The daughter of an alcoholic, abusive father, Tamra Oman remembers trying to protect her mother from his violent outbursts, even though she was not yet in kindergarten.
“I remember him choking her over the sink. Spitting out blood. Blood coming out all over the place and landing on me,” Oman said, recounting one incident in her early childhood in Crown Point, Indiana. “I remember going into this situation trying to save her. Trying to jump on top of him and save her.
“I can remember what I was wearing,” she continued. “That’s what trauma does. It also gets you stuck in those places.”
It was one painful episode in a childhood punctuated by sexual and physical assaults and teenage years tinged with cocaine use. Oman, now 45 and living in Fond du Lac, said she went to drug treatment more than a dozen times.
Wisconsin is part of a growing nationwide movement to adopt trauma-informed care, or using information about children’s troubled pasts to improve mental health, provide social services and address a wide range of criminal justice problems. Research has shown that adverse childhood experiences can lead to a lifetime of problems.
[For more of this story, written by Dee J. Hall, go to http://www.postcrescent.com/st...d-part-one/84649854/]
Comments (0)