How Trauma Affects Middle School Girls
Every child responds to traumatic events differently, with some showing adaptability and others finding it difficult to process their experience. Without secure attachment, your daughter is likely to experience difficulty in relationships, anxiety, depression, loneliness, low self-worth, and other related challenges. Middle school girls are particularly vulnerable to trauma experienced through bullying and rejection in relationships and develop negative beliefs about themselves and their social skills early in life. For this age group, their biggest fear is feeling different and not fitting in, so trauma can feel very isolating, when, in fact, it is more common among middle school girls than one would think.
At Asheville Academy, we recognize that student’s behavior is often a learned response to situations they’ve experienced. Often, we work with girls with PTSD who have been diagnosed with multiple other mental health disorders before recognizing that the symptoms may stem from the experiences they’ve had and that PTSD is a better explanation for them. Our holistic approach involves getting to know every student on an individualized basis in order to come up with a personalized treatment plan to help them process trauma they’ve experienced and cope in healthier ways.
The guide is meant to be comprehensive, but as such, not every section will be applicable to everyone. Instead, we invite you to click on the links in the table of contents to jump to the sections that most interest you.