Two-thirds of kids experience childhood trauma, and these are stored as memories and emotions that can be triggered throughout their lives. Dr. Tim Jordan interviews trauma therapist Beth Tyson about how these memories show up and ways to support kids with their emotions, triggers, memories, and forming healthy narratives about their experiences.
Check out Beth Tyson’s resources about childhood traumas: https://www.bethtyson.com/
Help kids understand their traumas through cartoons: https://www.youtube.com/@all_connected
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How Childhood Traumas Form Lasting Memories And Ways to Support Kids With Beth Tyson
Welcome back to the show. Thank you so much for stopping by every week to read as I talk about kids, mostly girls, parenting girls, and what’s going on for girls. I’ve done a lot of reading in the last several years. I also had an author on talking about different traumas that kids experience growing up. I thought it would be interesting to circle back and look at it in maybe a little bit different way.
I talk about trauma. Some people think only of the worst cases of trauma. The truth is, at least two thirds of kids growing up experience some trauma. We can talk about that more with my guests. Also, there’s been lots of studies that show that when they survey adults, most adults have been through at least one trauma of not growing up. This is not this little small subset of people or kids we’re talking about.
This is about lots of kids, including probably some of the kids whose parents are reading this. What I decided to do was to have a trauma consultant on. Her name is Beth Tyson and she’s a psychotherapist. She works one-on-one with clients, but she has a lot of other things also. She does lots of speaking. She educates organizations and institutions about the impact that trauma has on kids and families and also how to support them. Beth, thank you so much for coming on the show.
Thank you for having me. It’s an honor to be here.
I would love to know how you got to doing this in your life, being a trauma specialist and therapist. Whatever you call yourself like a trauma therapist.
Trauma consultant. I’m not currently seeing individual clients as a therapist at this time, but that’s where I started as a psychotherapist for children who had experienced trauma. Children that were being raised in foster, kinship or adoptive homes. We’re on the verge of being removed from those homes due to behavioral problems and challenges between the caregivers and the children. It was my role to sustain those families, stabilize the situations and help to maintain the placement of the child in that home for many reasons.
Mostly to prevent additional trauma from the child being removed and sent elsewhere, which could have either been a residential facility or another foster home. That gave me a lot of experience working with some incredible children who had been through horrific trauma from abuse to neglect to loss and grief and constant moves from home to home. The thing that struck me the most was always the positive impact we could make with those families when the caregivers understood trauma and how it was impacting the child’s brain, body, and nervous system, and what they could do to help the children feel safe and comfortable in their presence.
I made a list of some of the traumas that kids can experience growing up. Let me read it off quickly. Physical abuse, mental abuse, emotional abuse, the loss of parents who have some addiction issue, kids who are growing up in unsafe neighborhoods, who are in war zones and turn the news at nighttime. You’ll see kids around the world experiencing that racism. If somebody in the house has a mental illness, who is depressed or who is anxious or angry or growing up with domestic violence or parents fighting a lot.
Kids who go through divorces and separations. I see a lot of girl’s parents who are divorced and their parents ends up with multiple partners, which becomes a real stress on them. Strange parents, parents don’t show up, don’t call, and aren’t around. Kids who get bullied by kids at school or at home. Kids who feel excluded and alone. Dating violence, sexual harassment, being raped, and stress at home from all kinds of ways.
The Impact Of Age On Traumatic Memories
I see a lot of girls also who have siblings with issues. It might be a kid who has a sibling who has severe autism or an addiction problem and the police come to the house. Lots of unrest in the home. That’s a partial list of some of the things that kids can experience. It’s probably true, I want you to address this as the memories the kids have about trauma growing up is dependent upon how old they are when they experience it.
Yes and no. They may not have a narrative memory if they were very young. They may not have visual memory and a story they can tell, but the memories are implicitly held in their brain. Even if a child was, let’s say, removed from their primary birth parent at birth. That memory of the loss will still be there and will still continue to play out as a trauma often long term even into an adult and beyond. There’s the other memories that usually start around five, where they are narrative. They’re more narrative. There are more visuals that go along with the memory.
These preverbal memories, implicit memories, can come back as more of an emotional flashback than a visual flashback. An emotional flashback is going to look more like a panic attack or an anxiety attack and can have similar characteristics to being activated into a trauma response, but they may not have an actual story they remember. It’s more a sense of a feeling that they remember.
Understanding Emotional Responses
I saw a girl in my counseling practice. She’s in high school. I’ve only seen her twice, but there was domestic violence in her first 3 or 4 years of life. Her dad was an alcoholic. He used to beat her mom and also was abusive to her. She experienced a lot of other physical abuse from her mom for years. We were talking and she was talking about how one of the things that triggers her as a seventeen-year-old is angry men’s voices. She doesn’t go into fight or flight. She goes into a freeze. She shuts down. One of the things that I have found, I want to ask you, is important. I want kids to understand what those emotional responses are about because a lot of times people haven’t educated them about what’s going on for them.
One of the projects I co-created with a nonprofit called Connect Our Kids is an animated series of videos. Short videos, under three minutes to teach children, teens, and young adults about trauma, how it impacts their nervous system, and what they can do to cope with it. To your point, oftentimes the child has no language for what they’ve gone through.
They don’t have any understanding of why they’re acting or behaving or feeling the way they are. They blame themselves. It becomes a shameful thing that they blame themselves for not being strong enough or for something being wrong with them when it’s not their fault. It’s just not their fault for the way that they feel and are behaving.
Often, children who have experienced trauma lack the words to describe what they've been through. They don't understand why they're acting or feeling the way they are, and this can lead to self-blame. Share on XYou probably see this too, they get diagnosed with all kinds of things. I don’t know if they ignore it but ignoring what’s going on which is an old memory they got triggered.
Many of the autism spectrum disorder symptoms as well as ADHD symptoms overlap with trauma. It can be hard to differentiate between those three situations. My feeling and my thought is always assessed for the trauma first because if you can start to heal the trauma and start to help that express itself and heal, then you can see what’s left of the other symptoms that may be related to things like ADHD or autism.
There’s a lot of overlap there. It can get real muddy as to what the actual diagnosis is. Children are getting diagnosed because that’s how our system works. In order to get treatment, you always need a diagnosis and that’s not the parent’s fault. That’s not even the therapist’s fault. That’s the way our system works. However, if we are treating ADHD when it’s trauma or if we’re treating trauma when it’s ADHD. There’s things that we’re missing and harm that can be done. It’s important to assess that trauma alongside ADHD and autism spectrum disorders because there’s so much overlap.
Medical Trauma In Children
I wonder if you see kids who had a history of being a preemie, had spent time in the intensive care nursery being sick, all the beeps, the pokes, the sticks and the IVs and all that. It didn’t have to be a preemie but just kids who were sick, had operations. Do you see that? How does that show up then?
The same. It’s going to show up and look like the trauma responses of that fight, flight, or freeze response when under stress. Birth trauma is something that our country doesn’t acknowledge. During birth, there’s so many things that can go wrong and do go wrong for both the parent and the child that never gets addressed or processed properly.
You have parents who are traumatized trying to raise a newborn, who’s also traumatized and the attachment is affected. The attachment process, which is the framework and the ground floor of our mental and emotional well-being. If you’re starting off right in the beginning of life with some trauma or medical interventions that were traumatic, then you have cracks in that foundation. We need to heal those.
Birth can be a complex process with many potential complications that can leave both parents and children feeling traumatized if not addressed or processed properly. Share on XWe need to heal those traumas. It can be done but it’s often unacknowledged silent invisible traumas that happen in early life. It’s the same with medical traumas when the child is older, whether it be an accident or a health condition that requires invasive treatments because they don’t have the ability to understand what’s happening and what’s going on and process it that way. It can be extremely stressful. A lot of the practices that doctors and nurses engage in are not trauma-informed.
They’re focused on the safety of the physical well-being but they’re not thinking about the emotional mental well-being. It’s getting better. We’re trying to do that outreach and educate health care professionals on trauma-informed care but it’s a slow-moving ship. Medical trauma is another area that affects children and families, but nobody’s aware of.
Another thing we don’t spend enough energy around or enough interest in, have you ever heard the concept of ghosts in the nursery? That’s a praise bite. It was coin based Selma Freiburg back in the ‘60s or ‘70s. She was doing psychoanalysis with women and they were having some issues. She was able to trace back that a lot of times there were issues from their past that were unresolved and emotions from their past that were unresolved that then would resurface ghosts talking when they were parenting. I bet you see a lot of that as well. The parents get triggered.
I’ve experienced it myself firsthand. As a new parent, it was difficult for me to hear my daughter crying. The sense of helplessness that I felt of not being able to console her, soothe her, and comfort her. Her crying would send like lightning bolts of anxiety through the center of my body. I blamed myself at that time. What’s wrong with me? Why can’t I do this like everybody else? Is handling being a mom better then me?
There was a lot of that like self-blame but it was something being activated in me from maybe my cries not being responded to when I was a baby. I don’t know for sure what even exacerbated that trigger, but it was an example of becoming triggered. The way that you can spot it as a parent is any behavior or situation that you’re in with your child that either a brings up memories of a traumatic situation for you, that’d be the most obvious way to make the connection or if your emotional response is more intense and more exaggerated than the situation you’re in. A baby crying is a normal thing. Babies cry. This is what they do. You know that intellectually but my emotional response was heightened to it in an unhealthy way where it’s harming me, my response to it.
It’s out of proportion to the event. Anything that brings up a big emotional reaction out of you while you’re parenting could be, not is, tied back to some trauma from your own childhood that you either didn’t process or felt like a need of yours wasn’t met. When you see your child having that need, it then activates those old unmet needs in you, concrete.
I always tell parents, those feelings that come up are normal. I say the same thing to kids who are triggered for whatever reason. This girl I worked with, what she does is she stuffs it. She doesn’t want to think about it. She’s got a lot of shame around it and all kinds of things like a lot of kids do. It piles up. It gets then she gets overwhelmed and she can’t sleep and focus. She’s more anxious and all these symptoms come up because she hasn’t learned to allow herself to be with the feelings and ask questions like what’s this about? What am I feeling? What might this be telling me?
Those are great questions. I love that. Asking ourselves and being curious when we have a big emotion whether it’s of the parent or the child. It’s harder to do as a child because you don’t have that ability to zoom out of your own self and serve your behavior and your feelings. Adults do have that capacity. For me, knowing that I can become activated as a parent, I try and fail often.
I try to look at this and say, “What is this bringing up in me and why?” Questioning whether or not the situation is a you thing or the kid thing can put like a pause in there long enough for you to not do your instinctual reaction, which might be to yell or scream or ignore. It might say, “Let’s get curious about this. Why is this bringing up such a big feeling in me? Is it what the child is doing or is this touching on something painful in my own life? To give you some perspective when something’s down.
Supporting Children In Processing Triggers
When kids get triggered for whatever reason, sometimes they may know their story. Sometimes it may just be they were too young to have a, you call it a narrative, which is a good word. They may not have a narrative like, “This is because.” It’s an emotional response. How do you talk to parents about how they can help their kids learn to deal with those emotions that get triggered?
The first or the most important priority is helping the child feel safe because what trauma does is it erodes our sense of safety and trust in the world. Children who have experienced trauma often don’t trust themselves. They don’t trust the world around them and adults. Especially if adults were perpetrators or harmed them in some way.
Trauma erodes our sense of safety and trust in the world. Children who have experienced trauma often don't trust themselves and the world around them. Share on XHelping the child feel safe and in a trusting relationship is key. Sometimes you have to go back to the basics with that and form that foundation that might have been missing for a child. There’s multiple different strategies for doing that. Some of it is like always trying to be as honest as you can with your child, even if you don’t know the answer. Saying, “I don’t have the answer to that but I’ll see if I can find it and get back to you, or sometimes there is no answer. I wish I had one I could give you but now, we don’t have one and that hurts.”
That honesty, authenticity, and being genuine with children instead of trying to always put on a face and have to have it all together, can build trust. Once we build trust then we see the trauma responses diminish. It might not go away completely but it’s trying to establish that connection in a genuine way that de-escalates the child’s trauma responses.
I don’t know if it’s obvious, but parents need to stay calm. Not add their emotions to the child’s pile, which I hear a lot of from girls I work with. When their parents get triggered by them being triggered, then they bounce the emotions off each other. There’s a sweet book I found a couple of years ago. I read it at camp sometime. It’s called Rabbit Listened. Have you ever seen that book?
I have it. I read it to my daughter.
It’s a sweet book because this little kid gets his toys. He has built something. It gets knocked down. All these animals keep coming by different animals. One of them wants to get angry with them and one of them wants to fix it and one of them wants all this stuff. This kid doesn’t want any of that stuff but then this rabbit comes and sits next to him calmly. He melts. He needs someone to be there with him who’s calm when he can’t be.
That’s at the root of all humans. What we want is to be heard. If you can help the child feel heard and seen for who they are, that establishes that sense of safety and trust that’s missing. Being a good listener, someone who’s not judging or ashamed them for their reactions and responses. Someone who’s willing to see them as a whole person with a fully functional life. Not just as a kid, but as a human being, as someone who needs care, love and compassion just like the rest of us.
Unfortunately, a lot of these children didn’t receive it. I like to think of families as a collective nervous system. As you were saying, you feed off of each other. The parent has to be the modulator of that nervous system. If the parent or the person, primary caregiver. It might not be a parent but maybe it’s a grandparent or foster parent. If you are constantly on a high alert and on edge and upset and angry or shut down and dissociated. You’re setting the tone for the family nervous system.
This is not to blame the caregiver because they certainly haven’t asked for this stress and they certainly wouldn’t be behaving that way if they could do better. It does help you at least, again, find that pause, like, “How I’m acting is going to affect how my child responds. Maybe I shouldn’t do that. Maybe I should try a different approach this time.” Sometimes it’s just enough. You need five seconds to think about, “I shouldn’t respond that way. Maybe it’d be better if I did this,” and interrupt that cycle of outrage or outbursts towards a child because it’s going to set them off more. They’re not going to feel safe.
I’ve been running weekend retreats and summer camps for many years. Part of that experience is the girls sit in a circle at different time in the weekend or in summer camps talking about life. These are not kids who have been traumatized. These are just kids. I always tell people I walked into any school. I forgot where you live.
Outside of Philadelphia.
If I walked into any school outside of Philadelphia and grabbed the first twenty middle school or grade school or high school girls and they came to retreat. Most of them would have something to talk about. Being able to sit in a safe circle and feel comfortable enough to share your story and to hear other people’s stories because they all think they’re the only ones. There’s so much shame and secrecy and all that around it that they feel along with it. Having a safe person like you, a therapist or having safe circles for them to share is so incredibly valuable for them.
It can be transformative, even as an adult. I went on my very first grief retreat because I have a past of traumatic grief. I was surrounded by twenty other women who have been through something similar and the power of that to not feel alone. To hear the same experiences from 10 or 15 other women who say, “I feel that too, or I have that thought, too, or that’s how I felt when I had my daughter, too.” It’s like that me-too feeling of, “I’m not alone in this,” is so incredibly powerful. Getting groups together, whether it’s girls, boys, or mixed. Having the safety of the group and seeing like, “There’s not something wrong with me. This is a normal response to a very abnormal situation,” can be very healing.
Secrecy And Shame In Trauma
One of the things I also have found over the years is that sometimes what kids have been through is less influential than the secrecy around it. Keeping secrets and the shame that gets layered on top of that. I wonder if you have found that as well.
In a lot of my work as a trauma therapist, there were so many lies that were being perpetuated by caregivers, social workers and all sorts in the child welfare system. Not from a place of ill will or malice but because they thought they were protecting the child from the truth. They thought, “The truth is too painful. I don’t want to harm this child anymore. If I tell them the truth that their mom is addicted to substances or their dad is in jail.” The kid won’t be able to handle it. It’s the reverse of that.
First of all, children are so perceptive that they know that they’re not getting the truth. They might not know what facts are, but they can sense that you’re not being authentic with them. That’s the first thing. Secondly, when you don’t know the truth of your life, how can your nervous system ever feel calm or settled if you don’t even know the facts of your own family and your own life?
Children are incredibly intuitive and can easily tell when they're not getting the truth. They might not know all the facts, but they can sense when you're not being authentic with them. Share on XWhen you do get the facts in age-appropriate terms, that’s the caveat. You don’t want to tell a four-year-old horrific details about their father, but you could tell them in an age-appropriate way what is going on and give them some version of the truth. That is going to settle their nervous system because they know now what this nebulous feeling that they’ve been having is. The truth will set you free. The truth will also set the child free from their anxiety. Though it may be painful, at least they can process what has taken place versus not having answers. Not knowing all that uncertainty, lack of trust of adults and not being able to put their finger on what’s bothering them will make them more anxious.
I saw a girl. She’s in high school also. Anyway, she was adopted as a baby from another country. She’s a senior in high school. She got to go on like a trip to this country she was adopted from like a mission trip or something. She goes to a Catholic school. She was there for two weeks and she got to go to the area that she was adopted from.
She knew a little bit about her history, but very little like her mom. She knew had a couple of the kids that she kept and this girl was put up for adoption. She always had some feelings about that. She’s smart. She’s one of the most mature kids I’ve ever met my whole life but still. Anyway, having that experience was extremely unsettling, painful, and freeing.
Her parents were reluctant to send her because they were going to protect her like you’re talking about. The truth was, it gave her such a perspective about, “This is what my life could have been.” She said, “I saw these little girls. This is who I could have been.” Even though it’s unsettling and painful, at least now she knows her truth.
I got the chills hearing that story because it is. It’s such a misunderstanding from adults who want to do the right thing and want to protect but they end up doing the opposite when they keep secrets. I had a story somewhat similar to that where a child did any facts about their family, about who they were, and what they were like.
We were able to get a hold of the name of the hospital that she was born in. It was close enough that she could go see it and be visited and at least know where she was born. At least be able to say that. I don’t have a lot of information, but at least, I know where I came into this world and having that small piece of information did wonders for her self-esteem, for her identity formation, and for her ability to feel grounded and rooted in something. It improved her well-being. That small piece of information that maybe we would take for granted in our own lives for her was huge. You never know what might be powerful for somebody.
I do with girls in my retreats and camps and even in school sometimes. Especially middle school, high school and beyond, it helps them to understand this happened to you, wherever this is, like, “My parents are divorce. My dad hasn’t called in three years.” That’s horrible but oftentimes, what’s even more important for them to understand is, what are you making of it? What’s the story you’re creating about that? Why doesn’t my dad call? Why are people leaving me out at school?
Helping Children Make Sense Of Trauma
They’re constantly asking themselves that question and they’re constantly, in my experience, answering the question in their heads with some private logic, which is often almost always faulty, negative and doesn’t fit. It seems like the right thing. I wonder if you do the same thing with kids helping them to make better sense of the traumas that they’ve been through so they don’t make it about them.
One of my favorite videos from that animated series that I helped create is about intergenerational trauma and how the trauma is passed down through families, both epigenetically but also through learned behavior, circumstances, poverty, racism, and some of the systemic things that you mentioned earlier in this interview.
When you can see that and understand that, like, “My parents are the way they are because they came from this incredible hardship, adversity and trauma.” It’s not to excuse their behavior. I wouldn’t say it’s an excuse, but it at least explains the behavior and understanding that as humans, most of us are doing the best we can. I believe that as part of my philosophy. The majority of humans always do the best they can.
If they’re not living up to our expectations, there’s probably a reason why they can’t. Whether it be a systemic issue or a family issue or a mental health issue. There’s all different reasons why it can happen but helping children see their parents from a less judgmental, bad guy versus good guy position, but looking and becoming aware of their own parents’ trauma can be healing and take some of that shame and that self-blame.
A lot of the narratives I hear are, “They didn’t want me. They didn’t love me. They don’t care about me. They hate me.” Whatever it is, but that’s probably not the truth. That’s probably that they didn’t have the capacity to love you because they were not loved or they might not have the capacity to be present with you because they are struggling with so much unprocessed trauma of their own. It isn’t because of the child and it’s not their fault.
That’s part of the process but it has to happen organically. They have to come to those conclusions on their own through reflection and through the process of therapy or else it may just seem like you’re trying to make excuses for their parents. It’s a delicate lesson to learn but it’s the necessary one to have that healing occur.
I tell girls, too. I say, “It’s easy for me to look at you and say, you’re important and lovable.” I said, “That’s not what’s important. What’s important is you need to learn, believe that and say that to yourself. It’s easy for adults around you who care about you to see that, but you’re going to learn how to see it in yourself.”
One of the things I mentioned earlier about the trust in the world and the people around you being broken, but the trauma breaks trust in yourself too. You have to actively, and even though it’s not fair because you’re not the one who broke it. We have to actively work on rebuilding trust in ourselves so that we can feel that sense of confidence and self-esteem.
You’ve mentioned a couple times but tell me a little bit more and our readers about the videos you have. What’s it called? How can people find them?
I would love for your readers to have access to those. They are on YouTube. They are free and available to anyone who has access to YouTube. It’s called All Connected. A Place for Belonging is the subtitle. The name of the video series is All Connected. These are two seasons so far short, animated, engaging, and entertaining. Sometimes funny and sometimes heavy videos that in small bites teach young people about childhood trauma, how it impacts their body, their brain, and nervous system, and what they can do to help themselves heal and cope with the adversity they’ve experienced.
What’s great is that people like you, parents, professionals that work with children, counselors, therapists, or social workers can use these short videos as conversation openers. Especially if you don’t know how to broach a particular subject. Say you are uncomfortable talking about grief and you don’t know how to bring it up with a child who is grieving. We have a video on grief and loss.
You could say, “I have this video I’d like to watch with you.” It becomes a bridge to opening up some hard conversations. That’s how I’ve been hearing from professionals that it’s been very valuable to them. Also, kids will stumble on it by themselves too, learn and pick up skills from it without a professional’s help. If possible, we do expect and want those videos to be watched with a safe and trusted adult so that they can help process what they’re learning and talk about afterwards, what they heard and saw in the videos.
If they go on YouTube, they go to Connect Our Kids? That’s how they’d find it on YouTube?
If you go to YouTube and you search for All Connected, it should come up. They were funded by an organization called Connect Our Kids and co-created by myself and several other people with lived experience in the foster care system as well as trauma specialists in the field. It comes up on mine when I search All Connected but that’s because I’m always going.
If parents wanted to get ahold of you and find out more information besides the videos. What’s the best place to find you?
I’m available on my website, BethTyson.com. While I don’t do family counseling at this time, what I do is I teach organizations about trauma-informed practitioners and trauma-informed care for children, so schools, hospitals, law enforcement, the judicial system, and nonprofits that serve children and families, like protective services and Department of Human Services. I train the staff and the employees on a lot of the stuff that we’ve discussed and how to help children heal.
It’s such important work. Thank you so much for doing that. Thank you so much for giving us your time. I appreciate you and the work you’re doing. It’s not easy working with kids and/or adults who’ve been through trauma. There’s so many layers to it. I’m glad that you’ve developed your practice and your organization to educate people about how to support kids better.
Thank you. It’s truly not just a career choice, but the purpose of my life. I love being able to help in any way that I can. Children are our future and they deserve the best in life. It’s part of my life’s goal. Another resource that folks might be interested in, I have a free newsletter with lots of guidance, resources and oftentimes about once a quarter of free webinar with me. If people are interested in this conversation and want to know more, the newsletter you can subscribe to on my website at BethTyson.com. It’s right at the top of the webpage. That’s a great way to keep learning and growing in this area.
Thanks so much again and keep up the great work.
Thank you for what you’re doing. Girls and women, we need more places to come together and connect. Thank you for your incredible contribution to their lives.
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That’s a great conversation. I will put the links to Beth Tyson’s website and also those videos that she said are on YouTube. Check those out and also check out her newsletter. I’ll be back here as always in a week with another topic and another issue. I’m trying to get together some middle school girls and interview them about what it’s like to be a middle school girl. I look forward to that.
Also, I found out from our show that a lot of people read this show through Apple on that platform. They did something where if you miss a week or two of the show for a reason, which is awful, but if you happen to, they take you off the list apparently as opposed to keeping you on and sending you the notices or whatever. If you haven’t been reading for a while, you might want to make sure you’re still signed in to Apple for the show, therefore, you won’t have to miss them. Thank you so much for stopping by and passing this on to your friends. Take care.
Important Links
About Beth Tyson
Beth Tyson is a trauma therapist with 10+ years of research on childhood trauma. She helps organizations with childhood trauma training & education. In her words, “I am a healer, a helper, a mother, and a flawed human being who shares in the joys, fears, and sadness that we all experience. My personal and professional journey, shaped by encounters with trauma and loss, has transformed into a mission to educate others on supporting children in navigating adversity.”