Beth Tyson On Addressing Behaviour Patterns Caused By Relational Childhood Trauma

Beth Tyson, is a childhood trauma consultant and trainer, 3x best-selling author, and child welfare advocate.

She has several years of professional experience as a trauma therapist for children and gained an understanding of PTSD from her personal experiences with trauma and loss.

As a childhood trauma therapist, Beth witnessed an outrageous gap between the number of children that experience trauma and the number of adults who know how to support them. With a relentless hope to improve the mental and physical health of children, she founded Beth Tyson Trauma Consulting which is a provider of trauma-responsive and trust-based mental health education.

Beth discusses how families and educators can effectively respond to adverse behaviours in children and why infancy is a crucial developmental stage for kids to establish and learn positive mental health traits.

Highlights from the interview (listen to the podcast for full details)

[Sarah Ripper] - To start off, can you please share a bit about your background and what led you to the work you're doing now?

[Beth Tyson] - I ended up where I am now through a series of events I didn't necessarily plan. I never knew that at a certain age I was going to be a doctor, and then I took the steps to get there. It's been a winding path for me which is great, it doesn't always have to be so planned and obvious to get to where you want to be, because now I am absolutely where I want to be because of that winding path.

I spent my early 20s in corporate America and was unsatisfied and unhappy with that. I just felt like there was something more I wanted to do; it didn't feel like I had any purpose. I felt like I was not making a lot of impact and I thought there has got to be more I can do. There had to be something else I could do that would be more fulfilling. I was on that path when my mother passed away suddenly and unexpectedly, and that trauma sent me into a tailspin.

That was 17 years ago now, but at the same time once I worked through that grief and loss (I went to therapy and did all those things), I felt motivated to find what matters to me. Her dying so young made me realise that life can be cut short unexpectedly, and if you keep putting it off until tomorrow to do the things you want to do, you may never get there.

As painful as it was, her loss led me to where I am today, because I decided to go back and get my master’s degree in clinical counselling. I left corporate America to start my career over again, and it was the best decision I ever made. Out of college I was offered a position working in homes with children who are in foster, kinship, or adoptive families helping to stabilise crises so that the child wouldn't have to be removed from that home and sent somewhere else.

That work was powerful and eye opening, because I had never been in that world before. I'd had losses and my parents separated when I was young, but I never had been exposed to foster care or child welfare system. Once I saw that, I couldn’t unsee it. I thought that this work has a purpose, and so I dove into that work.

I loved working with the children and families. But when I had my own daughter eight years ago, I didn’t know if I had the capacity to work with children right now the same way that I was before I had her. I was already so taxed and stretched thin as a mum that I realised I am not going to be good to anybody if I'm doing both at the same time.

I pivoted to education using the knowledge and expertise I had gained as a therapist. I train and provide education to organisations, groups, non-profit and for-profit organisations who want to understand childhood trauma and help people heal from that.

Now I travel around the country (virtually and in person) to teach adults how to help children heal from trauma, and it's been the greatest blessing of my life. In that process I also published a children's book based on the work I was doing, and I love that I did that. I'm about to publish the second one, and it's been an interesting journey I’m very proud of but also sometimes overwhelmed by.

Like with any job or career choice you love, your whole heart goes into it. Sometimes it can be painful, but at the end of the day, it was the best path for me and the best choice I could have made for myself.

Can you tell us more about the training you're doing with adults and young people and what that looks like in shifting the way people are approaching mental health?

Everything I teach comes from a trauma informed lens. This means that I perceive the world differently than others might if they don't have those lenses. If they don't have those glasses on to see the world through, they might miss some things and not understand certain behaviours from children, because they don't understand the trauma that the child has been impacted by.

A lot of my work looks like teaching about the neurobiological changes that take place in a child's brain and body when they experience extreme adversity. Most people when they think about trauma think of a big, huge event, like a car accident, a natural disaster or a sudden death in the family.

For children, oftentimes it's more of an ongoing, complex trauma that can take place in their relationships, that’s the trauma I'm working with. Relational trauma (also known as developmental trauma) is where children are being raised by people who aren't meeting their needs emotionally, physically, psychologically, and mentally.

Because their needs are not being met, the child is having difficulties managing their emotions, and when you have trouble managing your emotions, it looks like challenging behaviours like tantrums, outbursts and oppositional behaviour.

It can also on the other end look like shutting down, going numb, not being present, hiding or avoiding a lot of things. I've helped to pull apart for people how trauma impacts a child's sense of self, well-being, and their trust in the world.

When we experience this type of trauma, either a traumatic event or these more subtle forms of traumas that happen in relationships from needs not being met, we erode their trust. We erode their trust in the world and in other people for that child, and that must be rebuilt for the child to thrive and to be mentally, emotionally and physically healthy.

I help people understand what's happened to the child and their brain, and then I help them understand how to rebuild that trust and safety so that the child can thrive. They can be successful and have the relationships they want, because being able to trust your caregivers, adults and having a sense of safety in the world is the foundation of mental health.

I see it as the root of all our problems, socially, individually, and culturally. What we're witnessing around the world right now is rooted in these unhealed, unprocessed traumas that have taken place collectively and individually.

The reason why it's so powerful to educate adults and people who aren't familiar with these concepts is because we can unintentionally continue traumatising people if we don't realise what we're doing. We can also end up punishing children for a lot of their trauma responses and retraumatising them that way.

Oftentimes, children who have a history of trauma end up with these big emotions or on the opposite end shutting down and being avoidant. They are either shamed for it or punished, and they are oftentimes labelled “the bad kid”, a troubled child or criminal.

What effective pathways have you observed for supporting children and young people to process their trauma, and what do you wish the community knew?

We need to focus more on early childhood mental health and infancy to prevent trauma that doesn't need to take place early on in life. One of my big passions is spreading awareness about early life attachment to caregivers between children and parents, because birth trauma that takes place when giving birth doesn't need to.

When a mother and father have a child, there's lots of traumas that take place that don't need to happen if we had a more informed and responsive approach to maintaining and preserving the mental health of the baby.

Early life is where we can make the biggest impact on children's brains, and we have it upside down. We tend to think they won't remember because, “they're babies, so they don't have any memories,” or, “They're resilient, so they're going to be okay.” But what happens in the first 60 days of life is critical to the long-term mental health of that person.

If we can fortify those early days with lots of secure attachment, bonding and relational safety between the caregivers and the child, then we can prevent, the long-term mental health problems that might emerge down the road. That's just one area, building on relationship skills between adults and children and trying to get away from some of the more traditional methods of parenting.

We're making strides, but we need to be more conscious and aware of how what we say and do impacts our children and their well-being. Sometimes we don't realise we're doing harm, so that's where I feel we can intervene and make the most impact, during early childhood by helping parents and caregivers process their own trauma from the past so they don't keep repeating the cycle.

Trauma, dysfunction and emotional dysregulation can be passed down from generation to generation not only through learned behaviours and norms within the family, but also epigenetically; they're finding that there are changes happening at a biological level in people when they experience extreme adversity in life. When you think about that, it makes sense where we are in our world right now, because after an accumulation of distress and trauma over generations we’ve reached a boiling point.

What inspiring projects or initiatives have you come across creating a positive change?

I had the opportunity to co-create an animated series of videos on childhood trauma specifically for teens and young adults. This is so they don't have to wait until they end up in therapy at 30 years old after a string of hard times to find out it’s because of everything that happened in their childhood.

The whole time you end up blaming yourself, and this is what happened in my own story where I struggled in my early 20s with anxiety and panic attacks. I blamed myself for being weak and not as strong as other people. I asked myself what's wrong with me and blamed myself for it.

Over time, with this shift to the trauma lens, I can now look back and say, "wait a minute, this isn't because there's anything wrong with me, but this is a natural human response to what I've been through throughout life plus my temperament and my genetic makeup. It's just a perfect storm and it's unfortunate, but there are ways to cope with it and heal.”

Having that framework instead of the ‘what's wrong with me’ framework has been empowering, so I wanted to help bring that to younger people. We created this incredible series of entertaining, engaging, and extremely educational videos that are three minutes or less.

Each video covers a different topic and they're all related to childhood trauma and how to heal and cope with it. My hope is that someone will stumble across these videos sooner than I ever did (because I didn't have access to stuff like that when I was young) and that they'll be able to suffer less with the shame, guilt, and feelings of being less than others. Then they can find the help that they need faster than I did, and most others have in our generation.

It's on YouTube and it's called All Connected: A Place for Belonging. It was created by or funded by an organisation called Connect Our Kids, and they're doing amazing work trying to find kin and extended relatives for children who are aging out of foster care to wrap support and love around them so that they can thrive and reduce the negative outcomes of that situation.

What books or resources would you recommend to our audience?

My favourite book personally of this year is called The School of Life, and it's by Alain de Botton. I just found his work this year, and maybe I'm a little late to the party, but I love his books. I've literally devoured everything he's written in the last six months, so I recommend his book.

Another book I enjoy is about intergenerational trauma, and it's by Dr. Mariel Buqué. It's called Break the Cycle, and it's all about how do we stop these patterns? How do we recognise and stop these patterns in our own families and do the work to heal our lineage so that we can stop perpetuating pain? I recommend her book, she's a beautiful human being inside and out doing incredible work.

Beth, any parting thoughts before we wrap up our interview today?

I know this topic might not be something you've ever heard about before, but I encourage you to investigate it. If anything I said resonated with you, go and learn more. You can find lots of free resources on my own website or Dr. Mariel Buqué’s website, but just do a little exploration if this piqued your interest.

If you know or work with kids with big problematic behaviours and you can't figure out what's wrong and they don't seem to make any sense, consider whether it might be because of a history of trauma and loss.