When I started my blog, I wanted to write from a spiritual, emotionally healthy, trauma informed, relational perspective. I began to write and share some of my stories using TILT—trauma informed life tales. TILT is a robot I built out of wood that I’ve taken to work, to school, and to camp to help kids to connect and to discover God’s help and healing. When I slow down and make time, I’d like to write a TILT book 4 kids who are recovering from trauma.
Although I’ve been professionally trained to help people who are recovering from trauma, what helps me to understand and to help kids comes from what I learned as a kid and from what kids teach me. I can’t help people until they teach me what they’ve been through and how it impacted them. Kids are trauma-informed and shaped by what they’ve gone through. They frequently know what’s wrong, what’s missing, and what’s needed.
Parents sometimes get upset with me when I invite them to turn their attention back to their children to understand what’s wrong, missing and needed. In our society, we are taught that leaders, parents, teachers, and counselors are the experts who know and tell kids what to do and what not to do. But If you want to know and love and understand and help kids who have been hurt, you have to give up the expert-teacher role and become a humble student of the student-teachers. It’s counter-intuitive. I must begin with a position of “I don’t know,” and ask the kid, “Will you teach me what happened and what’s missing and needed?”
Kids are always communicating. Each child has a unique pathway for communicating. We must learn their language. We must adopt their learning and communication style instead of demanding them to learn and use our language and pathways for communicating. I have developed and collected a lifetime of props and tools that kids use to share their stories and to educate me about what’s missing and what’s needed. Then I take their props, tools, games, songs, artwork, and stories and help them take steps to connect, heal, and outgrow their problems.
When you respect and trust kids and let them lead you, they love it. When someone older and wiser views kids as experts on themselves, they love communicating and co-creating their own Spirit-led pathway to connecting, building, and healing, and restoration. They can’t get there without God’s help and without your help. You can’t get there without their help. It’s a 3-way process. Whole body listening to God, self, and others simultaneously from the heart. And most of communication is through kid-orchestrated play, art, music, sports, games, and non-verbal communication.
Don’t rely on what you already know or have been taught. Start each day fresh with God. Sit with God and His Word like it’s your first encounter together. Allow God to speak and teach and shape you. And then go into your day with people full of God’s love. Go as a student ready to be taught by kids of all ages. Allow them to teach and create pathways for getting to know them. Once you’ve connected and listened well, maybe God will allow you to share something from His heart with His prize possessions: His beloved kids of all ages. Enter each day as student-learner-teacher and watch what God does. You’ll become trauma-informed and so much more. My favorite teachers are the ones who are younger and older than me!