Center For Healing Childhood Trauma

The first week of school fills me with anxiety and dread. I once loved the smell of new crayons and was excited over the new backpacks and folders. Now I worry because I parent children from hard places — children who have experienced trauma. I’ve been lucky the last two years because I had a teacher that “got it.” I had a teacher with a trauma informed classroom that listened to me. She understood that unaddressed trauma generates lifelong impacts on a child’s brain that can end in early death.

Sound extreme?

It’s not.

Parenting my child is life or death. I was once a third-grade teacher, so I know that you may think this is dramatic. However, I am now the mother of seven, and I live with the effects of childhood trauma every day. These are the things that I understand as a mother, a former educator, and a nurse.

Trauma Informed Teaching is Crucial 

We have sanitized trauma in our lives. Opioid crisis. Food insecurity. Sirens and fights in the night. We don’t think about the smallest victims. We don’t read about the child hiding in the backroom during a drug bust, or the baby left in an apartment tended by his 11-year-old sibling with only ramen and cereal to eat. Instead we protect anonymity to the detriment of these children who end up in the classroom struggling with a story that is never told. We end up treating the traumatized by ignoring the trauma.

If you are a teacher, you will teach children who have been traumatized. The CDC ACE study tells us that more than 50% of students in the classroom have experienced one or more adverse childhood events (ACE). The time in life when the brain is the most sensitive to experience is infancy and childhood.

In the CDC’s ACE Study, the ten types of childhood adversity measured were:

• physical, sexual, verbal abuse
• physical and emotional neglect
• a parent who’s an alcoholic (or addicted to other drugs) or diagnosed with a mental illness
• witnessing a mother who experiences abuse
• losing a parent to abandonment or divorce
• a family member in jail

Trauma Changes the Brain

Studies show chronic stress or unaddressed ACEs can change the chemical and physical structures of the brain. In the classroom, children can display traumatic stress through aggression, anxiety, defiance, perfectionism, and withdrawal. The signs of trauma look similar to ADD, ADHD, ODD, and autism spectrum disorder. Inattentive, hyperactive, and impulsive behavior mirrors the effects of trauma or adversity. 

Children show their emotions through behavior. What might seem like random, nonsensical, or manipulative behaviors in a child, might actually be rooted in fear and pain. The emotional backpack they carry to school each day is one that they cannot set outside your classroom door — it will remain heavy and forefront in their brain.

These facts necessitate training in trauma informed teaching and the creation of a trauma informed classroom. Trauma undermines attention, executive functioning, and working memory. When trauma causes emotional or psychological damage to children, they may adopt a set of behaviors or patterns of thinking that put them on a path for further trauma. In other words, trauma begets trauma. Here is the basic process for trauma informed teaching.

1. Set the tone. Use the environment to regulate the brain.

Your students who have experienced trauma in their lives are often operating from a primal state — always ready to fight or flee. They have learned that the world is not a safe place. They are living in a state of hypervigilance; their little minds have been hijacked by their basic instincts and impulses which renders them unable to concentrate.

Your classroom environment is your greatest asset in trauma informed teaching. Clear expectations and schedules are everything. You can create a safe environment that actually helps regulate the brain. Think schedules and procedures. If a child can anticipate routine, they can feel safe.

2. Recognize that a child is going into survival mode.  

When you notice that a child might be having a difficult time, start by asking yourself, “What’s happening here?” rather than “What’s wrong with this child?” For example, the student might:

• Get a “deer-in-the-headlights” look
• Look angry
• Breathe more rapidly
• Become fidgety and squirmy
• Burst into tears or look ready to cry

When survival mode occurs, you are not going to be able to talk and correct the child. You need to provide a safe space and help them regulate. This might mean sinking down to eye level and saying, “You are safe,” and then simply stepping away for a while. The cure for trauma is trauma informed teaching — a safe relationship where you give the child space and environment to feel safe. 

3. Help them self-regulate through co-regulation.

School is not easy for my children and every year I walk in praying they have a teacher that ‘gets it’. A teacher that can see how self-regulation doesn’t exist with a child from trauma. Yes, it sounds crazy, but this is important. Regulatory skills live in the highest part of the brain. Dysregulation lives in the lower parts of the brain. Trauma in a child’s life causes children to live in the lower part of the brain and this means dysregulation, and this looks like a child who is either hypervigilant or disassociated. As a former teacher, I would have described this as the ADD child or the daydreamer. I would have used stickers, rewards, and consequences to curb this behavior…and it never worked.

What works isn’t teaching self-regulation. It’s giving children experiences of co-regulation repeatedly until their brains literally take in and imprint the regulated adult. Children from trauma or from hard places, cannot self-regulate because they were never given the experience of co-regulation. They need you. Yes, you may be the only co-regulating adult in their life. This is another reason trauma informed teaching is crucial.

4. Pursue relationship, not attachment.

Trauma informed teaching means my children need you to have a teacher relationship with them, not an attachment. Attachment is the bond that develops between a primary caregiver, usually the mother, and her infant. This attachment ensures survival for the infant. My child should not attach to you as the means to survive. However, they should have a relationship with you as a ‘secure base’ within the school system.  My child needs you to navigate the world of school, and to point to me for attachment.

This relationship you have will help you teach my child’s emotional age. It seeks to understand how history can cause learned helplessness and behaviors you do not understand.

The goldfish shark is how I best describe my child, and last week I shared it with a group of incarcerated mothers who “got it” when it comes to trauma. Here’s the story:

I share the picture below. I began talking about how our children often present with behaviors that look like the shark, but if we look below the water, we will realize they are really just scared goldfish trying to have a need met. Their behaviors might communicate anger and hostility, but below the surface is a fearful, hurting child. I further explained that it is our job as parents/teachers to stop parenting the shark fin, and look below the surface and meet the needs of the goldfish.

One of the inmates raised her hand and said, “I’m a lot like that picture. I act all tough and mean, but I’m really just a scared fish. I wish when I was a kid, someone would have thought to look for the goldfish, instead of just seeing me as a shark.”

See the NEED behind the BEHAVIOR. – Karyn Purvis

Here are a few tips on how to see the goldfish:

• Consider all extreme behavior within the context of survival to better understand why the child keeps doing something.
• Repetition reinforces positive experiences and impacts brain growth.
• Traumatized children expect the worst. If you understand this, you will be better prepared for it.
• Childhood neglect is the most damaging trauma. The child must not have basic needs threatened in any way.
• The development the child missed due to abuse will need extra attention.
• Traumatized children will often score lower on IQ tests than their true ability.  Retest when their environment is helping them heal and watch the scores go up.
• Healing trauma involves helping children learn skills to reduce agitation.  This repeated cycle is what most helps the child.
• Promote play -– it aids healing.
• Don’t give up hope! The human brain is capable of healing in ways we do not yet understand. It may be a long road to healing and the child may not get there while still in your trauma informed classroom, but every situation makes a difference. (excerpts from Traumatic Experience and the Brain, A Handbook for Understanding and Treating Those Traumatized as Children.) 

May we all spend the day looking for the goldfish, instead of punishing the shark.

Written by Stacey Gagnon (2018)