Tonight's picture was taken on October 4, 2008. We took Mattie to the Inner Harbor in Baltimore to have lunch along the water. We were trying to distract Mattie before his first big limb salvaging surgery on October 20. My parents were visiting too and we made it an adventure for Mattie in Maryland. Naturally back then we had no idea how Mattie's surgeries were going to transform his life, and not for the better! In retrospect it is good that we were clueless, because if we actually knew what we did now, I am not sure we would have had the necessary hope to carry on.
Quote of the day: Anything that’s human is mentionable, and anything that is mentionable can be more manageable. When we can talk about our feelings, they become less overwhelming, less upsetting, and less scary. The people we trust with that important talk can help us know that we are not alone. ~ Fred Rogers
This afternoon, I glanced down at a publication I received from the American Counseling Association, and noticed on their front cover of Counseling Today, the topic in bold letters.... providing trauma informed treatment. Naturally this topic is in my strike zone and I was curious to know how trauma was defined in the article and I wanted to understand the impact of childhood trauma on the lives of adults.
Here's an excerpt from the article:
In 1995, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Kaiser Permanente began what would become a landmark study on the health effects of adverse childhood experiences. Over the course of two years, researchers collected detailed medical information from 17,000 patients at Kaiser’s Health Appraisal Clinic in San Diego. In addition to personal and family medical history, participants were asked about childhood experiences of abuse, neglect and family dysfunction, such as emotional and physical neglect, sexual and physical abuse, exposure to violence in the household and household members who had substance abuse problems or had been in prison. Researchers found that the presence of these negative experiences in childhood was predictive of lifelong problems with health and well-being. The more negative experiences a participant had, the more likely — and numerous — these problems became.
So in a nutshell, this study was asking adults to recall their childhood traumas and one thing that immediately caught my attention was there was NO mention of illness as a potential trauma (of course my lens is on cancer, childhood cancer, or a parent's cancer diagnosis) and let's not mention the taboo words... death/grief. Illness and grief can both cause traumas, and I would beg to say more than just one trauma, as dealing with a chronic or life threatening illness exposes the patient and caregivers to multiple traumas (diagnosis, adverse side effects of treatment, having to undergo scans and to receive test results, receiving bad news, prolonged hospitalizations, exposure to other infections, watching others around you in treatment die, and the list goes on).
The article seemed to identify other traumas pretty easily.... abuse, neglect, family dysfunction, exposure to violence, and family members contending with substance abuse or incarceration. With almost 500,000 childhood cancer survivors in our US population, clinicians in the community should be alert to the traumas associated with illness and death.
Putting aside what qualifies as a trauma, the article talked about the fact that people coming to talk to a therapist may not bring up, admit, or feel comfortable addressing past traumas initially. So it isn't the therapist's job to uncover or pressure a person to reveal something he/she isn't ready to discuss. Which I think makes perfect sense because when I think about my own situation, I am not going to relive aspects of my time with Mattie with just anyone. Regardless of who I am with.... because reliving aspects of Mattie's care and the reality of our daily life are heavy and complex.
But I love the paradigm shift in therapy from.... what is wrong with the person, to what happened to the person sitting before me. It is vital to understand how we all have been impacted by trauma and how we have reacted and adapted to those experiences. The article discusses how trauma effects the brain and emotional regulation and how such things as self care and exercise help on a daily basis to fight the impact and arousal of trauma. I would like to insert that the impact of trauma isn't necessarily short term. For me, it was like a catastrophic emotional experience completely altered my circuitry, and though things may reconnect and I look like I function, the wires aren't connected the same way. How do I know? Because for example, I no longer can multi-task. If you ask me to read something in a public place with music or talking in the background, I can't! I literally can't. It is as if I am seeing the words but I have NO IDEA what they are saying to me. I have other examples too, not just this one!
I find that exercise does indeed help me with a whole host of issues. Certainly walking Sunny gets me up and out every day, but now I am back to doing Zumba. Zumba works for me because it is intense, high impact, and involves music. If you ask me to exercise and music isn't involved, I literally won't do it. Music keeps me focused and also in a way forgetting about what I am physically doing. Sure I may have preferred this form of exercise prior to Mattie getting sick, but now I really need it to keep me focused and expending energy. To me, everything I am talking about is yet another psychosocial impact of childhood cancer. The medicine may have ended 8 years ago, but the psychosocial journey is ever present and constantly evolving.
Informed by Trauma:
https://ct.counseling.org/2017/09/informed-by-trauma/
1 comment:
Vicki, I am glad to know you had a planned time together before Mattie's first limb salvaging surgery. While I had read the timeline of Mattie's diagnosis & surgeries, actually listening to you talk about them gives a far clearer picture than reading words. It is hard to phantom, that his medical team would not realize that such life altering surgeries would not automatically call for intense psychosocial support. But then, I remember that when Mattie was treated Psychosocial support did not equal the medicine so it was not automatically in place for Mattie. I can't figure out how Mattie coped with so much at once or how you & Peter did either. In my mind, I see all the suffering Mattie did. It is so unfair.
I knew even before I saw his name that the author of your quote tonight was Fred Rogers. Mr. Rogers stressed feelings & talking about them. Hard thing is sometimes it is a true challenge to find the person, you want to & can share those feelings that take your breathe away even thinking about them, much less sharing them.
I am so sorry Mattie suffered so much and lost so much as he fought courageously the Cancer battle!
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