Self-Parenting for

Helping Professionals

 

Patricia O’Gorman, Ph.D.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Patricia O’Gorman, noted psychologist and author in circles related to addiction, trauma, and the social-emotional problems of young people, recently joined the Board of Directors for Guest House Institute.  The editors asked her to offer some thoughts for this 3rd issue of Guest House Review and she sent us this brief essay.  We hope it will be the first of many.

 

Dr. O’Gorman has served as Director of the Division of Prevention at the National Institute for Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH).  Her books include The lowdown on families who get high: Successful parenting for families affected by addiction (2004), 12 steps to self-parenting (1988), and Breaking the cycle of addiction: A parents’ guide to raising healthy kids (1987).

 

This essay is addressed to all those – pastors and religious included – who are “professional helpers.”  It continues the Guest House Review conversation around trauma and addiction.
Self-Parenting for

Helping Professionals

 

Patricia O’Gorman, Ph.D.

 

 

Who helps the helpers? The answer is that helping professionals need to learn to help themselves through learning how to self-parent.

 

At first blush this may seem silly. Obviously helping professionals are trained; they know how to guide others through life’s challenges. Yes, they have skills to help others, but this does not necessarily translate into the skills needed to help themselves in dealing with what is before them, and how they are feeling about it, and what it is triggering within them.  Recent research has focused on the impact of helping others for the helper, particularly when the helpers are working with those who have been traumatized, and magnified significantly when the helpers have their own trauma history.

 

Trauma and the Soul

We know that many of those who are attracted to being life guides are those who have experienced their own set of personal challenges, and many of these include the experience of trauma.  Some even have experienced Complex Trauma, “the experience of multiple, chronic and prolonged, developmentally adverse traumatic events, most often of an interpersonal nature and early life- onset” (Van der Kolk, 2005).  Be this physical, emotional, or sexual abuse or neglect, perhaps compounded by alcoholism within the family, trauma leaves its mark upon the soul.  Sometimes the impact of trauma is hidden; after all people are resilient, they find ways to cope. We call this a positive adaptation.

Having a trauma history and wanting to help others is a positive adaptation to the trauma. One example of this: many healers are doing what is called in AA 12th step work, the work of reaching out to the larger community and finding and giving hope to others like themselves. We see this for some called to the religious life. Here trauma is sometimes utilized as the stimulus for the development of magnanimous compassion that leads the helper to transcend her or his pain and reach out to the larger community in Christ. This is good, but it does not prevent the impact of trauma from coming back for the helper. 

For many of those who gravitate to helping others, events may pile up until the scab that covers their trauma is ripped off, leaving them exposed and re-traumatized – the re-experience of their own personal trauma – and sometimes leaving them to add maladaptive ways of trying to cope such as the use of alcohol and drugs to ease their personal pain.

 

The Early Effects of Trauma in the Development of Addiction

A decade ago a study that involved over 1000 adolescents examined the link between a diagnosis of PTSD and later substance abuse.  The study found that when subjects were reevaluated 3 and 5 years after their initial diagnosis of PTSD, they were 4 times more likely to meet diagnostic criteria for substance abuse or dependence than the matched control group subjects (Chilcoat, H.D., and Breslau, N. 1998).

More recently, research published in the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs this year found that children exposed to physical or sexual abuse, or who witnessed domestic violence before the age of 10, had an increased likelihood of starting to drink alcohol before the age of 13 when compared to similar youth not exposed to such traumas (Hamburger, M.E., Leeb, R.T., and Swahn, M.H., 2008)

 

Trauma and The Brain

In recent years our ability to study the brain has broadened exponentially.  Using techniques such as CT, MRI and PET scans we can visualize brain structures with unprecedented clarity and understand the function of brain cells at the level of the neurotransmitters.

As to physical brain structure, this year researchers at Cornell University, in what has been described as one of the first studies to look at the effects of trauma on the brains of healthy adults, have discovered that the brain’s gray matter appears to be physically changed by exposure to major traumas.  Everyone was affected by the events of 9/11, but we know that it was a very different experience for those of us who heard about it on the radio and watched it on TV, as compared to people who were actually there.

Using MRI to compare the brains of individuals who were within 1.5 miles of ground zero on 9/11 to a control group of people who were at least 200 miles away, the researchers found that three brain areas involved in the processing of emotion were physically smaller in people who were near ground zero than the same areas in the brains of people who were further away (Cornell University, 2008).

These findings have several implications.  First, the smaller size (less gray matter) of these brain areas means that these individuals will be more reactive when exposed to threats or trauma in the future, and will have greater difficulty managing the resulting stress (more symptoms).  In fact, in this study the near-ground-zero group had higher scores on measures of anxiety, years after their exposure to the trauma of 9/11.  Second, the researchers found that subjects who had experienced other types of trauma, such as violent crimes, had similarly smaller brain areas, similar to those who had been closely exposed to 9/11.  Third, while this study focused on adults, given what we know about the incomplete brain development of children and adolescents, and that we know that the still-developing brain is more vulnerable to a range of factors than the fully-developed adult brain, we have to consider the likelihood that exposure to trauma in children and adolescents is even more impactful on the structure and functioning of the brains of young people than it is in adults (Rothman and O’Gorman, 2008).

 

Healing the Healers through Self-Parenting

What to do?  There are many approaches to treating trauma.  A key one that is sometimes overlooked is for helpers who have been traumatized to also learn to parent themselves, to Self-Parent, if you will. 

Not a replacement for other treatment modalities, but a compliment, Self-Parenting, utilizes the strength and focus of helpers in teaching them to become active in taking care of themselves, and not just focused upon taking care of others. In this way they can become an active participant in their own recovery from their trauma.

Self-parenting is about uncovering and utilizing our True Self, our vital core, composed of both our Inner Child and our Higher Parent. Our Inner Child is the center of our love, our feelings, our spontaneity, our curiosity. It is that part of us which is exquisitely alive, creative and from which we draw our energy. Our Higher Parent is the gentle center of our inner wisdom and intuitive knowledge.  It is our connection to God.

Self-parenting teaches ways of protecting our vulnerable cores while we accept our past and reconcile it to our present through a simple 12-step program. It is about learning how to fill oneself, learning to receive and not just give. Self-parenting is modeled after the 12 Steps of AA, reworked to include a wider array of concerns.  Practiced through individual readings, specialized groups or retreats, this approach offers a spiritual, recovery-based compliment for growth and renewal.

 

Summary

Who can help the helpers?  The answer is that the helpers can do this themselves through learning to Self-Parent, through learning to care for and nurture their vital cores, through learning to make their well-being a focus of their attention.

 

 

Bibliography

Chilcoat, H.D. & Breslau, N. (1998). Posttraumatic stress disorder and drug disorders. Archives of General Psychiatry, 55, 913-917.

Cornell University (2008, June 4). Brain's gray cells appear to be changed by trauma of major events like 9/11 attack, study suggests. ScienceDaily.  Retrieved June 6, 2008 at http://www.sciencedaily.com­ /releases/2008/06/080603184256.htm

Hamburger, M.E., Leeb, R.T., & Swahn, M.H. (2008). Childhood maltreatment and early alcohol use among high-risk adolescents. Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs, 69 (2), 291f.

O’Gorman, P. & Diaz, P. (1988). 12 Steps to Self-Parenting.  Deerfield Beach, Fl: HCI.

Rothman, B. & O’Gorman, P. (2008, November 20).  Working with traumatized and addicted adolescents. Counselor Magazine. Retrieved February 2, 2009 at http://www.counselormagazine.com/content/blogsection/1/63/

Van der Kolk, K. (2005). Developmental trauma disorder.  Psychiatric Annals 35 (5), 401-408.