I saw a sad little story last week about a family of traumatised lions being brought to the UK. The lions had been in a Ukraine zoo where they had become traumatised by the sound of bombs dropping around them. The irony of my feeling sadness for lions traumatised by bombs being dropped around them with current world events is not lost on me, and perhaps that was the intention of the editor of the newspaper that carried the story. If you can traumatise lions that way, what about the affect on children.
That got me to thinking about Bessel Van Der Kolk and his book 'the body keeps the score'. It is a clever book by a clever man. It's about how we need to work with the body in trauma work because body and brain are intertwined. The health of one can impact the health of the other.
One quote I remember from my training is 'after you have been traumatised you live in a different universe' and one of the key learning points was that how a child processes trauma depends on the quality of their attachment (bit like the healing in therapy). So the trauma from hearing bombs drop around you can in part be mitigated by quality attachments but in events we have seen in recent weeks, how many of those attachments are disrupted by the death and injury of family members as we have seen on the news.
I admit I don't understand the geopolitics of the world right now but there must be a way forward, towards peace.
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