Transcript for
Families: Supporting children who have experienced trauma

Narrator (00:02): Welcome to the Emerging Minds podcast.

Nadia Rossi (00:08): Hi, I am Nadia Rossi from the Emerging Minds Families podcast channel. For something different this week, we wanted to showcase another one of our families podcast episodes. For those of you who don’t know, each fortnight we talk with people from all over Australia as they generously share with us their experiences and knowledge and the strengths and skills they’ve developed while navigating the ups and downs of parenting, raising a family and the trickier times that life can bring. We also hear from professionals who offer practical strategies to help families support the mental health and well-being of the children and young people in their lives. Our conversations highlight what families and professionals have learnt throughout their journey, and our hope is that their stories can help you support the families you work with in your everyday practice.

(00:55): At Emerging Minds Families, you can find trusted information and resources including videos, printable fact sheets, animations and more on the Emerging Minds website under the Families tab. Today we wanted to share an episode recorded with our very own Dan Moss who talks about the difficult topic of childhood trauma and in particular, the concept of relational trauma. Dan has a long history of working in supported services with children who have experienced trauma, and he helped us unpack for families what is relational trauma and how it can affect the mental health and wellbeing of children in our lives. We hope you enjoy this episode, and if you’d like to hear more, you can find us by searching Emerging Minds Families on your favourite podcast, streaming service, or by following us on Facebook at Emerging Minds Families or Instagram by searching Emerging Minds AU.

Narrator (01:50): Welcome to the Emerging Minds Families podcast.

Alicia Ranford (01:54): Hi, I’m Alicia Ranford, and you are listening to an Emerging Minds Families podcast. Today we are talking about the difficult topic of childhood trauma and in particular, the concept of relational trauma. Within this conversation today, we will be touching on themes around abuse and neglect. So please, if you feel this may cause you distress, perhaps give this episode a miss and join us next fortnight, or you can find some resources for support in our show notes. Our guest today is Dan Moss. He has a long history of working in support services with children who have experienced trauma and is going to help us unpack and understand what is relational trauma and how it can affect the mental health and well-being of children in our lives. Hi, Dan. Thanks for joining us today.

Dan Moss (02:38): Thanks, Alicia. Thanks for having me.

Alicia Ranford (02:40): Oh, it’s great to have you here. I wondered if perhaps you could start by explaining to our listeners what is interpersonal trauma?

Dan Moss (02:48): Yeah, so when we talk about interpersonal or perhaps relational trauma, we’re thinking about the distressing or overwhelming childhood experiences that are caused by a breakdown in trust between adults or important adults in that child’s life. These experiences invariably involve an abuse of power, so we’d be thinking about instances such as physical, sexual or emotional abuse or neglect. We know that children need safe and supportive relationships to make sense of the world and to be confident in their place in the world. So when the people that should be providing the safe and trustworthy relationships that children need, when this is ruptured, this has significant repercussions for children.

Alicia Ranford (03:34): What do you mean by the word ‘ruptured’?

Dan Moss (03:36): Interpersonal or relational trauma so often involves a rupturing of the trust that children need to develop confidence in their place in the world. So if you think, for example, of small children, they’re looking to the parents or adults in their lives to comfort them when they’re distressed and to give them the sense of safety and certainty that they need. So when those adults, those people that are causing those children to feel hurt or unsafe or scared or anxious, then this often has significant ramifications for these children in the fact that they’re not sure who to turn to for the safety and support that they need. This can also really play havoc with children’s internal messaging around who they go to for support and really what they deserve. We would say that all children deserve to have safe environments in which to learn and thrive. When children have experiences where there’s not safety or where adults sometimes deliberately ensure that environment is not safe, well then this often imbues in children a great deal of confusion both about the world around them and about who they are within that world.

Alicia Ranford (04:52): So in your experience, what are the ways in which children usually respond to this kind of trauma instead of say the trauma of experience, an accident or perhaps living through a bushfire?

Dan Moss (05:04): It’s interesting because you’re right, Alicia, there are lots of different traumas and community trauma is one of them, but in relational or interpersonal trauma, there’s some specific effects on that for children and often for children who are abused, certainly by someone that they know and trust. There’s often a great sense of shame or self-blame for those children, particularly when they come to believe that what happened to them happened because they were a naughty kid or they were complicit in what happened or they wanted what happened to happen. So there can be a whole lot of these effects which can actually continue in the lives of children throughout their lives. What we know now in talking to adult survivors of abuse that these effects, if they’re not supported to be able to tell their stories, can actually have long-term negative consequences for decades in the lives of children, young people and then adults.

Alicia Ranford (06:03): You mentioned in their secrecy and self-blame, why is it important to address these aspects in particular with children?

Dan Moss (06:12): Yeah, so secrecy is really a strong nurturer of abuse. I know that’s a funny contradiction in terms, but so many instances or episodes of abuse throughout our history in countries like Australia have never been disclosed or come to the fore. That’s because we’re not very good as a society in talking about topics like abuse. It’s nobody’s favourite topic. We really would not like to think that things like this can happen to our children. But, of course, recent events in Australia, and we’ve seen so many media events now where we are thinking about institutional sexual abuse of children, and so now as a society, we are much better at understanding that these things can and do happen to children. As a society, we need to be better at being able to firstly protect children from the effects of abuse, but also be better at having conversations like we’re having today because children who have been abused are so often told by the perpetrator that if they tell someone what happens, then they will get in trouble themselves or their parents might be in trouble or this will cause their family to break down.

(07:31): So not only are children having to by themselves make sense of the really traumatic and at times horrifying events that happen to them, but they’re also trying to negotiate living with these events alone so that they don’t hurt the people that they care most about in their lives. If you think about sexual abuse particularly, perpetrators are often so effective in making children believe that their family members will come to great harm if this abuse is ever disclosed. So secrecy is a really strong risk factor still in our society in terms of helping children who have been abused to be able to seek the necessary support for that abuse. 

(08:18): If we look at self-blame too, so many children who have been through abuse come to believe either through the words of the perpetrator or through things that happened to them later in life. So these children are more likely to have trouble at school or to have trouble with friends. So children who firstly, go through traumatic events and secondly, have the effects felt in their peer or school or family relationships so often just start to begin to think of themselves as failures. So these effects can become really quite real for children who are not only dealing with the trauma itself, the event itself, but with the ramifications for years to come.

Alicia Ranford (09:01): Dan, for parents listening today, and I have two children myself who are young adults now, I always tried to really foster an environment where they felt that they could tell me anything. I listen to you now talking about perpetrators who perhaps encourage the notion that children can’t trust in their parents or carers. What can parents do to really give that message strongly to their kids that they can trust them or tell them anything?

Dan Moss (09:26): Yeah, a really great question Alicia. I think there’s so many wonderful ways now that the families and parents are able to imbue in their children a sense that they can tell them anything or discuss anything. I think if you go back a generation or two generations, you remember that old saying that children should be seen and not heard. There was a great sense that children shouldn’t be involved in adult conversations, that children were not ready for those conversations. So there was often a lot of hushed corridor conversations with adults where children were not allowed to be involved in that.

(10:04): I think as a society now, and I hear of your experience that parents are much better at including children in the conversations that they need to have. In terms of practise, we now start to talk about a practise shift where we see children as contributors to decisions that affect their lives rather than just recipients. This is a really important shift because we now think much more about the importance of children’s voice and that they should be involved in all kind of decisions that will or could affect their lives and to be involved in mature conversations supported by an adult so that these conversations confusing or anxiety-provoking for them is a really very important thing for all children. I think as a society where we’re definitely getting better at that, but there’s still work to do.

Alicia Ranford (11:00): How do you help a child cope with the effects of this kind of trauma?

Dan Moss (11:04): Yeah, another really great question, and lots of parents are going through this at the moment. They might have been involved, often it’s the stepfather who’s used violence or cohesive control, a non-offending parent might be working to support their child who’s been through sexual or emotional abuse. This is obviously a highly anxiety-provoking experience for non-offending parents. In social services and practises we see this so often where a parent just wants the best for their child but doesn’t quite know how to go about supporting them.

(11:40): Research shows the absolute most important thing for a child who’s been through an episode of interpersonal trauma is that their experience is believed and validated. So where a parent can just listen to their child and be empathetic to the consequences of the traumatic action and can start to position that child as being believed and in no way being complicit in what happened to them, well then that’s the most powerful tool for recovery that a child can have. It doesn’t mean that a parent needs to be an expert in trauma or to say exactly the right things on every occasion. It just needs that consistent, safe nurturing environment for recovery to take place.

Alicia Ranford (12:25): Can this really personal kind of trauma affect the parent-child relationship?

Dan Moss (12:30): Absolutely. As I said before, there are often huge consequences for a child who’s been through interpersonal trauma. There can be consequences for their behaviour. There can be consequences for their communication. There can be consequences in their mental health. So all of these things, different stages of a child’s development may actually provide a challenge for parents. Within this, parents can often think that the behaviour might just be a child acting up or a child being naughty, but often behaviour can be communication in terms that children need a bit more support around what’s happened to them or they’re feeling particularly distressed or they’re having particularly strong reactions to what happened to them.

(13:15): So often this can just mean that they just need a little bit more time, a little bit more support, again, to get to where they’re going to. But again, with that consistent support, there’s no reason that children can’t make those recoveries and that they can’t enjoy the same sorts of experiences that other kids do. I think often for parents it’s a great sense of anxiety that their child’s going to be forever affected negatively and not enjoy the same experiences as other children, and that kind of anxiety can have them feeling particularly heightened or particularly worried. So I think it’s really important just to remember that children can recover from these events and certainly can and often do, most often do go on to recover well and to live really positive lives with positive experiences.

Alicia Ranford (14:07): That’s fantastic to hear you say that, Dan, ’cause I think that that would be for anyone listening today whose children are perhaps going through this, that’s a really hopeful message to hear that kids really can go on to lead fantastic lives. One of the things that we hear from families is that they fear saying the wrong thing to their children when talking about abuse or perhaps potentially what might’ve happened to a child, what would you say for our listeners who perhaps are feeling that way themselves?

Dan Moss (14:35): This is a really natural reaction, isn’t it? I think also it bears mentioning that children who have been through traumatic experiences often have demonstrated a real sense of resilience against the odds against a powerful adult in being able to do that. So when we’re working with resilient children, it’s not so much saying the wrong thing that will either help a child recover or not recover. It’s the more consistent environment that where child’s able to express what happened to them, able to tell their story, able to have the consistent support that they need, that’s really what is most important. Again, this is borne out by research from adult survivors of trauma who consistently say for them these were the most important things either that they had or in some cases that they didn’t have.

(15:29): The other thing is children are never passive participants of trauma. We can often think that children just have things done to them, but in my experience, children have so often found such innovative ways either to tell somebody or to keep younger siblings safe or to keep their mother safe sometimes. These are all stories that as they become generated, stories that children can tell about themselves, and really what these are, these are stories of resilience is stories of connection, of courage, often of love. If these stories can be told by children, then they’re a really great safeguard against shame or self-blame.

(16:15): It’s really helping children to tell a new story about themselves, one where they weren’t passive, one where they just didn’t let someone do scary stuff to them, where they found a way through that, they found a way to tell somebody. Once I think parents are able to share in these conversations with children, it may be that initially a therapist or a support person is needed to start to safely tell these stories, but once children are able to tell these stories, well then this provides a new opportunity for meaning-making. So rather than children seeing themselves as losers or weird or their fault, they start to be able to have a whole new story open up to them, which provides much more positive interpretations of what has happened.

Alicia Ranford (17:03): That real strength of character that they’ve shown to survive during these circumstances.

Dan Moss (17:08): Yeah, absolutely, Alicia. These stories don’t come to the fore unless parents and important adults and teachers and practitioners are able to ask children questions. I’m not saying that we ask these questions without a great deal of care and deliberation and thinking about what’s the right time. But where we are able to ask these children questions about their experiences in ways that open up new areas of thought or meaning making, yeah, then you’re right, they’re absolutely more able to think about the strength of character that they’ve shown to get through really quiet emotionally, physically or sexually abusive situation.

Alicia Ranford (17:50): You mentioned other trusted adults like teachers, and I think you mentioned family, friends, but what role can a child’s village or community play in supporting them when they’ve experienced some trauma like this?

Dan Moss (18:03): Yeah, it’s a really great question. What we find is that where you can build a team around the child where all of the adults, whether they be a non-offending parent or a cousin or an uncle or a teacher or a social worker, where they’re all guided by the same consistent messages about, as you said, that child’s strength of character or ways that child finds to protect themselves where they all know about these stories and can keep reinforcing them, then that provides that village, as you said, around a child which is totally safe, consistent and nurturing and counters those voices of self-blame or shame or secrecy that child may carry with them.

(18:50): Often I think that what can be tricky for some parents what they say is that they have this team, but they have a couple of people in that team that might sometimes go down the path of blaming their child or saying things like, “If only you didn’t go with that person,” or, “If only you didn’t make that decision.” That can be the challenge for a parent, I think, who’s wanting to make sure that their child is nurtured by safe and consistent messaging. So in thinking about having a team, a consistent team around a child, there’s some work, I think, to be done in making sure that everybody’s on the same page

Alicia Ranford (19:26): Talking about this lovely way to create a team around a child, you spoke before about children being active contributors in these conversations. How can parents help their child do that where

Dan Moss (19:38): Where a child is actively involved in what they want from their team, and often this will be dependent on how old or the stage of development of a child, but where a child or where we can actively ask a child what they need from us as adults and to form a team what they would most like from us, then we’re moving away from the thought or the assumption that that child is completely naive about their experiences. Actually, we’re moving to an acknowledgement that that child is knowledgeable, that child is the one who has been through then or multiple experiences of trauma. So they have some idea about what makes them feel better. They have some ideas about their preferences, about how they’d like to be known. This might take a bit of negotiation with them. 

(20:30): They might not just be able to verbalise this right from the get-go, but where we have a team of adults who are really interested in what a child thinks about almost making a child a co-researcher in all of those things that make them happier or feel safer or more confident and offer these processes can take a long time and require a bit of patience and repeat efforts. But when we’re able to do this with children, well then we’re positioning them in a much different way to the way that the perpetrator of abuse positioned them where positioning them in the way where their voice is the most important voice, where the adult accountability is to the child rather than the other way around. All of the ways that we can do that as adults or parents, we make the opportunities for children to recover much more present and much more prevalent. So any work that we can do in positioning a child’s knowledge at the centre of that is really important.

Alicia Ranford (21:32): How powerful for that child to really feel seen and heard after perhaps experiencing a situation where they didn’t?

Dan Moss (21:40): Absolutely. Certainly, there’ll be the parents probably listening to this who have been in this situation or are in this situation in supporting a child, and it’s really amazing, I think, at the innovative ways that parents are now helping children who have been through traumatic events just to start to position their own knowledge and start to help them to develop the sense of safety and consistency in their lives and agency in their lives that they need. That certainly continues to be really inspiring, I think, how parents are able to help children to recover from events of interpersonal or relational trauma.

Alicia Ranford (22:18): I guess probably important for parents to know that they don’t have to walk this journey alone, that there are professionals that can help them and their child through this situation.

Dan Moss (22:29): Yeah, really good point, Alicia. I think also particularly if we look at something like sexual abuse or even physical violence for the non-offending parents, and often mothers will come to services and say they feel really guilty. They should have known. They put their child in harm’s way or feel really angry. Often, it’s really important for non-offending parents to have someone. If it’s a family member, great, or if it’s a professional, also great, whether they can just talk about thinking about their own emotions so that they can manage those emotions and get the right support for those emotions.

(23:06): Because without that, obviously they’re not going to be as well-placed as they possibly could to be able to support their child’s recovery. Often, there’s all sorts of emotions that follow a really traumatic event both for children and for adults. Just as you say, making sure that children or parents are not alone in that recovery process is just so important. There are a whole lot of great services out there, and people are really also lucky to have really supportive family members or friends, and I think you’re absolutely right that this is so often a really important protective factor in families recoveries from interpersonal trauma.

Alicia Ranford (23:49): For anyone listening today that is going through this experience, we will have more resources listed in our show notes. Dan, thank you for chatting with us about this today. It’s never a nice topic to talk about because as parents, we hope that we’re never faced with that situation. But what would be for our listeners today, the one thing that you’d want them to take away from this?

Dan Moss (24:11): Just in terms of thinking more broadly about how we can avoid secrecy in our society and in our families and how we can involve children in important conversations about their safety and their ability to be able to tell their parents or family really important things whenever they need to, and also ways that we can think about how we help children to make meaning of possibly distressing events in their lives and how we can constantly open up opportunities for children to tell their stories and to tell their stories in ways which really demonstrate their sense of resilience and connection. As you said, strength of character, I think, is a really lovely message to leave on.

Alicia Ranford (24:55): Thanks, Dan. That’s really great advice and yes, thank you again for spending time with us today. Really appreciated it.

Dan Moss (25:01): Thanks, Alicia.

Narrator (25:03): Visit our website at www.emergingminds.com.au/families for a wide range of free information and resources. To help support child and family mental health, Emerging Minds leads the National Workforce Centre for Child Mental Health. The Centre is funded by the Australian Government Department of Health under the National Support for Child and Youth Mental Health Program.