Broken heart: how to survive the consequences of children's turmoil

However it would be desirable to protect the child from the cruelties of the world, it inevitably faces with them. Trauma interferes with life, takes away strength necessary for development. How to help your child survive the shock? As most adults to cope with the consequences of long-standing childhood trauma? This is - family psychologist Lyudmila Petranovskaya

. Why do not they break?



- Is it possible to protect your child from possible shocks and injuries

? - With some injuries are rising all the children: it is difficult to find a family in which nothing happens. Someone badly burned, someone has fallen and hurt himself, someone's grandmother died, the dog hit by a car ... It happens to everyone, it's part of life. This experience is required for a person. Any life - a balance of injury and resources. It is the sum of two different forces: on the one hand, that weakens you, on the other - that you support and gives strength

. - It happens that a child is not only what had suffered as a child, and grow a normal person - this is how Gorky grew among the "leaden abominations" and even became a great writer ... And someone breaks in full, it seems, welfare

. - I had a chance to talk with the children of refugees who actually lived through the horror - somewhere fled under the bombs, hiding in the muddy ditch ... but they were with their parents, and one of the parents died, was not lost, and the adults kept the presence of mind. Children remember what happened to them, but it did not destroy their world view. A small child does not have an objective idea of ​​the danger.

It is based on how he sees the situation subjectively: Mom next - well, no mother nearby - bad. I recently told a friend about her mother in law, who at the age of three or four years, survived the siege of Leningrad. She preserved the specific memories of this time, but there is no feeling of horror, because my mother has set a goal to show the children that it's OK. When they went to the shelter, my mother said that they go for a walk, they went down there with fairy tales and stories ...

Children's perception is based on the attachment. If the child is strapped to an adult, he has delegated his relationship with the world and himself lives quietly: adult is responsible for everything. That is why, by the way, many of the children was a shock in the nineties, when people do not seem to starve, do not fall and did not die on the streets, but the parents could not cope with life, and children injured this experience.

- But some children perceive the world tragically, even when they have a prosperous life and good relationships with parents ...

- The children themselves are very different. And the injury is different: one type - is when something bad happens (let's say, a man broke his leg); Second - this is when it is constantly, chronically lacking something essential: love, parental warmth, affection. This second type of injury is called deprivation.

It is known that deprivation different children respond differently: there are children who like something to stores and other deprivation destroys much. Why is it depends, no one knows is how some children are often sick, and catch any infection, while others almost never get sick. I am familiar with the man, who has always had a good relationship with his father. But one day, Dad is so beside himself that this child beaten, and that once it was enough for a lifetime: he is now 60 years old, and he still stutters

. Pain knocks out of the box

- How can we help the injured child

? - To help, it is important to remember about the balance of injury and resources. The more complex the situation in which the child is, the more resources you need to invest in it. Overcoming trauma may go through regression - the baby descends back to a younger age, if it can count on him to help adult

. But adults often do not wish to have anything to do with children's pain, it seems - that he may quickly forget. They provide signals child, stop this feeling, do not talk about it, forget it. The children in this case are not melted the pain, not process it, and lock feelings freezes them in the inner box. And along with them and freezes certainly part of the external experience.

And it seems that the child is forgotten, can not remember an injury, he does not talk about it, but not one feeling of freezing without freezing everyone else. If it has frozen mountain, freeze, and other senses. A trauma does not just lie in this box: it is out of her bangs, he wants to escape. And here we need an inner guard to protect it, not to produce. A lot of emotional energy is not spent on the execution of the tasks of age, not on the growth and maturation, and to him who knocks it out of the box the pain.

- How does it affect an individual's life

? - If the child has not experienced an injury in the arms of an adult, its development pritravleno this injury, even if it seems that he has all right. It often happens that you talk with an adult, a child who has experienced something heavy, and it is not clear even that is not so, but there is a general feeling of ill-being. It can, for example, about the terrible events of his life to tell buratinskoy with a smile, is a sign of loss of sensitivity, this evidence is not experienced and not processed injury.

- How to help a child who is bad

? - Whatever happens, adult task - to contain the feelings of the child. Being a container for them to become a psychological womb for another. Hug him and his feelings - and not be destroyed by this. It is not necessary to specifically study courses, is in each of us laid. For example, when working on someone of his colleagues suddenly bad news - what is our first impulse

? Hug's shoulders, nothing to ask for work, did not require him to action, maybe bring him some water ... Do not try to distract people from the fact that it has happened, zabaltyvat it does not need installation of the fact that it is necessary to immediately entertain him , to reduce the "McDonald's", no need to explain that all will be well, before a person will live their feelings.

Our task - to allow the child to throw the feelings: his pain, his anger, his fear - only then it can be restored, albeit with a scar. But if the child be closed, fenced off, shaming him for his feelings - then the child frostbitten

. On the other hand, if we take up the task to save the child's sensitivity and give him of freezing, we must understand that the world around nelaskovy. What a sensitive child in the world is doomed to swim in the pool with sulfuric acid, and will always be in pain, and is covered with a crust. My daughter, for example, experienced a real existential shock in elementary school: she could not understand how it is - why continue to tease the man if he was crying

?  - Where is the golden mean? To the child, and sensitivity is not completely lost, and was not in this world, a man with a tattered leather?

- If we want to keep the baby alive, we must protect it. At least until adolescence. Most of the children somehow manage to lose sensitivity, while others - no

. Because in a good school with a safe psychological climate and competition for twenty-five people in place, it is not just a place to educate, but also a nature reserve, where you can stick your not frostbitten Babe and hoped that she was not hurt and will not say, "well what do you want, it's not like the others» .-

- And what do parents "no such" children? If, for example, the child cheerful, open, still playing with dolls, and all around - already skeptical semiklassnitsy with beer and cigarettes

? - My daughter, has not yet changed the school truant. It is possible to change schools - must be changed. If this is the only school in a small town, it is necessary to reduce the amount of communication, search for other media for children. For my daughter this environment began training in the "Far Rainbow", she is there placed a center of communication.

It can be a travel section, circle, country company - another place where a child can place his main aspirations. If peers are hostile child must learn to respond to them so that most do not break down. For nine years the child is a task premature. For fourteen years - it is age-appropriate tasks

. It's time to declare demobilization

- Sometimes parents, faced with the problems of their children begin to remember their own childhood - and it is full of unhealed wounds. What to do?

- If a man in his childhood there was something very bad, it is better not to climb himself. The independent activity in such a case only hurt, it is necessary to seek a professional therapist. But if it is small, chronic trauma - something to help yourself it is possible. It is necessary to refer to himself as to her child -.ne ignore their needs, take care of yourself.

Unfortunately, adults often produce models of their parents in relation to itself. But such a position consumes a lot of energy. However, there are also children's perception errors: children misunderstand the attitude of parents towards them. For example, talk with the person and see what its type relationship to the world - like surviving brutal violence

. Biography prosperous, and he sees the world as if for him extinguished cigarettes. Then it turns out that he was one and a half years has experienced a burn, for weeks my mother made him a painful bandaging, he begged her not to do them, and she did.

The child did not understand then, that it should be, and my mother does not seem to cope with feelings, I yelled at him - and so are injured, and only then a specialist will need to disengage the mother's activities and children's perception. Often the experience of forced hospitalization at an early age without a mother; children it is usually perceived as a betrayal of the parents gave the cast and

. If hospitalization without a mother still happened - it is necessary to talk about feelings. Do not seek to distract, entertain - should verbalize feelings hurt, scared, bad - to show that the adult is ready to deal with them. In no case do not show: me so hard, stop, please, feel it

. - If you know that your current problems - is the result of an old injury, what to do

? - You can try to work with the current behavior and to deal with the past: from psychotherapists have different techniques - drawings, conversations. Usually, a qualified specialist will know what is the matter.

- But many perceive it as a sad soul-searching - the fate of wimps and whiners

. - No, of course it is important that taking care of yourself is not turned into a soul-searching. But many mothers on the contrary tend to state gipermobilizatsii - I think, is inherited from their parents: to bite the bullet, to live it, to experience ... a box of intensive care, a full mobilization of forces that we can not relax. For previous generations lived, as experienced war, but some are stuck in this state, even when time is not a war.

This is often noticed by psychologists who work with parents of recovered children with cancer. They used to fight, they can not stop to do it, get them this status and start having fun. This type of behavior of women in the family existed for many years and is inherited. But mobilization - this is not for free, it also occurs due primorazhivaniya feelings. And the mother herself may be, and do not ask for help, it somehow seems that she lives right, and is not even admit the idea that the time has come to declare demobilization.

- For many people, the idea that at the core of their problems may lie childhood trauma causes a skeptical grin

. - And may there be all sorts of reasons. Trauma that's not always the horror, the horror smash the knee - is also injury. There are people who have actually happened is nothing worse than broken knees - the body and the terrible separation - with a soul. And these injuries have left them no trace.

Or maybe it was bad, but thanks to the wise adult behavior, they were able to survive. Maybe the injury was and did not have enough strength to cope with it. Touching the pain can not be a person puts freeze on it - and it is not always necessary. The relationship between trauma and adult problems may not be apparent. For example, on one training for the parents I had a mom who is very rapidly react to baby lies - despite the fact that it is tolerated to other violations

. And on the second day of the training, she suddenly remembered that in three or four years, parents told her that they were going to Grandma - and themselves left her in a children's sanatorium. No wonder that her whole life a lie hurts. But she never thought about this connection, did not see it, although I understand that there is something wrong with the way she soared up from a harmless children's lies.

So if a person has neperezhitaya injury, its effects will still be evident. And if there is no obvious problems - so there is nothing to hunt them, of course.

Author: Lyudmila Petranovskaya