plain + simple
Tell us how your story begins.
I was working in a group home for kids who had all kinds of trouble. They had suffered a lot of violence, a lot of abuse, a lot of addiction. And I was puzzled.
I was also attending university and I took a course about what we now know as post-traumatic stress disorder. Our teacher was this really lovely medical doctor who’d worked in World War II, the Korean War and the Vietnam War. He was describing combat veterans and their symptoms: nervousness, jumpiness, hyper-vigilance, that kind of famous fight-or-flight tendency. He described over-controlling behaviour. The more he was describing combat veterans who weren’t adjusting very well, the more he seemed to be talking about the symptoms that the kids in the home I was working in had.
It wasn’t long after that I decided to travel and volunteer in South-East Asia. There were really big refugee camps along the Thai–Cambodian border, and a lot of stuff going on in Indonesia as well. I was volunteering at various sites and I came across nervous and jumpy kids, hyper-vigilant kids who were over-controlling and had a lot of night terrors.
I moved to the UK to study more about childhood stress and trauma. I opened a little counselling practice. Through the door came kids who looked just like the kids in Cambodia and just like the kids in Indonesia, and just like the kids in my group home.
They were nervous, jumpy, hyper-vigilant and over-controlling, and they had night terrors. It wasn’t as severe, but the look—it’s hard to put into words, but there was a feel and a look with these kids that was just unmistakably similar to the kids who had suffered abuse in the group home, and the kids who’d suffered trauma in the refugee camps. Only, these kids were living a relatively normal life. They were from different socio-economic backgrounds, different cultural backgrounds.
I came across Steiner education. Steiner teachers in the UK, the US and Europe do home visits when the child’s in kindergarten. I started doing a lot of home visits. The only common thing I could see between these kids was a kind of low-grade, under-the-radar fast pace of life. They were all living in this too-much, too-soon, too-sexy, too-young world. And this is before computers and the internet.
I could identify that this was under-the-radar stress. It was also the really early days of brain research. What was being shown, although not proven, was
