The significance of trauma in work with the parents of severely disturbed children, and its implications for work with parents in general

Abstract

Living with disturbed children is seen as traumatizing to vulnerable parents, who identify their disturbed child with trauma so that their parental functioning is disrupted and parenting capacities lost or impaired. This paper links Tischler's thoughts on work with the parents of psychotic and autistic children with more recent work by Garland on the impact of trauma on psychic function in adults, suggesting that the personal disaster of having and living with such children is as traumatizing as a major public one. Those who undertake work with parents need to be sensitive to their impact on parents who may feel further traumatized rather than supported. It is suggested that an understanding of post-traumatic stress phenomena may increase the sensitivity of the child psychotherapist to these hypervigilant parents who so quickly feel persecuted. Commitment to work with parents often needs to be long-term. Well-established trust allows the worker to move between levels in the work, from that of giving support and advice around specific difficulties to more truly analytic work with individual parents or couples in which they may come to understand how some of their own history may be projected into the vulnerable child.

Key Words:

• Parents of autistic
• psychotic and atypical children
• trauma
• post-traumatic stress
• strain trauma
• parenting capacities
• parent-work
• parent psychotherapy