Piglet sidled up to Pooh from behind.  "POOH!" he whispered.  "Yes Piglet?"  "Nothing" said piglet, taking Pooh's paw.  "I just wanted to be sure of you."

Introduction

A child's behaviour is not learned in isolation.  Children spend most time in their homes, and this is where they are most influenced.  Some families have suffered from the same debilitating symptoms for generations, or through continuous breakdowns, because the contribution of the child-caregiver relationship has not been adequately assessed and utilized.

No one needs prerequisite parenting skills to become a caregiver.  On the contrary many caregivers may not understand how the past contributes to their relationship with the child.  To earn the trust of children who have had their trust shattered many times in profound ways, adults must prove that change is possible by changing the way that they meet their child's needs.   Many of us caregivers cannot deal with the situation of our children without first understanding the meaning we've found in our past, and present life experiences, and showing our changes to our children.  When we understand ourselves and build coping skills, we will have the energy and awareness to make the next step to guide our children through the same process.

With this connection made between us as a facilitator of strategies and emotional support, empowerment is found.  The consistency of an emotional and physical bond with us - the caregiver - is the best way to give a child a chance to develop healthy self worth and a bright future.  We can only achieve this goal by being committed as an involved caregiver.  For children, the consistency provided by parents working on the same therapeutic activities means that they are being guided as they need to be in all aspects of life.

   TOOLS: When are the children of a BPD parent at risk?

Since we have discussed the ideas of when the child might be at risk, I would like to look at some ways to help our children cope with traumas in their lives.

"A child's life is like a piece of paper on which every person leaves a mark."

-- Robert A. Heinlein

"Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them."

-- James Arthur Baldwin

In this workshop, I would like to cover some of the following areas:

• Traumatic events that children might experience

• What are some signs of distress to look for in our children?

• Have you experienced any of the same events as your child - either as a child yourself or as an adult (perhaps during your relationship with a BPD SO? Your relationship with your own BPD parent?)

• What tools do we as adults have at our disposal in order to process these events differently than our children? Are there similar tools we can use for our children? Different ones?

• What are some basic ways we can help children exposed to trauma?

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B&W  xoxox 

I'm so glad you've jumped in!  xoxox


Would you care to share any examples of the traumas you faced? How have they affected your parenting style?

I would like to start by gathering list of 'traumatic' events.  What makes these events traumatic?

What are some  that we can look for to tell if a child is experiencing distress or trauma?

I can understand how traumatic events "leave marks". It's part of our natural way to store those memories and an attempt by our brain to help protect us. A traumatic event will trigger our nervous system and benchmark the event in our mind, so that we are aware in the future.  

It's like when I touch a hot stove and burn my finger, the memory is stored so I don't do it again.  I may be afraid the next time I see a stove, but once I'm able to assure myself that I can protect myself from a burned finger by not touching that stove, my fear will eventually subside. It's the natural and healthy process of how our brains are wired to help keep us safe.

Unfortunately, sometimes as children, when a single event is of great measure (even if only to the child) or perhaps ongoing, that storing of the event(s) can become trapped into our nervous system.  It's where you'll see a great deal of the PTSD symptoms in adolescence and adulthood (American Pyschiatric Association):

Re-experiencing the traumatic event

• Intrusive, upsetting memories of the event



• Flashbacks (acting or feeling like the event is happening again)



• Nightmares (either of the event or of other frightening things)



• Feelings of intense distress when reminded of the trauma



• Intense physical reactions to reminders of the event (e.g. pounding heart, rapid breathing, nausea, muscle tension, sweating)

PTSD symptoms of avoidance and emotional numbing

• Avoiding activities, places, thoughts, or feelings that remind you of the trauma



• Inability to remember important aspects of the trauma



• Loss of interest in activities and life in general



• Feeling detached from others and emotionally numb



• Sense of a limited future (you don’t expect to live a normal life span, get married, have a career)

PTSD symptoms of increased arousal

• Difficulty falling or staying asleep



• Irritability or outbursts of anger



• Difficulty concentrating



• Hypervigilance (on constant “red alert”)



• Feeling jumpy and easily startled

Other common symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder

• Anger and irritability



• Guilt, shame, or self-blame



• Substance abuse



• Depression and hopelessness



• Suicidal thoughts and feelings



• Feeling alienated and alone



• Feelings of mistrust and betrayal



• Headaches, stomach problems, chest pain

I'll explain one of my oldest SD's traumatic events and share her experience.

At 10 years old, she witnessed her mom being assaulted by a boyfriend in the front of the car.  The boyfriend took the keys from the ignition and walked into his house and her mom followed while SD10 stayed in the car with her two younger sisters.  She quickly called her dad who kept her on the phone and both the police and Dad came to rectify the circumstances which included the girls being removed from the situation along with a restraining order.

Her coping skills for the next few weeks involved getting up at night to make sure the doors were locked. She felt afraid that he would come back. She felt better when she could double check.

One of the long term affects have been that she hates the smell of campfires. It reminds her of the boyfriend because they went camping a lot.

When we saw the boyfriend in a Walmart a couple months ago, she grabbed my arm and gasped like she had seen a ghost. She tugged at me and begged me to go the other way and we did.  I reminded her that she doesn't have to worry about him anymore and she agreed but wanted to excercise her right to stay away from him.  I made light of it with her and her sisters like we were covert spy operatives ducking in and out of aisles. We giggled as the sound of our flip flops hardly made us unnoticable.

It's an experience I'm sure she will carry with her for her lifetime.  She felt helpless in that moment and very afraid. In our talks, I remind her how proud I am that she took care of herself (and her sisters!) and I think she feels she had a sense of doing the right thing and gaining back her power.  She knows she's safe now and the boyfriend is gone.  She holds him responsible and knows that she did everything she could and none of it was her fault.

Next step is to go camping with our family and have lots of fun. Maybe create new memories to get rid of that trigger of when she smells a campfire.  xoxo

~DreamGirl

DG ~ those are excellent examples of   we can be on the lookout for. 


What we as adults have in our arsenal is the ability to look at our own past and present in order to help predict our future.  Children are focused on the present.

When we are stuck in traffic in rush hour, we all have our thoughts that go through our heads... ."Geez... .not again." "I was really hoping I'd miss rush hour today."

If you are stuck in that traffic with children who haven't experienced it before, what happens? "What's going on?" "Are we there yet?"

We know that we are stuck in traffic. We also know that eventually we will get out of it. Just like we've done every day for how long?  We know that we might be a little late, but eventually we'll get there. Because our past has told us that. It will all be okay and we'll eventually get out of the traffic.

But children don't know that. They might be thinking "Is there an accident?" "What's going on?" "Should I be worried?"

They might also be looking at us for cues on how to react.  If we are stressed out (even though we know we'll be okay), then the child might get stressed.  If we are getting angry, then the child might become scared. 

They have no past experience to draw on so that they know it will be okay in 10 or 15 minutes.

But if they are in the car with us next week and the same thing happens, what might they be saying or thinking? "Is this going to be the same thing as last week?" "Oh geez... .stuck in traffic again! We are always stuck in traffic!"

And right now your SD is 'stuck' on what her brain knows about campfires.  The smell of them remind her of something bad.  I think by planning this outing, you are doing something so important!  xoxo  And now she will be able to smell a campfire and she can remember that it also goes with s'mores and stories and family fun.  xoxox

I am going to copy and paste from a post I made on Black & White's workshop - TOOLS: Mindfulness for children under stress

Common stress indicators for kids--signals that kids need more coping tools or other help

Some examples of recognized trauma events

Abandonment

Rejection

Witnessing violence

Incest

Bodily Injury

Death

Witnessing death

Family Disaster

World disaster

Multiple traumas

Molestation

Sexual abuse

Neglect

Verbal Abuse

Physical abuse

**Perceived threat to the life of a Primary Caregiver - either through an accident/illness or threatening the child "I'm going to send you away to live with strangers!"

Stressful events that can also be trauma

Substance abuse

Parental separation

Sibling loss

Breakdown of relationship

Life threatening illness

Attachment difficulties resulting from behaviour of a parent or inconsistent parenting (eg due to access visits being limited by one parent or the other) and parental alienation

*********************

Has anyone experienced any of these occurrances in their lives? Have any of our children experienced any of these things?  Can you describe the event and the impact it had on your child/still has on your child?

If it happened to you - what was your coping mechanism? Have you been able to heal from it?

I think your example is an excellent example of how our own experiences and messages that we've received in our past have the ability to impact our children either positively or negatively. 

I also think that it improved your attunement with your daughter.  And that is a key element in helping our children through traumas that they face.

The bond between the parent or caregiver and the child is the most profound and emotional of all relationships.  There aren't many other relationships that are capable of emitting such intense emotions that we feel with our parents and/or children.  And the relationships are built through connections which give meaning to our experiences.  And these experiences give us our sense of self and how we relate to the world and people around us.

Emotional connections are established in so many ways and some of those ways are through story-telling, comforting and showing appreciation and understanding for the child's point of view.

When these experience increase, so does the attunement between the parent and child.  When traumatic events occur, the level of attunement can be weakened, causing a child's inability to emotionally gather themselves and carry on.  However, individuals have an inherent need to meaningfully attach to each other, and have the capacity to reconnect despite difficult circumstances.

Dozier et al 2001; Siegel & Hartell, 2003

In your case, all these instances and experiences you share like this will be valuable to your daughter when she is faced with some form of trauma later. It's like putting money in the bank for a rainy day.

And this experience, if she had a parent with BPD, might have differed greatly as was the case for you.  In turn you are changing your daughters thoughts and future approach to how she will resolve the same occurance in the future.

That whole experience, even if it seems trivial to some people, still creates a sense of emotional security for your daughter. 


In this instance, you are able to recognize your own symptoms of uncomfortableness with the situation and are then able to stop, think and change your thought process in order to provide a more comfortable experience for your daughter.

How have you taught yourself to recognize it and calm yourself over the years?

What are some ways we can teach ourselves to recognize the affects our own traumas have had on our thought processes?

I really like this quote!

Because I was beaten/physically/verbally/sexually abused as a child and then kidnapped by uBPDparents as an adult, I ask myself how did others see me as a child? I do know that it seemed my uBPDparents were always speaking for me and giving explanations. I recall a bloody nose that I was totally confused about and uBPDm giving the explanation that "you shouldn't have cried so hard... .look what you did... gave yourself a bloody nose" I don't think so. Then another occasion, my lip was split open and my only memory is having it stitched up. But the "explanation" I was told by uBPDparents and I believed for years is that I was jumping up and down on a metal grate over a window well!    First of all, I am not a daredevil and secondly I hate heights and I have NO recollection of me doing that. But I accepted their explanations. And obviously others accepted their explanations. Because I am a musician and did well in school (kind of nerdy), they would tell people I was "sensitive and shy". Of course, at home I was beaten, verbally abused and sexually abused. I have an aunt who for years was a social worker who she says she helped get kids away from their abusive parents. I have told her in the last 6 years that I wish she had paid closer attention to how my parents treated me and rescued me as a child. She was speechless and seemed unfathomable for her to question her older sister's behavior. Why?

So I would say to watch how the kids interact with other kids and with adults. I know I was shy around other kids and usually just had one friend that I hung out with. I only dated one guy on a blind date when I was 16 and then again not until college. My husband was the first guy I ever kissed. Yes, some serious issues because of what my parent's put me through.

I wish I had felt safe enough to tell someone that I was being hurt by my parents. But no one seems to want to believe that parents could be evil to their own flesh and blood.

Children show the impact of trauma mainly through behaviours and symptoms.  It's the child's way of trying to make sense of their perceptions. 

These behaviours can also be misunderstood.  We all have our past experiences that we carry with us.  Sometimes our own personal point of view from our own experience clouds our ability to see the message that the child is trying to get across. 

What are some ways that we can see a situation from the child's point of view as well as our own?

My son has LDs (learning disabilities).  When he was in high school the only way the school thought to deal with his disabilities (besides constantly belittling him) was to give him hours upon hours of detention (he does move slowly, no getting around that).  I saw this as legalized abuse and it stimulated my own feelings of my own abuse.   When I got so angry at the system, I was completely ineffective at dealing with them and they probably thought I was a total nutcase, at the very least a "difficult parent".  Really, they deserved the anger, but if I could have been balanced at least they would have to respond to me in kind (at least I think so - really I think the public system is pretty BPDish anyway).   

My point is that by stimulating my own issues with abuse, it was really difficult if not impossible for me to respond appropriately to what was going on and I wasn't as effective as I might have been.   (At the end I just let him stay home from school, it was the only way I could get them to stop giving him detention - I mean he is a concert violin and violist and had professional gigs at the time - and they thought the best use of his time was to sit in detention!)   OK so obviously I still have some healing to do surrounding this.

My point about this story is that my son was being traumatized.  His trauma was different than mine.  Still because I was so busy rattling my own issues I wasn't nearly as present, helpful and proactive as I might have been for him.   

LD

Thanks for this workshop!  Sorry for being so slow to respond. 

I want to call attention to a couple of resources that this site and a child therapist I see referred me to that have helped me to understand what is going on for my two SDs, ages 10 and 6.

**First, the article "How a Mother with Borderline Personality Disorder Affects Her Children" was one of the first I read that addressed empirical research on the impacts of having a borderline mom on a child.  This article can be found on this site at:

https://bpdfamily.com/bpdresources/nk_a108.htm

This article discusses the effects of BPD on kids as something that influences a child's attachment to his or her mom/parent and some possible impacts when this bonding process is damaged due to mom's mental illness and/or behaviors.  More info on this topic can be found in looking at literature related to attachment theory.

Some of the interesting tidbits I gleaned from this article are that kids of BPD moms have a higher than average rate of "dazed glares" and glance away from the parent more than the norm; that learning disabilities and cognitive dysfunction are more common amongst kids of BPD moms than the norm.  This article also provides some issues typical for different ages. 

**The child therapist I see referred me to work done by Vivienne Roseby on responses in kids to living in a high-conflict family.  My therapist provided a list entitled "chronic trauma and character structure" that identified characteristics of kids exposed to trauma versus not exposed.  Here they are:

1. Difficulties with basic trust

2. Egocentricity (others don't matter)

3. High levels of anger (often not expressed directly)

4. Emotional constriction

5. Hypervigilant

6. Rigid oversimplification (of thought and feeling)

7. Entrenched introversion (turn in, not out)

8. Compromised reality testing. 

This list was very helpful for me in attempting to understand if SD10 was exhibiting symptoms of trauma.  First, I noticed that both my SDs 10 and 6 were not very strongly exhibiting these characteristics.  However, I did notice that SD10 exhibited many of them after long periods of time with mom, or when stressed.  SD6 did not exhibit many of these characteristics, though when I first dated her dad she was very introverted and showed signs of "emotional constriction" and "difficulties with basic trust," as her pre-school teachers pointed out. 

Vivienne Roseby also co-authored a book on group therapy for kids in conflicted, violent, and separating homes titled A Safe Place to Grow that has many interesting exercises recommended for professionals to use with kids--good for ideas on how to address tricky issues with different ages of children, as well as good for understanding what kids exposed to trauma are likely to seem like. 



**I cannot find the article, but have it somewhere... .there was an interesting article that looked at factors positively correlated with children of high conflict families/divorces NOT developing problems associated with high conflict.  Some of these were:

--the child's charisma

--presence of hobbies and activities in which the child is engaged

--whether the child does well in school

--friendships with trustworthy adults other than the parents

--friendships with peers

--stability of at least one home environment

--availability of family other than parents, such as grandparents

These are all resources that have helped me to figure out when is what I am seeing likely to be related to BPD and how I can help the kids through it.  When the kids' BPD mom refused to let them continue to see a therapist, I sought a child therapist to help document what I was doing, to  give me step-parenting advice, and to help me to understand what was happening with the kids--especially to understand when the trauma is "too much."  This last bit he has not really helped with--it is so subjective.  But he has really helped me to contextualize what I am seeing in the kids and to evaluate my responses. 

In addition to some of the indicators discussed below that I have seen in the kids, this past year, SD10's health really just fell apart.  No major cause, just really low immune system, lots of infections (pneumonia, strep, staph, you name it).  Food allergies.  Lung problems.  Getting sick A LOT.  Faking sick, too.  Also, broken or sprained toes, two concussions, etc.  I felt this was a real indication of her having a very stressful time at mom's.   Most all illnesses originated at moms, UNTIL we noted that was the case in response to her mentioning that mom said all these illnesses happened at our home.  Once we mentioned, "hmm... .if that is the case, why have we taken you to the doctor on most mondays you come to our house for the last 3 months, and then you are well when you leave?"  Big mistake.  The next week, she made a habit of getting sick at our house for 3 weeks in a row. 

In addition, SD10 has learning disabilities that seem to come and go. 

I have shown some of these articles to her teachers and have been able to help them make modifications to SD10's individualized education plan so that educators know more about what is happening with her.  Also, we have continued to emphasize helping SD10 and SD6 develop consistency in other areas of their life including our home, by encouraging ongoing relationships with special adults, their grandparents, and by encouraging activities like music lessons and sports lessons and being involved in art shows and performances.  These things have really helped the girls. 

I have consistently heard that helping kids focus on future goals and dreams when in a difficult family situation can help, too.  So we encourage that in the kids.  We would anyway, but we take it more seriously.  It is hard to hear SD10 saying that she just wants to move to the state her mom wants to move to, but we still encourage her to dream all her dreams. 

SD6 seems to be doing well, needs much less from us other than just plain love and support. 

Understanding Child Traumatic Stress Brochure:

www.nctsn.org/nctsn_assets/pdfs/edu_materials/Understanding_Child_Traumatic_Stress_Brochure_9-29-05.pdf