3. Parents model for their children ways to explore their emotional and cognitive world. Parents know that their children follow the parents’ model much more than their words. Children with early trauma are always watching their parents to maintain a sense of safety. This hyper-vigilance drives the child to learn from the parent’s behavior, on a deep, experiential level, much more than the many lectures parents tend to give.
4. Parents use interactive repair. Parents are the adults in the relationship. They should model appropriate behaviors for their children. Interactive repair demonstrates how to repair relationships. Parents have to demonstrate for their children the skills they want them to use. These skills are not gained by lectures or demands. Sometimes, parents state their child was wrong and the relationship cannot be healed until the child “takes responsibility and apologizes.” This stance assumes the child is reflective, evaluates the behavior as wrong and desires to repair the relationship, all of which are higher-level thinking skills and require a healthier internal working model.
5. Parents build the environment to support the child’s development of healthier affect regulation and healthier views of self, others and the world. The environment will either support or hinder healing. The essence of parenting is simply the agreement to supply the growing environment for our children. Chapter 16 has suggestions for environment interventions.
6. Parents recognize and label their child’s fear level. Parents learn to read their infants’ internal states. Now, the task is reading a child’s internal state that has grown to avoid even the perception of fear. Hurt children often take great care in keeping others from knowing their thoughts and emotions. For healing to begin, parents must recognize their child’s fears and label the emotions for the child. These skills will be new to the child and may initially create more fear.
7. Parents address the child’s stress but not necessarily always the circumstance. In some ways, addressing a healthy child’s stress is easier than changing the circumstance that created the stress. Parents may go to great lengths to eliminate stressors to keep the child more regulated instead of helping the child develop new self-regulatory skills. When a parent knows the child is stressed, they can help with the stress. Not all circumstances have resolutions. Further, it is not unusual for the child’s emotions to not match the circumstances. Identify the disparity.
8. Parents reduce the use of cognitive interventions during emotional responses. As parents use the ECTM, they will understand the neurological impact of trauma and the brain’s response to triggers. When a child has an emotional response, the brain has less ability to process or respond to cognitions.
9. Parents label emotional states and notice the increased cognition. As parents read and label their child’s emotions and offer comfort, the child’s brain may become less emotionally flooded and be freed up to have increased cognition. The goal is for the child to notice how his or her body changes with/without stress. Complex early trauma causes children to avoid feelings of fear and sadness. In the early stages of life, the baby’s brain was dependent upon the caregiver’s brain to facilitate moving out of “fear.” If the relationship with the caregiver did not prompt this change of state, children will lack a dependable means of regulating emotions. They feel as if any small fear could wind up being overwhelming! Since they have no experience with modulating and changing emotions, they default to avoidance. Consequently, such children grow to have just two “emotions,” mad and more mad! We as parents must demonstrate that first we and then they can feel fear and sadness and then stop feeling it. We all have a wide variety of tools we use to accomplish this for ourselves. It is very hard to teach these skills to little brains that have already learned to avoid those feelings as a survival skill.
10. Parents explain what their child experiences without shame or blame. Parent self-regulation is important with this intervention. The parent’s task is to relay what is going on with the child, separate from their frustration about the problematic behaviors that may have occurred. They can use storytelling or just describe the events as if they were talking to a younger child.
11. Parents use “helpful statements” to assist their child in internalizing a healthier sense of self. Interventions are provided in chapters 16 and 17.
12. Parents provide a wide range of developmental activities for their child. Due to Trauma-Disrupted Competencies, most children with early trauma experience developmental delays. To help children mature, they must be exposed to multiple age activities. Children who have not fully mastered skills at one developmental level will experience “gaps” in their ability to function at the next developmental level. When healing begins and the child feels security, he or she will often automatically gravitate toward activities that are not necessarily age-appropriate. These activities will become the building blocks for more “mature” activities. They should not be seen as primarily pathological.
13. Parents accept, enjoy and parent their child at his or her developmental level. These children need unconditional love, not relationships based on academic success, appearance or skills. Their egocentric nature causes them to blame themselves for removal from their birth family and changes in placements. Even when children deny it, there is no motivational substitute for parental attention. They will always grow in the direction of our attention. It can be extremely difficult to find and enjoy the small, fearfully hidden positive elements of traumatized children. Our attention that nurtures their growth may require a very strange skill set to enjoy playing with building blocks with a nineteen-year-old or a twelve-year-old sitting with mom reading a picture book. But these activities are often just what the child needs to facilitate acquisition of previously un-mastered skills. The new skills in turn allow for eventual mastery of chronological age skills.
TREATMENT GOALS
As with any model, success is dependent on the participants. We have established goals that can be measured (useful in treatment planning) and explain what needs to be accomplished during the process. Goals are dependent upon the number of times the parent uses components of the ECTM.
1. To explain confusing emotional reactions. This reduces a child’s feelings of shame.
2. To explain the source of the emotions driving a child’s behavior.
3. To reorganize and redirect the familial system’s efforts at recovery from an external focus (to change others) toward an internal focus (how I can change).
4. To illustrate that the child is not “sick” or “bad,” but has a hurt part, a part that learned not to trust others, that the child is unlovable and the world is dangerous.
5. To increase internal reflection for parents and children by the application of an alternate and more accurate assessment of their own emotional world as the motivational source for their actions.
6. To interpret present emotions and behaviors and link them to past events.
7. To predict emotional responses to future events.
8. To base personal responsibility and accomplishment on something other than immediate change in the child’s behavior.
9. To reduce parental interpretations of malice as the origin of children’s behaviors.
10. To increase parents’ healthy trauma-informed behavioral expectations for their children, the verbal and non-verbal expressions of which will build the child’s self-image.
PARENT SKILLS
Now,
