Communicating Trauma: Disorders, Delays, and Clinical Presentations in Traumatized Children

Even adults who have well-formed language abilities often find putting distress into words a challenge. Children, whose communicative abilities are still forming, may not always verbalize their distress nor know how to explain it. In remarkably compelling prose, Communicating Trauma explores the co-occurrence, relationships, and presentation of communication disorders and post-traumatic/dissociative disorders in traumatized children. Vignettes culled from decades of clinical work are woven into the text, and the role of neurodevelopment, attachment, and life experiences in children of different ages is explained in clear and precise terms. Clinicians and students in a wide variety of fields— speech-language pathologists, trauma clinicians, education professionals, medical personnel, physical therapists and occupational therapists, social workers, and more—will learn points of differential diagnosis between primary disorders and those secondary to trauma; they'll also explore the complicated reality and risks of having trauma co-occur with developmental issues, and they'll come away from the book with a toolbox of proven strategies for supporting traumatized children in everyday and therapeutic settings.