Secondary Trauma

[misspollysdolly]

We have just started seeing a therapist, specifically specialising in attachment theory and working with looked after/adopted children/families. She spent two months working with DD doing specific Life Story Work which was very helpful for DD and therefore for us as a family. She is now spending some time with DH and myself addressing our Secondary Trauma, which I feel (for myself at least) is pretty severe.

We had a first session on Tuesday and I spent most of the time crying. I am finding it hard to reflect on the session and feel a bit sad and hopeless about the situation. She says that secondary trauma/carer fatigue can be helped and healed, but I am feeling particularly hopeless and emotionally struggling with DD. How can I be helped and healed when DD's attachment stuff is so present all the time...?

We've had her nearly 8 years and I think we have been being ground down and ground down for all of that time. I love our therapist for being there to help rebuild some of that which has been ground down, but it is the hopelessness that is so crippling. I think my feelings are not helped by my being pregnant with our third birth child. Sorry for the long post, but I just wondered if anyone has either had therpay specifically for secondary trauma or whether my feelings resonate at all. Above all just wanted to share. MPD

MPD, I don't have any relevant experience, but am absolutely here to listen and talk. I am so very, very sorry you are going through this.

Would it help to tell us more about what daily life is like for your family?

I have had counselling (posted a bit about it in December i think) and am having my last session in April. I just couldn't deal with everything with no help for me any more. Both girls have attachment problems (though not disorder) but they do both have complex PTSD which is so hard. The hardest thing is disclosures, and eventually yes, being ground down by it resonates so much! A wake up call was when i got more disclosures one night, and I suddenly felt so hemmed in and claustrophobic and overwhelmed with hateful feelings - I found myself almost unable to respond the way she needed me to respond - be empathetic and calm and relaxed as possible. It just made me realize how much it was affecting me (also lack of sleep because i lay awake thnking about it) and so i asked or help

I know that i have had counselling for a different reason to you, but it has helped, and more so as the months have gone on. I felt an immediate benefit just from sharing and talking with someone who understood, but longer term i feel more relaxed and i am sleeping better, i have lost the nightmares, and I am able to deal with more disclosures without the same raction I was having. Yes, it's still very hard, but when i look back at before I am amzed at how well it's gone

I am so sorry you are going through this. It is so hard to see any way out after a few moths- and you have been ground down for years! I am here to chat if you need to :)

Lika xx

misspollysdolly i can fully understand where you are coming from. My husband and I are having counselling with Barnardos for secondary trauma. My dd has, they say, attachment disorder and I am finding it so hard to deal with. I feel like I am ground down to. She has been with us 7 years now and since then i have had 3 birth children so i am finding it extremely difficult to deal with her constant behaviour as well as find time for the others.
I do also feel that my trauma is quite severe, my husband not so much, but it is me who deals with her constant detachment on a daily basis. It feels like a thankless task. You put everything into bringing them up and get nothing in return..no 'i love you mummy' or anything. It is so difficult to deal with and the guilt that i feel as her mother is horrendous. 'why can i not let it go and love her like the rest' It's awful. I had to fight alone for a councillor as social work got involved when i asked for help and it got messy. made us feel even worse.
I hope you manage to work through this but please if you wana chat..i'm here and with you

I have also had some counselling for my secondary trauma and it really helped me to realise that I have always done my very best and I really couldn't have done any more and helped me to feel less guilty. I am still on ADs as well.

It really grinds you down, dealing with your child's trauma, day after day, year after year. You are not alone and I can totally empathise and sympathise. Your feelings more than resonate.

Thank you all so much for your replies. I have popped back to this thread everyday since Thursday, but either because of time or more specifically just not really knowing where to start, it has taken me until now to write anything in response. Though I also understand that this in itself can be part of having secondary trauma (?) - not knowing how to reach out, claim or express your own feelings so I guess that might be a part of it. I have tried to think about how to describe the stuff that goes on in our household because of DD and find it is so hard since a lot of her behaviour is very subtle - this in itself adds to the not being able to express what it's like to people.

The session with the therapist last week and the fairly off the cuff decision to post on here has had one positive effect of encouraging DH and myself to chat a bit. In the course of this conversation I boiled down the main stresses of caring for DD to the following:

• At the very core of her being, DD is not able to really properly trust us. Parenting her therefore for the last 8 years and knowing ultimately that this is very unlikely to change is hard, relentless, undermining of everything that you aim for as a parent, and just really really sad. The effort to be trustworthy all the time, yet still be met with deep-seated mistrust is just a relentless grind.

• Despite the lack of trust, DD also has a deep-seated need to be loved and to always always always be connecting and reconnecting with us. She finds quiet or 'slow' spaces and times extremely difficult and must fill them with activity or relentless talking/waffling/asking questions (often about repetetive subjects or hard, impossible to answer or adoption related issues). She wants to know all the time what we are doing. In response we actually often choose to withhold information from her, which I realise probably compounds all the trust type issues, but at least allows me/us to feel that there are some things in life that we own privately, even only for a bit. The need to reconnect extends to her calling good morning to me seconds after I have put a foot out of bed in the morning from wherever she is in the house, and having to be the first to say hello to DH even before both feet are through the front door after work in the evening. This feels like such an intrusion to my/our lives, and you start to dread those most. Anticipating these tiny miniscule yet highly controlling/connecting behaviours becomes a thing bound up in dread and anger for me.

• All this leads to me anticipating all her difficult behaviour and then being completely on the defensive all the time, and it is this alone that has alerted me to how bad our secondary trauma has got. I find everything she says a does feels threatening to my very core. A question about what's for tea can easily be met by me questioning why she is asking. I have lost the ability to interact with her in a seemingly normal way.

At the core of how I am feeling at the moment is a sense of anger/sadness/grief that DD has just complicated our whole lives. Everything and every aspect of our relationship feels complicated. From the mundane to the massive it is complex and I sometimes just don;t want it to be complex. All this alongside having two birth children (and pregnant with another) with whom life does not feel complicated. It sometimes feels like such a stark difference - and even that in itself is complex. The fact that I'm even making that comparison or noticing a different makes it all complicated. and at the end of the day I am tired and my brain is too worn out to do complicated. As a result the main emotion that I/we connect with in relation to DD is anger. Then huge, enormous, stonking great guilt. I feel so responsible for DD's self-esteem and for the damage I am inevitably doing to it, whilst always trying to safeguard it at the cost (it seems) of my own life, well-being and mental health.

It just feels so hard at the moment. I feel like I am drowning in something thick and viscous and it would be easier to just hang here in it rather than try to fight against it and be consumed by it. I cannot see how this can ever be made better...but I like and trust our therapist and for the sake of all our children I/we must get some help.

It is good to know that I am not alone though I hope I have not been too candid in my post. It's a bit all or nothing with me tbh - it can be held below the surface or else it all comes flowing out. Thanks again. MPD

You both make so much sense to me. Especially MPD's bit about about the defensiveness I can't seem to help but feel when I wake up every morning no matter how hard I try to start each day fresh and forget about yesterday's troubles. Things are so much better here though now that we have respite. Do you get any respite, MPD?

Thanks for getting in touch. I definitely identify with the 'ever-deteriorating cycle' maryz and I also try to start each day with a clean slate, bythesea - but I think this is the feature of where we are now with this whole thing - we've almost lost the ability to do that and everyday feels like it's 'stacked against us' with the build up of grief, sadness and challenging behaviour. Hence seeking help. I actually think we have always had these struggles - the first six months for example were absolute hell and I'm not wholly convinced that we (DH and I) really recovered from that. We have no formal respite, no. But then most people meeting DD wouldn't think there was anything untoward going on. It's only when people get very close to us or spend extended time with us do they notice the subtleties, so it has never seemed right to seek out any organised respite. Since the first summer we have had DD she has had various amounts of childcare (two days per week with a childminder initially) or holiday clubs, which I know in my own mind feel like respite, and I do sign her up for (for example) a week's Guide camp, school camp or similar. These feel like respite and when DD is away, we feel and acknowledge how much more relaxed we are and how much more our parenting is relaxed. Trouble is, I start to dread her return which makes me feel like a really horrible person . It is good to know that I am not alone with these feelings, but it feels like a fairly tough road to walk, emotionally. MPD

Oh, and in addition, I was cheered by maryz talking about the relationships between siblings. While it messes with my head sometimes (often), having had the boys since DD I believe to have been the best thing for DD really. There births and their relationships with her have totally cemented her into our family. They are the only people in the world with who there are absolutely no complications or pretentions - she is simply their sister and they are simply her brothers and neither party ever questions this. The boys do love her and tolerate (mostly) her bossy, domineering behaviour. That said DS1 (who is 5 and a half) has begun to comment when DD isout for the day or away that 'we can now have a nice day because DD is away'...etc, so I think her behaviour does impact on him too sometimes. I am never certain whether it is this simple or whether he picks up on our more relaxed parenting without DD - probably a bit of both... MPD