Therapeutic Parenting's Super Strategies and Solutions

[Music] Welcome back to the therapeutic parenting podcast which is coming to you from COECT, the Centre of Excellence in Child Trauma. We provide proven strategies to help people living and working with child trauma, no matter if you're a parent, someone who suffered trauma in your early years or even a supporting professional. In the second series we're talking to experts and focusing on tackling specific problem areas like violence and aggression, parental isolation and sexualised behaviour. And as before we're talking to experts who have first-hand knowledge of the challenges we know you're facing. I'm Serena Gay, your host and today we have Jane Mitchell back with us. Our topic is going to be super strategies, ways of coping that are always relevant, always necessary and which really form the backdrop to how you respond in every situation. Jane is birth mother to three children and also an adopter. She co-wrote the diploma in therapeutic parenting and has many years experience working with adoptive and foster parents. Hello again Jane, welcome back. Hello Serena, thank you for having me. Oh well, it's a pleasure as ever. Now you have written that we have to be brave and resolute in the way we parent our children who have suffered from their individual cocktail of trauma. You would say that part of being brave and resolute I imagine is inconsistently applying super strategies which seem to form a sort of template for dealing with all the individual issues. So can you tell us what your super strategies are? Well we have some strategies that we just return to again and again. You've touched on one of them there on that consistent, predictable and reliable approach. So if you're saying one thing one day it doesn't suddenly change another day, you have a consistent, predictable, reliable, routine in the house, in the family that helps the child to really understand that their food will always be there, that big time will always be the same, that they will be time to play, that they will be time for school and that everything will just carry on just in the most consistent manner and that helps them to rebuild a different perception of themselves and the world. So it's massively important. We've spoken before in podcast Serena about just pausing. Now pausing for me is a super strategy of other people may not agree with me but I feel that if we can as parents have the presence of mind when things are going a bit haywire to stop and take a step back and pause we are able to be more effective as parents and the reason for that is that when you stop and pause it takes you a step away from whatever's going on and enables you to reconnect your brain so that you can think your way through it and use your knowledge and understanding of your child and whatever's going on to work out what's the best thing to do next. It stops you from jumping into your own kind of reaction so it enables you to remain proactive instead of jumping into being reactive. When as parents we jump into being reactive it sometimes isn't very helpful. Sometimes it's entirely necessary. Sometimes your child's about to jump onto the road. You don't need to do anything other than be reactive at that point. You just run and grab them, pull them back, get them to safety. Of course, there are those times but when they are being challenging in other ways because they're just being stroppy or they're being rude or they being controlling or they're just not doing anything that you ask them to. They're being very demanding avoidant or they don't want to go to school. They're just you know you're pulling your hair out with it all. I really do understand how hard that can be and one of the best strategies that you can use is to pause, not get pulled in to whatever's going on with them but stop and think literally move away from them, go and make a cup of tea, think what's going on here. So another one of my super strategies is it is actually from pace but I think it's very important and that is acceptance. Paste stands for being playful, accepting, curious and empathic. Okay but I tend to use those different elements in a slightly different way as do all of us at an ACP and you can take any one of those out of context and use them in different situations but acceptance is very important because our children from trauma come with baggage. People don't expect children to come with baggage. For a long time it was assumed but actually if you've got to child young enough you won't have any problems at all. Of course we know that that's not true these days because we understand about the fact that connection and childhood trauma can begin in utero we very well know that but for a long time that was the idea you know that all they're too young they won't remember everything. So we have to have a level of acceptance that if a child has come through the care system or if they have had an adverse childhood experience of any sort that they have got challenges as a result of those experiences. So we need to have a degree of acceptance that this child will have additional challenges to other children and that they will need additional thought and additional care and additional nurture to enable them to get back on to the childhood path that they should have been on in the first place. Acceptance is also not just about the child, acceptance is also about us accepting our own limitations and being kind to ourselves. It's about thinking oh my goodness I am finding this really hard that's okay it's okay for me to be feeling bad I can get help from different places. It's about accepting that someday is going to be hard and some days are going to be great and to an extent it's about accepting that you're going to need to roll with the punches but also don't forget acceptance is a corner stone of everything that we stand for at CoECT and if you have a need to be heard we are here to hear you so you can always use that as a strategy. The third super strategy that I have is all around empathy. Empathy is a tool which allows anybody to feel that they are truly listened to and truly seen in their situation and when you feel that coming to you from another person actually it helps you to feel that you are important and you are valued so it is a hugely important skill for us to take on board. Sometimes it takes a little bit of practice people aren't always naturally empathic and it can be very hard to be naturally empathic to a child that is being extremely challenging and it can be very very hard or even harder if that child happens to be quite violent in their presentation but empathy helps them to know that they are seen and understood and accepted in all of the ways that they are and also helps them to understand that you are there and ready to help them. So the way that we use empathy is to be saying to the child wow that must have been so hard for you today at school. I can tell that you really really had a difficult day because you were struggling when you came out already. Let's go and have a drink and we can talk about it or let's go and run around the field so that you can get some of that stress out of your system and so we sort of take how we imagine that they're feeling and we say gosh I'm so sorry that you're feeling like that. I can see that it's really really rubbish for you. I want to help you with that and then find a way through trial and error that enables us to help the child and retain that connection. It's quite tricky but if you have an idea of your child's history then that makes it a bit easier. So for instance if you've got a sibling group and one of the children is physically trying to look after all the other siblings all the time and not letting you be the parent you might say to them "Gosh it must have been so tricky having all of that responsibility when you were living in your previous house. It must have been so tricky to have that all that responsibility and to have to look after the others all the time. I can't imagine I want you to remember that I can look after all of you and thank you so much for being so helpful. I really want you to concentrate on having some fun now the playfulness is a super strategy for connecting with your child and if you've got the right sort of child it can be a super strategy for deflecting a situation. For example if your child's lying down in the middle of the floor refusing to get dressed you might say to them "I can see what's going on here you want a tickle and you could maybe have them" but that might work for some children actually being approached with a tickle might trigger adverse memories but then you would know that from the history. So you might also use playfulness to distract a child who is emotionally much younger if they're feeling in a cranky kind of a mood so you might start doing a silly dance or singing at them all holding their hands and skipping down the street and just generally pull them out of their defensiveness by being playful. You have to be a bit careful with them because sometimes it can create a worse situation so you need to judge very carefully when to use playfulness but you can always use playfulness to connect with your children because you can always ask to join in their games. You can always let them take the lead and tell you what to do in their games and have you be lizard man while they're being Batman and you know kind of yeah or maybe you're being Buzz Light Hero whatever else it is or maybe you're playing with lots of small mini world toys and just joining in with whatever they're constructing with that. You can help them to build their leg home you can play Uno with them you can sit and pretend to be really really interested in their video game or you can do what I did once and try and strap on their roller blades and learn to roller blade around the campsite they absolutely love it because it shows them that you are interested in them and everything that they are doing and that is one of the jobs that we do with our babies very very early on that a lot of these children have missed. It's really important to remember not just what has happened but what has not happened with our children and one of the things that has not happened is that they've been played with so let's play with them. It's more important sometimes than anything else so one of my other top tips by the way is to have a freezer full of food so that on days that it's more important to play with your children you can still have a good meal at the end of it without having to run up and cook it and what about the super strategy of curiosity? Curiosity is something that we use as part of our therapeutic narrative with a child so that's about gosh I wonder if you've had a hard day at school I wonder you know it seems to me that you're feeling really not in a good place I wonder what's happened I wonder if you had an argument with your friends today I wonder if you don't want to go to school because it's pee and you don't like getting undressed I wonder if you don't want to go to school because there's a new teacher there and you're not used to them you sort of you can use wondering to to help the child to understand where the feelings come from so that they can kind of make that link themselves so it's not about you the parent helping helping yourself to understand the child it's about helping the child to understand the child absolutely that's exactly what it is helping the child to understand the child now what about parental presence because I know you've spoken a lot about that as a as a super strategy where would you start in explaining its importance the importance of parental presence goes right back to those unmet needs that we always are not talking about serena so parental presence allows us to maintain that literal presence in our children's lives but sometimes it's say a virtual presence in our children's lives so for example we might demonstrate parental presence with a teenager that's maybe in their room a great deal by putting little notes under the door or by sending them a text that has an emoji on it or by saying I was thinking of you today and I saw these chocolate brownies and I just remembered how much you love them so I thought I'd get them for you so you're using your strategies simple strategies to let the child know that you are there still that you are thinking of them and that you are holding them in mind even when they're not around and near you so parental presence can also be about kind of you know putting a kind of a safe boundary around somebody so you might you might be saying you might be putting your rules in place and you might be negotiating with your child about something that they want to do that they've not done before so it feels very very uncomfortable for you and you might be saying well do you know I think you can do that but I'd like to come and collect you afterwards so I'm going to just be around the corner here waiting for you in the car okay um it's very important parental presence because it kind of keeps letting the child know that whatever happens you're still there it can be really important for parents when their children are at a distance from them for whatever reason and it can be really important for children in school and stuff because you can demonstrate parental presence while your child is at school by both of you having matching little heart strong on your wrists or by putting a little note into their lunch box or again by sending your text and it just enables you to keep letting that child know that no I'm still here I'm still here haven't gone anywhere just because you're at school doesn't mean that I've gone anywhere it's fine or all this is really reinforcing in the child's mind that the child matters to the adult yeah and the other important thing because what you've just said is a massively important thing because the child has an internal sense of worth which typically is extremely poor for children that are that have had adverse childhood experiences and when you employ these simple measures to let them know that they matter to you it chips away at that poor self esteem and by being consistent, predictable and reliable about it to go back to the beginning you build those ideas from being a sort of an inkling oh maybe they do care about me to a no I'm quite sure that no they must be thinking about me they're always sending me these notes it must be true to a conviction so you can gradually shift your child to a place where they believe that you think them to be wonderful and worthwhile and important but when you do that gosh that's so important when you do that you have literally reset part of the child's brain that you would expect who have been fully in place when they were a tiny baby in the center of your universe you see and when they're from a when they're from a traumatic background it takes longer to get that kind of certainty in place once they've got that secure base they can move on and start to make other relationships too so it also connects with friendship and socialisation and everything else and this comes back to your maxim about repetition building brains right absolutely absolutely so so the more you the more you remind the child of their importance to you the more you're reestablishing a more normal sense of their self-importance a more positive sense of self-importance absolutely the other thing that you're doing by being so consistent predictable and reliable and I do mean it in your sanctions as well as in your as in your love and your care the more that you do that the more you are showing them that adults are safe and the news flash for today is that children from trauma do not believe that adults are safe they have no experience of that it takes a really really long time for a child to develop a sense of safety with an adult and being consistent predictable and reliable boringly so really helps that that process it is a massively important thing to do it really is so the the final thing I wanted to talk about Serena was about relationship repair because this is something that I talk about ever ever ever such a lot because as parents we make mistakes and you know what we tend to feel really really rubbish about it because we've proved if we are an adopter or a foster parent that we can take on anything that Serena does and if we're a biological parent we just think well of course we should be able to do this it should come naturally it should all be easy but sometimes it just isn't and sometimes we get cranky and sometimes we lose our temper and sometimes we can't pause and be connected and sometimes we get pulled into our children's trauma reactions and you know what that's entirely normal that happens in every household where there's children part of their job is to push the boundaries and make sure that they're safe part of their job is to jab your buttons because they're checking they're just checking is still is still used and interested that's still what we're going to be doing here and actually that can mean that we say or do things that we regret now we've all done it I'm sure that we have I know that I have so I hope I've not the only one out there the important thing about having an argument isn't that you've had an argument the important thing about having an argument is that you build resilience in the relationship by your recovery from an argument and that's about relationship repair and relationship repair is not ever saying sorry and then saying but it's all your fault because of the way you're behaving. Relationship repair is about saying I am taking ownership of the thing that I did wrong and I am saying sorry to you for it so it's a you know it makes us vulnerable to do that it does but it's hugely important first of all because it allows the child to see that vulnerable place in you secondly because it gives them a really strong model for the fact that do you know what you can get things wrong in this family and you can be sorry for it and we can move on and as I say to my daughter who's had a trauma background don't worry love it's just a bump in the road we've got over all of these bumps before we're going to get over this bump too and it really helps with that kind of having little catch phrases like that can really help you to build a sense of resilience with your child and it helps them to see how to repair a relationship with you after time after time. Absolutely so it's really having the ability isn't it as the adult to say I'm sorry I made a mistake and that's that actually is that's quite difficult for some people. It's really difficult. I think it's really difficult which is why I said before you do not use the word 'but' I'd like to have the word 'but' taken out of the language of language with some children from trauma because when you say 'but' you always follow it up with the good reason why it's all there for you know I'm really sorry I shouted at you but you know you're not allowed to go in my room you know I'm really sorry I shouted at you but I found all those chocolate wrappers under the wardrobe. If you say 'but' you immediately take all of the power out of the bit where you said I'm really sorry and sometimes here's the thing sometimes what happens when you say 'sorry' to a child and say I'm really sorry I shouted that must have been really scary for you and I just want to say sorry can we have a hug or whatever however you manage it sometimes you'll find that the child will say well I know I shouldn't have taken all those biscuits mommy you know so they might by you being from you showing your vulnerability you might encourage them to be vulnerable themselves and say sorry themselves. Yeah because by giving ground yourself that encourages them to give ground and in fact you know you can then move forward to a position where perhaps that doesn't get repeated again that error or that mistake or that irritating behavior. Well exactly because if your child then says sorry because you know I know I shouldn't have eaten all the biscuits you might then be able to open up a conversation about well don't really love the actual consequence of that is that there aren't any more biscuits till I go shopping so I can never mind or you know or something like that or you might say well I do know that it's really hard for you if if we've got a cupboard full of snacks I know it's really hard for you not to eat them all at once so what I've decided is I'm just going to buy them a few at a time or you might say I know it's really hard for you so why don't we have a snack box that you can have in your room so that you know you've always got some food there but I am going to look the cupboard otherwise so that you can't so that you've just got the food that's in your snack box and you've got the food that's on the table because there's always fruit remember and there's always a orchid in the fridge. Now I think all this makes so much sense and it really helps all your super strategies really if you apply them in that intentional way that you expressed earlier you know helps form bonds doesn't it and it that will help traumatise children to heal. It does help them to feel safe as well Serena I try and give you an example of a foster family where it's the first foster family the children have had from being taken into her away from their mom they have just thrived under the consistent predictable and reliable routines that have been established for them by their new foster parents and one of the children was saying well I do sometimes think I'd like to go back to mom because then I can just not go to school and be on my Nintendo all day and blah blah blah blah blah but as he said it he had this huge problem his face and the person he was talking to just said well your face is telling me otherwise I can see that you feel really really safe here it does work it might not be spontaneous and it might not be sort of therefore people think of us fun but actually having fun is actually a skill that some children have to learn and it's easier if they learn it in a really contained environment because then they can take that learning and assimilate them. I'd like everybody out there to remember that there's all of these strategies and more on the NATP website and part of COECT so if you're a member go and have a route around and don't forget we're always here to listen and to help. Oh great thanks Jane there are so many takeaways from what we've been talking about today and great that you've directed people to the website to find out more information. Thank you that was another terrific performance from you today on the podcast really useful. You're very welcome. If you'd like to receive this podcast every week just press the follow button you'll find it where you found this podcast and please leave us a review for the podcast because it'll help other people find us and all our helpful advice. Bye for now.