Helping Boys Thrive (w Dr. Sandy Gluckman)

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Stress and trauma can make it difficult for boys to thrive.

Counseling, chiropractic care, socio-emotional learning, and other child-focused interventions may help, but only to a certain degree. For real, lasting, sustainable change to occur, adults must manage their own stress.

“There’s nothing good that’s going to come of taking our children to others for help until we have looked at ourselves,” says Dr. Sandy Gluckman, a psychologist based in Texas. The first step to helping our boys thrive, she says, is becoming stress-aware.

Chronic, on-going stress can turn into toxic stress and trauma. And trauma can inhibit our ability (and our kids’ ability) to become their best selves. Trauma can make it difficult for boys to thrive.

“Trauma is not an event,” Dr. Sandy clarifies, but an emotional response to a distressing experience. It can be cumulative as well. People who have experience a second or third trauma before they’ve had the opportunity to heal or recover from the first trauma may struggle more than those who’ve had time to heal.

Trauma doesn’t simply “go away” once when a stressor is removed. It can get “stalled” in the body, Dr. Sandy says, and negatively affect our physical and mental functioning.

Healing trauma

It’s possible to heal from trauma.

“There are remarkable and simple tools you can use to ‘tease’ that trauma out” of your nervous system, Dr. Sandy says. Parents can help boys thrive by first healing their own trauma.

“As we being to heal, children pick up a different energy from us and they spontaneously heal with us,” she says.