My background is in mental health nursing and secondary school teaching, counselling and pastoral care. I have been working in these areas since 1994. When I started working with adults in mental health settings, you rarely heard the word ‘trauma’ being used and if you did it was about war veterans or major disaster survivors. It was even less common to hear the word ‘trauma’ used about children and adolescents. Thankfully, our understanding has moved on a lot from those days and we increasingly understand and acknowledge the debilitating role that trauma plays in the lives of children, and teenagers as well as adults.

Today, the word ‘trauma’ refers to incidents and situations that adversely affect people and which have not been processed properly. This means they become ‘trapped’ in the nervous system. Hence, symptoms such as panic attacks, palpitations, sleep paralysis, some ticks, bedwetting, delays in toilet training, motor skills or language. Added to this are psychological signs of trauma: flashbacks, hallucinations, nightmares, feelings of ‘unreality’, excessive arousal (anger, hyper-arousal, rage, irritability, etc), avoiding people, places or situations that may ‘trigger them’. There are so many symptoms of trauma – enough to fill up the whole page. It is important to remember that children show incredible resilience and ability to learn new responses. However, they are also potentially quite vulnerable as regards trauma as they have not been around long enough to develop a ‘thick skin’ and their experience is limited, so certain events are beyond their understanding.

Two great books that will help you understand what trauma is and the legacy it can leave in your child if not treated are:

Bessel Van Der Kolk: ‘The Body Keeps the Score’ and Peter Levine: ‘Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma’. If you read these books you will understand how and why your child is showing the symptoms that you want help in order for them to overcome.

What becomes clear from trauma studies is that it is not enough to just have your child talk to someone about what is upsetting them. This is just the start. What they need is a way to shift the trauma, reprocess the memory and integrate new thoughts, feelings and responses into their nervous systems and imaginations. This is where EMDR helps. It is a mind-body therapy that can enable your child or teenager move to on from adverse events and memories that are holding them back now.