A recent article highlights the strides forward we are making with our new knowledge of brain development and trauma. In this case, the criminal justice system is recognising that children should not be sentenced to life without parole when their acts may reflect an undeveloped pre-frontal cortex - something that the right intervention or just the maturation process may well correct. The only problem is that the criminal justice system is using a definition of immaturity that doesn't match our knowledge of brain development. In legal terms, a child is an adult once they hit 18 years of age. The pre-frontal cortex may not finish maturing until the age of 25 (or even as late as 29).
So it appears that although our new knowledge is chipping away at the traditional punitive response to 'bad' behavior, we are a long way from changing our belief system. Because that is what it is going to take to become truly trauma-informed.
Readers on ACES Connection may be feeling a little as if I am preaching to the converted - after all, aren't we all 'trauma-informed' now? Don't we recognize that 'acting out' is exactly that - acting out all the hurt a person has received in their lifetime, usually when they were too young to defend themselves. The creaking wheels of the criminal justice system may be slow to catch up, but we are comfortably ahead of the game.
Only l wonder how deep our reframe really goes? A teacher trained in a popular school-based trauma program accuses her student, "You're in your PTSD, aren't you!" Classmates shame their peer, "Miss, Miss, she's in her amygdala!" An evidence based program for parenting traumatized children recommends time-out as an appropriate parenting tool, when everything we know about trauma and attachment says that this child needs reassurance, safety, connection, not isolation and shaming. We change our language, we learn new concepts, but can we really escape our conditioning if we were programmed from an early age by the interactions with our own caregivers? Of course we are judgemental and punitive, use shaming, blaming, and manipulation (such as incentives or withholding our approval) to get the behavior we want: Wasn't that what we learned at our mother's knee?
Anyone familiar with Echo Parenting & Education and nonviolent parenting has probably already heard us talk about this 'paradigm shift' that has to take place before we can really practice the principles of compassion and lack of judgement we so ardently believe in... until we are triggered, or tired, or really, really angry.
Are you with me so far? Well here's the last challenge to us all - violence. Have you noticed how much nonviolent people hate violence? How bids to reform the criminal justice system center on those convicted of 'nonviolent crime'? How we shudder and condemn not just violence but those who are violent? To me, that is as incomplete an understanding of trauma as the punitive trauma-informed teacher, or sending a traumatized child to sit in the time-out chair. We know that the anger of the traumatized person at the injustice, helplessness and pain they have suffered goes somewhere: It goes inward to be expressed in acts of violence to self, or it goes outward in violence towards others.
I have a story I would like to tell but it's very close to home. It's about a son and a moment of rage and a history of trauma and now an 18 year old locked up in jail for a violent crime. It's a very sad story and a very difficult one, because there is almost no compassion in our society for 'perpetrators' however narrowly they fit that description, however narrowly it was even a crime. One day maybe I will tell it, but for now please look into your trauma-informed hearts and think again when you use the terms 'violence prevention' or 'violent criminals' to make sure you are seeing the act not the person as the disease. To all mothers whose sons are hurting and have hurt others, I think of you this Mother's Day.
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