Trauma In Dr. Lene Terr's Too Scared To Cry

In Too Scared To Cry: Psychic Trauma in Childhood, author and Psychiatrist Dr. Lenore Terr explores the fearsome effects of childhood trauma, defined in the book as occurring, “when a sudden, unexpected, overwhelmingly intense emotional blow or a series of blows assaults the person from outside,” (Terr, 1990, p. 8). Dr. Terr’s main focus is on the abduction of a group of school children in Chowchilla, California, a small farm town. The children, along with their school bus driver, were kidnapped right off the bus when they were on their way home from summer school. Dr. Terr who is a child psychiatrist, interviews the victims after their abduction and their escape from being buried alive in and abandoned rock quarry. She continues her assessments

When my daughter was three and a half years old, she witnessed my now ex-husband, her father, physically abuse me. Neither her nor my one year old son at the time had ever seen this before even thought it had happened many times. This was the worst and the last beating I ever endured at his hands. After the incident, I got out of the marriage and took my children far away from the situation. I received counseling to help me through the trauma, because I also lost a child (I was 8 months pregnant) due to this particular incident. Overtime with the right help, I was able to move on with my life and have rarely had any aftereffects. My children never received any treatment, because at the time I thought the only thing that might have affected them was the divorce. However, once my daughter was a teenager and at a point in her life that I thought she should be beginning to show interest in boys, I noticed more and more how she avoided most anyone who was male. She also had issues with trusting others. I decided it was time to have a talk with her so I could understand what was going on. Unbeknownst to me, she remembered the abuse she had witnessed at just 3 and a half years old, and this had been haunting her and causing her feelings of fear of others, especially of men. This is what I thought of when Dr. Terr stated, “For the traumatized child, new problems will come up

While I have not been involved in the Human Services field for very long, I feel that I gained some great insight from the information Lenore Terr presented. There are certain pieces of this reading that I plan to carry with me as I dive deeper into my career as a helping professional. One of the main things I plan on doing as I go forward, is making sure that I always listen to a child when they are telling about a terrible event that may have happened to them. I know that at times it may seem that children are not telling the truth, but the old saying ”better safe than sorry” carries so much weight. So often children are powerless because it is too easy for an adult to judge them and make their own assessments. However, if we find out later that they have only told a tale then we will know that a different road must be taken to provide the correct type of help they need. But, if we ignore a child and later find out that what they were saying was very much true, I don’t believe I would be able to forgive myself. Another important thing I want to keep in mind with my future in this field is that those directly affected by a traumatic event are not the only ones that need help getting through the effects of the event. Parents, siblings, children and any others directly involved in that person’s life may need to be treated as well. Just as I told in my personal experience, many times we may not