SUPPORTING FAMILIES WITH CHILDREN FROM TRAUMA

ABOUT THE BOOK

Supporting Families With Children From Trauma

Most parents today might say the ability to deal with the various personalities is the hardest part of being a family. However, families with children who have suffered trauma would say nothing else can compare with the hardships and hindrances they endure. Robin Lynn knows the struggle both personally and professionally. A Houston area counselor, she says, “This writing creates a simple guidebook for anyone struggling with how to support families dealing with someone in trauma or post-trauma circumstances. This works whether you, like me, started life sheltered or not. I believe it is my ethical duty as a therapist to assimilate information and strategies to those needed support teams for the families with children in trauma. Simply, therapy sessions aren’t enough to provide the support they need. Families need help in the trenches far more than a one-hour session, once or twice a week. They need an understanding, educated team to lock arms with them.”

An Inside look

An excerpt from Chapter 1

Leading experts in the medical field have done a broad array of research on the power of the brain and the influence and devastation that occurs in the brain of a person who experiences trauma, especially childhood trauma. Whether it is physical, mental, or emotional, the brain is deeply impacted. It can be a one-time severe experience of something that happens to them or in front of them that creates a damage point in their development. It can also be ongoing trauma that develops patterns in the brain that divide the working connectors within the intended pathways of the healthy brain.
Either way, the outcome creates a physical change within the brain, which, without therapy and deep work, creates a trauma brain that assaults the way a person reacts and responds. Trauma does not show mercy to those it targets.
Children, in particular, are deeply affected not only on an emotional level, but the biological make-up of the brain is severely impacted. As a result, a multitude of behaviors and disorders can result as the brain is literally changed by the trauma. This forces a disconnect of the child’s functionality, logic, reasoning, and emotional control. The lasting effects of trauma can create dysfunction throughout a lifetime. Depending on the severity, the brain can actually be completely rewired and a person can struggle with emotional regulation, processing, and decision-making, and certainly their trauma response of fight, flight, or freeze. The response system can continue to be overzealous and overactive, creating situations of illogical behavior to those who observe, yet the response makes the trauma-experienced person feel somehow “safe.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Robin Lynn

Robin Lynn, author of Supporting Families With Children From Trauma, is a veteran in the field of trauma from both a personal and professional standpoint. She combines those perspectives to create simple, yet empowering awareness for families. Having raised a combination of biological and adopted children, her perspective concerning how a child’s trauma affects the entire family finds balance by her field of expertise, where she has made it a career to grow and support others.
Robin is an international trainer in counseling and education, with a background as a special education teacher with a specialty in autism. She is also a nationally certified school counselor, and a licensed professional counselor. She does work in the states and oversees, using her experiences and expertise to empower others who try to
overcome obstacles.