How Trauma Can Affect Children and Young People: PDF Worksheet, Tools and Exercises

Explaining trauma reactions to a child or adolescent without a visual support tends to produce polite nodding rather than genuine recognition. This fiche PDF gives clinicians a single-page psychoeducation tool calibrated to children and young people (CYP), naming twelve common reactions in age-appropriate, body-grounded language and offering the neuroscience behind them without jargon.

Why Trauma Reactions Resist Oral Explanation With Young People

The core clinical difficulty is one of reattribution. The child who is hypervigilant, irritable, or dissociating has usually already constructed a self-narrative in which those reactions mean something is broken in them, not that their nervous system learned to protect them. An oral explanation rarely dislodges that narrative, because abstract concepts such as hyperarousal, intrusion, or amygdala dysregulation have no referent a ten-year-old can hold.

The problem is compounded when the referral describes secondary features rather than trauma per se: poor concentration, somatic complaints, social withdrawal, sudden anger. Without a shared vocabulary, the child cannot connect those symptoms to their experience, and neither can the caregiver sitting next to them. The fiche solves both problems at once, by making the full footprint of trauma, somatic, cognitive, behavioural, and relational, visible on a single page.

What the Fiche Contains: A Visual Map of Twelve Trauma Reactions

The resource is structured in three panels. The first, titled Twelve ways trauma can show up, lists twelve named reactions paired with concrete sensory descriptions: "Heart racing, sweaty hands, shaky legs" for being scared or on edge; "A smell brings the whole thing back" for flashbacks; "Anger is often fear in a costume" for irritability. The tick/cross format invites active participation without requiring narrative disclosure. A child can point to a box on the page without speaking about what happened, which substantially lowers the threshold for engagement. For clinicians building a PTSD symptom picture or mapping common reactions to trauma, the checklist doubles as an informal clinical inventory.

The second panel explains the amygdala in one paragraph, using an alarm metaphor: the brain's alarm "learned to be loud" to protect the child, and afterwards "stays sensitive", triggering on cues even when safety is present. This framing is consistent with the Ehlers and Clark model and lays the conceptual groundwork for later fight-flight-freeze psychoeducation or, with younger children, the simpler fight-or-flight explanation designed for children. It also connects directly to autonomic nervous system work, should you move toward a somatic regulation focus.

The third panel offers four micro-strategies (naming the reaction, ticking the fiche, showing one box to a trusted adult, accepting non-linear recovery) and a set of explicit safety prompts, including nightmares most nights and thoughts of self-harm, framed as cues to "tell someone today".

> Key point: The fiche is a visual support that facilitates the explanation in session: the clinician leads, using the panels as a shared referent, and the sheet stays with the young person as a concrete anchor between appointments. It is not a self-administered questionnaire.

When and How to Introduce the Fiche in Trauma Work

This resource is best introduced once a basic working alliance is established, typically in the second or third appointment, after rapport work and an initial anamnèse. It is particularly well-suited when:

• The child is pre-verbal about the trauma but presents somatic or behavioural sequelae a caregiver cannot make sense of
• Concentration problems, sleep disruption, or irritability have been flagged without a trauma formulation being in place yet
• EMDR preparation is underway: the twelve reactions give the young person a ready vocabulary before you move into EMDR negative and positive cognitions work

Introduce it plainly: "Here's a sheet that lists some things young people sometimes notice after something hard has happened. Can you look through and tick the ones that feel like you?" Then debrief item by item. Pay particular attention to item 6 (self-blame), which frequently carries strong affect and where the fiche's direct message, "It was NOT your fault", does useful therapeutic work before you name it explicitly.

The fiche integrates naturally with 50 coping strategies for children and adolescents, grounding techniques, and belly breathing exercises for kids. For caregiver sessions, it pairs with the Anxiety in Children and Adolescents parent programme and the Depression in Children and Adolescents parent programme. With younger children, use it alongside emotion thermometers to build the affective vocabulary the fiche assumes.

The "healing wobbles" framing in the final Remember panel is worth discussing explicitly with both child and caregiver. It pre-empts the discouragement that follows a difficult week and keeps the therapeutic alliance intact through the non-linear course that trauma recovery almost always takes.