How many emotionally injured children are there? It’s uncertain, easily millions. Most of these children go untreated; many unnoticed or falsely labeled ‘bad’ kids. While the damage to them is not well understood, the increase in anti-social behaviors stemming from unhealed trauma and abandonment is disastrous. Our homes, schools, communities, and judicial system all pay a price for unhealed children. Healthcare professionals are either uncertain what to do with them or believe that they cannot be “fixed” after the age of five. Schools don’t understand, so aren’t much help. And our courts, now filled with them, can only punish and make matters worse.
My name is David and I am a semi-retired school psychologist and adoptive father of two abused and abandoned foster-children. These wonderful kids are now 25 and 30 years old, well-adjusted, successful and contributing adults, so my main focus now is to try and spread around what I learned in the last 30 years. My work has always been and still remains to take the abstract and sometime difficult psychological research and translate them into practical knowledge and successful applications meant to lead children to their own, personal healing.
At our web-site (www-kid-epics.com) my wife, Barbara, and I are concerned with trauma only as a state from which to recover. It is necessary to see the effects that extreme distress has on the developing personality before talking about what can be done with it. A successful solution requires knowledge of both the problem and desired outcome. How else can we recognize when we’ve found our solution? Likewise, to heal, first we must understand both the state of trauma and the nature of health.
We intend to help parents, teachers, and all students of human behavior understand the effects of emotional injuries on the developing personality. we will illustrate the thinking and learning of the developing child and lay a clear path to recovery from rage and shame to trust and forgiveness.
At certain developmental points, the traumas of early childhood have specific sets of possible effects on the emergent ego. These effects impact the personality in definite ways and lead to predictable patterns of beliefs and behavior. These are knowable. Therefore, we can act in strategic ways to redirect growth towards wellbeing. In this manner, we can immunize the abused or abandoned child against significant mental disorders as adults.
Much has been written concerning mental illness. Book after book, edition after edition of working manuals are dedicated to describing what sickness is in profound minutia. As a society, we’ve spent an uncounted fortune in time and money on investigating what we don't want but have given little or no thought to what we do.
[Adapted from our website www.kid-epics.com]
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