Helping Clients With Trauma

And the different ways trauma can show up

Photo by Susan Wilkinson on Unsplash

The effects of trauma and stress on a person’s mental and physical health will be explored with two videos and an article. I will look at the impact of historical and childhood trauma, how best to explain PTSD to an adult client with childhood trauma, and how to explain historical trauma to a child or teenager. Additionally, I explore trauma from within the lens of my field in drama therapy to see the effectiveness of drama therapy on children who have experienced trauma.

Throughout my exploration, I found how damaging the effects of stress and trauma can be on a person. Stress and trauma can form in a child’s life and in different contexts. I hope that as we continue to research and learn about the effects and solutions to stress and trauma, we start adapting our medical systems to include more awareness and attentiveness to trauma in a child’s life.

In the Ted Talk with Nadine Burke Harris, she explains her exploration of a 2019 study with the CDC and Kaiser Permanente on childhood trauma’s physical and mental effects. Through their research, they crafted specific questions related to emotional, physical, and other forms of trauma. They created the Adverse Childhood Experience survey; this survey gave participants an ACE score that showed that the more points or traumatic experiences a person experienced, the more likely they were to have other health symptoms like cancer, high blood pressure, depression, and more.

The research further explained that it was not just “bad behavior” that led to this increase in health issues, but that from that trauma, the person’s actual DNA, immune systems, and brain development changed. This knowledge propelled Dr. Harris to use the ACE survey and scores to understand her patients better, which she believed would become a widespread practice.

Unfortunately, she found that not many other doctors used this research to assess their patients better. She discovered that the possibility why the issue of childhood trauma and stress is not more addressed in our medical systems is due to the struggles they might have to accept the possible trauma that they have experienced. Moreover, it makes it easier to manage when it is an issue in another community to solve but much more…