Surviving Trauma - Dilemmas in the Psychotherapy of Traumatised Children

It is a sad fact that some children have had such terrible life experiences that their parents feel that it is beyond their own resources to help them recover, and so they decide to seek professional help. The children have become isolated, and totally different, from other children. They have actually experienced what is felt to be unthinkable and unbearable by their family and the community at large. As a result they have become emotional ‘untouchables’.

In this paper I would like to share the dilemmas experienced in the therapy of two children who have suffered in this way. The first child, nine year old Lesley, was referred to me five weeks after she had been raped with full penetration, not far from her home, whilst walking the dog with a friend. She had been a ‘normal’, lively child before this happened. When I first met her, she was tragically shocked, as indeed were her family and the local community from which the alleged rapist came. The other child, Derek, was also nine when he was referred to me. He was not, in fact, referred because of his past traumatic experience, but because he was stealing and behaving extremely dangerously, as if he believed he was a ‘cat with nine lives’. However, I was told by his adoptive parents at referral, that he may have witnessed the murder of his natural mother by her lover when he was two and a half years old. Paradoxically, they also assured me that he really knew nothing about what had happened in his past or why he had been adopted.

For both of these children, I was immediately aware of my gut reaction of horror at what they had experienced. I found it difficult to be genuinely emotionally available to them in the transference. This holding back on my part, I realised, was similar to the reaction they felt they generally evoked from adults around them. In particular, a gulf existed between them and their parents in which the traumatic event appeared to block close emotional contact at a time when this was de