I heard an anti smoking commercial on teen smoking. It started out with a message to parents about something like 22% of teens smoke...What are you going to do about it? It ends up with a message to spend more time with your children. In between, they talk about teens who smoke being more likely to do poorly in school, drink alcohol, use drugs and a whole bunch of other bad stuff.
I thought: This commercial is not trauma-informed. As a systems thinker, I immediately went into my five whys. That’s what I do when I jump to a conclusion. Jumping to conclusions is not a good way to analyze stuff.
So, why is this commercial not trauma-informed?
Well, the first answer I had was that smoking could be described, as Dr. Vincent Felitti stated when talking about negative behaviors that are adopted by kids with Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs), as an attempt at self healing. It is a symptom of ACEs, and not a predictor of other behaviors also judged as negative.
Why is smoking a symptom of ACEs? When looking at the data from the ACE Study, we find both correlation and causation with a majority of teens who smoke. The more ACEs, the greater the likelihood they will smoke.
Why is there a greater likelihood that teens will smoke if they have higher ACEs? The answers are harder to come by the deeper you get into the 5 whys. At this point, my research tells me that teens with high ACEs have both a heightened fear response and greater anxiety. The act of smoking, together with the chemicals contained in a cigarette, are soothing and calming. This is why Dr. Felitti said that what we view as a negative behavior might well be someone’s attempt at self healing, or soothing and calming from a fear or anxiety response.
Why do I doubt that smoking causes other negative behaviors such as poor school performance and alcohol consumption? Again, the questions get tougher as we progress, but I believe that all of the behaviors mentioned in the commercial are also attempts at self-healing. The behaviors mentioned, like smoking, influence the brain in a way that is soothing and calming to the teen. If they are all symptoms, then we need to look at symptoms as having a similar root cause—developmental trauma and anxiety resulting with development of the prefrontal cortex. The symptoms could actually be selected by teens from a range of behaviors that are available to them—behaviors that can be viewed as negative, neutral or positive.
Why can behaviors be viewed as negative, neutral or positive? Again, this is a tough question, and one I wrestled with for years. A neutral behavior is one like gambling. Unless gambling approaches addictive status, it doesn’t hurt anyone. It’s not like smoking. And in adults, drinking is viewed as neutral until it becomes addictive. And who doesn’t know about retail therapy, where you buy stuff because it makes you feel good? What about positive behaviors? I actually learned that this is a viable concept from Dr. Gabor Mate, author of an amazing book, “In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts.” He pointed out that some people, like himself, could be driven by the approval of others into achievements in education and professions. As I thought about it, this can be viewed regularly when we look at the deconstruction in behaviors of teen performing stars after they become adults. Negative behaviors accumulate as the paparazzi and tabloids start taking aim and the praise stops.
Here is the final question I am going to ask, although I am sure there is more. Why isn’t this commercial trauma-informed? As I stated, the commercial focuses on a negative behavior in a silo. It states that smoking is a predictor that the teen will enter other siloes. And then it jumps to a conclusion that does not take into account the developmental trauma roots for the behavior. If, as the ACE Study reports, there is both causation and correlation between the trauma that children are exposed to and negative behaviors, that fact is ignored. It is particularly ignored in the advice given to parents.
Here is the conclusion I came up with. The 10 questions examined in the ACE Study are all based on behaviors that can be categorized as predominately perpetrated by parents. The advice that’s given is to spend more time with your children. Doesn’t that advice give the parent more time to perpetrate trauma? When we have a parent who is causing the damage to our kids, do we really want to be giving them advice about spending MORE time with their kids? If letting kids have matches leads to setting fires, do we tell parents to let their kids have more matches?
OK. We have come to a point where I believe I am justified in a hypothesis that states: The anti-smoking commercial is not trauma-informed, and the advice given to parents to spend more time with their children can actually cause more damage than we actually know about. Why? The damage is caused when we are not properly informed about trauma.
Of course that leads to another question I have posed before. What advice can we actually give that might help? I have answered that in my Restoration to Health Strategy. We need to heal the parent generation so they can parent the next generation well. A child raised by healthy parents generally exhibits few negative behaviors.
Thanks for following along. I am concerned that we place too much emphasis on the identification of developmental trauma as a cause of negative behaviors and not on what can be done for healing the trauma.
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