Childhood Trauma Treatment
Support for your family when childhood is way heavier than it's supposed to be.
Childhood Trauma: Understanding what your child is carrying
As parents, we all want our children to feel safe, loved, and free to enjoy their childhood. But sometimes, life brings experiences that are too overwhelming for a young child to process. These experiences can leave lasting marks on how a child thinks, feels, and behaves.
What "counts" as childhood trauma?
Most people think of trauma as an event. The truth of trauma is that it is not an event it's our experience of an event. Two people could experience the exact same event and have very different reactions-- One person may be largely unaffected, while the other could be deeply traumatized. Our unique histories, capacities for coping, external support systems, and identity factors affect how we respond to difficult experiences.
Any experience that overwhelms our capacity to cope can be traumatizing. Many children come to trauma treatment with histories including:
- Family changes, divorce, or prolonged separation from parents (due to a deployment, hospitalization, or move)
- Death of a loved one
- Medical treatment or procedures (for the child or a close loved one)
- Acute events like car accidents or natural disasters
- School trauma related to ineffective behavioral management techniques or changes in school placement
- Ongoing exposure to an adult with substance use challenges or significant mental health symptoms
- Interpersonal trauma such as experiencing or witnessing domestic violence or bullying
- Systemic forms of trauma like experiencing discrimination, racism, ableism, or homophobia
I'm worried bringing my child to trauma therapy will make their symptoms worse if we "bring up" the traumatic material with them. How will you help them?
While many clinicians have training in trauma therapy for adults, recognizing and treating trauma in children requires specialized training and attunement to how children process traumatic experiences. At Madeline Mental Health, we use developmentally appropriate play therapy approaches to help children process their traumatic experiences at their own pace and support them in developing the sense of safety and resilience they need to move forward.
Many parents worry that bringing their child to trauma therapy will "re-traumatize" their child or in some way make a hard situation worse-- and some forms of trauma treatment can be harmful if they don't respect the child's timeline and developmental capacities.
That said, Child Centered Play Therapy and SMART treatment are the most developmentally appropriate forms of childhood trauma treatment available-- it respects the child's pace, readiness to dive deep, and natural means of processing their experiences. Using these child-centered approaches, children process their trauma when they're ready-- not when the therapist decides they're ready.
