Therapist focuses on childhood trauma

Trauma is something everyone has experienced.

“Trauma is as basic as losing your pet, divorce, or as intense as physical abuse or neglect, and everything in between — a car accident, surgery, a parent with mental illness,” said Licensed Clinical Social Worker Stacy York. “It’s really any event that has an impact on a person.”

When it comes to children experiencing trauma, these adverse events and experiences can impact brain and emotional development. This is the focus of York’s work as a therapist.

How a community responds to a child impacted by trauma is the reason York has recently been in the valley training Kalispell Public Schools staff in addition to families, mental health professionals and community members on being “trauma-informed.”

“It applies to every kid,” York said.

So what does it mean to be trauma informed?

“Trauma-informed care is really about regulating brain and sensory stuff,” York said.

Outside the home, one of the key stakeholders in children’s daily lives are teachers. On Wednesday, York was at Elrod Elementary meeting with a small group of teachers, social workers and the principal.

“So the brain develops from the bottom up and inside out. Schools are set up for cortex thinking — top brain stuff — and what we want to do is we want to understand that bottom brain and how it impacts the top of the brain. You can’t really care about English and math if your sensory system is dysregulated,” York said.

A child’s response to trauma may be triggered by different sensory experiences. The child may hide under a desk, shut down and stop talking, cry and scream responses exacerbated by physiological responses such as altered heart rate and breathing.

“The hard thing about education, right, is we’re very behavior driven,” York said.

To York, behavior is a symptom, not a root she said.

“Behavior is a symptom with roots, and the roots is in dysregulation,” York said. “Behavior is not personal. A kid is actually struggling in his or her brain.”

Modeling and teaching is also part of working with children and trauma. During critical years of early development, a child may not be exposed to, or have feedback on interpreting facial cues for example, “lower-brain stem-type stuff” she said.

“The sensory system is crucial to understanding development,” York said.

The response should be “regulation,” a word York returned to often.

“Regulation is about having self-control, being able to manage your emotions. Kids can’t do that right away so they have to have adults with them to help them with that, and who understand that piece,” York said.

This could be letting a child sit and color, eat a snack, take a nap or play in the gym before class for example.

York used one example of a child that had to be restrained for hours before attending class on a daily basis. This was before she became trauma-informed.

“I think if we had regulated him before he ever got to school — he came from a super abusive home so he was coming to school in the ‘flight, fight or freeze’ mode all the time — so if we had done some of this before he even started his day we would never had to do two- to three-hour restraints,” York said, noting that during meltdowns the child was not going to care about academics.

“Sometimes as adults we feel pressure that ‘I have to do something to get them out from under the table, or doing property damage,’” York said. “Developmentally you can’t always move them through that quicker. Sometimes they have to go through the roller coaster.”

It’s a shift in thinking from reaction to prevention.

“And we don’t like prevention as Americans in general. We’re all about intervention. That’s a society thing. I’m saying come at it from a preventative way. You know the kids who walk into school and they’re going to have a bad day as soon as you see them,” York said.

One school social worker asked what information she could provide to people who may be concerned about shifting more resources from academics to behavior.

“Academics cannot happen if this part of the brain is not regulated, period,” York said. “That simple. So managing behavior is really teaching self-regulation, getting a kid regulated or co-regulating a kid has to happen before their cortex can ever be on board to learn. I do not give a crap about math if I’m hungry. I cannot care at all about reading if I’m very upset the police came to my house last night. Right?”

Academics will improve if the right action is taken, York assured the group.

“If we work on this stuff you will actually see your test scores increase. You will see your academic stuff go through the roof,” York said.

York’s training is sponsored by a grant through the Montana Support, Outreach and Access for the Resiliency of Students, which works to improve academic and social success of youth by strengthening family, school, and community relationships and increasing mental health awareness.

For more information about York visit http://bewhatsright.com.

Reporter Hilary Matheson can be reached at 758-4431 or hmatheson@dailyinterlake.com.