Kim S. Golding

If you’ve managed to make it to adulthood without suffering trauma, you should be thankful. A very large number of us did not have that privilege. As a result, each day, literally, is affected by so-called ACEs or Adverse Childhood Experiences.

These take many forms from simply neglect right through to outright abuse. Their number, severity and frequency determine the level of trauma you suffer as a child and, without a great deal of help, you inevitably bring that into your adult life.

Most adults expect other adults to behave like adults. They don’t understand that many adults have to live with parts of their psyche that are still locked into the developmental stage they were at when they experienced their ACEs.

Take me, for example. I suffered an emotionally abusive and violent mother who was an alcoholic. She left us when I was 9. My father did his best but he was often absent on business trips and then, when I was 11, I effectively left home. Sent from our overseas life back to boarding school in the UK, a country I barely knew and certainly didn’t call home, I spent weeks being intensely bullied there and weekends with a grandmother I barely knew and who I had very little in common with. It was misery.

As a result of this, I grew up without any good models of how to simply relate to someone on an interpersonal level. Because I found this hard, I didn’t make friends easily. I therefore entered a vicious circle of having to become self-reliant which made me even less inclined to develop interpersonal relationships. By the time I had reached my early 20s, I was so embedded in this pattern of behaviour that I have had to spend the last 30 years having to first recognise why I am like I am and then attempt to deal with this. It is something I struggle with every single day of my life.

Books like Creating Loving Attachments help, in part, to address issues like this in children. They first help us understand the issues. They secondly help us to repair the broken bonds which lead to issues in later life, like I’ve described above … and ones much, much worse than that.

The book is subtitled Parenting with PACE to Nurture Confidence and Security in the Troubled Child. I’ll admit that this is nearer in length to an abstract than a subtitle, and it does a good job of summarising its content.

PACE (Playfulness, Acceptance, Curiosity and Empathy) is an approach developed by the co-author Dan Hughes. If you’ve ever struggled to raise children (and by that I mean if you’ve ever attempted to raise children) and you’ve not heard of PACE and Dan Hughes, you need to get on YouTube now.

Creating Loving Attachments takes you through PACE step by step, gives you examples of how parenting works with and without each step and generally helps you understand how the job of raising the next generation can be made less stressful.

Along the way, they do a good job of helping to balance what you give your child with the care you give yourself. I truly appreciate that. Going from nought to nine months of full-time foster care for three boys under the age of 8 has pushed me to my limit. It’s good to know that it’s okay to reach that limit and okay to take time to pull myself back from the brink when I need to.

I followed up the book with an 8-week training course that covered more of the details with a much more therapeutic approach where we could cry on each other’s shoulders (sometimes literally) and share our experiences. That was incredibly useful.

But especialy if you don’t have a support network around you like that, Golding and Hughes will give you the essentials to get you started. I honestly don’t understand why all those involved in the care of children who suffer trauma are not provided with PACE training initially nor why parenting isn’t a mandatory subject at school. The good Lord knows it’s a heck of a lot more useful for the future of society than English and Maths.

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