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Photo: R. Rozen-Zvi
The soft brown curls
Sweetly turned back
Away from images
She’ll track
As she grows older
And discovers
Mirrored reflections
Of her self
And others.
For the Photo a Week Challenge: Through glass
Photo: Smadar Halperin-Epshtein
I can play in the tent
I can play with these balls
But to have you play with me
Is what I want most of all!
For Cee’s Fun Foto Challenge: Play
Photo: duffylondon.com
There needs to be an extra chair now at the table, another place setting, extra fork. The bath requires extra towels. Reading choices necessitate an added pause. There are lively conversations from the bedroom, laughter, whispered dialogue, deep monologues. A seat to save in rides, a window-or-middle deliberation. Opinions of a first-line advisor, a determined intermediate, a confidante.
Granted, he is secretive, selective, and exclusive. It doesn’t mean he isn’t a good friend.
Accepting him is fact, not question. Get used to it. He’s there. He may not show up to explain, but he will not be ignored or shunned. Be nice. He has deep feelings. He has needs. A keen mind.
Should not matter that he is a dragon-human made of magic. Invisible to all but a certain little one.
For The Daily Post
Photo: threeoclockbears.com
Tamina attended first-grade in a Harlem public school. She was homeless most of that year. Her mother lost the apartment after she lost her job. Sometimes they stayed with relatives but mostly Tamina, her mother and her sister slept in shelters where they could never stay very long. They carried their belongings in thick black garbage bags, protection from the weather. Tamina used to have a teddy bear, but it got left in a shelter and her mother was ‘too tired’ to go back for it. Tamina never got it back.
Tamina had very little. Other children had a home, their own bed, place for their stuff, more stuff. So she stole. Mostly small things: erasers, crayons, hair-pins. Things she could hide in her pockets and later in her black garbage bag. If confronted, Tamina would furiously demand it “was always hers.” I suspected she often believed it and wondered if some items resembled things she once had and owning them was a link to a time when life was less overwhelming. Beyond an overall language delay, Tamina seemed confused about concepts like the difference between possessing and owning: in some shelters cots were ‘first-come-first-serve’ and while you had it, it was ‘yours’ even if it did not remain so for long. You had to ‘watch’ your stuff or have it disappear. Why could an unattended eraser not be ‘hers’?
While children often crave things that are not theirs, Tamina’s stealing was possibly about unmet needs. Her mother was “always mad and cussing” and Tamina could not rely on her for support. Children whose ‘hungers’ are neglected seek other ways: become secretive, dissociate, numb themselves with substances, steal, hoard. These behaviors often further distance them from care and social support, when they in fact communicate confusion, loneliness, anger, loss, and shame.
[The above is an excerpt from “Communicating Trauma” Routledge, 2015]
Homelessness does not necessarily mean neglect, but the realities and causes of homelessness pose many risks, especially to children. In addition to loss and grief, there are increased health and safety risks, along with reduced access to care. Children without homes suffer insecurity, and their caregivers may be too overwhelmed to attend to their emotional needs. Depression, posttraumatic stress, illness, disability, poverty, domestic violence and other life-crises are all too common among parents of homeless children. Any one of these factors can overwhelm a parent and reduce their availability, let alone when such factors combine.
Having no place to call home–in all the forms it takes–can be distressing and occupying. It leaves children anxious and unavailable for learning. Homeless children are often wary and worried, angry or withdrawn. They are three times as likely to require special-education, four times as likely to drop out of school, and almost nine times as likely to repeat grades.
Homelessness devastates. It is crucial we work together to understand it and resolve it as well as support families in crisis and address risk factors before they reach a loss of home, hearth, and heart.
“For children who depend on mentally escaping into their minds to survive, imagination can become both refuge and desert island.”
(Na’ama Yehuda, Communicating Trauma, p. 148)
Vintage Phrenology: thegraphicsfairy.com
There are over 1,000,000 substantiated reports of child maltreatment annually in the US alone (US Department of Health 2013). The impact of maltreatment on development and health is indisputable. The last two decades showed brisk research in the area of trauma and dissociation all over the world. It is therefore quite surprising to find psychology textbooks to be so behind the times (and behind the data) on covering child maltreatment. This leaves hundreds of thousands of students a year with less-than-accurate information that may impact their ability to identify or understand the aftermath of child maltreatment.
In an important article (also see full link below), Brand and McEwen review the three leading introductory psychology textbooks and how they address (or not address) childhood maltreatment and its aftermath. The results are distressing in lack of citing of current data (as in many textbooks on psychopathology).
One can hypothesize why prominent textbooks will not sufficiently cover such an important topic (one would think they would find it essential to cover well if only for the known health effects of childhood maltreatment across the lifespan, in both physical and psychological health, costs, and healthcare utilization). Maybe it is as simple as using outdated resources or not keeping up with research and known data. Maybe it speaks to more widespread issues of denial and minimization of childhood maltreatment. Maybe other reasons. Regardless of why the textbooks are lacking, the reality remains that the textbooks leave students un-informed on the topic.
The good news is that this can be changed! The data is available–it just needs to be included and reviewed better!
Hopefully having more awareness to this will allow students and faculty to challenge the choice of textbooks and to demand better coverage of such a relevant issue. Students are shortchanged when they are under-informed and when data is slanted or may appear to be biased or outdated.
What can you do?
Let your faculty, librarian, and fellow clinicians and students know that our college students deserve a more cohesive review of childhood maltreatment. Share the article below. Talk to professors who teach these courses and support them in seeking better balanced textbooks. The research is available, it simply needs to be included rather than avoided. Let us work together for improving information in education!
In her great blog Adele and the Penguin, Adele Ryan McDowell posts about all manner of lovelies (well worth peeking in!). Her recent post is about sensitivity, about those of us who may be labeled “too sensitive” or “highly sensitive people.”
Reading it made me think–and not for the first time (Adele’s blog posts do that–they touch the everyday in novel and eye-opening and heart-opening ways).
The highly-sensitive people thing? Yep. I can totally relate …
So can many of my little clients.
Personally I don’t see being sensitive as a bad thing. Like any quality, I think the ability itself is neutral. It is how we react to it, what we do with it, how it affects our lives, and whether it adds or detracts from the person we are and can become, that is the most important aspect of it to me.
There seems to be more good than bad in sensitivity. Creative people are often sensitive. Artists, writers, thinkers, inventors. I certainly see more positive than negative in the more sensitive children who come to see me. They perceive the world minutely, they read people amazingly well (even if they don’t always know how to verbalize it), they feel deeply.
They are also, all too often, overwhelmed. There is too much, everything, everywhere, from everyone. In reaction, they snail in, lash out, fidget, shut down, alternate being acutely perceptive and deeply numbed out. They can have spectacular tantrums, meltdowns for seemingly nonsensical slights, go from happy to weepy in a blink of an eye. They get all kinds of acronym diagnoses, sometimes rightfully, often not … They can walk through the days feeling raw, exposed, vulnerable, tender, empathetic, perceptive, disorganized and evocative.
Emotional regulation is a must for all children to learn. Without ability to do so and find a place of calm attention–they will struggle at school, in public, in getting along. All caregivers of children are tasked with the teaching and modeling of emotional regulation to the children in their lives. It is even more crucial for highly-sensitive children … who can tax even the most patient caregiver. The sensitive children need more help, much more help, to learn to regulate, to know when they need to take a break, to recognize the beginning of overwhelm and be able to apply a tool for grounding.
They need more time. To play. To rest. To think. To cuddle. To get bored. To dream. To get used to new things. To gather their courage to try. It is a luxury of time all too many of them do not get these days, in our modern world that does not make it easy to be sensitive.
Our world–and within it the education system and children’s schedules–is currently calibrated for very low sensitivity: there is information everywhere and increased pace galore. Blinking screens, beeping car horns and phone messages, jingles of all manners, multi-sensory bombardment, loud, fast, multitasking everywhere. There is stimulation all the time. Every. Where.
Wake up and rush to school, bend over homework in the car to complete what didn’t get done the night before because there was a birthday party and soccer practice. After a long day at school in a class of 30 and no recess or playground because it rained and a two hour assembly in a noisy auditorium followed by lunch in an equally ruckus lunchroom, grab your bag and gobble down dinner on the way from dance to chess before you go home and try to do homework with the TV in the background, someone angry with tech-support on the phone, the vacuum and the dishwasher rumbling along. Get a math problem wrong and dissolve in tears onto a kicking puddle of misery on the floor. It is not the math problem. It is the everything and that little bump of difficulty simply toppled tolerance. Everyday stuff mushrooming to a thunderstorm.
Sometimes I think that sensitive people may be better calibrated for slower life … for long walks from place to place, bigger nature around them, more connection with animals (and their highly regulating energies), more connection to the earth and its calming breath.
It is not how most children grow up anymore, and it is not about going back to lack of modernity (there’s much to be said for running water, electricity, and even the Internet …). However, it is about helping children–especially sensitive children–learn how to stop, pause, breathe, step away, maintain boundaries.
All children need that. Sensitive children need it even more. Their drama-streak, their tantrums, their meltdowns, their whining, begging, shutting-down are all their ways of communicating to us that they need our help to manage. That they are feeling raw and need a hug, a pause, a hand.
What to do?
First what not to do … It is not about ‘helping them grow thick skin’ or expecting them to ‘suck it up’ or ‘toughen up.’ Shame has yet to heal any sensitivity. Expecting one to be what they are not will not resolve anything other than create a distance and thicker pain, not skin.
What does work?
Try to keep things simple. Establish routines and try to maintain them reasonably consistent (we’re not talking OCD here, just predictability). Make time for quiet. At the very least relegate a certain space in the house that is off-screens: a place to read, do homework, dream. Be aware of competition–of stimuli, that is–if there is much background noise you cannot control, consider noise-canceling earphones for the child to wear when they need to concentrate. Keep it comfortable: temperature and clothing, yes, but also tone of voice and your own emotional regulation. Sensitive kids pick up on your state of mind and internalize it. It filters in. It gets under their skin. They are too young to manage your adult feelings for you … and they already have plenty of their own. Keep it soothing: quiet cuddling, snuggling together with a book or a few precious moments at the end of day, offer comfort when they are distraught. Let them know you see them, hear them, feel for their discomfort. It is real.
Sensitivity is like a fragile gift. It is precious, it is beautiful, it can light up the room and make for excellent potential. It is also delicate and needs some special care. It calls for careful holding in times of transition. It needs a very safe space, for sure.
Have no worries, if you treat your child’s sensitivity (and yours, if you need to) with care and … yes, sensitivity … you will not spoil them. To the contrary, you will teach them how to control and modulate their hyper-acute-perceptions. They will learn from your attuned care how to keep aware without drowning in information, how to keep empathetic without taking on other people’s needs, how to keep their senses vibrating brilliantly without becoming blinded or overwrought. They will learn from you to take time to breathe, to pause, to consider. They will recognize their own cues and clues and find ways to respond to them healthily.
They will blossom like the rare delicate beings that they are. Come fully wonderfully into their own. Sensitivity seen, understood, utilized, known.
An acquaintance once stunned me and a colleague when she noted she believes that, “babies are basically a lump of meat just lying there until they are 10 months old.”
After I collected my jaw from the floor, I went on a long winded explanation (okay, tirade …) about all the things that we know and that prove infants are anything but lumps of meat until they reach 10 months old. In fact, they are active learners and interactively relating beings from the very moment they are born. Babies are so visibly actively engaged that I recall my absolute incredulity at the very notion that anyone can think them “lumps of meat just lying there.”
Well, they are not “just lying there,” not one iota so. Don’t know how the notion got into this acquaintance’s head, but she was wrong.
This fabulous Ted Talk is a great (and I admit far less tirade-like) way of explaining some of how they are very much the opposite. It is well-worth listening to. In it Alison Gopnik describes some things you may not think babies can do, as well as how they might be doing them.
Oh, and don’t miss the adorable ‘little scientist thinker’ video embedded in her talk. He defines “cute”!
http://www.ted.com/talks/alison_gopnik_what_do_babies_think?
Today, I marvel at the universality
Of love.
At the way deep care connects us all.
And should. And can.
How it forms us.
How it spells the words of heart upon a child’s new soul.
How it breathes hope into desperation.
How it nourishes across languages and color, tradition, race, religion, state, connecting all.
How it writes upon the slate of birth
And opportunity.
How it shapes resilience to withstand strife and sorrow.
How it holds through thick and thin, through calm and turmoil.
Today, I marvel at the universality,
At the miracle.
Of love.
So utterly expected
So innately ordained
So perfectly humane
Yet so often bent by apathy, oblivion, ignorance, senseless hate, violence, disdain.
The very shock we feel at its absence
In itself speaks volumes
Of Love’s natural flow.
Its ingrained, spirit-sustaining need.
The bounty of fortitude and growth that it can seed.
Today,
I marvel at the awesome
Touching
Never mundane
Breathtakingly beautiful
Universality of love.
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