Tag: secondary trauma

  • Thirty Stories from Thirty Years: Story Number 5

    Thirty Stories from Thirty Years: Story Number 5

    30 Stories in 30 Years. A Career in Child Protection. Blog.

    By Tammi Pitzen, Executive Director of the Children’s Advocacy Center of Jackson County

    The Secondary Trauma Quagmire

    This is story # 5 in Tammi Pitzen’s series of 30 stories from her 30 years working in child welfare.

    You can read all the stories here.

    Secondary trauma can change you.

    It can change how you view the world.  It can change how you feel.  It can change how you dream.  That is even if you are educated on secondary trauma and look for the signs and exercise self-care.  Sometimes it is the reflecting back that helps you put it to rest.

    My first job in child protection was on a crisis intervention team.  We investigated child abuse reports.  It was prior to a change in perspective in the field.  We were definitely doing investigations versus assessments. 

    There were levels assigned to each report that indicated the number of steps that needed to be completed and the number of people that needed to be talked to in the case.  The paperwork increased with an increased level of risk and increased again if it was found to be true neglect or abuse.  In some ways, the things that were apparent got more attention.  The ones that were grey or murky could be closed without the full story being told.  In those cases, they usually came back multiple times, like a tantruming toddler needing attention.  

    Most of the really serious cases that I worked either came out of nowhere, meaning no reports made in the past or they were one of those murky grey cases where there had been multiple low-level neglect reports that were closed with no finding for abuse.

    In about the second year of my career, I was assigned one of those cases with no history that turned out to be a pretty significant, chronic, heinous abuse case that had a great impact on me.  I learned a tremendous amount about myself, about building resiliency, about listening to the silence that is part of many abuse cases. 

    Silence because children refuse to talk and sometimes silence because they no longer have the ability to talk.  In this particular case, it was the latter. 

    The child was four or five.  He presented to the base hospital with a head injury.  He had been accidentally run over by a car by a parent.  On face value, tragic.  The call came in late to me.  Both in time of day, but also in the process.  In the emergency department, the on-call pediatrician also noted multiple injuries and bruises of various aging all over this young child’s body.  The child had to be medevacked to a hospital in a nearby town because the military hospital was not equipped to handle the level of the head trauma. 

    By the time I got the call, the child had been moved to the other hospital, the parents went with the child and had not been questioned by anyone regarding the current injury or the older injuries. 

    The child was unconscious and in critical condition.  It is never easy for an investigation to catch up to real-time once you are behind.  It is also never easy to have to call a judge in the middle of the night and ask for an order of protection for a child and not have all the facts yet.  Lucky for me, our process in these circumstances was to have a supervisor make that call.  We were lucky and were able to get that order.  Due to the gravity of the case, we had to get the orders served right away at the hospital and to the parents.  Those were the times you were thankful for the military cases, as it was much easier to make all that happen within the structure of that system.

    Rather than go into the details of this case, what I will say is that as a young worker, a young adult, and newly coming out of my sheltered existence, this case hit me very hard. 

    I held onto the case well past the sixty days allowed.  I was investigating this case and every new fact brought on new abuse allegations.

    This unconscious child would utter clues.  They were garbled.  Out of context.  As he became more fully awake and regained some speech, they became unimaginable and fantastical.  Some allegations against parents.  Some involving others.  One of those others was a pediatrician in another state.    

    Each new day brought on a new horror that this child had lived through.  Sexual abuse, physical abuse, torture, emotional abuse…. Really a classic target child.  It crossed state lines.  

    I got on a quest.  Which is always dangerous in the child protection world.  I was going to make everything right for this child.  I was going to track down every allegation.  Prove or disprove it.  I was going to make this child’s future secure from abuse.  I was not alone. 

    The pediatrician who had not reported timely also spent a fair amount of time trying to right his mistake.  He wrote a letter of commendation to go in my personnel file for the professional and thorough way I went above and beyond to protect this child.  Which to be honest, did as much to make me angry as it did to make me feel good.  I was offended as I felt like I handled every case that way.  I did not want to be part of the process to forgive his transgression of not calling the report in.  He was very aggressive and opinionated and now he was caught in the same lens of judgment that he cast on others and I was not sure I wanted to relieve him of that.

    What my quest and misplaced anger looked like was me sitting in my office, crying as I wrote up my case notes.  Interviewing every person I could find that had ever had contact with this child.  Smoking outsides fuming to anyone who would listen about the injustice of the other state for not pulling the license of the pediatrician who I had initiated a report against.  And more crying in my office at the thought of interviewing the little child again based on information coming from statements of the siblings. 

    In that time, caseworkers were not supposed to cry.

    If you cried or felt things, then you were not able to do the job in an unbiased manner.  You were not tough enough to do the job.  There was no such thing as compassion fatigue, secondary trauma, or vicarious trauma.  Those were concepts that came much later.  There was no discussion about self-care. 

    Most of the workers tended to do things together socially as we no longer had friends outside “the system”.  We were jaded.  We did the exact opposite of what is advised now.  We drank together.  We smoked our stress away.  Back then you could even smoke in your office.  Seems absolutely crazy to think back on.  Your coworkers became like family because no one else understood.  You became inundated with the very thing you were trying to escape.

    My quest ended when my supervisor came into my office and I was telling her of the latest allegation that needed to be investigated. She put her hand up telling me to stop.  I fell silent.  She looked at me and said, “This is finished—close out your case and get your paperwork to me by the end of the week.” 

    I sputtered all the reasons why I should not…with tears being held back as much as I could.  She then shared some wisdom with me from her many years of child protection.  She said sometimes it takes years to know all the allegations of abuse perpetrated on a child.  Sometimes you never know.  There are other children who need your expertise.  This child is safe in a foster home with parents who want to adopt him.  You have done all that you can.

    I went home that night fuming.  I wrote out my notes in front of the TV and cried some more.  I went in the next day and turned over my case file.  I was exhausted.  She hugged me.  By noon I had two more cases that needed to be investigated. 

    Later, some of us chuckled a bit about the doctor trying to relieve his guilt by praising my work.  We were hardcore.  We were cynical.  Now looking back, he was probably sincere.  Maybe.

    This work changes you.  You have choices to make about how it changes you.  Does it make you angry?  Does it make you hostile?  Or depressed?  Helpless? 

    There are a couple of “takeaways” in this story. 

    As a supervisor, know when to step in and guide your staff.  As a professional working in the field, learn your limits, and recognize when you stray too far from “center”.  Know when you have done all that you can do. There are some really “dark” secrets in this world.  Some of us have the responsibility to hear these secrets.  That responsibility is an honor.  You have been deemed trustworthy to hear the secret. 

    But this is about building resiliency.  How do you build resiliency without building tolerance and immunity?

    One way is when you lose your way and become too immersed, listen to the wise person who points that out to you.  Another way is to own your feelings.  Do not act like you don’t have a response to the terrible things you hear or see.  Choose healthy habits to deal with those feelings.  Follow good nutrition guidelines.  Exercise.  Seek therapy.  This will be a repeated theme throughout these stories.  Sometimes you get so buried in your work, the sadness, the enormity of it; that you cannot see the impact it is having on you.  Surround yourself with people you trust, who you will listen to, and who will care enough to point it out to you when you have reached your limit and need to recharge or change your course. (Doing this of course while maintaining confidentiality)

    Earlier I mentioned this work changes you.  It will do that for sure.  I am not the same person I was at 21 when I started working in this field.  Part of self-care is, in a career where so much is out of your control, control what you can.  You cannot control that the work will change you, but you can control how you integrate those changes.  Use your experiences to be grateful for your own life.  If you experienced abuse and can’t be grateful for your childhood, be grateful that you were strong enough to survive.  Be more compassionate.  Trauma explains a lot of our unacceptable behavior, but it is still unacceptable behavior.  Give yourself the gift of forgiveness for those behaviors and learn your triggers.   Show compassion, when you can, to yourself and to those around you.  Do the best you can—every day. 

    Listen.  Listen to those who guide you out of the quagmire of secondary trauma and allow them to help you find safety. 

    This is story # 5 in Tammi Pitzen’s series of 30 stories from her 30 years working in child welfare.

    You can read all the stories here.

    #ThirtyStoriesFromThirtyYears #ThirtyFromThirty #ACareerInChildProtection

  • Thirty Stories From Thirty Years: Story Number 1

    Thirty Stories From Thirty Years: Story Number 1

    Thirty Stories From Thirty Years: Story Number 1

    30 Stories in 30 Years. A Career in Child Protection. Blog.

    By Tammi Pitzen, Executive Director of the Children’s Advocacy Center of Jackson County

    This is story #1 in Tammi Pitzen’s series of 30 stories from her 30 years working in child welfare.

    You can read all the stories here.

    I quietly celebrated the beginning of my thirtieth year of a career in child protection a few months back. 

    I get asked a lot about how I have stayed the course so long in such a heart-wrenching field. 

    I used to think it was a rhetorical question and would flippantly answer, “If not me, then who?” And then all the studies and articles began coming out in “flooding” proportions on secondary trauma and compassion fatigue and I realized maybe they were sincerely wondering how I have continued and remained emotionally and mentally healthy. (Although I think there are days that some would debate this being true.)

    I am setting out to answer this in a series of posts by telling stories from my career that were pivotal in moving me forward, timidly at times and forcefully at others, through the murk of the stagnating swampy waters of vicarious trauma. 

    My career began before I realized it had begun.  It is almost like this “thing” — greater than myself — picked me and here I am. 

    Picture this…(If you are a Golden Girls fan from back in the day, you totally get this reference. If you are not…skip over it—indulge me in my 80’s reference and read on.) It is 1988, in the fall semester of my second year of college.  I am sitting in an auditorium waiting for the first installment of my Child Abuse 101 class to begin.  Yes.  It was called Child Abuse 101.  There were about 50 students in this class.

    It was an easy elective for Social Work or Sociology majors.  There was lectures, lots of discussion on social issues, and many, many slides of abuse related pictures and graphs.  My entire framework on which the foundation of my life so far is about to be turned upside down, only I didn’t know that yet. 

    I was raised in a very conservative, very religious family in a very small community.  I was sheltered from a lot of the bad in this world throughout my childhood.  In that very first class, as I heard the statistical information on the rates of child abuse in this country and drilled down to my own state, I remember looking around and wondering why no one seemed shocked by this information.  I remember thinking, “How can this be true?” and “Why had I never met anyone who had been abused?” 

    I also remember looking back and putting the pieces together of stories I had heard in high school about classmates who no longer lived with their parents, and the reasons used to explain why were being shattered like glass hitting the ground.

    That may all seem a little dramatic, but in looking back, that “awakening” was THAT dramatic.  From that class on, most of my course work was weaved around child abuse and system interventions.

    And…so comes STORY NUMBER 1

    I completed my Social Work Internship in 1990 on a very cutting edge, as in maybe the first in the state of Louisiana, child abuse team at the Ouachita Parish Sherriff’s Office.  (That is pronounced “Washitall” for nonnative Louisianans.) 

    On my very first day on this team, I realized I was an adrenalin junkie and was hooked on the art of providing safety for children. 

    I had a very smart, strong, female detective as my role model of what I thought my career would look like.  I was sitting at my desk for only about 20 minutes before loading up in an unmarked police car to head out into literally the unknown areas of the parish to pick up a sex offender accused of molesting a young female child.  He took off into the nearby woods and all four officers, guns drawn, took off on a foot chase.  I did not participate in this chase, but quietly got back into the car and locked the doors.  This act was the source of much teasing and ribbing for the entirety of my internship.  However, I must point out that I was the only unarmed person there—even the offender was brandishing a fire arm.  Those two female detectives I was with came back out of the woods dragging that offender with the other two male cops “covering” them and I knew I had found “my people”. 

    I learned more about listening to children and understanding dynamics of child abuse in those four short months than I did in any of my social work classes.  I learned more humility, more compassion, and more empathy from that team of detectives than I did in three and a half years of college courses. 

    I also learned my first lesson in self-care.

    Never take yourself too seriously and always find something to laugh about every day.  Not at the expense of victims or even at the expense of perpetrators, but just something…anything.  Laughter is the best medicine. 

    I did not end up being a law enforcement officer as I had thought I would be.  I instead started my career as a Crisis Investigator with the State of Louisiana’s Office of Community Services in the very small town I grew up in, investigating, in some cases, parents that were my classmates in high school.  

    I literally graduated on a Saturday and started on the next workday.  There was a holiday or something in between.

     I took with me every lesson learned during my internship.  I never interviewed a child in those beginning days that I did not think of the soft gentle voice of my supervising detective reminding me of how the picture will be made complete if we pay attention to the little voice helping us to find the next piece of the puzzle. 

    Back then we were in the very early days of interviewing protocols. It seems odd to think there was a practice before there was a protocol.  It also seems odd to think of these protocols, and the dramatic change in how we do our work, happened in my career span.

    I always try to end my post with some call to action or some profound reflection.  Today I simply want to acknowledge that intervening in cases of child abuse is hard work. It takes a toll.  Self-care is not a luxury but a necessity.  For me it has always been about humor—not at the expense of others, but generally at my own quirky behaviors.  

    There is no special magical potion that provides you armor against all the hurts.  Find what works for you and build it into your life.

    29 more stories to go!

    This is story #1 in Tammi Pitzen’s series of 30 stories from her 30 years working in child welfare.

    You can read all the stories here.

    #ThirtyFromThirty #30StoriesFrom30Years #ACareerInChildProtection 

    Share This Story

  • My secret.

    My secret.

    By Tammi Pitzen, Executive Director of the Children’s Advocacy Center of Jackson County

    January is here again.  Halfway over and then on to February.  I don’t typically get very personal on this blog.  However it seems timely to talk about secondary trauma and what that might look like in a child. 

    I say timely because January 16 (yesterday) is the anniversary of a terrible event in my family’s history. 

    I won’t delve too deep into that tragedy, other than to say it changed me and it changed my family.  I lost a family member through a horrible tragic event from which I sometimes fear I will never recover.  And then February comes and I am functioning.  And then March comes, and with spring, the darkness is replaced with light.  Every year this cycle repeats.  I used to not recognize what was going on and now I anticipate it.  January is a “dark” month that is busy and maybe that busyness keeps me sane.  This event happened in 2002 and is unresolved in many ways.  It is unresolved legally.  While I recognize that healing does not happen in the legal system, it is hard to move on until that has happened. 

    Bizarre how my professional life and personal life become entangled during the first month of the year.  Logically I know things.  But my heart does not believe my years of experience. 

    I want to talk about secondary trauma and maybe provide some understanding to professionals who are working with children or even adults and those in between ( but for the purposes of this blog, I am going to focus on children) who have experienced trauma or secondary trauma.  I want to use my own experience to do so. 

    In January I become agitated.  I become a little scattered…more than the normal chaos that is my life.  I am tired.  Fatigued beyond what anyone can really understand. I get physically sick.  Sometimes with a sinus infection.  Sometimes with a stomach bug.  Sometimes with migraines. I stare off and disconnect…sometimes when it is not convenient.  I can’t sleep.  I over eat…junk food.  I am distracted.  I am full of anxiety.  (Even as I write this…I am worried about how my family will feel…will I offend them? Will I hurt them by putting words to the experience?  Will my colleagues feel differently about me?)  I sometimes burst into tears and don’t understand why.

    Until I remember.  My body remembers first, then my heart, and finally my brain catches up.  This went on for 11 years without my recognizing the connection.  About four years ago, I began to make the connection back to my family tragedy and recognized that I was having some symptoms of secondary trauma. 

    I am an adult.  An adult with 20+ years of working with trauma.  It took me 15 years to recognize what was happening to me.  This would be the first January that I am in control of my life.  (Or at least I think I am.) And when I say control, I mean that I recognize what is happening and have a strategy to deal with it.  Not that I don’t still cry when I think about the loss.  

    Children don’t have 15 years to learn to master their feelings and regulate their emotions.  Children don’t have the words to describe these emotions they do not understand. 

    That child who is in your classroom, your after-school program, your Sunday school class…the one who is always bouncing off the walls.  What if that is merely his body trying to save him from the pain of his trauma.  The child who can’t ever stay focused.  The one you call on in the middle of class when you know he is not paying attention, and then everyone in the class laughs at him—what if all his attention is focused on not completely disintegrating at any moment. We call these children low achievers.  That little boy you don’t want your child hanging around because he has anger issues.  Maybe he just needs some love and understanding.  Maybe he has good reason to be angry.  We call these children hyper.  We call them a problem. 

    These kids are everywhere.  Not just in school.  This isn’t a blog picking on adults who work in the school system.  I see them at church.  I see them in Fred Meyers.  I see them at the movies.  I see them on neighborhood playgrounds.  I see them in my son’s life.

    I want to remind everyone that trauma can be as a result of abuse, but it can also be as a result of many other things.  I recognize I am a child abuse advocate and most of what I write about is child abuse related.  Trauma is trauma.  Whether it is from abuse, from war, from loss…we may all experience it different.  The impact is never the same.  The response is not the same.  But none of us are immune.

    How many people do you recognize in your life who may be dealing with trauma? 

    Do you ever wonder how many social problems would almost completely disappear if everyone was given the tools needed to resolve trauma?  Do you think we would continue to have substance abuse issues?  If we could resolve trauma would we have the healthcare crisis we face now?  If we were all taught how to work through and resolve trauma, would we see as many hate crimes?  Would we need to spend billions on prisons?  I wonder.

    I am so incredibly lucky.  I have a supportive family who when they don’t know what to say, say nothing and hold on tight.  I am incredibly lucky in that I have a job that I love that allows me to take a sick day if I need to.  I am incredibly lucky in that I am not struggling with other life challenges.

    Usually at this point in the blog I am putting in some kind of resolution.  Some kind of call to action.  If I am honest I don’t know the answer. 

    Maybe compassion is the answer.  Maybe seeing past the behavior and seeing the child is the answer.  Therapy is a good start for the child so they can learn to recognize what is happening to their body.  Therapy can teach them to understand they are not crazy.  There are physical, biological responses to trauma both primary and secondary trauma.  Therapy can teach them to master their emotional responses. 

    As adults in the lives of these children, maybe we can pause before we react to the behavior that is presented and question what the driving factor for this behavior is.  Maybe we can stop asking why are you doing this and start asking how we can help.   Maybe we can help support the caregivers in the lives of these children by taking the stigma out of seeking counseling. 

    We all need help every once in a while.  Maybe love isn’t all we need after all.  Maybe we need acceptance.  Maybe we need understanding.  Maybe.

     

    Tammi Pitzen