Helping Children Cope with Secondary PTSD

Guest Post

Helping Children Cope with Secondary PTSD

It has been long recognized that family members of combat veterans who develop PTSD may also display the characteristics of the disorder. This has been referred to as vicarious PTSD or secondary PTSD. For children who look to adults for support and care as well as help making sense of what is often already a confusing world, adjusting to the stresses associated with having a parent in the military – in particular one who exhibits PTSD symptoms – is especially difficult to cope with.

According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, children in military families are frequently exposed to a variety of stressors which they have labeled “toxic.” The National Center for Child Traumatic Stress points out that the children of enlisted parents have to cope with unpredictable deployment and issues related to reintegration when the parent returns home. When the parent is career military, this process repeats itself, leading to uncertainty for the child as well as the remaining parent. As this parent can’t provide the ability to better predict when the other parent may be leaving or returning, the child has no foundation to rely upon and may become confused and fearful.

Additionally, the remaining parent is often overwhelmed by the increased responsibility they are required to shoulder or by having to act as a single parent on little to no notice. This can cause the remaining parent to become less accessible to the child as they struggle with the increased burden. The fear of losing the parent due to their repeat absence or to death, decreased attention from the remaining parent, and frequent moves and loss of friends can lead to a sense of abandonment in the child, a sense that they have no one to turn to for answers, and feelings of isolation from other children.

While children are normally excited to have a parent return home after a deployment, this excitement can turn to dismay and distress when this parent is suffering from acute stress or PTSD. When already at increased vulnerability due to the other stressors they’ve encountered as part of a military family, it is not infrequent that these children may begin to exhibit some of the same symptoms as the parent.

How Might Combat Related PTSD Symptoms in a Parent Affect a Child?

Combat veterans suffering from PTSD often exhibit symptoms that can affect or even potentially traumatize their child. Probably the most frightening of these is when the parent re-experiences combat related situations through nightmares, during which they may scream and even enact the dream, or daytime flashbacks during which the individual perceives everything around them as if they are back in combat. This can be terrifying for the child who doesn’t understand what is happening to their parent.

People with PTSD also attempt to avoid anything that might remind them of their experiences and thus trigger a strong memory or flashback. Since almost anything can serve as a trigger – a color matching their uniform, an ad for the brand of cigarette they were smoking at the time of the trauma, the smell of aftershave they were wearing at the time of an attack – they can’t predict when they might come into contact with something that will elicit a flashback or other negative response. This means they stop going places, stop taking their family to the movies, out for pizza, shopping, or practically anywhere else. While they are only attempting to avoid coming into contact with any triggers, the child thinks the parent doesn’t want to spend time with them, eventually coming to believe there must be something wrong with them or else their parent wouldn’t reject them. Those suffering from PTSD also tend to have a high level of arousal and to be extremely irritable. They can unintentionally lash out in anger if startled or feeling anxious without recognizing it, leaving the child wondering what they have done to make their parent no longer love them. Since the child can’t predict when their parent may exhibit any of these behaviors, and over time may come to experience them as traumatic when they do occur, they may go on to develop symptoms of PTSD in reaction to the way they experience their parent’s PTSD.

What Can Parents Do to Help Their Children if they are Display Symptoms of Secondary PTSD?

If you or your partner are experiencing the symptoms of PTSD, the first step is to get treatment so you are able to control your symptoms in front of your child and overtime get rid of them. It’s important for parents to work together to help their child learn to deal with stress and understand the nature of why their parent may display confusing behaviors.

Remember that your child may already be vulnerable to the effects of stress in their life, especially stress related to having a parent in the military. When they see either parent displaying signs of excessive anxiety or stress they will quickly react with an escalation of anxiety in response. Make sure you show your child ways you use to manage your stress levels, even explaining how you are coping with your anxiety to reduce it. This will help them understand there are ways to handle their own stress and they will attempt to imitate you, coming to learn effective coping strategies.

Parents can also show children other ways of working through fears and anxiety, such as talking about them in a way that leads to expectations of a positive result. A lot of the escalation of anxiety that occurs in children and their parents is the result of expectations of negative outcomes. Often we get what we expect, such that if we talk about ways that can lead to positive results we can alter our experiences from being predominantly negative to being predominantly positive.

Parents should also commit to specific blocks of time that will be family time— when the whole family spends time doing fun things together. When children feel like parents are making plans that focus on the things they enjoy doing, they will feel truly cared about and important in their parents’ eyes. This will also strengthen the parent-child bond with each parent as well as increase the bond between parents, which is also important in making children feel safe and able to count on their parents for their needs.

The most important thing  however, is to make sure you seek treatment for your child if the symptoms seem to be extreme, are worsening instead of improving, or your child simply does not appear to be responding to some of these basic family based strategies. Regardless of whether you feel your child needs profession help or not, these tactics will still serve to strengthen the connections between family members and increase the level of trust individuals feel in relation to each other.

Written by a Certified Trauma Therapist from A Healing Place, a leading treatment center near Ocala, FL for PTSD and issues caused by trauma.