Walking. A Wonderful Practice for Change.

“Walking…is how the body measures itself against the earth””
— — Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking

After a day of working in the outskirts of a city I don’t know, I asked the hotel desk attendant if there was a park nearby to walk in. The day was warm and I was craving fresh air and a walk. She asked if we knew the area and I said, “No.” And then she printed out directions to a food store. If we went past the food store and turned right, the park would be on our left. So my colleague and I headed out.

Apparently we weren’t the only people who felt the warmth  in the air and headed to the park. The place was packed!  With old people using walkers, with people walking dogs –very large and very small. There were lots of parents and children. All the children were running. All the parents were trying to keep up and saying all sorts of things to get them to walk instead. As one child responded, “I’m trying to walk, but I just keep running” as she hurtled herself downhill.

I laughed when I heard her say that thinking that running usually requires more effort for me and I wished I could easily say, “I’m trying to walk, but I just keep breaking in to a run.”

And then I got to thinking about change and growth and healing and realized how familiar that feeling really is. How you start something moving. You start changing and the momentum can pick up. And you feel yourself moving faster than you thought. And it is exhilarating, but also scary. You are new to this change, this growth, and your ‘new change legs’ feel wobbly. But you can’t stop, even as as some ‘inner scared parent’ is running behind you exalting you to slow down.

My need to walk today felt like a need for any other food or nutrient I have ever craved. In previous blogs I have talked about the need for routines as part of healing. And for me walking can be such a routine. In some ways it functions as such a source of organization or grounding, literally, feet connecting with the ground. And especially in times of change, or growth or healing, walking feels like a requirement. When I am away from home, or having a hard time connecting with myself—walking becomes my connection. There is something so reassuring about the fact that one foot follows the other. You keep putting one foot out, and the other follows. You feel the earth beneath your feet. You feel your arms swing. You feel the air in your lungs. You feel the air on your face.

One foot in front of the other. The rhythm and repetition are soothing. One foot in front of the other. It is the body’s perfect mantra. A way of practicing change. I can go from here to there. I only have to put one foot in front of the other. I can change where I am and how I feel. I only have to put one foot in front of the other. It’s not a matter of doing something huge. It’s just one foot in front of the other. And yet, if you keep doing it. If you keep walking, the steps add up. I know how to do this. I can speed up. I can slow down. Just keep putting one foot in front of the other.  And you will see, you try to walk, but you may just find yourself running.

And if you can't get out for a walk yourself today. You can follow Libby Delana on Instagram. She regularly posts photos of her #morningwalk and you can either let that image inspire you to head out on your own, or you can just rest in the image for the day.

© 2015 Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD  

Parent's Corner: Five Things to Help our Children (and Ourselves) after a Traumatic Event.

“Darkness cannot drive out darkeness, only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that.”
— Martin Luther King, Jr.

We have witnessed so many shootings. So many struggling refugees. “How do I help my children understand the violence?” “How do I help them understand the struggle and the grief?” “How do I protect them from the news?” What can I do to help them feel better?” What can I do to help myself feel better?”

Trauma shatters. That is true regardless of the trauma. It shatters our sense of trust. It shatters our sense of stability. It shatters our sense of safety. The physiological responses to trauma set off alarm systems in our bodies that make us capable of running away or freezing on the spot—which is designed to help us survive. But trauma shuts down our ability to take in a wide variety of information, and it often has us in survival mode of shutting down and avoiding, rather than staying active and reaching out.

And unfortunately, these events seem to be happening more frequently so it seems important that parents and really, all of us, understand the impact of these traumatic events and how best to recover, heal and strengthen our resilience. What can you do as a parent to help your children and yourself during these stressful events?

First: Turn off your television. Do not reinforce the traumatic experience at the emotional or neurological level. Our visual systems are highly connected to our amygdalas –the fear centers of our brain. Constant watching of traumatic images helps strengthen a neural pathway for a frightening event. News is 24 hours and the event already happened. You and especially your children do not need to watch the events of a shooting over and over. A different camera angle may help the FBI catch the perpetrator but all you will get is another experience of fear and helplessness. For you as an adult you will be activating your stress response system each time you watch it—and this will not help you create a calming environment for your kids or anyone around you. Television is problematic for children for different reasons.  Because they are more reliant on imagination and fantasy they may not understand that what is being shown repeated footage—they may believe that it is continuing to happen.

Second: Trauma shatters our experience of safety so we all seek some reassurance that our loved ones are okay, and we want to believe that this will never happen to us. While you can’t promise them that nothing bad will ever happen to you or to them, you can reassure them that you will do everything in your power to protect yourselves and them. You can say that there are bad people in the world who do harm to people, but that most of the people in the world aren’t like that. You can talk about all of the people who helped the people who were hurt: the policemen, the nurses, the doctors, the men and women of the national guard, the FBI and law enforcement. You can talk about how quickly people helped. You help the children see that in bad situations people can help.

Third: Trauma shatters our sense of trust and stability. The antidote to this is to attend to your routines. Breakfast, lunch, dinner. Bath, books, bedtime. Consistent routine help all people, not just children, feel more solid and secure. If trauma is about being caught off guard and thrust into the unknowable, familiar and nurturing routine help us feel more contained and safe. It can be tempting to let them slide and you may get more push back to the usual routine. Don’t give in if you can help it. Stick to the routine. Let them cry. Hug them tighter. And the routines apply to us as adults too—go to work, attend your meetings, keep up with the routines and rituals of your life.

Fourth: The hallmark of trauma is helplessness. At the moment of trauma we are rendered helpless to protect ourselves and others. Often this experience of helplessness is the most significant symptom. One of the greatest antidotes to trauma and the experience of helplessness is to help. Be active. Reach out. Especially for children it can be very healing to be able to do something to help. I know most people think, “What can children do?” But they can do a lot. In response to the actual traumatic event they can draw or paint pictures for the victims and you can mail them to the hospitals near the tragedy—or for the nurses and doctors and physical therapists or counselors who will work with the victims Or for the firefighters or police officers. Or for the other students and professors at the school. There isn’t a teacher or a police officer in the world who isn’t moved by a thank you card painted by a child. It helps your child feel better and it reinforces for the helpers their passion for what they do.

Or, you could look around your world and think about the people who need help closer to home? Who might need a picture, or cookies, or a song? What relative haven’t you connected with in a while?

Which brings me to my last and Fifth point that can help all of us. True to Martin Luther King Jr.’s words—only light and love can drive out the darkness and hate. This week we experienced this darkness again, and once again we all need to work together to bring in the light.  Let’s resolve each day to bring a little more light and a little more love: smile more, let the person in front of you pull in to traffic, pay someone’s toll or coffee, offer to get up and let someone who looks tired sit down, bring dinner to a friend or neighbor in need, call your pastor or minister and ask of there is someone who could use a little more support this week, plant a few more flowers. As a Girl Scout we were always taught to leave a place cleaner than we found it, and perhaps more now than ever we need the corollary—to leave a place ‘lighter’ or ‘more loving’ than we found it. Talk to each other. Reach out.

© 2015 Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD

When your teen is living with trauma

Over the past few weeks I have heard too many stories of friends and classmates whose teenage children are living with trauma: teens who have classmates who have committed suicide or been murdered, experienced tragic family deaths, or family or community violence.

Many of the parents have reached out to their communities and other parents looking for resources about how to help their children or the children in their lives.

What is Trauma?

Let me first say that I am using the word ‘trauma’ as an umbrella term for the overwhelming events that can affect someone. I am not defining what is ‘traumatic’—though a working definition is that it is an experience or event that overwhelms your capacities to depend upon or protect yourself. The hallmarks of trauma are feelings of terror, horror and helplessness.

The body and mind have a specific set of responses to acute trauma to help you survive. When a traumatic event happens once, as in a car accident or a gunshot wound, the normal system of psychological defenses is temporarily overwhelmed. Like water breaking through a levee during a great flood, your body is flooded with adrenaline in such large amounts that the system actually builds new receptors to take in that extra adrenaline. When the adrenaline levels recede, the extra receptors create an ultra-sensitive environment where the smallest amount of adrenaline is immediately picked up by the brain and nervous system—producing what is known as the ‘startle response.’ While typically in Emotional Geographic I often address long term trauma, in this post I am specifically addressing a shorter term or acute trauma. 

For the purpose of this discussion any major blow to your teen’s experience of safety or constancy can be considered traumatic—there is no need for a litmus test. If you are witnessing them having a hard time or they are saying they are having a hard time—that’s enough.

How long will my teenager be affected?

Trauma affects everyone differently—there’s no ‘one-size-fits-all’ response because trauma affects you differently based on how you were before it hit: what level of stress you were under, your health, your stage of development, previous experience of trauma and the resources you have available to you.  Most parents want to know—“How long will my child be affected?” And that is a difficult question to answer. If you were in a car accident—there would be no ‘simple’ answer to, “How long will it take to recover?’ It would depend on how bad the accident was and how you were doing before the accident. If you were perfectly healthy and the accident wasn’t too bad, the recovery might be relatively quick. If you had just gotten out of the hospital from surgery, or had a previous traumatic brain injury then recovery could be months, or even years. Trauma is like a car accident for the emotional being. It is something that slams our emotions, our resources, our world-view, beliefs, and values. When it hits it can shatter our belief in relationships, trust, safety and ourselves. It is an invisible, internal wound. And it takes time, patience and caring to heal.

First Steps for Healing

Parents need to take care of themselves.

How are you? As their parent or other supportive adult in their lives, how are you doing with the trauma that occurred? In order to help your child, it’s important that you have some solid footing yourself. What do you know about the situation? How are you managing your stress? Who is supporting you? Before you help your child—make sure you have support for yourself. Make sure you are leaning on other adults in your life so that you feel as solid as possible.

Re-establish Safety.

Since one of the biggest casualties of trauma is safety—re-establishing safety is the first priority. And when I talk about safety what I am talking about is the feeling of safety that is created by routine and constancy. I am talking about safety in the most mundane way.  I am talking about the simple routines of a day: breakfast, school, sports or work, homework, dinner, bedtime. A traumatic event knocks the physical and emotional systems and they need to be taken care of. The very nature of trauma is that it catches you off-guard so it is important to create a schedule that feels predictable. Your teen will need rest, food, sleep, and an uncluttered schedule for a while. You may need to make their schedule lighter depending on their level of stress: not attending all of their scheduled appointments for a few days, leaving school early. These accommodations probably wouldn’t need to last very long. You know your child—you will know when they are back on their feet. But what if they can’t eat or sleep? I know that trauma can interfere with appetite and sleep, but you will need to do the best you can. Foods and liquids that the teen finds soothing and comforting initially—and then just your family’s typical food.

Regression is Normal

Trauma can and often does cause regression: teenagers may want to be closer to you than they did before, may need their stuffed animals again, may argue with you the way they did when they were younger. They may be more afraid of strangers or they may have a harder time separating from you. Transition times (leaving for school, coming home from school and going to bed) are more likely to be stressful. You may not have to do anything differently, but it can be helpful just to be aware of it. The main thing is—these shifts are a normal response to trauma. It is not unusual for any of us to slide back when we are under severe stress and your teen is no different. Growth and development take a lot of energy. We slide back to an earlier state so that we don't have to work so hard--we can use our energy for healing. Don't worry--this is temporary. When your teen starts to feel better she or he will begin to shift back. 

Turn off the TV or Media

When really traumatic things happen, there can be a lot of talk about it—at school, from family, on TV, on social media. While it is important to be able to talk about it if they want to, it is also important to be able to have a break from it too. If the trauma that happened is getting a lot of media attention—turn off the TV and limit the computer to homework. You already know what happened—you don’t have to relive it over and over. Repeating the trauma by watching again and again isn’t helpful. 

Breaks from the Trauma can Help

Healing and grieving is really an intermittent process—it can hit hard for a while, like a bad storm, and then it can recede. Sometimes, you just need to be able to take cover from it and watch a whole season of the Gilmore Girls or Friday Night Lights. Sometimes you just need to distract yourself from the bad things that have happened so that your brain and heart can have a rest. It’s okay. It’s not denying it happened—it’s taking a break so that healing can happen. It’s okay not to talk about it. Sometimes spending time with people who haven’t been affected by the situation can give some respite from it. Everyone will find different ways to take a break from it, but the important thing is to get a rest from it when you can.

Things that can support healing over time

1. Go back to the things you were doing before:

The good news is that there are so many things that support healing and many of them were part of your life before the trauma hit. Any activity that helps you stay physically active will help your whole system feel better: sports, walking, gardening, dancing. Connecting with communities who love and support you: family, neighbors, religious communities, sports teams, clubs. Your teen may not want to tell everyone what happened, or want to talk about it with them, but you can coach your teen to tell people that she or he has been having a hard time, or that something difficult has happened and they could use more support.

2. Write a letter that you can’t send.

For teens who have lost friends or classmates or loved ones it can be hard to feel like they can’t say good bye. Sometimes writing a letter to the person to say goodbye can help them connect their thoughts and feelings about the situation—they may find they are sad, or angry or confused. They can share this letter with you, with a counselor or with another trusted adult.

3. Give back.

Since trauma can make you feel helpless, one of the most healing things can be to feel helpful or useful. Once your teen is feeling more sturdy and is back to a more normal routine—they can take their experience and turn it toward the world in a helpful way: they can support a cause that their friend or classmate supported, they can raise awareness about suicide or family violence by raising money or volunteering, they can find out ways to create a stronger culture of safety at school or in their communities.

How will I know if my child needs more help?

If the lack of sleep or lack of eating goes past a week, contact your child's primary care doctor to rule out any medical issues that may also be complicating the healing process. In terms of knowing when to worry: I have found that when parents are really worried there is often good reason. It can never hurt for you to talk to a professional counselor or physician about your concerns. If the school is offering counseling about the event, talk to them about your concerns. You can work with the counselor to decide whether your teen could benefit from counseling. 

Will this affect them forever?

Yes it will, but probably not in the way you imagine. Most parents worry that their child will be scarred or harmed from the trauma—and that’s a realistic worry—but the truth is that it’s in life’s most difficult moments we also get to see a lot of life’s most amazing moments. This is a huge and difficult thing for your child, but the thing that they will take with them more than anything won’t be the tragic event, but how they were or weren’t supported in the aftermath of it. You and your community have the opportunity to help your teen see that in really difficult situations people can come together to support each other and heal. That healing takes patience, love and time. They can learn that people will stick with them, even when it is hard for them.  And they can learn what strength and resilience looks like: that we can make change in the face of terrible tragedies and do what we can to create communities of safety and health.

(All of these things will help adults too).

© 2015 Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD 

Other Blog posts that might help:

For younger children you can read this blog post I wrote about trauma following the Boston Marathon Bombing

Need to find a therapist. This blog post may help.

Understanding the Need for Slow Healing days.

Understanding that Healing takes Courage.

Further Reading:

 

 

 

 

 

Parent's Corner: The Parent Achievement Trap

When I was in kindergarten, if I did a good job on my worksheet, I got a pumpkin sticker. I loved those pumpkin stickers. I wanted a sticker on everything I did.

Achievement is one the three main sources of motivation according to the psychologist McClelland.* Achievement is the need to do better than you did before, the need to master skills, the desire to be the best you can be. It is a great source of motivation and can be a great strength: it can help you learn things and do things. It can help you persevere when the learning curve is hard. Honestly, it can be pretty addictive. Yes, you start off small with pumpkin stickers as the gateway drug, but pretty soon you are learning languages, mastering scales in music and getting good grades—you are hooked, with each achievement giving you the hit you are looking for. If I were to be really honest, I would have to admit that I am always jonesing for that pumpkin sticker.

But the problem with achievement is that like all strengths—when you overuse them—they kick you in the pants. Your strength—achievement--actually becomes your weakness. Achievement becomes your trap.

Achievement works for a lot of things. But it doesn’t work for everything. It works great for things that are in your control—and for things that you can see, hear or touch. For example, if I want to organize my pantry—I have control over how fast or slow I want to do it—and when it’s done I can stand back and take pride in the accomplishment. I can give myself a pumpkin sticker. But achievement is much more complicated when something has a timeline of its own—like growing vegetables or flowers. I can plan my perennial border based on colors and what will bloom with what in my typical achievement mode, but Mother Nature rarely cooperates with me. This year, due to the temperature and precipitation, the grape hyacinth that were supposed to bloom with the daffodils waited an extra month and bloomed instead with the hardy geraniums. It was still pretty, but not what I had planned. Similarly, when I plant corn, I can do everything I can to support its growth, but it’s going to take between 60-80 days to get an ear of corn. I can’t just work harder, or put in more effort to get it to produce corn in a week.

One trait of humans is that whenever we run in to hardship and what we are doing isn’t working, we don’t stop doing that thing. No, instead we typically do that thing harder. It always makes me think of the times when I was younger and I locked my keys in my car (when you could still do that) and I could see them in there, and see that the locks were down and yet I would pull on the car handles anyway, hoping that maybe this time, when I pulled the door handle the car would open.

And achievement is one of those things that even when it isn’t working anymore, we do it harder, because achievement oriented people believe in hard work and “Hey, it’s always worked for me before, right?!”

My first clinical internship as a therapist was at a residential treatment facility—I would be doing individual, group and family therapy. And I met with my supervisor, Ann, eager (maybe even overeager) to do a great job. But after our first conversation, Ann had some paradoxical advice. She said, “I want you to get a ‘B’ in this internship. I am sure I looked at her like she had 2 heads. It was the first semester of graduate school and I was still trying to get in to the doctoral program. Anything less than an 'A' was out of the question. In fact, had there been a grade higher than an “A”-- I wanted it. Like all achievement oriented people, I had the belief that an “A” was good and meant your life would turn out the way you planned. And anything less than that was bad and meant that you would automatically go from graduate school to being homeless on the Boston Common, pushing a shopping cart and talking to streetlamps. Achievement people have no belief in a middle ground.

But Ann was absolutely right. You actually can’t get an “A” at helping other people. You can’t work harder to make other people grow, or heal, or develop. You can’t do more—because actually—all of the doing belongs to the other person. You can put effort in to creating a good environment for growth and learning, much like you can when you are growing vegetables—but you can’t put your effort into someone else’s growth. It isn't actually about you at all.

This is an incredibly hard lesson, and one you typically refuse to believe at first. Like Robin Williams talking about how he feared that when he stopped using drugs and alcohol, that he would no longer be funny—I feared that if I gave up achievement, my wonderdrug, there was no possibility of success.

Learning this was one of the most important things I came to learn as a therapist. I had compassion, I had hope, I understood the underpinnings of change. But I had to learn the patience of being, the ability to sit and witness another’s growth, struggle, and development—without the ability to be the one doing something. Really, I had to learn to trust in other powers in the world besides my own effort—to trust in the power of growth and development, to trust in the power of relationships and groups and communities, to trust in a power greater than myself.

And in working with parents I have come to see that getting out of the achievement trap is as difficult for many parents as it was for me as a therapist. High achievement parents want to parent well (okay maybe even perfectly), you want your children to be happy and successful, and you want to be able to use your strength—your achievement—to make it all happen.

And it doesn’t work. Because parenting doesn’t lend itself to achievement. In parenting you have to dance with development and personality and whatever happens that day. You have to dance with their decision to wear pink and orange because they are choosing to match the butterflies to the flowers, not the colors to each other. It’s Improv, not Shakespeare in the Park. In parenting you get to create the environment—and you can use your achievement oriented energy to learn about learning or development or attachment. But what will actually create it is letting go. Believing in something bigger than yourself. Believing in something bigger than your kids.

© Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD 2015

*The other two are affiliation and power. You can be motivated by affiliation, by being connected to others as a way to get things done as a great team player. Or you can be motivated by power: either personalized (moving up the corporate ladder and gain new titles and influence) or socialized power—gaining influence for a greater good. And probably some mix of the three, with one taking precedence when you are stressed