Ep #89: Developmental Trauma: A Trauma-Informed Approach to Parenting and Teaching with Stephan Friedrich

Parents and teachers, this one today is for you. We are talking about what is developmental trauma and what causes it. My guest today is Stephan Friedrich, is the founder of Knightlamp Consulting and is a leading child trauma specialist. He brings over three decades of experience in trauma-informed practice. He talks about some of the misconceptions that we have about what trauma is and what actually happens in a childhood that could cause some of this trauma.

One of my favorite parts of this conversation was his broken foot analogy talking about how using rewards and consequences for children with developmental trauma just does not work as a strategy. He offers some really good tips for noticing trauma and then also how to help children heal from it. It was an incredible conversation. I hope you’ll enjoy it. It’s coming up right after this.

Welcome to the Raising Healthy Kid Brains podcast where moms and teachers come to learn all about kids’ brains, how they work, how they learn, how they grow and simple tips and tricks for raising the most resilient, kind, smart, compassionate kids we can. All while having lots of grace and compassion for ourselves because you know what? We all really need and deserve that too. I am your host, Amy Nielson. Let’s get ready to start the show.

Amy: Stephan, welcome to the show. I’m so honored to have you on today and excited to talk about this really, a little bit heavy, but really critical topic about child trauma and just what to do, what to look for, all the things. But before we kind of get into that, I just want to say thank you for coming and sharing with us today. And tell us a little bit about how you got into this and what your experience has been getting into where you are and what you do today.

Stephan: Well, thank you, Amy, firstly, and thank you for inviting me to your podcast space and so let’s start. So, what was the first question?

Amy: I have all the questions. Yeah, tell me about, yeah, how you got into your interest in childhood trauma.

Stephan: Well, I guess I’ve been properly immersed in this topic directly for around 20 years, I guess and before that, I was also, but I didn’t know that I was. Before that, I’d spent my career working with adults who had been in prison. And then spent considerable time working with young men who were in custody under our youth criminal justice system here in Australia. And really kind of struggling as a lot of the world does with the behaviors, not just criminal behaviors, but other behaviors that we see, extreme behaviors from young people who tend to end up in the youth criminal justice system and really not knowing what it was about.

And I think that it’s a struggle because we get into this kind of work as social workers, as psychologists, because we want to make a difference. And we sometimes feel like we’re not making a difference. And I think for a while, they were thinking, what are we doing? And when I first came across, I guess the whole of the theoretical framework surrounding developmental trauma, and a lot of the emerging new knowledge that was coming up around 20 years ago, that I really found a lot of the answers that I had been looking for. So, I started applying these concepts with good results.

And so, I felt like, finally, now we know what’s going on and we know why kids are doing what they’re doing, why they’re struggling with the things that they’re struggling with, and it became very useful. So, I’ve been working in that space ever since and increasingly, we have a consultancy here in Australia called Knightlamp Consultancy and consulting in psychology. And a lot of the work that we do, most of the work that we do is through the direct use and the application of these theoretical frameworks around the neurobiology of developmental trauma. How it impacts on attachment and relational capacity, and how it impacts on the way that a child sees and makes sense of the world that they’re in.

Amy: So, can you talk to me just kind of about how you would define developmental trauma for someone who doesn’t really know maybe what that means, what is it?

Stephan: I guess we are used to thinking about the word trauma in two different ways. I mean, before we came across developmental trauma, we’re used to thinking about physical trauma, a bruise or a broken bone. We’re used to thinking about type one psychological PTSD type of trauma, which is a psychological injury, a psychological and emotional injury that happens to a brain that’s already reasonably organized.

And that things are different, that traditionally it was always thought that, I mean, if you imagine that if a six-month-old goes through a traumatizing period. In the old days, we would naturally think, well, I can’t remember being six months old and so, they’ll be fine because trauma is really just lots of bad memories, but it’s not.

Amy: Right. But that’s not, Stephan, yes.

Stephan: That’s not at all what it is. Now, bad memories can become part of it, can become attached to it, but it’s certainly not what it is. So, we now know that the first, say four or five years of a human being’s life is the time in which we do a lot of our organization and preparation for how we’re going to take in the world as we grow. Neurobiologically, this is when the brain is organizing itself, organizing its circuitry, kind of uploading its operating system, if you will.

And traumatization that occurs during that time actually provides the organizing environment for the brain, for a person’s makeup, for their attachment style, for all of those things. And so, if we have pervasive and constant traumatic events on a daily basis, the brain develops itself during that time, according to the world that it’s found itself in.

Amy: Interesting, okay.

Stephan: Yeah. And so, it’s about that organizing period. So, I’d say developmental trauma, we’re really talking about traumatic environments and events that really implicate caregiving and implicate caregivers, even though it’s not necessarily because caregivers or parents were bad. It is because of the situation that they have found themselves in, but it nevertheless implicates caregiving and therefore relationship.

Amy: I’m just taking all these notes because I love what you’re saying. This is so valuable. Kind of this developmental age, maybe up to five or six years old and the brain is kind of uploading, essentially its operating system with how it’s going to view and take in the world. And when we have, I don’t know, I almost saw it in my brain as you were talking about it, almost a virus or a bug that’s interrupting the proper uploading of the operating system. Then the brain kind of develops around that because it’s trying to keep going anywhere, brains are so amazing and develop around it. And so, it just kind of develops a little bit differently. Does that sound right?

Stephan: Well, yeah, if you think about it, for those of us who have already got organized brains. When we come under threat, there are certain things that the body and the brain does in order to increase the efficiency of our response, the likelihood that we’re going to survive the threat. So, there’s a few things that happen. We suddenly have limited access to the cortex for two reasons. One is it takes time to think and that’s going to put us in danger and slow us down. And secondly, the cortex really runs on glucose and that’s glucose that we need to fuel our legs for running and for fighting back.

So, we have limited access to the cortex and also the brainstem that operates the internal systems of the body really goes into hyperdrive and it also helps to make us more efficient. So, it pumps us full of performance enhancers like cortisol and adrenaline. Our heart rate goes up to ensure we get oxygen everywhere. And also, we again limit access to some internal systems like the digestive system, for example, which are not useful right now while you’re under threat.

And the other thing that is being impacted is what you’re taking in. If you think about when you’re under threat, what are you taking in with your eyes and ears? You’re taking in anything that is either going to be a sign of further threat or an escape, everything else won’t matter. You’re not going to notice the beautiful roses over in the corner or anything like that. So that’s fine because after the threat’s gone, all those things will be intact again and I can think again, and I can notice flowers again.

But if a baby is under that level of threat on a constant sort of basis, then the brain is in that state a lot of the time, limited access to parts of the cortex, limited access to parts of the limbic system where we develop our relational and emotional capacity. The brainstem is constantly in this hyperactive state, which is also called a dysregulated state, but it’s actually hyperactivated. What we call the diencephalon is really taking in all the data around us, which are looking for types of threat.

So, for example, now this baby, if there hasn’t been any adequate intervention. You think about this baby now being 10 years old with a higher heart rate, with higher levels of cortisol, the stress hormone in its system, having had some limited access to the development of the cortex earlier. And possibly, not always, possibly have learning difficulties, have some emotional dysregulation, some poor attachment perhaps.

And we know with taking in the world around us and what we notice and don’t notice, you would know, Amy, how much time babies spend looking at their mother’s face. And taking note of all her range of emotional states and expression on her face. We know that some studies have actually shown that these children later on in childhood are really primed to see signs of threat in adult faces. So, they’re primed to see signs of anger rather than nuance or confusion or concern.

They’ll just look at little signs, a little frowning of the brow and think, okay, this adult’s angry, which is a threat, especially if it has experienced bad things immediately after, it’s usually experienced being hurt after adults are angry. And so, this is really what developmental trauma does. And if we don’t have adequate intervention, then this leads on to the development of behaviors that are protective, that are trying to make sense of the world in amongst all this confusion.

Amy: Okay, I’m taking down all the notes. This is so good. I feel several pieces of that, that I pulled out from it is that it’s impacting because so much of their focus and attention has to go towards defense or being overactivated in defense mode. That they’re not able to properly develop maybe some of the relational skills and some of the other things that they would be properly developing. And then they also kind of tend to start developing protective behaviors or something instead of kind of more being open.

And I think this idea around when we’re in anxiety, I feel we kind of lose our ability to be creative and there’s anxiety mode and discovery mode. And so, if we’re in anxiety mode, then we’re not really able to experience the world in the way that children are so good at, which is hopefully discovery mode where they’re open and noticing and being creative and using their imagination and curiosity and all those things. And those are kind of shut down when we’re in fight or flight or trauma mode, is that right?

Stephan: Yeah. Well, absolutely. I mean, even as adults, when we’re in the middle of a serious crisis, friends and family tend to bring over meals because I might be here at home, but I just can’t cook because there’s all this other sort of, it feels like a threat around me. And what do we tend to do? I’ll bring over a meal, a casserole. And so, for children, it’s the same and it’s the same in terms of how they play and how they learn. And it becomes really very important to focus on their sense of safety in order for them to be able to play and learn, that safety is not a given.

We have to understand that those children, their, I guess, natural state will be a state of threat, they will assume that we’re in a threat. Whereas other children who have not had that level of trauma will gauge the room and think, well, this is safe, there’s no threat here and I can play, and I can learn, and I can listen to the adults. Whereas traumatized children will naturally return to assuming that the environment is unsafe. And so that’s why we have to make additional efforts to focus on that first.

Amy: Okay, let me ask you, I have all the questions. Okay, so one would be, I have been told that like we had kind of talked about, some of these traumas are not just these massive events, that you’ve been in a car accident, or a parent died or something like that. Which is, I think, some of those things that cause the PTSD we’re talking about. I think a lot of us, when we think trauma, we’re looking for the big, big things. So, are there other kinds of trauma that are maybe things that we wouldn’t have thought that our child maybe was experiencing trauma, but maybe they were?

And then I guess my follow-up question to that would be, is what are the signs of trauma in children? What should we be looking for so that we can be more aware of maybe some of the needs around this?

Stephan: Okay, so there were two questions there. I think the first one is, what constitutes trauma in early childhood? I think that we very quickly forget how vulnerable we are as little children, and I always feel like I’m popping the children are resilient bubble. I’ll always hear this, “Well, children are so resilient, aren’t they?” And I think, well, no, they’re not. That’s why they’re dependent on us for literally everything. I mean, human babies from zero to 12 months are pretty much useless. When you think about it, other mammals are able to survive on their own after a very short time.

And we are still useless because we have these amazing complex brains to develop. And so, I think really that it’s probably because human beings are born about a year premature. I don’t think anyone would tolerate a two-year pregnancy though.

Amy: No, I’m really glad I didn’t have to [inaudible].

Stephan: Yeah, exactly. We are extremely vulnerable, which means that what constitutes a threat is actually a lot less than what constitutes a threat when we’re older. If you leave me in a room for a couple of hours at the age of 55 now, I’d probably be quite happy.

Amy: That’s delightful now. Can I go to time out, I just need some time.

Stephan: But if you leave me alone in a room for a week, then I’ll start to panic because I would be under threat. But leave a baby alone in a room for two hours if they’re not sleeping and you very quickly know about it because they come under threat. This is why babies cry, because the threat causes an internal, that sympathetic nervous system to activate, their heart rate to go up, their arousal levels go up, and they cry as a result, which is really, crying is an arousal detection and alarm system, isn’t it, for babies?

And then the parent hears the crying and then comes to allay the threat. So, it’s the same when they’re hungry, a baby being hungry is a threat to life. Me being hungry means I’ve just got to go to the fridge and see what I’ve got. So, there’s a lot of small threats that don’t constitute trauma, but when these threats are prolonged and become more severe, then they constitute trauma. So, a baby being left alone for hours on end every day would constitute a trauma, even if someone is returning to them.

Not being picked up enough may constitute a trauma because when babies are picked up, they’re reassured that they are protected. And a human being at six months old, at three months old, that is not picked up is seriously vulnerable and is unlikely to survive the wilderness. A baby in the wilderness is an hors d’oeuvre for a lion. And so, we need to be picked up regularly and rocked so that we know that an adult’s got us, and we’re protected. If we’re protected, we’re safe.

The other thing that helps little human beings to know that the environment is safe, they can’t assess the environment, all they’ve got is their caregiver, usually their mother and her face and tone. So, if she looks okay, then the environment is okay. If mother looks distressed, then there’s a threat in the environment. So, it also can compound the traumatic environment if mothers are under threat constantly. You think about a mother who lives with a violent partner, who loves her child and nurtures her baby, but is constantly under threat, her baby doesn’t feel totally safe.

Or for example, she lives in a war zone and has other things to worry about or is ill with a serious illness, is not able to be fully present. So, these things, when they’re very prolonged and severe, now I don’t want your listeners to think, oh gosh, I left my baby alone yesterday for a bit and now I’ve traumatized my child. That’s not what I’m talking about. So, I don’t think anyone needs to worry about that. I’m talking about severe and prolonged instances of this, the kind of circumstances that lead a court, a judge and a court to say, “Remove that child from that home, because this is harmful.”

Amy: So, if we have these kids, are there signs that we could notice? Because we have parents here, we also have teachers listening to you right now. Are there signs that we should be watching for of a traumatized child so that we can maybe try to meet their needs in a different way? What would be signs of that, that we would notice?

Stephan: Okay, yeah, there are some definitive signs. And as I said, we don’t know how pervasive trauma has been. And if there have been some very acute traumatizing events in amongst this as well, if there’s been acute abuse along the way. The signs are usually fairly clear to me and a child’s behavior always tells me a story. And the more I do this work, well, the better I am at reading what’s happened in the history.

So, the first thing that you often see is because of that high level of cortisol, adrenaline, and just heart rate that’s there all the time. It’s what we call an elevated arousal baseline. And what that does is, gives someone a very short fuse. So, you end up with a child that looks like they’re overreacting unreasonably to things that other children will also react to, but not to that extent.

So, they very easily melt down and go out of control and become inconsolable. They’re often also, because of this, they’re often diagnosed with ADHD or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. But it doesn’t appear the same as other children who are not traumatized who are diagnosed with ADHD, it is not the same. And they’re not quite as responsive to the medication as those other children. So that’s one thing that you see.

The other thing that you see is sometimes when it’s been severe and very early, you do see some digestive and toileting issues at the time when there shouldn’t be those issues any longer. And when we feel nervous or under threat, we start to get butterflies in our tummy and our digestion, and our own toileting doesn’t work as well, and you often see that. You see some trouble settling for bed and you find that your bedtime routine needs to be a one and a half hour to two hours long routine where you are leading up to it.

Sometimes a lot of waking during the night, you see a lot of oppositional behaviors because, especially in a school. In a school, they’ve got the added stimulus of all the social dynamics around them, the noise around them. Then you’ve got the teacher who is there trying to control the classroom, and it’s got this one child who’s both overreacting, even more because of the level of stimulus. And they probably find that this child after midday can no longer hold it together, can no longer sit still for long enough. They become more defined and more oppositional.

What tends to happen is that school will double down on the usual behavioral approaches that a school would take, but these approaches are unlikely to work in the same way. The usual approach is an operant one, where you reward or provide a positive reinforcement for desirable behavior. And you don’t provide that reinforcement for undesirable behavior, or you impose a consequence. And that does not have the same impact on traumatized children. So, people will notice that as well.

Amy: Interesting, okay. So, the things that we would use that traditionally work well with other children are not going to work the same, which then becomes frustrating because you feel like they might need it even more than some of the other kids. But then the things that we know to use aren’t working. So, you mentioned when we were talking before, we started recording, working with children in relation to their behavior. Talk to me about what that means, where we’re really working specifically with them and their behaviors.

Stephan: Yeah. Sometimes I guess my colleagues and I are consulted with, usually, with regards to children’s behavior, what we call behavior support. And what we find is that we’ve usually got to undo a whole framework of routines and structures around this child that’s been put into place. That is all based on rewards and consequences. Usually when I say, “Look, let’s not do that anymore,” there’s a bit of panic because there’s a feeling of, but you’re taking away all my control.

To which I usually answer, “Well, considering you’ve called me, I’m guessing it’s not working anyway and that you don’t have the control that you think you have otherwise, I wouldn’t be here.” So usually it’s a matter of saying, “Okay, well, let’s give this a shot. Let’s just give it a try for a while. Are you on board?” Because we need to get people on board.

Amy: Right. So, what does that look like? If we’re not using positive reinforcement or consequences, if you will, or just not reinforcing behaviors that [crosstalk]?

Stephan: Yeah, we’ve got to understand where it’s coming from, because we cannot see developmental trauma. You can see physical trauma.

Amy: Yeah, not developmental.

Stephan: And if you drop something on your foot and then are limping around because you’ve broken a bone in there, your behavior is the limping around. Now, that’s been caused by trauma. And no level of me offering you a reward to not limp for the day or even worse, imposing a consequence on you if you do not walk properly. None of it’s going to help. It might work in the short term because you’ll think, oh, gosh, I really want the reward, and I don’t want that consequence. So, you’ll put all your weight on that foot, and you’ll walk properly for a couple of hours and then it will be worse.

And this is how we view behavior that is part of the overall symptomatology of developmental trauma. We try and understand where is this coming from. And this is why it’s different to other behavior, because if your foot is not traumatized and you’re just limping around because you feel like being disruptive, the reward and the consequence is going to work. I would just say, “Amy, stop clowning around. I’ll tell you what, if you stop clowning around and just walk around properly, you’ll get cake.”

Amy: Right. And that works pretty well, yeah.

Stephan: Yeah. And who doesn’t want cake?

Amy: I love that analogy.

Stephan: So, you see, the thing is that it’s hidden with developmental trauma. So, you’ve got this child who has got this level of physiological hyperactivity that means that they’re going to be stimulated to that hyper aroused point very, very quickly. And that’s the point at which they lose control. And so really, they’re asking this child to have control in that moment to be able to think. And they usually say to the child, “You need to make better choices.” Well, what choice are you going to make when you’re in pain?

If your finger’s been jammed in the doorway and you’re saying a whole lot of bad words, what choice are you going to make when someone says, rather than helping you with your finger, when they say, “This is really inappropriate language, and you need to stop.”

Amy: And you’re [inaudible] while your hand is being shut in the door.

Stephan: So, your language is going to get worse. So, what we do with these children, if we know that it’s a function, so we do, there’s a fairly comprehensive assessment that takes place. And the first place we start is to regulate this brainstem. We sometimes, or people sometimes make the mistake of thinking that these children are going to recover from trauma. They can heal from developmental trauma, but what does recovery mean? Recovery means going back to how you used to be but they’ve never been okay, not if they were born into it.

And so, we have to help them to build a new way of being and a new way of functioning. And that means that we have to resign ourselves to taking our time and to be patient with this child’s healing and development. So, there are a range of things that we do in the beginning, which are around regulating the brainstem. It’s about safety, lots of breaks with regulation in between.

Now, any time that there’s what we’d call a high arousal activity, which isn’t necessarily something that’s going to make them annoyed, but it could be an exciting game. You don’t want them to miss out on that game but now they’re at a level of excitement that they cannot manage, but other children can. And so, what I ask, for example, in a school, what you’d want in a school is to follow high arousal activity with a regulating activity to set them up for the next high arousal activity.

The other trick that people often miss is the importance of regulating these children when they already appear to be calm because we’re talking about their baselines being high. And if you want them to progress, they need to lower that baseline but what happens is they mask it very well. So, they say, “Oh, look, he’s been calm all day.” They always say they’ve gone from zero to 100 in 10 seconds. Well, they don’t even know what zero is. They were hiding 60 to make it look like zero and it wasn’t that far to 100.

And so, we make sure that the regulating activity actually occurs always unconditional on behavior. So, it’s a pleasant and regulating activity and that occurs when they are calm already. It’s not a frantic response to dysregulation to try and get them calm again. When the horse has bolted, now it’s a matter of containing it. Now these activities can be rhythmic one-on-one and non-chaotic environments will generally do it.

I mean think about babies being rocked, quietly soothed. This is what you need to replicate in older children but you’re not necessarily picking them up and rocking them. You might be putting them in a swing or a rocking chair, walking with them, bouncing them gently on a trampoline while you stand right by them, so it’s not leaving them alone. These things are all very helpful to do for a long period of time.

And then what you do is you spend some time actually consolidating the relationship with safe adults, giving them an experience of safety and care so that they also feel worthy of being cared for. Because part of their template, in order to make sense of the world, they must assume that they are not worthy of care, love, and safety like other children. So, when they experience this, they experience it for a little while, enjoy it. And then what teachers and carers and parents find is that they’ll undo it very quickly, almost to punish themselves to show that they’re not good. And so, by predicting this and staying ahead of it, we can also assist to kind of carry them through the pain of realizing that they’ve always been worthy of care, that this is a really important part of the process.

Amy: That is so good. And that’s a thing that we could do in a home or a classroom. I love that you talked about we’re not really trying to go back to who that person was before their brain was changed. But healing, I think that’s such an important thing for kids to understand too, that all of their parts matter and that there’s parts of their story that were maybe harder are a piece of their story, but it doesn’t necessarily need to hold them back or break them. That there’s things that they can do to still become all of who they want to be, I guess. I don’t know. I just feel empowering them in that situation is so valuable.

Stephan: Yeah, absolutely, they do. They can heal. And it takes time, and it takes patient adults who can hold hope for them when they do, this is what it takes and not all of us can do it. But that idea that they’re not recovering to how they used to be because they don’t know. This is something new. We see this in, look at the shock on people’s faces when they get a new ability that they never had before, when they can walk for the first time in their lives. Or they’ve always been blind and now they can see. It is weird. Okay, it’s amazing, but it’s also weird.

Look, I wear hearing aids because I have a hearing impairment. And some years ago, I finally had my ears tested because all the people around me could no longer tolerate the number of times I said, “Eh.” And I had no idea what they were saying. But the interesting thing about it was, and it hadn’t been for my whole life, but for a good chunk of my adulthood, I had been quite impaired. What I noticed is that the audiologist set up my hearing aids and he said, “Now we’re just going to set them up at about 60%.” I said, “Come on, give me 100. I want 100% of my hearing.”

And he said, “You won’t be able to tolerate it. So, for the next couple of months, we’re going to actually bring it up.” And in fact, even at 60%, I remember wearing them. I immediately went to a shopping center to meet my wife there and I couldn’t handle it and had to take them off. I couldn’t cope with hearing all the birds, rather than thinking, oh, beautiful, I can hear birds, I felt like I was in an Alfred Hitchcock movie.

And I couldn’t tolerate the indicators. You call them indicators or blinkers on the car, the noise that they make and the general noise of crowds in the shopping center. So, I had to get used to it. I rejected it. I took them off. That’s only a little thing. And I realized in that moment, I thought, oh, gosh, this is just a little bit of what the kids I work with feel.

Amy: Are experiencing.

Stephan: They’re just not used to a safe world and it’s freaky.

Amy: And it’s scary and not they’re on hypervigilance, they’re looking for the threats.

Stephan: Yeah. So being able to transform that hypervigilance into a passive wonder at the world, a joyful wonder, which is what they should have. Takes a while and we have to be prepared and work with it because imagine there’s a 10-year-old who deep down unconsciously believes that they are unworthy of good things, of love, of care and they misbehave. And they get told, “You are not good. Now you don’t get that special thing.” They are, on one hand, devastated that they don’t get the special thing and they’ll be angry about it. And on the other hand, they will know that they were always right.

Amy: Right, It’s a confirmation.

Stephan: Because that is for the good kids and that’s why the consequence gets us nowhere because we’re only really affirming what unconsciously they already believe and are looking for and sometimes they’re desperately looking for. I see this a lot in foster care. Children go into a safe placement and very quickly push the buttons of the carers until the carers start to lose it because this is just too unfamiliar and undeserving, not just unfamiliar. And we’ve got to change it, we need to make it deserving and familiar.

And all of these things need to be kind of built up as a foundation so that then the child can learn and be creative and relax. Just like when the crisis is over, now I can relax and go back to cooking meals rather than having people bring them to me in Tupperware containers.

Amy: That is so interesting. We are over our time, and it’s just been so good. And I think one of my favorite pieces, there’s been so much that you’ve shared today that’s just really valuable. But I loved the analogy of the broken foot and this idea of rewards, consequences, and how that doesn’t work with traumatized children. It just was so visual and so easy to see in that respect.

So I guess just in closing, when we’re working with traumatized children, it sounds like the solution then is to kind of do some re-regulating of the brainstem and create spaces that are safe so that they can kind of relearn maybe what that’s supposed to look like so they can really kind of start to feel safe enough to open and be back in discovery mode, is that kind of?

Stephan: It’s physiological regulation first. It’s literally getting the heart rate down through safety and a safe environment. We can talk for hours on this but the way that we play, the way that you might play with children. Actually, you might have a 10-year-old, and you would direct the play in the way that you might with a three-year-old, bring yourself back a little bit. There’s lots of dissociative states that are a part of trauma, not quite being here. So, the attitude has to be one of constantly grounding by narrating what it feels like.

And so, you’d always narrate what something feels like. You’d tell them what it feels like., “This feels soft, doesn’t it?” This is a bit rough. And then you’d focus on relationship, especially with adults more than peers, you’d pull back on the peers, you add that later. So, it’s one-on-one time that’s really important and also not raising the bar too high too soon.

Amy: Okay, I love it. This has been so good. Tell me where I can send our listeners, where can we find you if we want to be able to learn more about what you do and what you share?

Stephan: Well, I guess I’m not so good at social media, but they can find me on Instagram and Facebook. They can find our organization, Knightlamp. That’s nightlamp with a K. So, if they just search for that, they’ll find a whole lot of things. They’ll find our website and ways of contacting us. Yeah, everyone finds their way. Some people are more Instagram people, and some people are more LinkedIn people, as the kids call it, corporate Facebook.

Amy: Corporate Facebook. I love that we have options. It’s so nice to have a world of options. It’s so good. Alright, well, we will drop those links in the show notes as well so that people can just find that really easily wherever they want to connect with you online. And I just want to say thank you again for coming and just sharing more on this with us and helping us understand better what this looks like.

So that we just have, I think, maybe more perspective as we’re working with children that have really just had challenging things growing up and that we can be more aware of how to support them better and to create safety for them. So that they can hopefully kind of work through some of this and heal like we talked about, which I think is just so powerful. So, thank you so much for sharing and it’s just been lovely to have you on today. Thank you for coming.

Stephan: Thank you so much, Amy, for having me. I really enjoyed our conversation.

Amy: Good. Thank you.

Don’t you just love all the fun things we’re learning on the show together? Well, we wanted to give you a chance to practice a little bit of it at home. And so, we made you a special freebie just for being a listener here and you can grab it at planningplaytime.com\special-freebie. That is planningplaytime.com\special-freebie. So, what this freebie is, I’ll tell you, is an amazing alphabet activity that you can start using with your kiddos and it is based in play and is so fun.

You can use dot markers with it, you can use Q-tip painting, you could use circle cereal. There’s all kinds of options, but you can print it out today and get started. Just head over to planningplaytime.com\special-freebie and we’ll send that to you right away.

Thank you for hanging out with me today for this fun chat on Raising Healthy Kid Brains. If you want to see more of what we’re doing to support kiddos and their amazing brains, come visit us on our website planningplaytime.com. See you next week.