The trauma healing story: Healing chronically traumatised children through their families/whanau

Unprocessed trauma can have a devastating impact on all areas of development (Van der Kolk et al., 2009). Chronically traumatised children can be difficult to engage in trauma-focused treatment, especially when they are removed from their families by child protection services feeling blamed and disconnected. They display challenging behaviour, move from foster family to foster family, abscond, engage in criminal activities, use drugs and do not attend school. Their parents are often responsible for the abuse and families/whanau suffer from the consequences of intergenerational trauma. Instead of distancing the child from these ‘dysfunctional families,’ the trauma healing story intervention views intensive collaboration with the child’s parents and family as the key to engaging these children. The child’s life story is described and illustrated with simple drawings in which the parents acknowledge the child’s innocence and explain their intentions. Children can start to understand they were not responsible for the abuse and feel their parents’ permission to talk about their traumatic memories. Creating a mutual narrative of what happened reconnects parents and children, and parents can encourage their children to participate in consecutive trauma-focused therapy. The process of constructing this story with the parents provides them with an opportunity to heal from intergenerational trauma as well and break the cycle of intergenerational abuse. This article describes the Trauma Healing Story intervention, illustrated with case examples. The Trauma Healing Story intervention is part of the Sleeping Dogs method, developed for resistant chronically traumatised children with promising results. Clinical experience has also demonstrated that the structured format of the Trauma Healing Story intervention accommodates a Fly-In-Fly-Out delivery model of specialised trauma-focused treatment in remote areas in Australia and New Zealand

Journal

English

Arianne Struik

Struik, A. (2017). The trauma healing story: Healing chronically traumatised children through their families/whanau. Australian and New Zealand Journal of Family Therapy, 38. 613–626. doi:10.1002/anzf.1271