Can Childhood Trauma Make Someone Violent? | Gwen Adshead | #078 Mastering Change

It's interesting because obviously that work is really important and necessary and full of insight.

But there's two ways that it kind of ladders up.

One is it kind of deepens out the standard of the importance of supporting children and young people because I still don't think we've got enough attention placed on how we look after our little people and, you know, from a systems policy, all that perspective.

But also from a general public perspective, A big tipping point for me working in this field a long time ago was when, I know many people have said similar things, but when I heard Gabor say, ask, and I've said this so many times on the podcast, but it was a real shift for me in how I viewed other people's behavior, especially those extreme behaviors that I could not make sense of.

Not what's wrong with you, but what happened to you.

And so there's these two bits that seem so necessary and urgent, which is one that everybody can look at circumstances and situations through that lens.

And I appreciate that is very difficult, especially for victims.

But the second is the importance and urgency around knowing what's happening to our young people, how that's amplified and exaggerated when it's not taken care of.

And I think one of the biggest, for me, one of the biggest take-home things that I've been learning over the last three decades is that we do ourselves no favors if we separate the world into victims and perpetrators and good and bad.

Because not least of all, because I've certainly met victims of serious trauma who were extremely angry and who were really struggling with a wish to hurt people, a wish to hurt themselves, deep resentments, all of which were related to their traumatic experiences and were actually keeping them stuck in something kind of poisonous, which is really sad.

But I also see perpetrators of violence again with these very obvious histories.

And I'm thinking, I mean, we've been hearing, haven't we, over the last, just in the last few weeks about a young man who committed a dreadful act of violence.

And he was well known to services.

I mean, your point is well made, Emma.

He was a young man where everybody was very concerned about his risk of violence.

Everybody could see that he was a troubled young man.

And yet it seemed to be very hard for anyone to kind of step up and provide him with help.

Now, I'm not saying it's easy because actually I think that therapy with children and young people is really technically hard.

because children and young people's brains and minds are in motion.

So it's like working with mercury.

And it's also not clear that adolescents, and certainly, well, I divide, when I think about therapy with children and young people, I think you have to divide them really into kind of adolescents and pubertal children, going through adolescence and pre-pubertal children.

Because The prepubertal children had different kinds of attachments and different kinds of relating to people who call themselves heavers.

And you often have to do that work within the family.

Whereas adolescents, of course, are growing and stepping outside and away from the family.

unit and they want to have their own individual identity, but it's not fully formed and it's work in progress and it often feels precarious.

It's interesting because obviously that work is really important and necessary and full of insight.

But there's two ways that it kind of ladders up.

One is it kind of deepens out the standard of the importance of supporting children and young people because I still don't think we've got enough attention placed on how we look after our little people and, you know, from a systems policy, all that perspective.

But also from a general public perspective, A big tipping point for me working in this field a long time ago was when, I know many people have said similar things, but when I heard Gabor say, ask, and I've said this so many times on the podcast, but it was a real shift for me in how I viewed other people's behavior, especially those extreme behaviors that I could not make sense of.

Not what's wrong with you, but what happened to you.

And so there's these two bits that seem so necessary and urgent, which is one that everybody can look at circumstances and situations through that lens.

And I appreciate that is very difficult, especially for victims.

But the second is the importance and urgency around knowing what's happening to our young people, how that's amplified and exaggerated when it's not taken care of.

And I think one of the biggest, for me, one of the biggest take-home things that I've been learning over the last three decades is that we do ourselves no favors if we separate the world into victims and perpetrators and good and bad.

Because not least of all, because I've certainly met victims of serious trauma who were extremely angry and who were really struggling with a wish to hurt people, a wish to hurt themselves, deep resentments, all of which were related to their traumatic experiences and were actually keeping them stuck in something kind of poisonous, which is really sad.

But I also see perpetrators of violence again with these very obvious histories.

And I'm thinking, I mean, we've been hearing, haven't we, over the last, just in the last few weeks about a young man who committed a dreadful act of violence.

And he was well known to services.

I mean, your point is well made, Emma.

He was a young man where everybody was very concerned about his risk of violence.

Everybody could see that he was a troubled young man.

And yet it seemed to be very hard for anyone to kind of step up and provide him with help.

Now, I'm not saying it's easy because actually I think that therapy with children and young people is really technically hard.

because children and young people's brains and minds are in motion.

So it's like working with mercury.

And it's also not clear that adolescents, and certainly, well, I divide, when I think about therapy with children and young people, I think you have to divide them really into kind of adolescents and pubertal children, going through adolescence and pre-pubertal children.

Because The prepubertal children had different kinds of attachments and different kinds of relating to people who call themselves heavers.

And you often have to do that work within the family.

Whereas adolescents, of course, are growing and stepping outside and away from the family.

unit and they want to have their own individual identity, but it's not fully formed and it's work in progress and it often feels precarious.