Trauma
by Jo Griffin
Oct 3, 2023
The word trauma is often used to define both a significant event (such as an accident or natural disaster) as well as our emotional response to it.
Symptoms of trauma can include:
- Stress, anxiety and feeling ‘on edge’ (‘hyperarousal’)
- Difficulty sleeping
- Reliving aspects of the traumatic experience and feeling like it is happening in the present moment (‘flashbacks’)
- Feeling numb, spaced out or detached from things going on around you (dissociation)
- Traumatised individuals may also turn to unhelpful coping strategies to help them deal with difficult feelings, such as drinking too much alcohol, overeating or self-harming.
If left unprocessed, trauma can come out in different ways. Sometimes seemingly small things can trigger a traumatised response, surprising both the traumatised person and those around them.
Parent carers
Research suggests many parent carers experience traumatic events, both major events (‘Big T’ trauma) and ‘small t’ cumulative and ongoing traumas (Griffin, 2021; Emerson, 2019). What causes this may be different for different people.
For example:
- A parent who experienced birth trauma having to regularly attend the same hospital, or similar, where the initial trauma happened. A father who witnessed his partner and child almost dying due to birth complications. Factors such as stressful waits for appointments, witnessing invasive medical procedures or having to repeat difficult histories can retrigger the initial trauma. Even seemingly small incidents (a report being lost) take on heightened sense of ‘risk’. For some parents birth trauma is compounded by how information about their child’s diagnosis or prognosis has been delivered.
- A parent whose child displays behaviours that challenge and is regularly hit at home. They feel ashamed and don’t share this with anyone. Help is not easy to access. The parents manage this by very rarely going out, they lose contact with friends and support networks.
- A parent is distraught by a child’s autism diagnosis and is shunned by the wider family and blamed for ‘bad parenting’. Wherever the turn they feel ostracised and misunderstood. They start to believe that it is all down to them and them alone to support their child and their mental health deteriorates. In addition, they become battle weary due to the constant “fight” for services or respite and negotiating across complex appeal systems and multiple agencies. Sometimes the hard-fought-for service requires great effort to maintain on the part of the already exhausted parent.
Cumulative trauma can be debilitating, however, i) it is not always recognised in parent carers, ii) parents do not always receive the most appropriate referral for support. For example, where a parent is traumatised it may help them to receive Trauma-Focused Cognitive Behaviour Therapy, Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing (EMDR) or therapy from trauma-trained professionals.
A Parent Carer Trauma Working Group has been set up via Affinity Hub and a discussion paper will be published in Autumn 2023. We hope that this will help parent carers seek the support they need and help raise awareness amongst professionals and identify when a parent has experienced trauma.
You can sign up to receive quarterly newsletters on Parent Carer Wellbeing, including updates on the trauma work, here.
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