Why does my kid see all of life through a "horror" lens?

[InTriplicate]

Hi,

I wondered if I could ask for people's thoughts on a problem here?

My DS has cPTSD from surgery in infancy, and unfortunately he had an extremely hard time in secondary school, where they used horror to liven things up a lot. I didn't realise how much DS was suffering until he effectively had a nervous breakdown and I had to take him out of school.

I was told that the way to help him recover was that he had to "feel safe, and be safe" at all times and I've been absolutely on that 24/7 while we home schooled with council alternative provision.

It's been nearly two years now though, and he still sees the whole world through a sort of "horror lens". He can look at quite nice normal things and see them as horror, which terrifies him and triggers panic attacks.

It can be quite simple things like trees and shrubs, or a building, or the cover of a book that has a particular font. He says trees are weird and creepy and he can't cope with them. Holes in bread are also a problem.

Yesterday he saw a plug that had no cable coming from it and was terrified. (It was a special plug to stick a usb cable into for a phone) He often can't open the fridge and he can't go places in the house without an escort, because he is afraid.

I wondered if anybody might know what this is and how to help him?

We have been seeing a psychotherapist weekly for a whole year, and he has been seen by a paediatric psychiatrist and we have been referred on to a clinical psychologist who does EMDR. They all say we just have to keep talking and trying until we find what works.

He is getting much better at telling me what terrifies him and it is almost always things he has seen on computer screens, either at home or at school. The things at home were all computer games or youtube and he stopped both completely two years ago, but the images seem to stay with him, and not get forgotten.

He never used the computer at home without me being there watching so I know what he was doing at all times. It's just that he really liked it at the time and only later once school added to the burden it became too much in retrospect.

DS says the problem was all the horror in school and it was just all the time and it overwhelmed him totally. We have completely left the school, but the horror doesn't seem to leave him. His mind seems to have seen to much horror that it sees everything AS horror now.

He also says he still feels afraid of and controlled by the school and he says it's just really hard to recover. It's like he was exposed to so much horror there that it changed how he sees and now he sees everything as horror.

DS is ASD and started reading at 18 months, but otherwise he is pretty normal.

He has a lot of food intolerances, and exposure to the wrong food makes the MH symptoms radically worse.

We've excluded a lot of food triggers, and that helped. We haven't yet tried totally organic but with all the exclusions I think adding in that further contraint would make it very hard.

Thank you very much if you have read this far. I just wondered if anybody might have experienced the same and know what to do?

Thanks!

I really doubt he was constantly exposed to horror in school. I think it's a symptom of his autism and rather black and white thinking/issues with distinguishing fantasy and reality.

I would say that there are things that it's appropriate to be fearful of, such as horror films, and things that are not actually dangerous like shapes in trees and holes in bread. You don't have to protect him from things that aren't actually dangerous. You rationalise, normalise and expose to "safe fears" normally.

I don't understand how cptsd has led to a fear of holes in bread. Is there an element of complex anxiety disorder? Has anyone suggested medication? I am a ND psychologist and anti anxiety meds were a complete game changer for me. To find out what a calm brain feels like was a revelation.

Eg "omg that plug is weird, it's terrifying, why isn't it right? Where's the cable?"

"Oh, well, it's not surprising that you have noticed it looks different from usual plugs, but it's just a different kind of plug. It has a slot for a usb charger, here, look. They are quite common these days. It's completely ordinary and safe, you don't need to feel scared around it".

Thanks for replying. I do talk through things with him, and try to help him to tell me what he is seeing in his mind. Increasingly he is able to explain it to me and often there is a specific memory that is being triggered by whatever he has seen. It is hard for him to talk about the things and there are just so many of them. We just keep talking through each individual situation, one at a time, but it takes so long and there is so much of it.

I also sit with him while he grinds through screaming panic attacks which can really last a long time. A paediatrican said it would help if I could stand back and let him find his way in emotional regulation, so I am doing that. I sit with him, but try to let him find ways to cope with the massive emotional stuff. It is very intense for him though and his teen years are passing him by. He wants to be back with his friends but his head is wrecked.

The school thing was genuine unfortunately. I can't really go into details, but the senior folks I talked to at the school confirmed that their kids thought horror was funny and loved it all. My DS just didn't see it that way at all.

How was he exposed to horror at school? I think this maybe needs exploring a bit further.

EDMR therapy sounds like a great idea. You could also look into neurolinguistic programming - although I'm not sure if this technique is used with children.

I've not experienced trauma and I'm not neuridiverse. But my 'fight or flight' response is always on. I'm very easily startled by things and am always planning for worst case scenarios/imagining horrible things happening. It's exhausting. I have found hypnotherapy quite helpful.

I hope you find a solution.

Thanks for replying.

I can't really talk about the school stuff. I went all the way through the complaints process and the conditions of the complaints process are that I agree never to discuss my concerns on social media.

I will look up neurolinguistic programming thanks :-)

OP, along with EMDR have you considered EFT? It's more body focused and might help calm the reptilian brain which talking really doesn't.
Also, look at Matrix Birth Reimprinting to clear the trauma from surgery

I believe there can be a link between ASD and having a very strong visual memory - which can make people with ASD more prone to PTSD. This could explain why he is unable to erase these images from his mind that distressed him so much.
I’m afraid I don’t know what sort of therapy would be most suitable for helping with that, but I have several friends who have found EDMR beneficial.

The thing is with trauma and PTSD, talking to him and telling him he's safe won't actually work. It's in his fight or flight reptilian brain which takes in messages from the senses so he needs somatic body focused techniques which will bring him out of tbat
And then working on clearing the memories when he's not in that space

@SoManyDandelions actually the therapist mentioned hypnotherapy as he does that. Would it be okay to ask how that works?

One thing that I've realised is that we're never really had a proper holiday (as in time off. I don't mean travel) because things have been very hard during pre-school years and ever since starting school. I'm trying very hard this summer to have a completely peaceful holiday at home and just let him calm right down. I'm hoping that that might help.

Today he tried lying on a rug in the greenhouse in the warm and he said he felt very peaceful at the end. I thought that was good.

We had a hard time in primary because his had a lot of illness intially and we got a lot of threats in writing and he lost a lot of attendance certificates, which were a big deal in primary. Then also socialising was hard because of the ASD. I think he's just had his back to the wall for such a long time partly.

I do wonder if just keeping things calm for a long time might let him gradually come back to normal?

My 10yr old son was diagnosed last year with PTSD. He also has autism. The psychiatrist told me that people with autism are 40% more likely than neuro typical people to be left with PTSD after a trauma.

My son has slowly begun EMDR due to his young age they are taking it very slowly with him and I can already see a change. So I think EMDR really could be the way forward for your son too.

I understand about things seemingly unconnected or innocent can be deemed as a trigger for memories or flashbacks or lead into other fears developing because the exact same thing happened with my son.

How old is your son?

I mean the seeing things through a “horror” lense is classic cPTSD especially if it was early trauma.

I don’t know about academic research or the like but there are a number of books mostly written by psychologists or equivalent that tell stories about people who have had similar experiences.

not to be too blunt but these sort of experiences can be life altering and often people don’t get over them in any meaningful sense.

The boy who was raised as a dog and other stories is a book by a psychiatrist about various traumas/interruptions/deviations from normal socialisation that you might find interesting.

There are some interesting NLP techniques for forgetting things or at least lessening the power of recurring visual images which might be worth a try. They’re simple exercises and I’ve found they’ve worked for me in the past - you should find them easily by googling.

Can you do some work with him on zones of regulation?

Also I know travelling with an ASD child can be challenging, but my ASD DS loves watching gentle waves at the seaside - he find the motion and the sound really calming. Not sure if that is something you could try this holidays.

Thanks @Rowen32 and @TeaandHobnobs

This exactly the sort of thing I'm seeing.

DS has a brain like velcro for images. If we go cycling, he can tell me the number plates of all the vehicles we pass.

If we go to the book shop he can read all the titles of all the books as he walks part and process them all in his mind just as we walk.

Once he sees things he kind of can't unsee them.

He also can read languages that he has never seen before, even if he doesn't know what language they are.

The therapist says this is the problem, that he has no filter. His mind just sucks in everything he sees and then he can't unsee it.

Then also his pattern matching brain that reads foreign languages so easily sees the patterns in trees and maybe tries to process them as written language. DS hasn't confirmed about that. He just says trees are creepy. I think that maybe why bread holes are a problem. Maybe his mind is trying to read the bread. I'm not sure.

I will read about EFT and Matrix Birth Reimprinting. Thank you very much for that.

Another thing that is maybe partly the ASD child - I think the surgery was partly hard because even at young toddler age he was a very in-charge child. I would have gone along with anything at that age, but DS was very much "taking names" when we were in the hospital. After the first surgery he was afraid. After the second he was angry and resentful and that never left him. His inner baby has never forgiven the world for all the vaccinations he had. I think he definitely has a velcro memory.

Thank you for mentioning somatic body focused techniques. I will read about that.

So sorry to read about your DS's MH Struggles. It's truly horrific not just for the sufferer but for us as carer's having to watch our dc suffer. When you say horror at school, do you mean they used to watch horror films during school???
you don't have to go into details. Not everyone responds to 'horror' the same way. While many find it hilarious I am like your ds and suffer trauma if i watch it and have been since childhood. Very similar symptoms to your ds, various seemingly meaningless things make a connection in my mind to the horror' and i can't unhear the background taunting sounds. Completely neuro typical so this isn't peculiar to the neuro diverse.

What helped me was my faith, and also disassociating completely from 'horror'. It's taken yrs, but it heals eventually and the memory eventually fades & its hold is broken.

@Octavia64 thank you that is in a way reassuring because it does suggest at least that it is the PTSD that is the problem. I would be glad to know of more books in which this phenomenon is described because at the moment we just feel like the only ones who have every experienced this.

@Tonty thanks for posting. I really strictly cannot talk about the school stuff, but yes it was actual horror. It's good to know that it did fade for you.

I have seen horror movies by accident in the past and I also cannot unsee them. They bother me to this day, even though it was 30+ years ago.

I'm just fortunate that there was very little like that in my childhood.

There is so much exposure to screens these days that kids see all sorts of stuff.

@Realisation14 that's great that EMDR is working for your DS. Would it be okay to ask what you actually do? We are doing all sorts of EMDR type things with patting alternate hands or feet or that kind of thing. We haven't done eye movement as DS would struggle with that.

Your poor, poor boy.

A few things. Psychotherapy will be helping him differentiate what's coming from his mind and what he was exposed to as a younger child, and the reality, in the here and now. For a young person with ASD though it will take much longer to shift. Almost double the number of usual sessions built in as a reasonable accommodation. The images will be more ingrained and concrete and the process will take longer.

Secondly, you are absolutely right that alongside this keeping this calm and nurturing at home is key and then also building in as many different, hopefully calming, positive experiences as possible, such as the holidays you mention, which have been understandably missing while you did the fire fighting.

If he mentions any of this at home it is also OK to support him to question it in real time. It may get him used to doing this on his own eventually.

I am so sorry you have all been through this, it sounds unbelievably awful to need to pick up the pieces of something that never should have happened.

This sounds a lot like I was when I was experiencing PTSD - I started avoiding specific situations because they would get the "reel" playing in my head but actually what happened was that over time more and more situations/places/objects would start it up, even ones that were entirely unconnected, it just pervaded everything, and I saw the world and everything in it as threatening. If that's what your ds is experiencing I'm sorry, it's so stressful. I should imagine that the horror movies would only encourage his brain to interpret innocuous objects in this way. I had really good results from EMDR - honestly, I'm pretty much "cured". I hope your DS can experience the same freedom.

@Octavia64 - I just looked up that book "The boy who was raised as a dog" and one of the things I'm struggling with is that books to help us are often about other kids who have suffered really terrible trauma and I can't bear to read them. I really find them impossibly upsetting to read. DS tells me about all his trauma and I'm finding that I get to the point where I can't unsee it either.

I know this is called secondary trauma and I am meant to watch out for it, but I don't know how to escape developing it when I am spending all my waking hours with DS listening to him telling me about his trauma.

He is mid-teens btw. I don't want to say exactly as this thread is already very outing.

OP, I’m afraid I cannot offer any practical advice but I do sympathise, and will be looking into some of the helpful suggestions on this thread for my own DS10 with similar issues.

In my case, DS has autism/ADHD, went through treatment for cancer a few years ago that was scary, long and immensely difficult for him on many levels. He now really struggles with intrusive thoughts and images, the constant expectation of the bad thing happening to him. He needs me with him to go upstairs on his own, and cannot sleep alone as he a has a real fear of sleep paralysis, among other things.

He’s in a constant state of high alert, it’s completely mentally exhausting for him and I wish I could give him some peace for it. We’re in the queue for specialist psychotherapy but the wait is long.

Just give us a generalist.overview. You're not going to get anyone suing you unless you give the name of school and teachers!

Your poor baby. My ds is 10 too with autism and diagnosis PTSD last year. I feel your pain.

@joan12 Thank you very much for your kind reply. We have had little to no sympathy from anyone and very harsh treatment from the public services so your kind reply really means a great deal to me. I feel heard for the first time tbh.

While all this was going on my DM was developing lewy body dementia with all the associated hallucinations, so I've had it on all sides.

Thank you for suggesting that it might just take longer. That really helps.

@Wareart this really describes what I am seeing actually. It's like the horror lens is catching. Something that used to be safe becomes unsafe and then another associated thing becomes unsafe.

DS says that he is very sensitive to suggestion. So if I show any concern about anything, he immediately becomes afraid of it. I'm trying to be more suggesting that things are safe, to help the feeling of safety to be catching.