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Our bodies were weary from the excitement, multiple sugar overdoses and physical excertions post Labour Day weekend. An unexpected change was on the horizon. Swimming, building forts, fishing, joyful family camp fires, and reeking havoc defined our life at the cottage. I loved it there. One last sleep. Staring at the ceiling I remember thinking grade two was one day away. Argh! How could my life be over? What do I do now? “Shhhhh!!!!” … laughter … soft voices … someone was on the front porch. Quickly rolling out of bed I peered through my mother’s hand-made strawberry patterned curtains. Blinded by summers last incandescant full moon, its rays kissed the ripples of water parading luminescent diamonds as the backdrop. I saw my father’s arms around my mothers waist “Mummy, you are still the most beautiful girl after twenty one years. I love you”. They cooed like two doves, their silhouette faces touched. It would be the last time I would see them embrace. He died on the first day of school.
“Summer rain is still the most comforting sound that I know. I like to pretend it’s our dead mother’s fingers, drumming on the ceiling above us. (3)” Depicting the ireperable loss of her mother, and concealed feelings of sorrow, twelve year old Ava Bigtree is the protagonist in Karen Russell’s dramatic prose “Ava Wrestles the Aligator”. Ava, lures readers into the perils of wrestling with alligators unanimously named “Seth” and exotic bird estuaries within the fun, eccentric world of Swampladia! (1). Beneath Ava’s charasmatic veneer a different kind of story is unravling. Swamplandia! signifies the mortal remainder of memory and unification with her deceased mother. Ava’s voice evokes her physchological and emotional regression into the mag...
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...sell deliberately choose Ava’s multi-dimensional name to symbolize her role as the “bird” in the estuary and the strongest linchpin between the living and the dying, namely, her families demise. When she learns of her sisters plot to commit suicide, Ava rushes to rescue her sister “When I break free of the trees and make for the pond, my whole body primed for fight, there is no visible adversary to wrestle with.” As Ava charges (24) into the water she faces death head on and “wrestles the alligator” Ossie.
As Russell’s dramatic prose comes to a close, Ava decribes that the undoubted pain associated with death and mourning of a parent eventually resolves; consequently the initmate knowledge of grief remains imbedded in ones life forever “As if something were still clawing at her from within, pushing outwards, a pressure that is trying to break the skin.(25)”
Grief can arise from loss, whether large-scale or small, and may not be easily removed once it takes hold. Because of grief’s obstinate nature, many approaches have been developed in order to handle the repressive, and often painful, effects it can have on people’s lives. One of those approaches is Elizabeth Kübler-Ross’s theory, The Five Stages of Grief. In Sierra Skye Gemma’s essay, “The Wrong Way”, she juxtaposes her own personal experiences with grief against Kübler-Ross’s hypothesis. Gemma uses her confessional, combined with empirical evidence that contradicts the Five Stages of Grief, to demonstrate that feelings of grief are unique to the individual; therefore, there is no right way to mourn.
Has there ever been a time in your life where you had to experience a tragedy. The Seventh Man did. The seventh man was only ten years old on a september afternoon when a typhoon hit his home town of Providence of S. During the eye of the storm, he and his friend named K went down to the beach. A wave hit and killed K but the seventh man was able to escape. For the rest of the seventh man’s life, he had to deal with survivor's guilt until he was able to forgive himself. Should the seventh man forgive himself of his failures? Yes, The seventh man should forgive himself of all responsibility of K’s death.
"The grandmother didn't want to go to Florida. She wanted to visit some of her connections in east Tennessee and she was seizing at every chance to change Bailey's mind. Bailey was the son she lived with, her only boy. He was sitting on the edge of his chair at the table, bent over the orange sports section of the Journal. 'Now look here, Bailey,' she said, 'see here, read this,' and she stood with one hand on her thin hip and the other rattling the newspaper at his bald head."
Grief is a multi-faceted response to loss. Although primarily focused on the emotional reaction to loss, it also carries a physical, cognitive, behavioral, social, and philosophical connotation. Doctor Elisabeth Kübler-Ross introduced the idea of the stages of grief in her 1969 book, On Death and Dying. Although it has received much criticism since then, the Kübler-Ross model remains to be the most widely accepted model of grief today. However, as most psychological research conducted in the 20th century was based on people living in the North America and Western Europe, the Kübler-Ross model could be culturally biased. In the Laws of Absence, Ahmed El-Madini introduces the readers to grief and mourning in the Islamic culture. Through this journey with the narrator, the readers realize that despite cultural and chronological differences, human nature is essentially the same in regards to coming to terms with loss.
I walked into the room on New Year’s Day and felt a sudden twinge of fear. My eyes already hurt from the tears I had shed and those tears would not stop even then the last viewing before we had to leave. She lay quietly on the bed with her face as void of emotion as a sheet of paper without the writing. Slowly, I approached the cold lifeless form that was once my mother and gave her a goodbye kiss.
Life happens, and so does death as it is also a part of life. Moreover, in many cases, some of us will have to go through the experience of anticipating death in ourselves or in a loved one as opposed to a sudden death in the family. In other words, both the family and the person involved start to grieve, even before the parting actually takes place.
Through an intimate maternal bond, Michaels mother experiences the consequences of Michaels decisions, weakening her to a debilitating state of grief. “Once he belonged to me”; “He was ours,” the repetition of these inclusive statements indicates her fulfilment from protecting her son and inability to find value in life without him. Through the cyclical narrative structure, it is evident that the loss and grief felt by the mother is continual and indeterminable. Dawson reveals death can bring out weakness and anger in self and with others. The use of words with negative connotations towards the end of the story, “Lonely,” “cold,” “dead,” enforce the mother’s grief and regressing nature. Thus, people who find contentment through others, cannot find fulfilment without the presence of that individual.
Derricotte’s conclusive paragraph begins with, “My mother helps me. She sends me signs: her African violet bloomed for the first time on my windowsill three years after her death, on the first day of her death month…I love my mother now in ways I could not have loved her when she was alive, fierce, terrifying, unpredictable, mad, shame-inducing, self-involved, relentless, and determined by any means necessary” (53). The timing of her love for her mother became insignificant. It wasn’t about when she finally reached the point of loving her mother but the mere fact that she loved her. The utilization of descriptive writing and the emotional implementation in “Beginning Dialogues” are a couple of ways Derricotte enraptures her readers in this short story. Regardless of a painful past or a traumatic childhood she allows herself to see that love truly conquers
Death in a family seizes control over the emotional and physical health of the surviving family. Facing death is difficult, but it cannot be ignored. The trauma may be an opportunity to grow from the experience, if it is talked about and discussed and worked through with the support of others; or it may throw a family off course, misdirecting their actions or leaving them altogether emotionally stagnant. Two families confront death differently in William Faulkner’s “A Rose For Emily,” in which a well-respected woman degenerates into a reclusive spinster after the death of her father, and in Brady Udall’s “The Wig,” a flash-fiction story about a son who wears a discarded wig that resembles the hair of his dead mother. These two stories offer very different portraits of families who try to recover after the death of a parent -- in Udall’s story, the mom; and in Faulkner’s, the father -- yet each story, through imagery, metaphor, symbolism, and their climaxes, comment similarly on the importance of communication after a devastating loss such as death.
By the time Julie returned her grandmother was ever so lightly snoring. The look of gratification and appreciation of Julie’s previously stern face melted my heart and again my eyes welled with tears. The fence Julie had built around her heart slowly disintegrated as she observed the bond I had developed with her “mom”. With a quivering voice, Julie revealed the stress and emotional turmoil of watching this devastating disease imprison the only mother she had ever known.
The loss of someone close can be a very painful experience. When someone passes over to the other side, the people they leave behind are left grief-stricken. The process they go through is called bereavement or another word, people may use is called in mourning. This all depends on what beliefs the bereaved may have on dying. Different religions cope with mortality in different ways.
Death is something that many people have a hard concept grasping. The fact that a loved
Imagine growing up without a father. Imagine a little girl who can’t run to him for protection when things go wrong, no one to comfort her when a boy breaks her heart, or to be there for every monumental occasion in her life. Experiencing the death of a parent will leave a hole in the child’s heart that can never be filled. I lost my father at the young of five, and every moment since then has impacted me deeply. A child has to grasp the few and precious recollections that they have experienced with the parent, and never forget them, because that’s all they will ever have. Families will never be as whole, nor will they forget the anguish that has been inflicted upon them. Therefore, the sudden death of a parent has lasting effects on those
The fleeting changes that often accompany seasonal transition are especially exasperated in a child’s mind, most notably when the cool crisp winds of fall signal the summer’s end approaching. The lazy routine I had adopted over several months spent frolicking in the cool blue chlorine soaked waters of my family’s bungalow colony pool gave way to changes far beyond the weather and textbooks. As the surrounding foliage changed in anticipation of colder months, so did my family. My mother’s stomach grew larger as she approached the final days of her pregnancy and in the closing hours of my eight’ summer my mother gently awoke me from the uncomfortable sleep of a long car ride to inform of a wonderful surprise. No longer would we be returning to the four-story walk up I inhabited for the majority of my young life. Instead of the pavement surrounding my former building, the final turn of our seemingly endless journey revealed the sprawling grass expanse of a baseball field directly across from an unfamiliar driveway sloping in front of the red brick walls that eventually came to be know as home.
The dark, black sky was covered with a million bright shining stars. The moon shimmered above a small town in the suburbs of London. The gentle wind swept past the bare trees and danced with the leaves below it, creating a colourful array of orange, yellow, red and brown. Across the street, a light was on in a small house where a tall, dark haired woman stood, talking to her two children Nicola and Erin. While she was tucking them in Erin asked, “Mummy, will you tell us a story please?” “I’m sorry but its time to go to sleep now,” she said. “Please mummy,” begged Nicola “Okay but only one story,” she replied “This story is about how I got lost when I was a young girl and how I met an incredible man. It all began when…”