Lloyd - Improving Sensory Processing in Traumatized Children

IMPROVING SENSORY PROCESSING
IN TRAUMATIZED CHILDREN

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IMPROVING SENSORY

PROCESSING IN

TRAUMATIZED CHILDREN

Practical Ideas to Help Your Childs Movement,
Co-ordination and Body Awareness

S ARAH L LOYD

Jessica Kingsley Publishers
London and Philadelphia

First published in 2016

by Jessica Kingsley Publishers

73 Collier Street

London N1 9BE, UK

and

400 Market Street, Suite 400

Philadelphia, PA 19106, USA

www.jkp.com

Copyright Sarah Lloyd 2016

Front cover image source: Ray Lloyd.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any material form (including photocopying or storing it in any medium by electronic means and whether or not transiently or incidentally to some other use of this publication) without the written permission of the copyright owner except in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 or under the terms of a licence issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency Ltd, Saffron House, 610 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Applications for the copyright owners written permission to reproduce any part of this publication should be addressed to the publisher.

Warning: The doing of an unauthorised act in relation to a copyright work may result in both a civil claim for damages and criminal prosecution.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Names: Lloyd, Sarah, 1967- author.

Title: Improving sensory processing in traumatized children : simple ideas to

help your childs movement, coordination and body awareness / Sarah Lloyd.

Description: London ; Philadelphia : Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2016. |

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2015027858 | ISBN 9781785920042 (alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Abused children--Rehabilitation. | Sensory disorders in

children--Patients--Rehabilitation.

Classification: LCC RJ507.A29 L56 2016 | DDC 618.92/8--dc23 LC record available at

http://lccn.loc.gov/2015027858

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 78592 004 2

eISBN 978 1 78450 239 3

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am very grateful to the Springfield Project team for all its help and support in developing this work. Its a great team that is doing some really good work and I feel privileged to have been part of it. Also, a huge thank you to all the foster parents, adoptive parents, teachers, colleagues and friends who gave helpful feedback at various stages of the writing of this book and all the children who agreed to let me use their pictures. And last but not least, my family, for all their top tips, encouragement and support thank you!

INTRODUCTION

I started writing this book when I was working in Fife, Scotland, between 2005 and 2013 as part of the Springfield Project, a joint Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service and Social Work team looking at the therapeutic needs of children who are in foster and adoptive care.

This book is about sensory integration, one of the therapies that we found to be helpful for these children. Developed originally by Dr A Jean Ayres, an Occupational Therapist, it offers a way of understanding how early movement experiences affect brain development.

We found that some children who had missed out on early movement experiences werent able to do the more complicated things as they got older like recognize how theyre feeling on the inside.

We noticed a group of children who were so out of tune with themselves that they really struggled to manage to think about any sorts of feelings even things like if they felt hot or cold or whether they could make their hearts beat faster by running around. Foster carers often talked about children seeming to have no sense of whether they felt hungry or full and described having to stop the children eating when they judged that theyd had enough, otherwise they would keep on eating until they made themselves sick. While some of that may be about an emotional emptiness, the more we heard about it and the more we worked with these children, the more we realized that there was also a physical component to it they were dysregulated to the extent that they literally couldnt register how they felt on the inside. We realized that we needed to do something to address this before these children would be able to use psychological therapies to explore the emotional impact of their experiences.

While there are lots of good books around about sensory processing and sensory integration, we found that, because of the trauma these children had experienced, we couldnt just give teachers or parents activity ideas to do with children and let them get on with it.

These childrens early experiences mean that they react to things in different ways to other children. So while crawling through a tunnel into a snug den might be a fun adventure for one child, it might remind another of being trapped and unable to get away from someone who was hurting them.

We realized that we needed to do something to address this dysregulation before these children would be able to use psychological therapies to explore the emotional impact of their experiences. By combining sensory integration theory and a neurosequential understanding of trauma, we were able to understand the importance of movement in forming a foundation layer for social and emotional development.

While carrying out the work, we saw that good bodily awareness and functioning was really like the bottom layer of a tower of building blocks the stable base that allows the rest of the tower to be built on top of it. We found that by understanding which systems were not adequately primed (i.e. hadnt had enough stimulation to get them into good working order), we were able to develop games and activities that let parents and children go back and fill in some of those gaps. By doing so, children became much more aware of themselves and their bodies one teacher described the change as a child seeming much more comfortable in their own skin. Following this, we noticed that children were much more able to regulate themselves they stopped going too fast all the time and became able to stop and think sometimes. This leap in development made a huge difference to their everyday lives and gave us a platform to be able to help build relationships and learning.