One of the hardest lessons to learn in dealing with children who have been abused or who have experienced trauma is how hard it is for them to trust adults.  Once the trust of a child has been violated by an adult, that child does not trust adults again easily.  Even if a child has not been hurt by adult caregivers, the trust of a child is violated when adults are unable to protect a child from trauma.  Once children do not trust adults to take care of them, they have difficulty attaching to parents and other caregivers. 

In my experience working with children, they have generally trusted consistent rules, boundaries, and consequences long before they have learned to trust parents or other caregivers.  Children don’t trust that a person is safe or can protect them until they can trust that adult to provide consistent rules, boundaries, and consequences.  Children who have experienced trauma need a much higher level of consistency than other children.  They trust rules before they trust relationship.  They trust boundaries before they trust bonding.  The trust consequences before they trust cuddling. 

Literally, the greatest gift we can give children who have experienced trauma is consistency, so they can learn to trust their world again.  Once they learn to trust that every action has a consistent consequence, they can begin to move closer to trusting that people will be consistent with them. 

Consistent rules, boundaries, and consequences provide safety for children who have experienced trauma.

When children begin to feel safe, they can begin to trust again.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 25th, 2009 at 9:32 pm and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.