The Middletown Centre for Autism Podcast
The Middletown Centre for Autism Podcast
Understanding Trauma with Deirdre O’Shea
Trauma is a serious but important topic. In this episode, we’re joined by Specialist Teacher, Deirdre O’Shea who explains what trauma is, how it may impact autistic people and how we can support someone through trauma.
For more information on the topics discussed, please visit:
https://www.autism.org.uk/advice-and-guidance/professional-practice/ptsd-autism
https://mental-health-wellbeing.middletownautism.com/information-strategies/ptsd-and-trauma/
https://neurodivergentinsights.com/autism-infographics/autismandtrauma
Welcome to the Middletown Podcast. I'm Kat Hughes, I'm a researcher at Middletown and I'm also autistic. In this episode we're talking about a serious but very important topic, and that is trauma. I chatted to specialist teacher at Middletown, deirdre O'Shea, about her years of experience supporting young autistic people, many of whom have been impacted by trauma. We talk about exactly what trauma is, how it might impact the in-person and how to support someone who's experienced it.
Speaker 1:As I said, trauma is a difficult topic and even as I prepared for my chat with Deirdre, I found myself thinking back on difficult times that I've been through. So it's no harm to pause and think about whether this is a topic that you want to hear about today, saying that Deirdre is so warm and so gentle and so knowledgeable on the topic that it's a very positive and practical chat. I hope you enjoy it, deirdre. Thank you so much for joining us on the podcast. The first question I wanted to ask you seems like we're starting at a very basic level, but I think it's a really important question to ask is what do we mean exactly when we use the word trauma?
Speaker 2:Well, kat, it's such a loaded term and I think you know it is really important that we start with that question because everybody's going to have their own answer as to what it is. But I will try to condense it from what I've learned over the years. And trauma is a word that can be used to define an event that resulted in psychological or emotional distress. Okay, and trauma has often been misinterpreted as it was the event itself that was the trauma. But actually what a lot of professionals in the field and experts who speak a lot on this topic would say, the trauma is actually the imprint, the internal experience of what happens following the event. Now, I feel personally from my work over the years, is that trauma is what we know to be.
Speaker 2:Trauma is highly subjective. So there are those obvious traumatic events. So if we think about the conflict in the Middle East, we think about some natural disasters where there might have been, you know, somebody experienced a tragic loss. We all can relate to those traumas that you know we are exposed to in the media or we hear about or have lived experience of.
Speaker 2:But actually, what we don't often consider as trauma are those really small cumulative experiences of potential that are often invisible, and I suppose in the context of working with autistic people, um, and I suppose in the context of working with autistic people, this environments that, when they accumulate over time, then start to be experienced as a traumatic event. And when that happens, what happens is there's an internal experience, and that's what I'm going back to. I suppose I know this is quite a long answer, kat, but it is such a loaded word the trauma is then. It's the internal imprint that is carried on thereafter. So it's being important that we're not getting caught up in just the event. It's actually what happens internally after the event, or multiple events actually that makes so much sense and yeah it, it's.
Speaker 1:It's sort of got me thinking, knowing that I was going to be talking to you kind of about my own experience, and I suppose the the sort of first time that I kind of registered trauma for myself was, um, it was actually my then boyfriend, now husband, who registered it before I did um, and it was if a back to school ad came on the television wherever I was, I would die for the remote control because I just could not hear the words back to school. And he was like I think there might be a little bit of trauma there that you should possibly deal with, and I think that's the thing. It's not one big event. Potentially, as you say, it's that kind of chipping away that can cause the trauma. So I think it's so nuanced and so huge, isn't it?
Speaker 2:Absolutely. And when somebody's nervous system shifts from that calm and regulated state into the trauma response which is typically, let's say, the fight or flight response I mean the sympathetic nervous system or the freeze shutdown response in the parasympathetic nervous system. And I'm really simplifying this, by the way, just you know it's way more complicated than I'm describing, but I'm just trying to simplify it for ease of listening. But just as you described that, there was that trigger point for you, an ad on the TV that brought back this emotional flooding experience that is happening internally, potentially silently, to those all around you and you can just be in an everyday life experience.
Speaker 2:And sometimes you know when someone experiences a traumatic event and how that's processed in the body means that memory doesn't get stored in the hippocampus as per, let's say, the typical neural pathways. It becomes quite fragmented and it's often stored in a somatic level in the body, unknown to us at a conscious level. There is no conscious memory. So, like that you're describing, a back to school ad could trigger a real overwhelming um, dysregulated experience, um, dysregulated experience, and yet there's no coherent understanding or awareness at a cognitive level as to why that's happening. And I think that's the thing that's probably the most misunderstood about trauma.
Speaker 1:And do you think, then, that trauma is different for autistic people compared to non-autistic people?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I'm going to preface this just for the listeners to say that I'm not autistic. So what I'm going to be saying here is based on the past 20 years of my professional experience and the incredible children that I've had the privilege of working with and forming relationships with along the way that have left an imprint on my life, and when I started to learn more about trauma and really educate myself around it, I started to have a lot of aha moments, thinking back to children that I was working with over the years whose behavior was being labeled that this is because this person is autistic. This is part of what it means to be autistic, and so we would go down this pathway of um well, we need to change this because this behavior is not safe or it's not acceptable. But what was happening was it was being categorized as being part of the autistic profile, and what I've learned over the years is that actually, a lot of the distress that we are seeing and that I, that I was seeing, that I continue to see this is not part of being autistic. This is a distressed person who is showing me through their behavior that they do not feel safe, for whatever reason that may be, and I have the privilege of working with children, often for long periods of time, and sometimes when I see how long it can take for me to build trust, to build relationships, there is that cue for me that when trauma is present and it's not always that's the piece that I think is really misunderstood. It's that, well, the person may just not like to engage with you because they're autistic or they might not like to do these things, and actually we're completely misunderstanding the neurotype here actually.
Speaker 2:So a lot of what I'm seeing that are being labeled as autistic behaviors, I actually see as a threat or trauma response. That's the key piece I think that's missing, for when we're supporting distressed autistic children in school settings, school trauma is really ooh, it's, it's. A lot of people don't want to go there, I suppose because nobody wants to admit that potentially our school settings could, um, create trauma for a young person. Um, but that is the reality of what I'm seeing. So, yes, I do see that, not for every case of distressed behavior, of course, but for a lot of the distressed behavior that I see for autistic people, it is a trauma response.
Speaker 1:And isn't it interesting that we can almost it's almost easier to assume that distress is a natural part of someone's neurotype and to examine the environment that they're in.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I think a lot of things get labeled as sensory overwhelm, you know correctly. Okay, that is correct. It would be unfair for me to say that's not. But actually to experience.
Speaker 2:There's some research coming out now and I can't recall the particular study to mind at the time, but you are more likely to experience PTSD if you are an autistic person than a non-autistic person because of the flooding or sensory overwhelm that you're experiencing too much, too fast, too soon, and it's not being integrated and being forced to be in environments where you are experiencing overwhelming pain, potentially at a sensory level. And then it gets named as well. This is just a sensory processing issue and you know we'll use all these strategies, but we're not, we're failing to look at it also through a trauma-informed lens, as actually we have now subjected this person to being in a particular environment or experience for so many times. Now we have this cumulative effect of chronic stress and trauma, um, so there's a lot of things I feel that get labeled as other things and are not being recognized that actually this distress is. Has now um moved into a trauma response?
Speaker 1:yeah, you mentioned the sort of accumulation that someone might be experiencing, so is there sort of a long-term impact that that comes from that?
Speaker 2:yes, absolutely so. What we know if a young person is experiencing chronic fight or flight, for example, or has moved potentially into shutdown because the energy that they've exasperated in that fight or flight response over the years has been exhausted, what we can see is young people withdrawing from the everyday experience or the experiences of joy that they naturally used to acquire in everyday life. You will also see potentially, potentially a lot more withdrawal from social environments that may have been potentially safe in the past. And also what I've noticed is there develops and there's a lot of research around this in neuroscience the neural pathways can actually rewire to experience what is known as blocked trust, and blocked trust is it was actually coined by Dan Hughes and John Balin. They were working with highly traumatized children, and when I first learned about this, I started to see the similarities in blocked trust in the children that I would be going to work with, who had lost trust in educators and professionals because of cumulative negative experiences over periods of time. And what that means is, when you go into another environment with a kind of professional or all the conditions appear to be the same as what you've experienced in the past, there's an automatic blocked trust there where you are wired for defense and threat instantly. So what happens in those situations and I would see that often in my work in Middletown, when I'm starting to work with a young person at the beginning of the referral process is building trust has to be my main goal and what that looks like actually is being really slow and being really curious and it's never on my terms, it's always on the young person's terms, because I know, not for every young person but for a lot of the young people that I'm going into that there is going to be the biology of blocked trust is going to be present because of the trauma response that that young person is in. Also, I would see, kat, I suppose going kind of going back a little bit to that fight or flight response is. I suppose going kind of going back a little bit to that fight or flight response is I would see you know that cumulative effect of trauma.
Speaker 2:You know, particularly in school settings where the children just don't necessarily conform anymore, and you know that there's been so many negative experiences or experiences of feeling misunderstood or there's been like a communication clash where that young person has been left alone and negative experiences in the past, potentially because they don't have access to AAC or they don't have advice or some kind of communication system, or their way of communicating through just all scripts or spoken language is not being validated, that we then start to see these big outbursts. I remember working with a young person before where a teacher would say to me well, he just gets up and runs out of the classroom and he runs out of the school and it's a real safety. You know he's a flight risk and he's this and he's that. And I'm thinking have we even looked at why this might be happening? And I'm not blaming, you know, the educators in that situation.
Speaker 2:A lot of this, as I said, can be cumulative. It can be the threat response that's been building over a period of time and all it might take is someone to take out the maths book or to say a particular word or not be consistent with their word, to kind of set off that threat response. I've seen it with some kids that all it takes is just to walk in the doors of the school environment or to walk into an environment that might smell similarly to some area that was, you know, had a negative experience for them in the past and it sets off this big fight or flight response or shutdown. I think shutdown, kat, as well as a trauma response, is really misunderstood. Really misunderstood because you can have somebody in this freeze response or shutdown response and their bodies may look lethargic, potentially, or they may just look like they're, you know, tired or, but you know they're not really saying anything or they're not causing any issues for anybody. They're just sitting potentially there, passively, and it can go under the radar, like really go under the radar, and that, I think, is the one that is misunderstood the most. Because those externalizing behaviors, well, they can impact other people around the young person, but the passive freeze response or shutdown not necessarily. So it can go under the radar quietly for a period of time, maybe until that young person might retreat even further away from, as I said, the kind of everyday lived experiences that they typically engage in when you are working with a person in that state. They're often labeled as like I have air quotes here hard to engage or, you know, don't turn up for appointments, potentially. Or you know their parents might find them hard to get them into school, to get them into school, and I find that because the kids don't often give anything back potentially in terms of communication or engaging initially, is that services don't have the capacity to spend the long periods of time or schools that require to actually build back up trust and safety. And we go in so fast then and we further traumatize the young person. And I'll give you a bit of context to this.
Speaker 2:I work with a young person and I have been doing so for three years. For the first 18 months of that relationship I sat outside the young person's bedroom door and they never communicated or spoke to me. Now what I was doing there was I was building trust. Now I had services attached to this young person questioning my approach. I had people telling me I was crazy, and the young person is really clearly showing you a message that they don't want you to turn up. I knew from the interactions that the young person was having with their parent that they did value me showing up, um, every week or every second week, um.
Speaker 2:But I knew from that person's history and all the experiences that they had in school that they had very strong emotional memories of right from junior infants all the way up, that this person was in a state of shutdown that was going to take me a long time to unravel and I remember when I met the parents first, I said this might take two years, but we'll get there. And it took 18 months, as I said, to open the door and for us to communicate with each other. So, but what I was doing all that time was showing that I'm going to work at your pace, I'm going to only do things that make you feel safe and I'm never going to expect anything from you in this relationship, but I'm here for you when you're ready. So there might be a crossword done outside the door and I'd share mine. And sometimes there was things going underneath the door and showing around the young person's interest and I knew over time that I was building trust really, really, really slowly and that young person, I can share a space and have all the chats now and and that's three years into the relationship but that young person knows that they at any stage can tell me and it might require visual supports. Even the person can use their, you know, spoken language. Is that I'm? I just want to listen today, and that door can be shut at any time. That door can be shut at any time.
Speaker 2:Now, how often do we hear of stories like that? And I'm not, you know, saying this like for my own ego or anything. I'm saying that this is the reality of what some children require to move them out of a trauma response, threat response and back into a place of safety. Because there has been that cumulative effect over years and years and years and, from my experience, the longer the accumulation, well then, the longer it takes for us to build back that trust and that safety. But it can happen. That's the wonderful part, it really can happen.
Speaker 1:This is not fixed yeah, and and wonderful things that you. There's so, and wonderful things that you said. There's so many wonderful things that you said in that piece, but I think for me, the notion of following the young person's lead and allowing them to set the pace and set the tone is so, so important. And then you also use the word curiosity, which I think is gorgeous. Approaching a young person with curiosity about who they are and what they want is so, so important.
Speaker 2:I think the biggest mistake professionals make Kat is thinking that we know the answers and we're going to come in with our framework and our checklist and our assessment tools and to figure out exactly what this young person needs.
Speaker 2:Based on my professional hat, that is the biggest mistake that I see happening is that we put our professional knowledge first. We have to be curious about the young person's experience and we integrate our professional knowledge into that experience and we integrate our professional knowledge into that and I think that's the gift that I have allowed myself to bring to my work is sitting in that often uncomfortable place of I don't know what to do here, but I do know what to do to build trust. And I'm going to be curious with this young person and I am going to work with where they are at neurologically, where their nervous system is at, and we're going to just take it step by step and I think that has found me the answers on so many occasions not Not always the right answers. You know, I learn and reflect and start again and what I listen and I observe and I watch closely to what the young person is telling me through their behavior, through the unspoken, sometimes through the spoken, but I never assume that I know all the answers.
Speaker 1:So, then, that relationship is obviously incredibly important, and do you think that double empathy potentially plays a part in how we understand autistic trauma?
Speaker 2:Absolutely, and I think I mean Kat. Kat, you will definitely be able to talk more about double empathy than I can, you know, because you have such wonderful ways of talking about that. But if I can't bring myself to understanding the autistic person's experience, and even though I don't have lived experience, but I can try and understand and I can learn and educate myself about our differences and our commonalities, if I don't bring myself to that place of, as I said, the double empathy, of really being able to empathize with a lived experience that's different to mine, well then that, that clash, that that barrier that arises every time when it's all misaligned, I believe is absolutely contributing to the autistic person's trauma experience. We know from a lot of the trauma research that feeling misunderstood, unheard, say this, can create the same neurological experiences or biological trauma experiences as abandonment, and these are all things that we just I think we don't emphasize it enough. It's in me, as a non-autistic person working with autistic people, that is my job, to invest my time in learning and understanding different lived experiences. But actually, kat, we can talk about double empathy across many different neurotypes, cultures. It's not. While I know the theory was kind of autistic around the autistic experience and the communication differences. And communicating with non-autistic people, you know, the more I've educated myself about you, know different. You know marginalization across cultures, what goes on in our own community, for example, within the traveling community, versus people who are not within the traveling community, I see this same double empathy problem. And when you bring yourself to a place actually where you can hold now this requires a lot of widening your perspective when you can hold someone's lived experience that is completely different to yours in mind, with how you also live your life, and you don't judge, vilify or condemn the other, well then that is already being trauma-informed. That's what it means to be trauma-informed and this is how we can prevent so much unnecessary pain from happening in the first place.
Speaker 2:We've a lot of learning and unlearning to do, particularly in our education system around this, because you know the way things were, were designed. It was kind of with one particular school of thought and that this is how children learn and this is the expectation of how children sit and this is how children communicate, this is how children play. You know all of these things, um, we, we have a long way to go. I mean, the tide is shifting, for sure, and there's wonderful conversations happening, but we have a long way to go to make sure that everybody feels heard and understood in our education system. You know, often people would say to me but what do we do? Like he's just standing up walking around the classroom or they're interrupting the other students. And I said, well, what if we normalize that movement was OK, what if we set up the conditions that walking around the classroom or movement in the classroom can actually take place? And we had really cool discussions around it. And we had really cool discussions around it and we had visuals all around that, you know, influenced the messaging that children received that actually we just don't need to sit with our fingers on our lips in a frozen position to listen and learn.
Speaker 2:And I remember working with a young person before who used to jump on the trampoline in his garden while I chatted to him from inside his house. That was how he liked to listen to me. Now imagine if I imposed what I was led to believe was the right way to listen and communicate and interact with me. Well then, that young person was going to, over time, feel very threatened in my presence. And actually what happened over time was that young person felt very safe in my presence because I never imposed my beliefs on him. He set the tone for what it looked like, and to somebody who didn't know what, um, the you know different communication styles could look like, might've thought it was mad. What was going on, and actually what was going on between us was this beautiful connection, even though we weren't in the same room and we weren't looking at each other. One person was jumping on a trampoline and the other was talking in a room by herself that's gorgeous and I do think the idea of double empathy is just.
Speaker 1:It's such a gift for all of us if we can remember and sort of. It might not, you know, we might not understand the other person, but if we can take that moment to say, well, my experience is just my experience and I don't know what their experience potentially is, and we need to figure it out between us Like that alone, I think, is such a step.
Speaker 2:Absolutely, and from a neuroscience perspective, I feel double empathy and curiosity. They go hand in hand. If you stay open to being curious, well, actually, you are more likely at a neurological level to be open to new ideas and not to be fixed in your trail of thought. So being curious is, I feel, is that real first step of just hmm, I wonder. You know my fixed ideas are not going to be helpful here and they will come.
Speaker 2:We all will bring our own ideas because that's our lived experience and what it means to be me is not what it means to be you, kat, and for everybody else. We all bring our own lived experiences and biases and ways that we make meaning out of life. But that curiosity is so important and from a lot of training that I've done in the past, it's about being slow and curious. It's actually pacing that. So slowing it down, being slow myself, being slow and curious in my actions, in how I present, in my body, I'm less likely to be threatening and less likely to be showing up myself as being quite rigid and fixed in my ideas.
Speaker 1:Can you explain what neuroception is and how it relates to trauma?
Speaker 2:and how it relates to trauma. This is a huge question, I know, so I'm going to talk about it very simply. But neuroception was a term that was coined by Dr Stephen Porges and basically it refers to our autonomic intuition within our nervous system that, at an unconscious level, is detecting whether our environments are safe or threatening, and that's really it in a nutshell. But what's happening then is our neuroception is working all the time because, biologically, our nervous system's job and our brain's job is to keep us safe. It's a threat detection system, so, but what's happening is, at an unconscious level, our neuroception can be working in ways that obviously we don't understand or don't have conscious awareness of. But what can happen then, if you've experienced trauma, is that you may start to experience threat in a relatively safe environment. So you gave the lovely example, kat, at the beginning, where you were feeling and experiencing threat with a back to school advert. And this is another thing that I feel is really misunderstood for autistic children who, in potential everyday environments in education I'm going to go back to education, because this is where I spend a lot of my time where they are lots of kids, are happy and joyful and, you know, could be experiencing lots of fun around them and that this young person is actively experiencing threat. But it's a relatively safe, open and engaged environment and while the term like the term that Stephen Portage has used for that is faulty neuroception I don't necessarily kind of use that term, it's a little bit outdated I see it as a trauma response and some people can get really confused by that, because in you know, in schools we love taking data, you know, writing down what it is that happened before and after an event, to try and get a sense of what might be going on for a young person. Okay, that has value at times. There can also be a lot of issues with that, because I'll often see written down on it no trigger, yes, there mightn't have been no observable trigger, but what's going on at a physiological level?
Speaker 2:This young person experienced threat and my definition of what's dangerous cannot be imposed as the same definition of danger for the young children that I'm working with. Because what's dangerous to an autistic child who's been in a setting where they felt very unsafe or maybe felt very misunderstood, didn't have appropriate communication system for long periods of time, where they didn't were overwhelmed and flooded, maybe with just a huge amount of sensory experiences and again left alone with that as in no support. Or maybe those helping didn't know how to support. You know, this is not about blaming here. This is maybe someone didn't know how to support the young person. So what can happen then is that that threat detection system can go off then in these relatively safe environments.
Speaker 2:But the young person, at their neuroception, is detecting that there's a history, there's a memory where this has been unsafe in the past and I'm going to protect you now. And what happens then is that physiological response comes. It could be that fight or flight response, it could be a shutdown, fawn or freeze response, but that's generally what is happening. So, yeah, that's neuroception in a nutshell. I mean, it's a lot more complicated than that, kat, but just to simplify it for today, I think that's as good an explanation as I can give. I think that's as good an explanation as I can give.
Speaker 1:Within that, then I suppose if someone is feeling those moments of distress that might not be obvious to someone in the classroom, Is there something? That a someone that school staff can do to sort of help someone through that distress. Is it about that sort of curiosity and trying to notice what it is that's bringing on those distress moments?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think the first thing we have to do and it's not always easy straight away in the moment, particularly if we're in an event where people are, there's a potential for injury but we have to check in with our own nervous system state, because what I often observe happening is there's this big chaotic response. So I'm going to talk first about, maybe, a child who's shifted into a, an externalized response. Okay, that might be um destructive to them or to the environment or those around them. We have to make sure that we are now, whatever we are doing is going right in at the primitive brainstem level and we have to check in with ourselves as in how am I in this moment? How am I showing up? Sometimes when I find myself in those situations, I'll take the deep breath and I will just make sure that my body is now starting to move at a slow, predictable pace, as much as is possible in that moment. I understand that's not always possible, so this can take time of you know, you have to get to know the young person and what it might, what safety means for them, okay, but I know, you know, if we talk about it just at a, at a broad um, at a broad level in terms of what the research tells us movement rhythm, um, repetition, predictability. Okay, so that might mean that I know for a young person that I worked with, when a stress response starts to become high and quite heightened, or the signs that a stress response was occurring, we used to put on a predictable song and that song then meant that we were going to have also predictable movements with what we were going to do with our body and the young person would. I suppose what it was doing for them is they were switching them out of that fight or flight quite gradually and into a focused repetition, repetition and slowly kind of switching back on that prefrontal cortex because we weren't coming in with this big chaotic response of what are we going to do? Move the desk.
Speaker 2:You know what can often happen in schools. I've been in situations, kat, where a young person's in distress and there's maybe 10 people standing around them, all chaotic, chatting. Call this, get this person and you know this pool of people, and imagine that. Imagine what is happening at a physiological level with that young person's nervous system. They are going to be further pushed into that threat response and much harder to get back out of it actually, and what will happen then is when people don't respond safely, when a trauma response or a big outburst, potentially, is happening, I've noticed that children can become quite afraid of those emotions arising in themselves, because they know that what's going to happen next is also very upsetting and threatening. So they also they become afraid of their own emotions. So the key is and this can be really difficult for schools, because I feel that schools aren't appropriately supported with this you often need somebody available to hand and that can be really difficult. But what you need to do is you need to have people involved to have a good awareness of their own nervous system state and how they show up in these situations, because some people are going to be better than others because their nervous system is able to cope easier in highly stressful situations stress for the child, stress potentially for the supporting adult. And then we need to create a plan of action of what safety means for this young person and how do we execute it in a very rhythmic, repetitive, routined fashion. That's the key, so that every time there's a stress response, we are generally responding in the same way.
Speaker 2:I remember I was working with a young person many years ago and we would start to do predictions. We would start to do predictions from sports and different sporting games that he liked to watch, and when that response was rising and the distress was coming, then we would he. I was very routined in the words that would come out of my mouth and what I would do with my body, and there were very clear things that I did not say in that moment, for example, trying to have a young person reflect and questioning why did you do this? And all of these things, unfortunately, are a very common part of how people impose what they perceive to be discipline in our school settings.
Speaker 2:And Dr Bruce Perry a lot of people would know as being one of the leading researchers in trauma for young people over in America. He would talk about repetition, rhythm and routine as being the key for trauma healing. More than anything, his research would show that actually touch points in therapeutic relationships and how we continue to show up with routine and predictability with our young people who've experienced trauma is more valuable than the trauma therapy itself. So actually, how we respond to a child in distress and how we interact with a child who has experienced a trauma or who is likely to be experienced in trauma in, potentially, our school settings or in the community or wherever we are supporting. There's so much that we can do just in how we interact, just in how we respond and how we continue to relate in the aftermath if a big trauma response occurred. Because what we need to teach kids is that if you engage in a trauma response that may have imposed danger on other people, that I still care for you and that our relationship is not conditional on you keeping it together.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Gorgeous and so important, and I think I also love the fact that you talked about how we recognize our own responses within that and how important that is in terms of sort of protecting ourselves but then also protecting the young person and allowing them to sort of be themselves and do what they have to do to get through a moment. But I think, yeah, I think, for it's so important that both the the adult in the situation and the young person in the situation is allowed to recognize their own experiences within that and how they're responding to the situation, isn't it?
Speaker 2:absolutely, and again, it's just it's, it's not talked about enough. You know, we often hear about the words like intervention or support that young people require, but actually the first step is us.
Speaker 2:Yeah you know we're going to move through this and we fail to look at that and and you know what I? I think the reason for that is, kat, because actually it's too painful, I think, for a lot of supporting adults to recognize that we too have, you know, we can influence potentially in a negative way and cause harm, and also that we too have emotions that need tending to, because it often requires us to say out loud this is really hard or that I'm finding this really difficult, even though you know I might love what I do or love spending time with this particular young person, but I'm struggling. You know, some of us in this kind of work like to believe that we're the helpers and we can, we can do it, and so tuning into where we're at is such an important part of supporting young people so that we can show up predictably and safely in that relationship.
Speaker 1:And I suppose it's about then schools creating that culture of vulnerability where people can say well, this is quite difficult, I struggled with that and then being able to sort of learn from each other and support each other and grow within, that is really important.
Speaker 2:Absolutely.
Speaker 2:It's so important and it's really important that we are able to put our hands up and say you know, we have a lot of unlearning to do, as're many people across many professions, cultures, human experiences are unlearning about our beliefs and conditioning that was not helpful in the past.
Speaker 2:And you know, the kids who are coming into our schools today are teaching us so much about what's not working. And I think you know I have the privilege, I suppose, cat, of working across multiple school environments with many school leaders, with lots of different educators and class assistants and different people across Ireland, and probably one of the biggest barriers is when we cannot admit that we need to make a change, when that attitude isn't there that we need to be able to make a change. Here we need to support each other. What we're doing is not working and, as you said, to show that vulnerability of like this this is difficult is difficult, this is hard. I'm overwhelmed and actually that vulnerability is such a gift to making change within the structures that our autistic children are being educated within at the moment.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely. And then my final question for you um. I wanted to ask because I think trauma in itself is quite a scary word and I think when people hear it, shoulders can come down because it's something that people don't necessarily want to approach. Um, but I wanted to sort of ask you about the lasting impact of trauma and whether someone if someone has experienced trauma, is it something that will always negatively impact them.
Speaker 2:So the research would show there is absolutely room and neurological capacity for post-traumatic growth. But that is dependent, kat, on the type of trauma that the person is experiencing and the duration of time and actually at what stage in their life that it occurred. So the earlier the experience. We do know from research that it is more likely to have a longer lasting impact than and also if there is a cumulative effect over longer periods of time. But there's massive capacity for post-traumatic growth and rewiring of the neural circuits that keep people stuck in autonomic responses of fight, flight, freeze or fawn. But that is back to what I know. I said already. It's in relationships. Now, what that relational safety looks like is different for every person, because some people might do well in a talk therapy capacity and other people might do well, like the example that I gave of sitting outside a young person's door. Where it's, the presence is there, but it's not in a talking pushy capacity and the play was done in a very structured, predictable way that was relevant to that young person. We know so much about the power of play in healing and being able to have playful experiences and what that does to neural circuits in the brain. But what we need to be really careful about is that my definition of play is not imposed on the other person's definition of play with whom I'm in that healing relationship with. So I'm going to give you a lovely example of this.
Speaker 2:I was working with a young person before and in a school and it was very clear that that young person was experienced, having had experienced school trauma in the past with a number of different events, and we were looking at what it is that could work towards the healing. The healing for this young person in school he had formed was starting to form some really solid relationships with some staff who really understood the person. And I said, okay, well, what does the young person like to play with? And they said, well, he doesn't really play with anything. And I said, okay, maybe go back to the parents, speak to them and come back to me. So they said the same. Well, the parents said they don't really play with anything. And I said, okay, so what does the young person like to do when? Well, actually, you know, I was just saying what would you do if you kind of left him to their own devices? What would you do? Well, he might tap on the window or he might flap a ribbon or he might. I said, ok, so now we're tapping into what this young person likes to play with, so we're going to be tapping windows and we're going to get lots of different ribbons and let's see what happens.
Speaker 2:And it was life changing because now we were building relational safety and we were playing what it was playing with, how this young person liked to play, and flapping ribbons of lots of different colors and particularly shiny ones, was what brought this person absolute joy. They interestingly, looking through a neurotypical lens, did not see that as play and it never registered because it wasn't what was considered conventional play. And when I supported them to turn on their curious hats and to really look at this from a different lens, they found loads of examples of play. So that set off that young person on a journey to healing. Because what happened was we started to see that that big trauma response wasn't happening so much.
Speaker 2:That person was now. Their nervous system was shifting into more engagement, calm and regulated, and you know, for the particular environment that they were in, regulated. And you know for the particular environment that they were in and that when a young person starts to experience that repetition of safety, safety, safety. That's where the healing capacity is and that's when the trust can be built again and that, unconsciously, the young person's worldview can ultimately be changed, that not everybody that I'm going to meet is going to harm me. So there absolutely is room for, and capacity for, healing and growth.
Speaker 1:Thanks so much for listening to the podcast. This is a conversation-based interview designed to stimulate thinking and hopefully support the development of practice. It's not intended to be medical or psychological advice. The views expressed in these chats may not always be the view of Middletown Centre. If you'd like to know more about Middletown, you can find us on X at. Autism Centre and Facebook and Instagram at Middletown Centre for Autism Go easy until next time.