It is not easy to work with posttraumatic stress survivors, especially when they’re still in the victim stage. Most apparently, it’s difficult because we have to hear about the heartbreaking stress. I remember working with a client who stuttered. He was a successful executive of a big corporation. He recounted lying to his father at the age of four, and having his father toss him from his lap, yelling, “You are no longer a son of mine.” Fifty years later the pain was palpable and he cried.
In addition to being heartbreaking, therapy with posttraumatic stress survivors is faith testing. The stories of rape, molestation, torture and agony at the hands of usually a father, a kindly-looking grandpa, a “favorite” uncle, a “trusted” family friend, a cub scout leader, a youth group advisor, an older sibling’s “polite” friends, this is bad enough, this profile of the perpetrator, but there is something even worse.
The perpetrator always has an accomplice: a silent mother, a deaf grandmother, an aunt who blindly looks the other way, a co-minister or scout leader or teacher who “suspects” but “doesn’t want to make trouble” or “ruin anyone’s reputation.”
Let’s assume that dad is the perpetrator. Then, most commonly, mom gives her silent consent. This is clearly and definitely not always true. But even if mom “doesn’t know” and dad pulls it off single-handedly, still, in a child’s mind, the mom who has warned, “I have eyes in the back of my head,” “I can tell when you’re lying,” “Because I’m your mom and I said so,” that mom didn’t stop it. Let’s look at the spiritual, emotional, intellectual and physical consequences.
Many spiritual teachers suggest that our “conceptualization of God” is limited by our conceptualization of our parents. If our parents are warm and loving, we can imagine a warm and loving God. If our parents are scorekeepers, hey, God has an accounting book and God is keeping track, and besides, if God sees everything (omniscient) and is always with us (omnipresent) and can do anything (omnipotent), then stopping dad (or whomever) from hurting us and helping mom (or whomever) see that it’s happening should be no challenge at all for an omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent One. Ergo, we have a deep and profound spiritual problem.
Emotionally, children who are loved are loving. I’m sure you have read “If a Child” by Amanda Carter. You can find it on the internet by looking up her name or the name of the poem. Her eloquent point is that children become what they have endured. If they’ve grown up with hostility, she says, they learn to fight. If they’ve grown up with security, they learn to have faith. Children who grow up in negativity and pain become the hitters, the biters, the sluggers, the cutters, the head-bangers, the animal abusers, the fire-starters, and the vandals. Succinctly put, if you can’t trust your own mother or father, who can you trust? And if you can’t trust anyone, with whom can you connect?
And if you can’t connect with anyone? It gets cold and lonely in the solitary confinement of a wounded heart.
Intellectually, school is going to bring out two extremes: why bother, or school is their only triumph. In the “why bother” category, we have to realize that kids who are being abused are likely to be depressed, anxious, reclusive, non-engaging children. To make matters worse, these children are likely to act different, look different, be standoffish or hostile and perhaps even appear retarded. These are not the children who get praised and attended to in school either by teachers or other students. Having never been loved, or at least not consistently, these are not very loveable children.
The second extreme of intellectual consequences at school would seem to be preferable: school is where they shine. Many trauma surviving kids with average or better intellectual abilities are likely to opt for achievement because it brings validation and affirmation. The downside is that the school triumph is frequently unbalanced by any other development. So, we have spiritually and emotionally stunted children who are “smart.” These are the geeks, the nerds, the loners in the corners, eyes downcast, eating their cheese sandwiches alone, staying in chemistry labs after school. Learning to make pipe bombs? Because you see, they are only smart, not wise. These children have no spiritual or emotional template for their knowledge.
Physically, you’ve seen them and they are obvious. They are “too.” They are the teenaged girls who dress like sluts or nuns. They are the teenaged boys who are pierced and tatooed. They may wear black, but their hair is orange or purple. They might look at you, but they are more likely to look through you or to ignore you. They are different and they are defensive. Even someone who says hello to them is suspect. “Why are you saying hello? What do you want?”
If you are a therapist who works with children, you see these things. If you are a therapist who works with adults, you see adults at different levels of adult functioning who are pedaling furiously uphill, trying to compensate for childhoods and adolescences which cemented into their minds and hearts the lessons of exclusion and isolation.
Scared children, like frightened kittens, will frequently scratch and snarl no matter the size of the body they’re in or the various functioning and coping mechanisms they’ve learned.
So, fellow therapists, leave your ego at the door when you enter your office.
Find a support group and use it. Pay attention to yourself and your own system of warning signs which indicate you are overwhelmed and need to re-balance and re-prioritize your life. Remember that if you don’t put on your own oxygen mask first, you can’t be sure of being around to help anyone else with theirs. And play.
I recommend grandchildren, especially young ones. I have one with whom I watch Elmo, one with whom I build train tracks of great and daring complexity, and one with whom I play school and tell stories. If you don’t have any handy that you can play with, find some. They remind me, as they will you, that we come into the world with innocence and a hungry capacity for loving and being loved. If this innate ability is de-railed, we can and must get it back on track, both for ourselves and for those with whom we spend our days. It’s inside each of us, this ability to laugh and smile and enjoy each other. We may have to sift through layers of wackiness and sludge, but it’s there and it can be found. Just dig. Dig as deeply and as gently and as respectfully as possible. But dig, and don’t stop digging, until you find the buried treasure of the wholeness with which we each entered life. Didn’t you always want to be an archeologist?