Somebody Who Believes in Me

[Jaunty Guitar Music]

Mike: Welcome everybody. This is Avoiding the Addiction Affliction, brought to you by Westwords Consulting and the Kenosha County Substance Abuse Coalition. I'm Mike McGowan.

Mike: Childhood trauma can be a factor in everything from substance abuse to mental illness, but many children who experience childhood traumatic events turn out just fine.

Mike: We're going to talk about that today and why that is. Our guest is Dr. Kathryn Daley. Kathryn is a senior lecturer. And the program manager of the Bachelor of Youth Work and Youth Studies for the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology University in Australia. She is interested in good, just, and equitable policy and how it impacts those living on the margins.

Mike: Kathryn is an academic with a background as a practitioner. She researches issues to do with disadvantaged youth. Is the author of the book Youth and Substance Abuse and her work has examined issues of poverty, child abuse, homelessness, self injury and mental health. Welcome, Kathryn.

Kathryn: Hi, thanks for having me.

Mike: Well, thanks for joining us. You know, it's always good to start out right at the beginning, right? So tell us a little bit about your research and what you think is important with your research with childhood trauma.

Kathryn: So my research came about from working essentially after I graduated, I studied psychology and I was working in a youth essentially as a youth worker in a drug and alcohol service.

Kathryn: And I really enjoyed that work. I found it really meaningful. But I wasn't there that long before I started to see the disconnect between workers knowledge, like what they knew, like what was just part of their I just knew about the young people they were working with and what was written about them.

Kathryn: Like, not written about the workers, written about young people accessing drug treatment services. So, you know, as a new graduate I was like looking for sort of guidelines on you know, how to do good work, how to do best practice. And a lot of it was very structured, a lot of CBT 12 week intervention type things or group.

Kathryn: And none of that work is bad. With the service I was working at, more than 70 percent of the young people we were working with were homeless. Right. So a 12 week structured intervention. Just obviously doesn't work. I couldn't even get there. There's no, you know, when you're homeless, there's no weekly meetings.

Kathryn: Like you said, time is different, you know, like, so there's certainly a place for those things, but it wasn't helpful in the setting I was in. And and even just things like the organization I worked at, we had a few detoxes and rehabs and obviously when young people were homeless, they would use the detox for reasons other than just drug withdrawal, you know, respite, health, nutrition. And so you would see repeated studies. And then I would speak to people in government. Well, detox doesn't work. These people keep coming back. You know, so these disconnect between the needs of the young people we're working with and how others perceived it or how to work with it, I just sensed this really big gap.

Kathryn: And so that was what started my interest in filling the gap, essentially that research gap. And fortuitously, the organization I worked for was a very big organization and they had their own research component and team. And so I started to have sort of two feet, one foot in each world. And then some opportunities came up and a PhD scholarship.

Kathryn: And it kind of just kept on going.

Mike: That's fascinating. You know, I'm smiling as you're doing this because you just described my early work with the same sorts of youth. And we would have young people recommit crime or some way to come back in temporarily just to take a shower and get a meal and there was no longitudinal plan as to oh now you're released.

Mike: We're done with you now. See ya, right? Well that doesn't it doesn't it also explain Not every kid who grows up in a family where there's substance abuse becomes a substance abuser and not every kid who grows up with child abuse abuses their own children. Why do some avoid the multi generational dysfunction?

Kathryn: So this is that question has kind of been at the heart my research you know in in various ways, so I guess my first big study my PhD was looking at how drug use becomes problematic for some young people. Because it's fairly un, it's not fairly, it is extremely unusual for someone who's 17 to have so significant an issue with drugs that they're in rehab.

Kathryn: Like teenagers use drugs, sure, but you know, most rehabs are usually filled with older people. So what's going on where it's actually become a problem at such a young age. And then when you worked with, when I was, you know, talking to these young people and spending lots of time with them it became quite clear that it wasn't ever sort of just an accident, or they just fell in with the wrong crowd.

Kathryn: There was lots of, there was a fairly gendered difference. The young men and the young women had fairly different pathways. But, I didn't ever meet a young person where I think, gosh. It's just unexplained how you're using drugs. And that's, I think, probably fairly, you know, accepted wisdom now.

Kathryn: You know, people do use drugs heavily to sedate trauma and things like that. But that still didn't answer the question of, what about all the young people that might have experienced similar trauma?

Mike: Yep.

Kathryn: That are not here, that are doing okay. And what's the difference? Because I'm interested in that question because I think that understanding that can help us to inform prevention better.

Mike: Yep.

Kathryn: So if we can find out what is it that makes some people who go through these hardships and yet still they're okay. And I say okay, you know, like in a relative sense. They probably don't feel okay, and I don't sort of wish that level of trauma upon anybody. And when you look and talk to some of those people, there's often some common factors.

Kathryn: So one big difference is there's somebody that believes them, you know. So one of the big things, particularly for young women that I've, you know, that I've interviewed and spoken to, is that they did experience a very significant trauma. And often, perhaps probably typically, it was childhood sexual abuse.

Kathryn: Within the home and that trauma was compounded by them telling somebody who didn't believe them. or who rejected them. So for instance, you know, dad or stepdad is the abuser, they disclose to mum and mum kicks the daughter out of home. Or that's not true, but essentially doesn't adequately respond to that trauma, doesn't provide a safe space, doesn't validate the young person, doesn't remove them from harm. You know, so then they've got these two traumas.

Kathryn: You know, whether it's the initial abuse, but then the rejection and abandonment. As well as not having any support. So, you know, you've been through these hugely traumatic events. And there's no one, there's no, you know, mum or dad kind of going, well, let's get you off to therapy or, you know, like doing the things that might help somebody who has experienced any other sort of trauma.

Kathryn: So that's a really big one. The people who do fare better, often they will say, my mum always believed me or my auntie took me in. I had this amazing school teacher who sensed that things weren't right at home and they connected me with.... But there's always an anchor person who that young person knew believed them and loved them and would stand by them and was able to provide a sense of emotional and physical safety to allow them to recover from the trauma.

Kathryn: So that's probably the most crucial difference having that. Now that's not to say, like, there's people that have that. There's lots of people that have that. Mum's great, super supportive, but still the wheels fall off.

Mike: Yeah, she doesn't know what to do from there, right?

Kathryn: And you know, the impact of that initial trauma is still highly individual, you know? So and some people don't disclose it. That's, you know, like that mom doesn't even know what's happened or happening. And there can be other things along the way.

Kathryn: So the other thing, apart from having that constant positive adult role model is the number of traumas. So the young people, you know, when I was doing that, how did you sort of end up in rehab at 17? It was never one event. It wasn't like, oh, my parents split up and I was devastated. I mean, that might have happened.

Kathryn: Often it had, in fact. But when I sort of did these life history interviews with them, it was you know, there was family violence in the home. Maybe mum or dad had died when they were young. Like, a disproportionate number of these young people had experienced death of an immediate family member very young.

Kathryn: We were put into the care of the state. I was separated from my siblings. I was abused when in the care of the state. I had really patchy, you know, education. Went to lots of schools because I was in the care of the state. Didn't have any friends. Left school early. Fell in with the wrong crowd. Came into contact with the justice system. Started using drugs to block out the pain.

Kathryn: So for the young people who had significant problems, their life history was defined by multiple compounding trauma, not one isolated event.

Mike: You know, the way you just detailed that from, okay, here's what happened and here's the way I coped. Everybody who's listening to this is going, they're nodding, going, yep, that sounds so logical.

Mike: But then, for the young people that don't end up, let's say, using substances, or for the ones who do and need to get off of them, you gotta kinda go back. And learn other ways to cope. Yes?

Kathryn: Yeah. And so that's the you know, and part of that costs money.

Mike: Yeah.

Kathryn: You know, having a mom who believes you and loves you is great and is a really great protective factor.

Kathryn: But there's other things that can also help that cost, you know, like if you've lost a parent, you know, like died or, you know they're incarcerated or whatever, but they lost. There's grief and often, you know, young people don't have the... their inexperienced at grief and grief is something that you learn like you learn how to grieve.

Kathryn: And, you know, in my head, I actually think it's ideal to the order of grieving. It's great if the grandparents, a person's first experience of death, because it's kind of the natural order of things. But then the children can be supported by their parents. And they get to learn how other people are grieving.

Kathryn: You know, but whereas when it's, if you're still very young and you lose a parent, everybody around you is trying to make sense of it, because it doesn't make sense. It's not the natural order of things. You haven't experienced death and its finality before, so you don't actually know. how to go through grief.

Kathryn: And so often we talk to young people say, how are you coping? Are things okay? And I say, yeah, I'm doing all right. And they look like they're doing all right. And they're still kind of going to school, but we don't know actually what's happening inside. And then maybe five years later, they hit high school and things out of nowhere start to seemingly start to fall apart.

Kathryn: And often it's the long term impacts that's coming to fall. And so this is where professional interventions would be really helpful, you know, but grief counsellors cost money. So often you see sort of middle and upper class kids when they, you know, have these events, parents have the material resources to be able to provide the means or if a person really likes

Kathryn: sport or particular hobby is a type of therapy for them. Money enables that to happen. So you see, part of the reason you see this disproportionate impact of people from lower socioeconomic backgrounds in the justice system is that, among other reasons, that there's no material resources to provide kind of a really good trauma response when it was needed.

Mike: Well, and yet, right? The alternative also costs a lot of money. Incarceration costs a lot of money, right? Substance abuse costs a lot of money. Crime costs a lot of money. Homelessness costs a lot of money. So it's where do you spend the money, right?

Kathryn: Well, and this is the big, the big question. It's, it takes a lot of political courage.

Kathryn: And I mean, in, in the Australian context, and it actually, I suspect it's the same in the States. Is that concurrent governments have framed all of these issues as individual issues? You know, that addiction is a bad choice. It's a moral failing. It's a character weakness. People choose to, you know, commit crime. You're a bad person.

Kathryn: And so, you know, decades of framing what I think are essentially poverty issues as personal failings means that the public are not sympathetic or informed to this plot. So the government wants to come out and say, we're going to invest billions in prevention because it's cheaper than long term incarceration.

Kathryn: They don't have their voters on board with them.

Mike: No.

Kathryn: Because their voters have been "lock them up, tough on crime!", you know, all of that kind of rhetoric. And so they can't do it. You know, politicians can't do it. And, you know, in Australia, they'll fund, you know, drug treatment services. And it's kind of like, they're the nice guys. Look, we're funding this service.

Kathryn: It's like, well, actually you also funded the state care that traumatized them so badly that they're here, right? So, you should be funding it and more. (laugh) But it's, it's a big thing. Like, you know, the political money is only going to come when people are going to vote for it.

Mike: Mm hmm.

Kathryn: And these kind of social issues aren't something that most people would change their vote on.

Mike: Well, and then you have, you have those folks who point to those individuals who are doing okay, and say, "see, it is an individual issue." So, I get asked this a lot. Are, do some children seem to be, just be born with a natural resiliency?

Kathryn: It's tricky to know. Like, it's, because obviously you can never take away the nurture. Factors when you look at children, you can't change what environments they were raised in. What we do know is that resilience is learned, like it can be learned and that early exposure to small amounts of adversity that is couched with adequate support is a good way to learn resilience.

Kathryn: So, you know, losing an important sports match losing a grandparent. Like, it's not, we don't need to protect children from all of life's hardships, you know, because that actually won't adequately prepare them for life. And so we don't need to worry that an isolated trauma is going to ruin our child's life.

Kathryn: If we've given them support, it's actually probably going to help them in the long run, in terms of that life skillset and that resiliency, you can't learn resiliency when you're drowning in trauma, right? So the adverse event actually has to be surmountable. When your adverse events are so significant that they're insurmountable. That's crippling. You don't feel more resilient. You feel like you are drowning and you probably are. You know, so it's like dose dependent on how much adversity we can have. So I do think that there's probably something genetic in it too. Because to me, it always comes back to siblings. You know, you look at families where siblings might have experienced the same event and one's at law school and one's in jail, you know, like and so that there's individual factors and actually whether they're genetic or learned, I don't know, because one of the things that I have seen commonly is that younger men, often they're much more impacted by family breakdown than anyone ever realized and when you scratch at the surface and talk, you know, ask about when the family did break down and how did you cope with it. A common story I heard was, "oh yeah, the family went to counselling, we all saw counsellors, but I didn't want to go because I said I was fine. I thought I was fine."

Kathryn: And so what I, and this is sort of anecdotal because it wasn't a huge number, but I did see this common pattern where when the parents had separated early, sister and mum had gone off to see the family therapist or counsellor or some sort of professional help, but the son hadn't wanted to go he was fine. And yet I was meeting him at age 16 in detox and he's talking about and... So whether or not that as a young man, he'd already learned that men shouldn't talk about emotions whereas the sisters felt much more okay. I don't know, but I did see that a lot. Sisters kind of were off in therapy early and sort of fared okay, and brother was sitting there talking to me about it.

Mike: Well, that always makes me wonder then, how does somebody who lives with trauma and chaos learn to trust at some point? It's different than if it's auntie who you grew up with or grandma, as opposed to coach, teacher, or therapist.

Mike: So how do they learn to trust again? Or trust for the first time, perhaps.

Kathryn: Yeah, I always found this, like, an extraordinary gift these young people would give me. Because I always wondered the same thing. I thought, you know, when I was a youth worker and as a researcher, whenever I'm talking to young people about their stories, was that they wouldn't trust me with them.

Kathryn: And who was I to them? You know, a stranger, essentially. And I always said, how on earth do you trust anyone, let alone a stranger? When you've experienced these events, and that's part of why I liked working with young people was their positivity, like that, that optimism, that, that hope of a better future, of a better life, that the world is good was still there. Despite all of this, it was, and often they blamed themselves, like their narrative around it all was, "I was a bad kid. I was naughty. I was not the academic type. I got kicked out of school because I was bad."

Kathryn: But I think that that framing that it was all me also gives people a sense of autonomy and agency that "I'm in this situation because of me, but therefore I have the power to get out of it." Whereas it's quite disempowering to be like, "I was a victim of intergenerational trauma. I never had a chance. Society was stacked up against me", like that's really (chuckle) a disempowering narrative. And often by the time people get to adulthood, that might be where they're, they've landed. And look, to be fair, it's probably accurate.

Mike: Yeah. You see it.

Kathryn: Yeah. And whereas young people still have this, this hope and trust, and it's not always at the same degree.

Kathryn: Like, you know, some people it would be built up more slowly over time. And, you know, you would spend time just hanging out with the young people. You're not gonna go and ask their full life history on the first meeting, you know, so it's not that everybody, you know, had full trust from day one, but I don't think I've ever worked with the young person who just didn't trust the world at all.

Kathryn: I mean, they might not trust police or their child protection worker or whatever, but they still believed largely that people were good and the world was good and the hope was there.

Mike: That's what I love working with kids for that reason.

Mike: That brings me to my next issue then. Okay, now you're old enough, adolescent or whatever, and you start to look around.

Mike: You're dating, looking for a partner, finding one. How do you know what's healthy?

Kathryn: Unfortunately, often they don't. I mean, and this, this is for everyone, you know, drug use or not. I think that our, what we know about relationships is what we've seen.

Kathryn: It's like parenting. Often people don't want to, I'm not going to parent the same way my dad did. And then inevitably words are coming out of your mouth and you're like, "Oh my God, I sound exactly like my mum!" Because it's so hard not to because that's all you've seen. And so, you know, when I worked with young women who were raised in homes where there was a violent relationship between mum and dad, often they were finding themselves in violent relationships with mum and dad.

Kathryn: And a lot of that when I was a youth worker, I was very conscious of that and that role modeling of, you know, reframing, you know, when I was working with young women in these situations, you know, just unpacking as to what makes you think that that's what you deserve, kind of belief that it was probably one of the more challenging things to shift.

Kathryn: You know, I think people can get intellectually, oh yeah, this isn't normal but to actually change what you think is normal in, you know. Really inside of you is really very hard. Particularly when, if you've been raised in a world where it's not just your family was like that, but you know, your friends and your neighbors, you know, you've seen lots of it that is your normal.

Mike: Well, and going back to your comment before, how many kids have you worked with, or any of us who, if they start to get healthy at all, they become the ugly duckling in their family, neighborhood, social system. They're the outcasts.

Kathryn: And they're lonely.

Mike: Yeah.

Kathryn: Because the, the thing is that even if you do recover or, you know, [inaudible], you still don't feel like you're going to connect with your mainstream peers.

Kathryn: You know, and I say it in my university classroom now when I'm teaching is we have some young people. So I teach youth work students and there's different ways of arriving in my classroom. So some come straight, you know, like typical, they finish high school, they apply for university, here they are. We get some people that go and do like a diploma in youth work and then come and do the bachelor degree.

Kathryn: And often those students have some lived experienceof you know, having seen a youth worker themselves when they were younger. And they've got so much wisdom in the classroom, those students, like they're actually really valuable as an educator because if I had a whole class of students who were just really, you know, green, is what we sort of call them here, fairly naive to some of these issues and services, it's really hard to teach within the confines of a classroom, you know.

Kathryn: I was working in an organization, you see it, but, you know, me as a lecturer just talking about it. And so there's a lot of value from those students who do have some lived experience talking about their own experiences. But often the students with the lived experience end up making friends with the other students with the lived experience, because they've lived different lives to these other young people who, you know, have had fairly functional, healthy, mainstream, you know, their biggest stress is fighting with mum and dad about the kitchen being messy and these other young people have never had a mom and dad, you know, like So even when people do break the cycle often they feel alone.

Mike: Well, and both of those groups have so much to teach and learn from each other.

Kathryn: Yeah, but one young man. I interviewed once... you know, when I was talking to him about why he thought that he was using drugs and he said, "Oh, I just, you know, fell in with the wrong crowd."

Kathryn: And I said, "Oh, it's funny. This wrong crowd. I keep, I keep meeting all these people that fall in with the wrong crowd, but I've never met the wrong crowd."

Mike: (laugh)

Kathryn: And he started laughing and he was like, "Oh, I guess I am the wrong crowd." And he, he goes, "the thing is, doesn't everyone just want to hang out with people that get them?"

Mike: Yeah.

Kathryn: And I mean, that would have been a decade ago that he said that to me, and I'm sitting here quoting it to you today because that's, I think that's so important that we underplay as practitioners, as researchers, that that sense of connection, like it's so hard to break these cycles because you want to be with other people that get you, and that's often people that have been through the same stuff.

Mike: Well, it's what I ask when I work in high schools here, is I will often say to the student leaders, if you have a kid in your school that's wanting to change, trying to change, where do they eat lunch? Can they eat at your table? And they always say, yeah, but I'm like, they're welcome at your table. Do you invite them to your table? Right?

Kathryn: Does the kid know he can sit there?

Mike: Yeah. Right.

Mike: There's steps. So those caring people can come from anywhere, Kathryn. Right. It doesn't have to just be inside the family.

Kathryn: No, no, it just no, it can be from anywhere. We know that children who are more disadvantaged will benefit the most from it, like every young person will benefit from it.

Kathryn: But, you know, those who have experienced trauma will really, it can be the difference. It really can be the difference between where they end up in their life.

Mike: Well, and as your walk off question because I get told this all the time. Is it ever too late, like do we reach an age at which, ah, stop trying, is it ever too late to develop resiliency and change the pattern?

Kathryn: Oh, no, no, I don't think it is. I think it certainly gets harder. Just because you've had... Often the older you get, you know... A:, you become more entrenched in, you know, your default patterns of even just your default patterns of communication. Like, you know, when I work with families, a big part of it is always just working on communication and they're all good people, but they're so used to communicating with each other in a particular way.

Kathryn: You actually just need a reset. But it's so hard to not be sarcastic at your brother when you've done it for 30 years. You know, and so it's the same with every other sort of behaviour, that the older you are, the more entrenched it is. The other thing is often the older you are, the more trauma you've accrued along the way.

Kathryn: So there's sort of more work to be undone. Before you can repair.

Mike: And it's okay to take care of yourself.

Kathryn: It's the airplane thing, isn't it? Like you got to take care of yourself first.

Mike: Put the mask on.

Mike: Kathryn, this has been great. I'd love to do this for about seven hours. This is my entire life's work right here.

Mike: As those of you who are listening know, there are links to Dr. Daley's work attached to the podcast. Kathryn, thanks for being with us today and for your inspiring and ongoing work. It's not so different down under as it is here in the States. (chuckle) And as you said earlier, depending on who we're voting for, it shifts the funding a great deal.

Mike: To all of you listening, please listen in next time when we talk about more issues and until next time, stay safe and be there for somebody who needs you.