In the wake Parkland school shooting in February 2018, many stories focus on who to blame (more gun control, a broken mental health system, bad parenting, bad President, etc.) instead of how our mindset needs to change. Even Nikolas Cruz’s lawyer is jumping on the bandwagon as the central theme of his defense:
Cruz’s lawyers plan to fight the death penalty. They will argue that the community failed to heed the many warnings.
“Every single red flag was present,” said Broward Public Defender Howard Finkelstein. “If this kid was missed, there is no system.”
Not Blame: A New Mindset Needed
However, instead of blame, our mindset must change to ask ourselves:
“What can we learn?” and “What are the solutions to prevent another shooting?”
As a national family trauma expert, who recently published the book, Treating the Traumatized Child, I know there is much we can learn from the Parkland tragedy.
A new mindset will enable us to move from the blame game to a new mindset of concrete solutions and hope.
This journey begins by using the lens (better known as a viewpoint) of a traumatized family and community, instead of a focus on the individual (such as Nikolas, the mother, the FBI, the President, the school, the mental health worker, etc.).
It takes a family, community, and village to either heal a child deeply traumatized or maintain the problem. Therefore, it is within the village that we will find our answers to help prevent another act of violence.
Key events surrounding the shooting are presented below.
After each event, I will present what would happen if we looked at the same event from a new lens: the traumatized family and community. Then we can review the implications and solutions that emerge.
As Broward Public Defender Howard Finkelstein stated previously, “if this kid was missed, there is no system.” But what is there was a “system” and the answers were not as complicated as one thinks.
What is the New Mindset Around Key Parkland Events?
Key Event #1
Records show that social workers, mental health counselors, police officers, and school administrators missed red flags during home visits and school evaluations.
What We Can Learn?
Each of these systems worked in silos. There was no “quarterback” or centralized family therapist trained in family trauma to bring these different systems together, along with the mother and any friends or neighbors that she might have had.
A Proposed Solution:
In our work with families and communities, we use a Town Meeting Agenda to bring the parent(s) and their community together.
This means that the therapist is trained on how to motivate and invite school officials, mental health counselors, police officers, neighbors, and the family into a “town meeting” that is run efficiently with introductions, explaining the problem, brainstorming solutions, and clarifying roles.
In the old days, this coming together happened organically. Now, we live in an isolated society where people do not know one another as intimately and whereby most of us are hardwired into technology.
Therefore, why are we blaming a system if they do not have the tools, training, or mindset in family or community systems-thinking?
Key Event #2
A clear sign of trauma is that Cruz was cutting himself in late 2016 following a breakup and a DCF investigator didn’t check for cutting scars on Cruz “because he was wearing long sleeves,” according to the investigator's notes.
What We Can Learn?
That DCF case worker is an evaluator, not a trained family therapist. Without trauma or therapy training the DCF worker did not have the skills or tools to probe deeper or use it as an opportunity to start family therapy with the mother and her potential village or extended family.
A Proposed Solution:
Partner the DCF case worker with a trained family systems therapist when a child or adolescent presents any risks of trauma. In this case self-harm. It can be called a specialized triage team.
Key Event #3
Lynda Cruz, the shooter’s mother, assured the DCF investigator that he "doesn't have a gun" and that he was meeting regularly with his mental health counselor. The school staff did call the Henderson Behavioral Health in Broward County after learning Cruz had cut himself. The Henderson's Mobile crisis unit determined that Nikolas was not at risk to harm himself or others. Meanwhile, neighbors say his home life was in similar distress.
What We Can Learn?
What is the common theme in each of these events? Individual treatment for an individual child. There was no intensive family therapy work with the mother and son together, and no attempt to mobilize the support systems of the mother, which included her own neighbors and extended family.
A skeptic would say that the neighbors would never come to a town meeting and the mother lacked parenting skills. Furthermore, the mental health counselors might say that individual sessions with Nikolas yielded no safety risk.
A Proposed Solution:
The skeptic and the counselors may be right. But we will never know until we try.
Competency is quiet; it tends to be overlooked in the noise and clatter of problems.
And people will do well if they can (including Nikolas and his mother and their neighbors).
But we must first lower the noise and clatter of the problems to give Nikolas and his mother tools and support in a family counseling environment to bring her competencies into the light of day.
Isolation and silos of the helper systems will have little hope to achieve these goals.
Summary: What Can We Learn Going Forward?
In each key event, there is a common theme to give hope, rather than blame.
Mobilizing community and family in an intentional way with tools is an antidote to isolation. The natural tendency for a child or adult in emotional pain is to isolate or curl up in a ball. In turn, this isolation fueled by social media can lead to more anger, frustration, and more isolation.
As time goes on, this isolation can result in suicide or in Nikolas Cruz’s case, self-harm and extreme violence.
Therefore, the root solution is not contained in finger pointing or individual treatment in silos. It is going back to mobilizing the family, community, mental health workers with the tools they need to help an isolated and lost child get out of the darkness.
In the old days, it was the tribal chief or elder who took on the role of “quarterback” to organize and run a town meeting to help raise a lost parent or child. But that role is often missing from our current society.
This requires us to adapt or die.
Adaptation requires mental health workers and other professions to get trained in family counseling and systems thinking.
It’s also important to have the tools skills necessary to work effectively with the family and village.
It requires DCF workers, whose role it is to evaluate, to be paired up with trained family counselors to create a better picture of the current situation. Not adapting essentially is the same as the definition of insanity: doing the same thing over again and expecting different results.
The problem is an operating or delivery system error and not an incompetent family, President, FBI, school, child welfare, or police system that all currently work in their own silos.
Nikolas could not heal his deep pain alone and needed the help from his mom and community working together.
At the end of the day, Nikolas Cruz is accountable for his actions and he ultimately had choices.
But the outcome could have been different if the family and community had the tools to work smarter early on with a different mindset of the traumatized family, not just the traumatized child.
For more information on Dr. Scott Sells' work or free resources on family systems therapy, visit familytrauma.com.
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