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In part two of Diana’s conversation with Scotty Aemis, they delve into the complexities of adopting children from traumatic backgrounds and the challenges that come with it. Scotty shares practical advice on finding trauma-informed counselors, the importance of creating a safe environment for children, and the necessity of establishing trust before enforcing discipline. They discuss how integrating trauma awareness into various facets of life, including church and social activities, can significantly aid in the healing process. Scotty emphasizes the need for parents to provide a stable, loving environment rather than focusing on correcting behaviors. The episode concludes with resources for connecting with trauma-informed support and announcements about a new trauma-focused book and ministry services.
00:00 Introduction to the Podcast
00:33 Recap of Part One with Scotty Aemis
02:00 Choosing the Right Counselor
03:34 Creating a Safe Environment for Traumatized Children
05:25 Navigating Family and Social Situations
08:16 The Role of the Church and Faith
12:07 Final Thoughts and Resources
14:40 Conclusion and Farewell
Scotty Aemis is passionate about helping parents navigate childhood trauma. After he and his wife adopted two children, they found themselves learning everything they could about helping their children thrive. Everything that felt instinctually “right” was actually not helpful for children trying to heal from trauma. That set him on a journey to develop out my PSR (Positive Safe Relationships) Approach to parenting. It’s helpful for all children and parents, but especially those navigating childhood trauma.
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Part Two Scotty Aemis
[00:00:00] Welcome to the Wounds of the Faithful podcast, brought to you by DSW Ministries. Your host is singer, songwriter, speaker, and domestic violence advocate, Diana Winkler. She is passionate about helping survivors in the church heal from domestic violence and abuse and trauma. This podcast is not a substitute for professional counseling or qualified medical help.Now, here is Diana.
Hey everyone. Thanks for coming back to part two of my conversation with Scotty Aemis We had a wonderful time with hearing his background and how he came to adopt two children from Russia in a horrible orphanage And the surprises that he encountered when things just didn’t go the [00:01:00] way that they planned.
All you need is love. It’s not necessarily true. We need a little bit more. than love to parent children, including children that have had severe trauma.
So I’m excited to hear the rest of his story about
some examples of what works and what doesn’t work, and what resources are out there for parents.
We’re going to talk about discipline in detail. Sometimes discipline needs to put, be put on the back burner or done a different way. You first have to establish trust in the relationship before you do anything. So I’m not going to repeat his bio. If if you haven’t listened to part one, please go back and listen to that.
I’m not going to delay any further, continuing my conversation with Scotty Aemis. [00:02:00] Enjoy.
how do you pick a counselor? How do you know that they are trauma informed? Is there a list that you would say, okay, these are what, the therapist or the counselor should have?
You can’t just do a Google search, right? So most people will work an organization of some sort. I found a family counseling organization. And then within that organization, they have a bunch, a different group of different counselors. And then usually they either assign a behavior management, in Pennsylvania it’s called BHS, but it’s just a case manager.
And then you begin the relationship with that case manager. And then they work, you work with them to assign the right counselors for the kids. I’m not sure how they do it in all the states, but there’s usually some person that you can coordinate. And if you know that what, what is important, you can communicate to that person, that agency, and then they’ll help you find the right person that meets those requirements.
So, for us, because we understood it, we decided that trauma was the key. We insisted that [00:03:00] person was not a behaviorist, behavior management specialist and instead their specialty and their interest was in trauma. And then we had a conversation with them, and once they explained about a little bit about their understanding of it, and we were on the same wavelength, we said, yeah, that’s the right person.
they understand where the priorities are. it takes time. Sometimes you have to be willing to say, no, that’s not the right counselor for us. And this is where I get in. Also, one of the things for the key tenants of solving trauma. I use the line. It’s not how many great things you do for your child, how many negative things you can eliminate.
So, because 1 of the keys to healing from trauma is eliminating the retraumatization. We can be great and wonderful at home and all of a sudden they send off, send them off to school. They’re going to be traumatized all day long and they come home and they’re upset and they’re dysregulated and they’re having all kinds of issues.
And then we sit around and wonder and say. What’s wrong? How come my kid isn’t improving? [00:04:00] He’s not improving because, it’s like, sending a kid to war every day. Of course you’re not improving. I was just going to say that. Yes. it goes beyond school. We found we had, we switched churches.
a church where a pastor and his wife happened to be the same young lady that I talked to you before about who informed me about trauma because they had adopted kids. And all of a sudden, we realized that understanding of kids with special needs permeated throughout the church.
And so we could take him to Sunday school, and the Sunday school teacher understood about trauma, understood about special needs, and could deal with them. If they’d acted up in church or just popped up and walked out, you know, some churches are, if you move, you know, everybody’s looking like, What’s wrong with that child ?
Why are they up and down and moving on around? Because a lot of these kids, by the way, have have a have a DHD as well, and having them sit down in a church pew for a 25 or 30 minute sermon is pretty difficult. Good luck. Pretty difficult for anybody. . And how well does the church [00:05:00] willing to go with it and work with it?
So we found the right church for our kids. What was was in that environment and the same thing with my son was love boy scouts, but he was in a troop that was wild and crazy. And I had to move into a much more controlled troop where I could have a conversation with the scout master and he didn’t know anything about trauma, but he was willing to sit and listen and then work with me.
In terms of what we need to do for our children. So one of the things I, I teach with our parents is that you’ve got to look at all the areas of their life. And are you creating an environment for them that’s safe and not out of control? Oftentimes it’s even within family or extended family.
The big Christmas dinner or the big Thanksgiving dinner, all of a sudden all my , big family, and all of a sudden lots of things going on in TV and music and this. So you have to be willing to say, we love the family, but this year we’re going to skip this.
It’s okay to have a controlled environment. It’s okay. Not to have TVs and phones and [00:06:00] iPads in the room. They don’t need all that stimulation. They just need something to calm over time. I can help them take their brains up to the prefrontal cortex. It’s simple, but very difficult.
Glad you mentioned the family holidays. Even those of us that haven’t been through trauma that. It’s a stressful situation, you know, Thanksgiving and Christmas and the getting along with people that you don’t see all the time and the food and the noise,
the family I came from, we’re all talking at once and it’s, cause they want to be heard. Or you got people asking, yeah, it is chaos. And even for those of us that don’t struggle with trauma or those issues I tell people in my mending the soul group, you make Christmas and Thanksgiving what’s right for your family.
And don’t think you’re obligated to go to those big. [00:07:00] Get togethers, maybe have a smaller one, like, okay, you have your parents over or have uncle’s over that you trust and just have a mini celebration together, but you don’t have to have the big, huge, stressful event.
It’s not worth the anguish and the aftermath that you got to deal with when you get home, right? That’s so true. And to throw on top of that, one of the buzzwords going around now, but it’s so true, is generational trauma. Yeah. It goes from generation to generation.
And why do we want to bring our kids into a situation that, you know, we might not have had the trauma or we survived it, or we got beyond it, or we’ve dealt with it over the years, but why put them back in that environment? We’re constantly working to improve upon that and we can break the generational trauma with us or with our kids.
That’s a beautiful thing. They didn’t deal with it. They pushed it under the rug. They ignored it. Pretend it wasn’t there. [00:08:00] So, the people in that advocate for a lot of the generational trauma is. Nobody talks about it, and so it doesn’t go away because you don’t talk about it and deal with it.
Yeah, so you hit a lot of great points. I am glad you mentioned your church. I’m very fortunate that I have a church that has trauma informed children’s director. And we have special Sunday school teachers that they have special class just for them with a bunch of different variety of special needs kids.
And I don’t have any children myself, but I am so supportive of our church that is trauma informed. They’re the ones that told me about mending the soul. And so thank God that. I did find this church because then I can lead others to a trauma informed Sunday school for their [00:09:00] kids.
We’re getting a new building for the kids. We just finished the fundraising and now we’re in the process of actually constructing the building for children for the next generation. And there, and a lot of churches are not that way that they have people that are trained in trauma.
That’s a blessing. You have that, you know, also, one of the things I talk about churches or with faith is that, you know, the Bible is very clear that God adopted us into his kingdom. Yes. So we’re all adopted. And so the idea of differentiating your specific parental upbringing to me, my faith from perspective, it doesn’t matter because thank goodness that he adopted us or yeah, God adopted us because he’s going to adopt us into his kingdom.
And Jesus. Loved children and they were precious to him and he was countercultural in his day that [00:10:00] children were just, you know, annoyances or, be seen and not heard, but he actually took them into his arms and loved on them and ministered to them because they’re valuable.
We can just model his way. All these things, all these problems go away. Isn’t it? Isn’t it amazing? I know that we talked about a lot of things. Was there anything that we didn’t talk about that you wanted to tell the audience today? Oh, I’ll just I think there’s a couple of things that I was going to bring up.
One was that this is again back to the behavior modification issue. With trauma, it’s important to know that consequences don’t work, because consequences are based on trusting that person and they’re giving us a positive or a negative based on on our behavior, but our behavior is based on whether we trust and love that person that’s dealing with it.
Until you work on the relationship, and we call it in our system positive safe relationships. [00:11:00] I think that’s that was an important part. I often talk about the fact that kids are looking for three things from us, right? They want to know, do you love me? Can I trust you and can you help me, which really comes down to love, open empathy.
And if we can focus those as our priorities. Thank you. The kids will heal on their own. We’re not here to fix our children. We’re here to create an environment where they can heal. So, parents, it’s not too often I run into my parents who are trying 10, 20 different things. I’ll do this, and I’ll do this, and I’ll create this, and I’ll make this happen.
They don’t need all that. They just need a safe, quiet, loving environment and over time they will heal. So trust the kids and trust, be willing to invest the time and that takes and you know, as we spoke before, listen to Jesus as our model and [00:12:00] the kids will be doing better. We just have to give each other some grace.
And now that over time, our kids will learn and our kids will heal. So that’s pretty much, I guess the only thing I can show, is I have a book out. End up being number one. I didn’t even, I’m not even an author, but I want to put something out. And it ended up being number one in eight,
Amazon. So it just goes about a trauma and we can just get the word out best we can. It looks like a great book. So your your children, how old are they now?
And I would never have thought this five, six years ago. And they’re both talking about college now. Wonderful. So they made it to high school, and now they’re going to college. That is so exciting. Hey you made it to the other side, by the grace of God. So it’s almost, yes, but the yes.
And they’re out, you know, they’d go on missions. My kids went on a mission trip to El Salvador last year
They care for others. Oh, precious. That’s the cycle that we want to go inside. So they don’t even think about their background. They just move on and [00:13:00] you know, they’re teenagers.
Now the teenagers, they want to look at their phone all day, but yeah. That’s what everybody else wants to do, including us adults. How can the folks get a hold of you to take advantage of your resources? Get the book our website as well as our Facebook and Instagram is all child trauma Sherpa.
Or Ct Sherpa dot com at chop and Sherpa up on Facebook. Join, love to have your people join our group. We don’t sell things. Everything I do is like we discussed as a ministry. The book I have up is really at cost. I’m not looking at to make any money off it. I’m just looking to get the word out and, and share the methodology, the brain best based methodology. We know it works and we just want to be able to share it to as many people as possible and create the force in parenting that can make changes in our society. I so enjoyed our conversation. I’m very passionate about what you are doing and making a [00:14:00] difference in these children’s lives .
I definitely want to keep you as a resource for folks that need help with their kids. If I’m in Philadelphia anytime soon, I’ll come visit. Great. We’d love to have you. And by the way, we even have a counselor. That you can connect them from our web page.
First, the first visit is for free, they’re frustrated and need some help. We have professional on staff that can listen and give some ideas as well. Excellent. Thanks so much for coming on the show. I so appreciate you and God bless you. Thank you. And God bless as well.
And thank you very much for having us.
Thank you for listening to the Wounds of the Faithful podcast. If this episode has been helpful to you, please hit the subscribe button and tell a friend. You can connect with us at DSWMinistries. org, where you’ll find our blog along with our Facebook, Twitter, and our [00:15:00] YouTube channel links. Hope to see you next week!