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In her book Children and Trauma, author Cynthia Mohahon reminds us of the following important points about the impact of trauma on the family:
- A child’s trauma has enormous potential for creating family distress and disruption. Problems with coping are normal for all family members following a child’s trauma.
- Feelings of abandonment, jealousy, intense distress, fearfulness and guilt are not uncommon reactions for siblings of a traumatised child. Some siblings themselves show signs of post-traumatic stress in their behaviour.
- Parents experience many reactions similar to their child’s: feeling preoccupied with the trauma, needing to review and re-tell the event, experiencing intrusive thoughts and images of the trauma, feeling helpless and guilty, and searching for explanations.
- Many parents feel devastated by their inability to prevent a child’s trauma. Harm to a child can challenge parents’ sense of themselves as protectors and lead parents to questions their own goodness as parents.
- Trauma can shatter cherished beliefs in fundamental goodness and justice. Feeling raw and vulnerable to random destructive events disrupts basic feelings of safety in the world, for parents as well as children.
- Coping for parents sometimes involves minimising or exaggerating the importance or severity of a child’s trauma. Extremes of either minimisation or exaggeration can leave children feeling lonely and misunderstood.
- Recovery from a child’s trauma is a family matter. An important therapeutic goal is for parents to take the lead and model positive coping for their children. Encouraging open discussion of the trauma and family members’ feelings, focusing on children’s immediate needs in a one-day-at-a-time approach, respecting a spouse’s different ways of coping, finding and using supports outside the family, and maintaining an image of the child as a survivor are helpful steps toward family recovery.
> Adapted from the book Children and Trauma – A Guide for Parents & Professionals, by Cynthia Mohahon.
Published by Jossey-Bass: www.josseybass.com
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