Transcript for
Supporting children who disclose trauma – part one

David Tully (00:00): If a child can disable some of those other stories of self-blame and hold onto that, meaning that ‘no, I didn’t want that to happen. It made me feel horrible. I didn’t like if I didn’t want to’. That’s where other memories as they go through life can then attach to, and can disable some of those more pernicious, ongoing effects of abuses like depression, anxiety, self-hatred, all those things that can really be disabling as they go through life as well.

 

Narrator (00:26): Welcome to the Emerging Minds podcast.

 

Dan Moss (00:32): Hello everybody. And welcome to today’s Emerging Minds podcast. My name’s Dan Moss and thanks for joining me today. So currently, Emerging Minds has been working in the third of a series of trauma online courses. And this course is around supporting children who have disclosed trauma. To help us to develop this course, we’ve worked really closely with David Tully. David is Practice Manager at Relationships Australia in South Australia, and David works in the specialised family violence service there. David has a long history of working both with children who have been affected by childhood sexual abuse, but also more recently in his work with family violence, where children who have witnessed or experienced coercion control or power differentials.

 

Dan Moss (01:17): So this is episode one in a series of two podcasts with David, entitled ‘Supporting children who disclose trauma’. Just to let you know that today, David will be talking about some of the details of his work with children who have experienced quite traumatic and distressing events. So in listening to this, please be aware of your own emotional safety. And if any of these things that are discussed today, have you feeling like you might be struggling, please talk with a friend, colleague or your supervisor, or if you need to please seek help or call Lifeline on 13 11 14, Beyond Blue on 1300 224 636, or SANE Australia on 180o 187 263. So David, it’s really great to have you here today. Welcome.

 

David Tully (02:04): Thanks Dan. And I think this is a really good opportunity to further this conversation around the way children impacted by family and domestic violence and also sexualised violence as well. Because I still think as a field, we’re still walking around the edges of how to have these conversations. So I really look forward to the opportunity to have this conversation that can help us expand this space, which we can actually have these conversations with young people and children.

 

Dan Moss (02:29): Great. Thanks David. So you’ve got a really long history, as I said of working both with children affected by sexual and physical violence. Can you just tell us a little bit about that history?

 

David Tully (02:42): Yeah, and I think I always come back to this foundational story when I stepped into this work. I came in through this work, working with young people, experiencing homelessness as a youth worker during uni and stuff like that as well. And quite quickly realised that a really big part of that pathway into homelessness, a lot of these young people was experiences either domestic violence or sexual violence that had incurred in their lives, but realised that at that place in time, which is going back a couple of decades now, that there wasn’t really a lot of language or skill development for people working with these children and young people as well.

 

David Tully (03:17): But I think one of the really foundational concepts that that initial approach gave me is understanding the way meaning that children, young people may experience with their experience abuse that children, young people do make meaning. They make meaning from a developmental context, but they’re still making meaning of these events. And if we don’t have a clear way of actually helping them make meaning, that brings that concept of power relationships into that meaning, the young people will still experience very distressing and ongoing impacts of abuse. If we can’t provide that context about understanding power, that helps them disengage some stories of self-blame, self-hatred, self-loathing that are some of those terrible ongoing experiences of abuse as well.

 

Dan Moss (03:57): So without access to some different stories or accounts of what happened, which does take into account part and saying then is that children will go on to have significant effects of self-blame as it occurs to.

 

David Tully (04:10): Yeah, and I think there’s obviously really important effects of abuse that a whole range of things we can help young people and children, or even as that travels through into the adult lives with them around managing and dealing with effects around self-care, a whole range of other strategies or ways we can do that. But to me, what was really clear on that foundational work was, is if we can actually disempower or disengage in the story of self-blame, that a lot of those terrible effects either are lessened or even completely sort of dissipate from their lives if we can do that. And particularly if we can do it as close as we can to the experiences of when the abuse occurred, because in my work to what children, young people, also working with adults when their forties, fifties, sixties, first time talking about these certain experiences.

 

(04:56): And what that told me is that really early meaning making is actually the critical part of therapy. And if we can actually provide a framework where they can actually make meaning it’s experiences of abuse, it gives them sort of a framework or a scaffold to not be recruited into further stories of self-blame. A lot of those affects like depression, anxiety, disassociated memory, all those other things we often associate with abuse. They can actually manage and deal with those things by giving them a framework around understanding that then not to blame. And that was really that early foundational work that people like Maxine Joy, who was a therapist I worked with really early on and even some of the work of Alan Jenkins around the us of violence really brought that really into the centre of therapy, not as a, ‘oh that’s an erroneous belief’ like, well, how do actually children, young people get recruited first into stories of self-blame, which I think is primarily, usually done by the person who chooses to abuse them.

 

(05:56): And secondly, as a society, we have these meanings that blame children, young people, women, victim survivors around a whole range of different ways. So it’s both the tactics that perpetrators use to use that language as also that those social discourse that exist around the recruit, children, young people, victim survivors into self-blame as well. So we need to bring them into the centre of therapy, not as a sort of a… they’ve just got a false belief system. There’s actually a reason why children, young people blame themselves and we need to actually get in there and actually help them actively pull apart those meetings that they’ve made as well.

 

Dan Moss (06:35): Because there’s lots of ways isn’t there, that children can be disconnected from their meaning making through legal processes or through family separation, family breakdown, even in schools that often a therapist might have to encounter in their work with a child who’s experienced trauma.

 

David Tully (06:54): Yeah. And I think it’s about for me, one aspect of therapy and there’s many aspects of therapy, but for me, it’s providing a context where some of those societal belief systems, unhelpful societal belief isn’t that children can be examined, counted and put into a different framework as well. So I think one of those really critical things that therapy can do is provide space where young people, children can actually talk about this stuff and sort of tell you how they’re making meaning of those sort of experiences. But if we don’t actually allow that some space, that young people are going to stay caught into probably two or three different stories about what happened. So there’ll be the story of what the person who did the abuse told them, which would be like, “Well, I did that to you because you were running around the house, wearing a towel.

 

(07:42): And that showed me that you are being sexy. And you wanted me to do these things to you,” as one example of a story. So the child’s got that story running around their head about what the experiences of abuse is. They’ve got another story that’s running around their head is, maybe six months later they told a sports coach about what the abuser did as well. And then that person said, “No, that couldn’t have happened. That’s just silly. Don’t say those sort of things.” They might have another story floating around their head when eventually, they told somebody else and was brought to the police and they’ve been told, “Well, it’s very important that in terms of taking a statement and then therapists get told, well, don’t talk to them about it because that might contradict the statements and then a child makes meaning that other people then don’t want to talk about it.”

 

(08:29): So there’s all these layers of meaning that are going on. And then there’s another layer of meaning, which is a really important one that we somehow make space for. And in you know, different things, but experience it’s also how they’ve actively responded to that experience of abuse. And there’s still another meaning there where actually take that example, the uncle that no, I didn’t want him to do those sort of things. It made me feel yucky. It made me feel bad. And I was just walking out in the shower to my room. There’s nothing else I could have done. I did definitely didn’t want… sort of child young, person’s got all those different layers of stories rolling around their head.

 

(09:03): And if we don’t have the boldness to actually create some space to… Those unhelpful stories, beliefs, meanings to be unfolded. So we can put them into context of the power relationships to disable them, but also to bring forth that story of resistance and response, because that’s the core meaning that if a child can disable some of those other stories of self-blame and hold onto that, meaning that no, I didn’t want that to happen. It was my uncle’s idea. It wasn’t my idea. It made me feel horrible. I didn’t like if I didn’t want to. That’s where other memories as they go through life can then attach to and can disable some of those more pernicious, ongoing effects of abuses like depression, anxiety, self hatred, all those sort of things that can really be disabling as they go through life as well.

 

Dan Moss (09:48): So David, in terms of moving away from self-blame, I think what you’re saying there is that it’s so important that children have the opportunity to take into account the power different tools that were at play and which assisted the perpetrator to do the traumatic events. And it’s through practitioners helping them to understand this power differential, where children are significantly more able to move away from the effects of self-blame.

 

David Tully (10:16): I think there’s reasons why we don’t make those power relationships avert for children and young people because I think as a society and community, we’re still really struggling with the place of children and young people positioned within a society. I mean some laws still allow physical violence against children, but it doesn’t allow it against adults. And the idea of hurting children in the name of discipline, it’s still ideas about their inactive inservice society. So, I think there’s reasons why therapists, we struggle with some of these ideas and practises. But I think for me, it’s that really important thing to help understand what I call their social position. And even because I have political position in the world and that wouldn’t be the language I’d be using with young people, but that’s the framework I’d be thinking about helping young people understand there’s power relationships they operate in with.

 

(11:04): And there’s some obvious ones which is obviously physical size and strength. The idea that when you rate and you’re dealing with an adult, you’re dealing with someone who’s 80 or 150% taller than you. And again, a board and draw pictures of that, that makes that sort of physical size available. Is it someone aspect of what they’re sort of understanding as well, but also that sort of psychological and social power relationships as well, like the children aren’t taught to question what adults tell them as where they get told that these things are real and you just sort of end up believing them for years and years and years and years, because that’s what you got told. One who’s where he was now. And he even told me as a child that he got told, if he disclosed and experienced, his granddad would get arrested by police and he would become capital punishment.

 

David Tully (11:55): But the reality is it wasn’t to that man was even in his twenties, he realised actually capital punishment abolished for years and years and years. But that was one example of one thing he got told around that his granddad told him about why… Please don’t tell because bad things will happen to me. And also that’s an example of how people who choose to abuse or actually not just create fear and intimidation against children, but sometimes take advantage of that really beautiful loyalty and protective from its children happen as well, which is another power relationship that people who choose to take advantage of those power relationships can cause harm to child.

 

(12:30): So that knowledge of the world, the way things work, it’s that sort of psychological understanding around people and emotions and the way that can actually be taken advantage of making all those things much more visible to children and young people. But the thing is children, young people do have those experiences in the world. They know when adults do the opposite things, they say one thing and do the others. So it’s making all those aspects about physical size strength, that sort of social power, that psychological, that knowledge of the world much more visible in those therapeutic conversations as well.

 

Dan Moss (13:06): Yeah, because the perpetrator obviously would like to keep those power relations secret. And I suppose secrecy is such a big obstacle for children in being able to access different understandings of what has happened to them.

 

David Tully (13:19): Yeah. And then I think that secrecy or that silence and discourse, he operates both in the tactics that those who choose to harm or personal traits use, but that those also seeking in societal context as well, like people who choose to abuse know that children are silence, that they won’t be believed, that can be isolated. They can be manipulated. That’s one of the reasons why they choose to do what they do. So it’s important that in therapy that we can be aware that secrecy in silencing is part of what we need to counter in therapy. Now, obviously there’s a process of engagement and developing what I call credibility with children. Sometimes I don’t people think trust and I think trust is an aspect of it. It’s actually, to me creating a sense incredibly like if you tell me these things that there’s a value in you telling me these things, which is really important.

 

David Tully (14:15): Because as a child or young person, they don’t really know if I tell you about these really terrible memories, is it going to make it better or is it going to make it worse? So I think that’s really important that we… Some credibility to that, but secondly, that if they share those things with us, that we know how we can actually manage those conversations to make them valuable for the child, a young person, so they need to get a sense of us, but they also, they need a sense that there’s some sort of value in talking about these experiences. And that’s why not just managing the effects per se, but coming back to the way they’ve responded actively to that experience of abuse can actually make the conversations feel like they’re worthwhile and the child wants to actually enter them as opposed to just, no, you have to go to therapy, you have to go to therapy, you have to go to therapy.

 

David Tully (14:58): We actually need to get beyond that, around that engagement and that sense of motivation that is actually worth having these conversations. And if it’s like a child young or even an adult comes to therapy and they don’t really feel a benefit from coming and all you do is you have the terrible effects of, well, you make me think about these things and nothing shifts. You’re not going to immensely have that create that sort of sense of credibility in process. That’s going to have the child or young person wanting to come back into those conversations as well.

 

Dan Moss (15:28): Because this is a topic that’s off debate, isn’t it? The purpose or the intention of a practitioner in asking direct questions around the events that led up to and actually involved or evolved in the trauma. So is what you are saying, David, that it’s important to have those conversations, firstly, but that there’s a really strong purpose and intention from the practitioner?

 

David Tully (15:50): Yeah. If we’re not clear about our intended therapy, we can walk around the edges and go, well, there’s a really terrible effect abuse there. And I can really see the kid can’t sit down and I can really see the kids got nightmares and I’ll just try to deal with those issues one by one. And there’s some value in doing that work around in the edges, but for me, and this goes back to some of that foundational story about when I stepped into the work and say, I was then called to child substance abuse counsellor. I was told really clearly there was even in the first session with certain conversations you need to had an understood. And my job was to create that credibility and process that we could make those things happen. But really it was three things.

 

(16:29): It was about who was the person who did the harm to the child, because then you can understand that relational context that the abuse occurred in because that’s important to understand this type of abuse is not just random person often doing harm. And that can occasionally be the thing, but more often it’s in a relational context. So we need to understand what was the relationship, because that also tells you the relationship around the wider system deals with it. Was it a trusted adult or so that was going to be a dynamic you had to deal? So we need to understand who the person was that done the harm to the child. The second thing is to understand the ages that they’re at and also checking out whether the abuse is stopped, because often we can make an assumption, abuse has stopped, it might be ongoing, but that importance of understanding their age when the abuse occurred was really, really important.

 

(17:15): Because that would then tune us into that developmental stage. If a child was between the ages of five and seven, and say the child’s 10 now, it tunes us into the way they were making meaning of it as a 10 year old now may be very different the way they made meaning when they’re five to seven. So we understand there’s a slightly different developmental context and ability to make meaning in a different sort of way is really important. And the third thing, which is again really often where we would start the counselling or the therapy was about the experience of disclosure because that told you not just the tactics that perpetrators use, it would also tell you both the positive and negative social responses that this child’s already had about the experience of disclosure. And you do so much work just through that.

 

(18:03): So if they had a not so helpful disclosure where somebody said, well, that person couldn’t have done that, it allowed you then to position around that story and make develop that political, that power relationship sort of framework around that experience of abuse to say, well, actually I believe that as a youth worker, they should have known that straight away saying that person didn’t do it. It’s not the right thing to do. And are you just to know why I think that’s not the right thing to do and child might say yes, no, maybe, but usually they’re interested because I think it’s our job, particularly people who take seriously looking after children, young people that we understand that children can’t say yes to any of those sort of behaviours, particularly because they’re not on a stage where they can really understand and agree to what’s going on. So they can’t really say yes.

 

(18:50): And therefore if you can’t say yes, the way I think about it, I think that’s doing the wrong thing. And I’ll be reading the child’s young person’s response to that. And I might even take that language into abuse or I might actually take that language into violence, but I’m just wanting to help see where that child, young person is positioning around that as well.

 

Dan Moss (19:09): So from what you’re telling us, David, that quite early on in the piece, when you’re talking to a child who’s been through sexual or physical violence, that it’s important to you to develop some sort of an account of some of what has happened to the child.

 

David Tully (19:26): Yeah. And I think that there are a couple of reasons for that. And I think most importantly, that as difficult as is that the child, young person will get some benefit out coming through to this further process because as I said, we can deal with all the impacts and effects around related to that abuse. But I’d rather come back to some of those that foundational meaning a child’s making of those experiences. And I don’t want a child really leaving the counselling room, not having heard me be really clearly positioning around what is abuse. And I think that’s even really important that abuse is often really… We call abuse, cause of abuse of power. So it’s hearing me position around that is really, really important early on in the therapeutic process. And if we can’t position around that, a child, young person might like us, but they might not be getting any benefit out of coming.

 

(20:17): So I think part of that is if we clear that children, young people have some level of understanding about these power relationships and they probably did things to resist and respond to spirits of abuse. So I don’t need to hold them in the therapy alone that I can understand that children, young people might have done things like crime during abuse, for instance, as an example. If that story can come out and I didn’t stop him and all I could do there was sit and blah, like a little baby but I didn’t do anything to stop him. Like as an example as a sort of a story. And I’m thinking a young boy, he was about eleven, who was telling me this sort of story. And I just sat there.

 

(20:57): I didn’t stop him and I didn’t fight him often. I didn’t do anything. I can sit there and just say, “Oh, that’s not true.” Or I can actually try to put that story into a bit of a framework and ask some sort of questions about… So, I don’t want to stick my nose in your business, but I noticed that the mirror’s just at you and you’re really just looking at yourself there. Can I ask you what it would’ve taken for his uncle from memory that did these things saw you crying and you didn’t stop. What would it taken for someone to see it when you were like about seven or eight crying and they didn’t stop? What does it say about them as a person that they didn’t think about your feelings or what’s going on for you?

 

(21:33): And we’re trying to then flip the mirror from child, young person looking at themselves. I didn’t do these things. I was weird. I was blubbering, I didn’t fight him off to actually flipping that mirror and looking whose idea was it to do these things and what did they do to try cover up what they did. And what did it take for you to be able to resist and respond these things? Because we understand as a child, you couldn’t have stopped those things, but you did stop. So we need to understand what you did to try and stop it within your power and what you understood at that stage in your life.

 

Dan Moss (22:05): Yeah, David, that’s really fascinating because so much of what we hear about particularly child sexual abuse is authoring children as passive recipients of their experiences. It sounds like from what you are saying, you’re really trying to flip this on its head in certain ways and really bring to the surface, the active decisions that children made to keep themselves or other people safe.

 

David Tully (22:28): Yeah. And I think for me, it’s moving beyond just the language of effects. And impacts and effects are really important. I’m not saying that’s not a valuable place to go and understand impacts and effects, but I’m also interested in developing what I call language response. Often in the accounts of and particularly trauma stories, we construct people as being passive recipients. And that doesn’t mean that people could have stopped what happened to them or there was responsibility to stop what would happen to them. But they’ve done things that are quite clever, smart, courageous to try to stop what was going on. And those accounts are also just as true as the language of impacts and affects the language of developing, understanding those responses. And therefore it starts to see the child as an active agent within those power relationships that we talked about earlier. They couldn’t stopped it, but they did things like crying or turning over, or even when they realised they couldn’t stop it going elsewhere within your mind.

 

(23:29): And later on doing things like, well, I knew I couldn’t tell about it, but I was really, really naughty at school because I hope somebody would ask about it. So that’s me the language of resistance and response that if we could have that sitting alongside the language of effects, it gives us places to go working with children and young people doesn’t seem just them as passive. And I’ve got some techniques I can give you to manage your effects. It actually goes to that really foundational meaning that I am to blame. And we’re looking to shift that as well.

 

Dan Moss (24:00): Thanks so much, David. Unfortunately, that’s all we have time for in episode one. I really appreciate the benefit of your practice experience during this conversation. The good news is that next fortnight we’ll be releasing episode two with David, where he will continue to talk about his experience and wisdom in supporting children who disclose trauma.

 

Narrator (24:22): Visit our website at www.emergingminds.com.au to access a range of resources to assist your practice. Brought to you by the National Workforce Centre for Child Mental Health led by Emerging Minds, the National Workforce Centre for Child Mental Health is funded by the Australian government Department of Health under the National Support for Child and Youth Mental Health Program.