Youngsters Coping With Trauma

     Last week I was able to attend the Charleston Child Trauma Conference in South Carolina. The sessions focused on supporting children and teens who have been victimized by different forms of neglect or abuse. Although this is a difficult topic to consider, the mental health profession is recognizing the immediate and long-term risks faced by young people who have been mistreated. 
     We cannot erase the overwhelming situations that impact a portion of youth in our society. We can recognize the impact of mistreatment and work to help them cope with the stressors they face.  
     Dr. Karen Horney wrote about children adjusting to significant stress in their lives in her 1945 book, Our Inner Conflicts.

"...the child gropes for ways to keep going, ways to cope with this menacing world. Despite his own weakness and fears he unconsiously shapes his tactics to meet the particular forces operating in his environment. In doing so, he develops not only ad hoc strategies but lasting character trends which become part of his personality...At first a rather chaotic picture may present itself, but out of it in time three main lines crystallize: a child can move toward people, against them, or away from them...In each of these three attitudes, one of the elements involved in basic anxiety is overemphasized: helplessness in the first, hostility in the second, and isolation in the third." 

      

    Dr. Horney recognized that children tend to develop a strategy to deal with their sense of being alone and overwhelmed in a dangerous world. This is most pronounced for children who have been victimized. She went on to explain that children who present as helpless try to make connections to gain support and move toward people. Children who are hostile move against people because they lack trust in others and look to fight so that they can feel stronger and protect themselves. Children who isolate themselves move away from connections with others because they feel misunderstood and do not make the effort to connect or fight.       We have all encountered children and teens who predominantly behave with one of these three attitudes that were described over 70 years ago by Dr. Horney. We are sometimes quick to think these children are simply misbehaving. We can describe them as needy and clingy; oppositional and rebellious; or aloof and conceited.
     It is rare that we will know the personal histories (especially the traumatic histories) of the young people who we coach, teach, supervise or otherwise encounter in our daily lives. We should take the time to consider that the youngsters we find challenging might be doing the best they can to cope with stressors many of us could never imagine. Youngsters often need our kindness and understanding more than they need our criticism.

The quote above is from Our Inner Conflict: A Constructive Theory of Neurosis pp.42-43 by Karen Horney; 1945 by W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.

Anxiety Is Common To Everyone

People worry about things. It is normal to think about all the items on our to-do lists, or the health of loved ones, or those projects at work. When the worry becomes more intense we may even become fearful. Generally, we are afraid of what might go wrong. A certain amount of stress about these worrisome or frightening situations helps us to focus our energy and take action. We complete a task, offer support to a sick friend, or plan a strategy to meet the deadline for that project. Our worries and fears are situational and temporary. When we take steps to confront them, they don't linger. They may be replaced by another stressful situation, which also leads to action, and then that worry fades. This is a typical cycle for most of us in our fast-paced culture.

Anxiety is a different condition which confronts people from childhood through the retirement years. Rollo May wrote about the contrast between anxiety and fear in his 1983 book titled, The Discovery of Being.

"The understanding of anxiety as ontological illuminates the difference between anxiety and fear. The distinction is not one of degree nor of the intensity of the experience. The anxiety a person feels when someone he respects passes him on the street without speaking, for example, is not as intense as the fear he experiences when the dentist seizes the drill to attack a sensitive tooth. But the gnawing threat of the slight on the street may hound him all day long and torment his dreams at night, whereas the feeling of fear, though it was quantitatively greater, is gone for the time being as soon as he steps out of the dentist's chair. The difference is that the anxiety strikes at the central core of his self-esteem and his sense of value as a self, which is the most important aspect of his experience of himself as a being."

When Dr. May writes about anxiety being ontological he means that it is a state of being or an indication of who we are. By contrast, fear is a temporary emotion that we have and it is not what we are. May and the other existential psychotherapists of the mid to late 20th century recognized that being anxious was part of being human.

Everyone experiences a certain amount of anxiety in her or his life. It is an unavoidable condition. There is variation in how effectively we can live and cope with our own unique sense of anxiety. The next blog posts will focus on where anxiety comes from and how we can manage the experience.

The quote in the post above was taken from page 108 of The Discovery of Being by Rollo May; published in 1983 by W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.