there is anything positive I can claim from raising terribly depressed and anxious kids, it is learning how to truly empathize, how to dive down to wherever they are and help them verbalize what is really going on in their heads. It sounds easy to do until you realize you’ve never actually done it before. Those times I thought I was empathizing with people? I was really just sympathizing, just doing or talking about something with someone that I already had personal experience with or similar opinions about. I wasn’t doing the hard work of learning something new, let alone something new and terrifying. It can feel like exploring a dark cave with a very weak flashlight. Empathy is WAY harder than sympathy.
As Think:kids clearly pointed out to me, people often have unrealistic expectations of each other. This is hard to hear, even harder to hold yourself accountable for, especially if you yourself are a person who usually does meet expectations. If we are honest though, whether at work or in a relationship or as a parent, everyone has been in situations where one person simply does not have the skills they need to meet another person’s particular expectation at that particular time. As a society, we have been taught to respond to these kinds of situations mostly with blame and shame, with “try harder, do better” or “if you really cared, you would do this.”
Those setting expectations are often offended by the idea of making extra effort to figure out what other than motivation might be in someone’s way. That is supposed to be the other person’s work. Power struggles ensue, especially between parent/child and teacher/student. Exasperation and condescension creep in: the kindergartner who plays baseball with their eyes closed is a “fraidy cat”, the first grader who avoids the math facts speed challenge is “lazy” and the third grader who asks for a chair during circle time is “attention seeking”. They start to feel terrible about themselves.
But the truth is more complicated. I know the qualifiers in these scenarios because after I learned the importance of empathy (too long after the fact I am afraid) I used CPS skills to talk to my kids about them. Turned out that my kindergartner hated the dizzy feeling of following the ball through the air, my first grader felt extreme pressure to make perfect scores like their best friend, and my third grader lost circulation in their legs after sitting cross-legged for too long. Effort or lack of desire to follow directions had absolutely nothing to do with anything. If I had had these skills earlier, I would have been in a much better position to help them advocate for themselves in these situations and so many others. We’ll never know what brain toxicity might have been avoided, what suffering might have been prevented. It’s really hard for me to think about now.
But Think:kids also teaches parents, “Remain calmly optimistic and relentlessly persistent in the face of all odds.” I try. I am deeply grateful now that as adults my family members are all seeing each other more clearly. We have all learned to recognize the trauma in each other. We are gentler with each other and more generous with the hard, hard work of empathizing. All power to encourage growth and healing in another human being comes first and foremost from relationships of trust and safety. We, as the adults who bring children into a world with expectations we have created for them, are the ones responsible for making the extra effort to help them learn to manage it all – not the other way around.
By: Allison Kretzmeier, Anxiety In Teens Contributor