Welcome to session two of the Introduction to Trauma-Informed Care course. Let’s start together by looking at our goals and then discuss stress and trauma. There are three goals of trauma-informed care for children. The first goal is safety. Children and adolescents must be safe from harm. Second, they need permanency. Permanency means a forever family – no more moving around, no aging out. How many of us, after we turned 18, didn't need a family anymore? All of us, for all of our lives, need permanent relationships. The third goal is that children and adolescents experience a sense of well-being: health, happiness, and satisfaction with life. We also have goals for ourselves as trauma-informed adults. The first is that we need to understand the impact of trauma. Remember, exposure to or the experience of trauma is not rare. The second goal for ourselves is to learn to recognize when emotions and behaviors we see in others or ourselves are survival behavior rather than willful disobedience. And the third is to respond in a trauma-informed way. There's a big gap between recognizing where behavior comes from and responding to it in a helpful and healing way. It’s vital that we don’t react to big behaviors and emotions but rather respond to the needs behind the behaviors.
Now we're going to jump into a discussion about stress and trauma - the differences between the two and how they overlap. Stress has a purpose - to prepare us for and get us safely through a challenging event, and when that event is over, we return to a state of calm or regulation. For that reason, some stress is positive. An example of positive stress is in athletes who are about to play a really important game. Their heart begins pumping blood away from non-essential organs like the stomach and sending it out to the muscles. Breathing increases. Focus narrows. When the game or event is over, the body will go back to calm. The next kind of stress is tolerable stress. We call stress tolerable when it lasts longer than just a typical event, but the person experiencing it has relationships in their life to help soften the effects of the stress. Moving houses, switching jobs, having a baby, or losing a loved one are examples of life events that may bring extended but tolerable stress.
The third type of stress is toxic stress. Toxic stress is extremely harmful to our bodies, brains, and emotions and is the underlying cause of at least 60% of all diseases and disorders. Stress is toxic when it’s constant or chronic, meaning the stress response is kicked in all of the time. When that happens, the stress hormone cortisol, intended to be helpful, can destroy our health. For kids with a chronic trauma history, the stress response has been kicked in for so long that even if the stressor goes away, the body has lost some of its ability to go back to a state of calm. The stress response is a system in our brains, but you can also think of it as muscles. We really want both muscles to be equally strong – the one that can react to a threat or challenge and the one that can calm us down afterward. Chronic stress keeps that calm down muscle from being developed and becoming strong and healthy to be used when needed. Let’s just sit in this for a minute. Some children and adolescents have come from traumatic histories and have difficulty calming down. This is not just because they have a bad temperament, are choosing it, or want to ruin your day. Their brains and bodies need to develop those muscles left weak because of traumatic stress. What will help is when we provide support, not heap shame. We will talk more about how to regulate in a later session.
Let's talk about trauma because stress and trauma are different though similar. All trauma is stressful, but not all stress is traumatic. A trauma is something that completely overwhelms our capacity to cope. Trauma often carries with it the feeling that my very life may be in danger. There's another critical factor to consider with trauma: perception. How we perceive events influences whether or not we experience that event as traumatic or incredibly stressful. That's why two siblings could grow up in the same house, with the experiences and dysfunction, yet be affected differently. One perceived the situation as very stressful. And the other was traumatic because of each child’s temperament and personality. It is not our place to tell another person that an event wasn’t traumatic.
