Early trauma effects can be long-term
BUTLER TWP — Traumas that occur during childhood can affect people years later, according to a nationally renowned psychiatrist who spoke Tuesday at a seminar at Butler County Community College.
Dr. Bruce Perry told more than 200 school, juvenile justice, county department and university workers at the Succop Theater about the complexity of an early traumatic incident, such as rape or another act of violence.
“One of the characteristic elements of trauma-related problems is that your brain makes associations in that experience between all kinds of things that have meaning and kinds of things that have no meaning,” Perry said. “Your brain in a midst of a trauma is essentially grasping at straws to try to make sense of it.”
Depending on the situation, a trauma trigger can be based on music or scents when the trauma took place, and then come back to haunt people long after the event. Various reactions can lead to mental health misdiagnoses, often because what’s going on in a child’s brain is oversimplified, Perry said.
The seminar, sponsored by Family Pathways in partnership with Butler County Human Services and Butler Collaborative for Families, was a way to spread the word about what the group’s Trauma-Informed Committee does, particularly when it comes to philosophical views on trauma.
“Not what’s wrong with you, but what happened to you?” said Elan Welter-Lewis, executive director of Family Pathways, in talking about to look at trauma.
While Perry’s talk was cerebral-focused with charts and three-dimensional graphs on reactions during and after a trauma, Joyce Ainsworth, director of Butler County Human Services, said there is a way to show the complexities of trauma to everyone.
“We’re not just trying to get to the therapist,” Ainsworth said about an effort to education people about the impact of trauma. “We’re trying to get to everyone, even to the guard in the jail.
“We want to get to as many people who touch human lives just so they can get that awareness of what’s underlying all the behaviors that they’re seeing.”
Perry said there are ways to deal with children who are acting out. One is to provide a platform for dosing, which allows children to mention a trauma on their own terms, and provide as much or as little information as they feel comfortable.
For instance, a child saying, “My mom got shot,” and an adult saying “I’m sorry,” can be considered a dose.
“You need to let them control dosing,” he said. “This is one of the most fundamentally misunderstood concepts in therapeutics.
“The truth is, our economic model and our structural model impairs our ability to allow this to happen. Home visiting models, residential settings, open clinics, school-based staff, all have the qualities to allow that stuff to happen in a more natural way.”
Introducing more mentoring adults into a child’s life, what he calls a “therapeutic web,” can provide more options for a child to confide in.
Bill Halle, founder of the Grace Youth and Family Foundation in Butler, said, “The application of this information by (the Grace Youth and Family Foundation) and its staff and other social human organizations within Butler County would be transformational.”
Perry, who lives in Houston, has published two psychiatry-related books and is a senior fellow at The Child Trauma Academy.
