Part I: Meeting Jake, Anna, and Alice
When Trauma Systems Therapist Nicolas McReynolds first met with siblings Jake (9), Anna (7), and Alice (4), the children had been separated from their parents due to substance use and domestic violence. The three young children had had their world turned upside down and were struggling to cope.
All three children were experiencing trauma symptoms in different ways. Alice still did not understand where her biological parents went and would scream for hours straight, asking for her mom. Anna, who was replicating the abusive behavior she had seen, would become incredibly violent when upset. Her fists would fly in a rage whenever she felt upset, leaving bruises on her siblings and alarm in her caregivers.
Jake was used to trying to protect his little sisters. He would take the blame for everything, even if it was clear he was not responsible. And he never spoke, other than trying to take the blame or distract others when his sisters were having outbursts.
When one of his sisters broke a mug, he insisted it was him, even though he was not in the room, and everyone saw it happen. When asked why he said he did it, he just sat silently.
Recent years have seen a change in how we talk about the drivers that lead to behavioral problems. According to Savio’s Associate Director, Julia Roguski, even 10 to 15 years ago, a child might be labeled as aggressive or a problem without much consideration of how trauma might be shaping their behaviors. Children like Jake, Anna, and Alice would have been labeled as having a history of child abuse or neglect, and their files would not go much further to explain how that might impact their mental and behavioral health moving forward.
“Our depth of understanding of how trauma impacts a developing brain has just increased drastically. And the trauma symptoms a child might be experiencing are no longer labeled as being dysfunctional. Instead, we are able to recognize how their trauma is driving those behaviors. It is becoming more and more acceptable for people to say, ‘That was really hard for me.’ And people are starting to recognize that there is so much more going on behind the scenes that people might not know about. ”
And while conversations about trauma are becoming more common, there are still those who have a hard time grasping the concept.
When Jake, Anna, and Alice referred to Savio about a year ago. They had already been removed from the family’s home because of their parents’ substance use, which led to domestic violence and housing insecurity. There was a time when the five family members were all living in a van. After child protective services intervened and assigned them a county caseworker, they went to live with a family member. But the family member was not prepared to take care of three young children, and it led to neglect.
The siblings’ birth parents had not taken any steps to address their substance use or to prevent their parental rights from being terminated. The foster family that the children were placed with was interested in adopting and began the difficult process of reassuring the children that this was their forever home and working to show them stability.
Jake, Anna, and Alice were three of the thirty-five children who received services in the past year thanks to a grant from the Caring for Denver Foundation.
The Caring for Denver Foundation was created in 2019 from a ballot initiative to address Denver's substance misuse and mental health needs. Thank you to the Denver residents who supported this important work.
At this point, a county caseworker suggested that they receive services from Savio, because of our track record of providing effective services for families who have experienced extensive trauma. This step represents our community’s growing understanding of trauma; in the past, these children may have just been labeled as difficult or problematic and never referred to trauma therapy.
Here the children run into a large hurdle. While their foster parents were doing the best that they could support and help these children heal, they had not fully grasped how deeply trauma can impact a child’s developing brain.
They were paired with Nicholas McReynolds, a Trauma System Therapy clinician. McReynolds began to try and schedule with the foster parents. They wanted to protect the children and thought that the best way to do that would be to not dig too deep into their past experiences. They did not want to retraumatize them and wanted McReynolds to just address their behaviors, not their experiences.
They wanted to just not talk about it and thought it would go away. That is not the case, however, and the children’s trauma behaviors not only continued but intensified. Without being able to address the root of their trauma, the children were not going to be able to begin to heal. Despite this, they told Savio that they wanted to terminate services, but continue with the adoption.
While the foster parents understood that the children had experienced trauma, they did not understand the amount of work it would take for the children to be able to heal, nor how essential treating their complex trauma was in addressing their behavioral problems.
After many conversations with the county caseworker about how the children would most likely require an extensive amount of trauma intervention for quite some time and that these behaviors were not just going to go away overnight, the foster parents made the hard decision to stop the adoption process and request that the children were placed with a different foster home. They knew that the children could be more successful with a family that understood the impacts of trauma more clearly.
Always the protector, Jake continued to look out for his little sisters as they were placed in a second foster home. Will these next foster parents be the ones to take over that role?
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