TAYLOR BOROWETZ

Many different therapies are available for those who experience childhood trauma, but University of Saskatchewan psychology professor Jorden Cummings is working towards developing services focusing on the parents and strengthening the entire family.

“There’s no specific therapy for the parents,” Cummings said. “And sometimes parents have a lot of their own negative experiences that they are going through after the child has experienced trauma.

“As both a clinician and a researcher when I was going through grad school, I noticed that there wasn’t a place for the parents to get some help,” Cummings said.

The lack of support for parents is clearly an issue for Cummings, who said some studies suggest that parents might develop symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder themselves.

PTSD is characterized by flashbacks wherein the person mentally re-lives the traumatic event. Other symptoms include avoiding anything that reminds them of the event and high levels of anxiety. Usually parents do not receive treatment when their child experiences trauma.

Besides the lack of services, one barrier to parents of children who have been traumatized receiving treatment may be the parent’s own beliefs.

“They feel like they are being selfish,” Cummings said. “That if their child experienced a trauma, that it would be selfish for them to go get their own services and I would really like that stigma to be broken.”

This belief does not just impede on the health of the parents, but can affect the child’s healing as well. Parents are only in optimum condition to help their children when their own emotional needs are being met.

“I would like caregivers to feel like there’s a place where [parents] can process what they’ve been through as well,” Cummings said of her work’s goal to help parents help their children.

“This project right now is just focused on parents — developing a really brief therapy for them with the idea being that the next step would be to put these therapies into one package so that the child and the parent would be treated together,” Cummings said.

Not only would this address the previously overlooked needs of the parents, but children receiving treatment for trauma tend to heal better when they receive more support from their parent, Cummings said.

“The idea is to help the parent with what they’re going through, so they can help the child with what they’re going through as well.

“You could eventually develop a therapy that addressed the whole family’s needs at the same time,” said Cummings.

This process would help families heal together, improve communication and save time and resources.

“You are giving them skills as a family that they can take with them.”

Construction recently finished on the Video Therapy Analysis Lab located in the Arts Building. As the lab has a room with two cameras — one to capture the client and one for the therapist — a recording of the sessions can be coded and analyzed to find out which of the parts of the therapy are beneficial for the client. Cummings said they can find out which circumstances yield positive results by gauging the client’s emotion and how they respond to therapy.

Examining these factors brings the researchers closer to finding out what truly makes a therapy successful. The goal is to increase the potency and effectiveness of the service that is provided.

“Once you know that it works, the often helpful next step is to figure out why,” Cummings said. Once the researchers understand what caused the desirable outcomes, the way therapy is implemented could be tailored so that patients can be supported and treated more efficiently and effectively.

—
Graphic: Cody Schumacher/Graphics Editor