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Dr. Mica Gonzalez. Early Childhood, Trauma & Healing: from the archives · The Trauma Therapist

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  Or today we even another episode from the archives with one of my incredible guests.
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  Enjoy or Welcome back to the Trauma Therapist Podcast. My name is Gaming
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  Person. My mission is to help trauma therapist be their incredible selves, to
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  be human, to be real, not just a clinician. I'm a big
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  believer in who we are is more important than what we know, and this
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  requires cultivating authenticity, genuineness, and vulnerability, and that requires intention. Can
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  learn more about my courses and workshops by going to the Trauma Therapist project dot
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  com. That's the Trauma Therapist project dot com. Let's get started, our
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  guys. Welcome back to the Trauma Therapist Podcast. My name is Gammick Person
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  and if this is the first time joining us, my goal here is to
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  bring a great awareness to trauma and really focus on the trauma workers and more
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  specifically people who are just starting out on their journey getting trauma informed becoming trauma
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  focused. Today, I'm very excited to introduce my guest, doctor Mika Gonzalez.
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  Miko, welcome, Thanks, good to be here guy. All right,
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  man, So, Doctor Mika Gonzalez is a clinical psychologist specializing in early
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  childhood in the San Francisco Bay Area. His work involves helping young children and
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  their families recover from trauma and loss, primarily through the medium of the child
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  parent relationship. Mika received his doctoral degree from the Institute of transpar Psychology and
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  trained in a variety of settings, including a middle school, an adult date
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  treatment facility, and a home visiting early intervention program. Mika's trained in child
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  parent Psychotherapy, a trauma informed approach to early intervention, and has an endorsement
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  as an Early Childhood Mental Health specialist from the California Center for Infant, Family
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  and Early Childhood and Mental Health. Are right, brother, and I say
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  that because Meek and I were in school together at the Institute of Transport Psychology.
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  Man, I'm so excited you here, so welcome to share with our
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  listeners a little bit about where you're from originally where you're calling from, and
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  then let's get going. Sure sounds good. Well, I'm calling from Berkeley,
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  California, as you know, and I am from San Antonio, Texas.
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  So still got a little text in blood coursing through my veins even though
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  I've been out here for a good while. Nice. Nice, So one
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  of the reasons that I'm excited to have you on. I mean not just
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  you know, because I know you, but you're really one of the few
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  people that I've come across who's really specializing in early early childhood. We're working
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  with our younger kids and specifically working with the child parent relationship. And in
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  fact, I don't have anyone else who's been on the podcast who is really
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  speaking to that directly. So I'm really excited to have you share with our
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  listeners what's going on in that arena. Sure, sure, yeah, there's
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  a lot to say. So let's start out with a quote, something to
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  set the stage. Can be a mantra, a sentence, whatever, what
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  do you have. So I came across this quote like within the last year
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  or two, and I've just I still keep mullying it over because it's it's
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  so rich and there's just just it applies, I think, not only to
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  my personal life, but especially to my professional life. And it's from a
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  psychoanalyst named Christopher Bolus, and he writes, to be a child is to
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  endure a prolonged situation in which the human mind is more complex than this self
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  can ordinarily bear. Our minds in themselves produce contents that will be overwhelming to
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  be successfully normal, then we rather have to dumb ourselves down. Okay,
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  you got, you got, you gotta doubt one again for that. That
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  definitely is. It's got a lot to it. So yeah, do that
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  in one again. Sure to be a child is to endure a prolonged situation
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  in which the human mind is more complex than the self can ordinarily bear.
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  Our minds in themselves produce contents that will be overwhelming to be successfully normal,
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  then we rather have to dumb ourselves down. Wow, okay, so unpack
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  that for for people who are listening. You know why why that quote?
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  When did that begin to kind of resonate for you? I mean, I
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  can tell you have resonated right away, just because you know, I spend
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  most of my days working with toddlers and preschoolers, and uh, I spend
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  I spend much of that time confused about what it is, what it is
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  they're actually trying to communicate to me, because I mean, especially because many
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  of the children I work with also, in addition to having some mental health
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  issues, they also have a speech delay. So a lot of the communication
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  is nonverbal. It's it's through action, it's through movements. Through sound,
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  And this quote really captures the sort of predictament that I think, you know,
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  essentially all little kids find themselves, and that this is a normative experience
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  to have this you know, hulking, supercharged engine that we call a brain
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  or or or a mind that is really in some profound way, it's just
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  too much for us, especially in the beginning, and that we have to
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  find these ways, you know, ideally through through our caregivers and through our
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  peers and siblings, our early relationships, to to to dumb this these kind
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  of superpowers down a little bit and bring them within to some extent, within
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  our control. Nice you mentioned a speech delay. Is that coincidental? Is
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  that because a lot of the kids have experienced trauma or definitely definitely lots yeah,
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  lots of lots of I mean, I would say, you know,
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  ninety percent of the kids that I work with have experienced trauma. And you
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  know, developmental delays are are a common response, and they can be you
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  know, they can be in the sort of social emotional channel, they can
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  be in the speech and language channel. But we tend to see I tend
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  to see kids that have multiple delays in multiple areas. Let's kind of move
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  along and talk to us about how you got here. I mean, how
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  did you start becoming interested in this and uh progress into you focusing on this
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  particular specialization. Sure, sure, I think you know. It started out,
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  um early in my training. You know, I, of course,
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  just like anybody else, I wanted I wanted to be good. I wanted
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  to be I wanted to be able to think of myself as sort of competent
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  and a good therapist. But I learned pretty quickly that that was not easy.
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  That was not going to be easy for me to do. Um.
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  And my first practicum training was was working with kids, and it was familiar
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  to me because I had been a tutor for uh, you know, over
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  a decade at that point, and I continued to tutor, um, you
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  know, mostly middle school and high school kids throughout my graduate training, and
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  so my first placement was at a middle school, and so it was familiar
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  to me. But I really just spent most of that first year figuring out
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  how to not be a tutor with the kids. And so in some ways,
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  you know, it was it was a challenge because I had to learn
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  a new way of being with kids, but um, it was familiar because
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  it was it was kids. When I got to my second placement UM,
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  I was working in a community mental health setting, and I was working with
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  adults that were much much more impaired, and the kinds of adults that had
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  had, you know, tens of hospitalizations and had always, you know,
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  for at least their adult lives, had been in and out of different mental
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  health and sort of criminal justice systems. So working with people who had really
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  suffered a lot, and I learned quickly that that I didn't know. I
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  didn't know what their experience it was like. It wasn't just that I couldn't
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  relate to it because I hadn't had any sort of substantial trauma as myself in
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  my own upbringing, but I actually just didn't have a good theory of how
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  their minds got the way they were. And so when I would try and
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  do kind of present present moment kind of interventions with them, I would I
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  would trigger many of them, and they would sort of decompensate and gets or
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  otherwise get disregulated. And I didn't understand why. I didn't understand. I
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  didn't have a good sense of the structure of their mind. And I realized
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  that I need I need to I need to see this up close from the
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  very beginning. So I found out about early childhood mental health, and I
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  said, that's where I'm going. I need to see how this begins.
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  And for a number of reasons, I couldn't do that right away. And
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  so what I settled on was going to a training institute that focused on psychoanalytics
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  psychology because there I knew at least I could get the theory of early childhood
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  that was just while you were still in grad school or afterwards. Okay,
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  wow wow, okay, yeah. And so I had a great experience doing
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  a two year training program at ACCESS Institute in San Francisco, and it really
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  really changed how I approached therapy just fundamentally, and I felt like I had
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  a good, or at least a better sense of how my long suffering patients
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  got to be that way. But go ahead, No, Well, I
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  was just gonna say, I mean, what it sounds like. I mean
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  to me, what it feels like is you kind of really listened to yourself
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  to kind of follow, to put one step one foot in front of the
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  other. You know, someone might have said, oh, I don't even
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  despite the fact that maybe you didn't feel quote unquote at home with adults.
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  You know, someone might have said, well, you know, I kind
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  of still want to do that, but you kind of said yourself, well,
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  I want to go back and find out how this all starts, you
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  know, just that process of listening to yourself or I really kind of appreciate
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  that. Yeah. Yeah, And you know it didn't it didn't stop there,
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  because you know, while I felt better about having some understanding of where
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  my patients had come from psychologically and historically, I still wanted to see it.
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  I still wanted to see that those first relationships that were contributing to the
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  kind of uh, you know, presentations that i'd see, including the mythology.
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  And so it wasn't until my post stock years that I was able to
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  do that, and I found UM. I found a community mental health agency
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  where I could actually do this home and work with primarily mothers, but some
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  fathers as well. UM. I could work with them and see how they
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  interacted with their children, and and you know, it was a different focus
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  in some ways. You know, I had gone from doing a lot of
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  individual therapy and then you know, couples therapy with adults, and here I
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  was now doing almost like a kind of couples therapy, but with the child
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  and parent, and you know, it is really is really a cool thing
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  to to to discover. You know, of course, almost all the theories
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  that we learn in school about early life a privilege that first relationship. You
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  know, usually or historically we've thought about it as the mother and the child.
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  But to see it up close and to realize it like, yes,
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  man, this really I mean, of course there's other factors. There's constitutional
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  factors as well, environmental factors, but it really has such a profound impact
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  on how the child gets going in life. Nice and so, I mean,
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  there's so many questions I want to ask, but I just want to
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  be mindful as tide too. Well, let's let's um talk about un an
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  early clinical error and what you learned from that, how that maybe influenced your
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  your work. Sure, you know, there's when I was thinking about this,
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  I was like, you know, there's just so many to choose from.
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  The hard part is narrowing it down. You know, when I was
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  when I was in my preductile training, UM, there was a child who
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  I worked with who I just was never really able to reach, and it
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  led to I worked with them for several months, and it led to some
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  kind of bizarre moments in the treatment, um which I can say more about,
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  but what I realized I had I met with this child's mother first,
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  and UM just had a real strong emotional reaction to her after the set And
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  of course, you know, I was committed to working with the family and
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  still very much a beginner. I think I didn't really spend enough time understanding
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  my emotional response to the mother, who I believe had some you know,
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  access to kind of things going on, but was a mother who was concerned
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  about her child, legitimately and appropriately concerned about her child. Nonetheless, and
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  over the course of the next few weeks, as I got to meet the
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  child and continued to meet with the mom periodically, she disclosed something that necessitated
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  a call to child Protective Services and from that point, at that point,
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  I lost her and she never returned to the treatment, and I went through
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  the motions of reaching out to her and trying to bring her back. The
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  dad who was the dad and the mother were divorced, so the dad stepped
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  in and he began to participate in so the child was able to continue with
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  me. But UM, you know, I went through the motions to reach
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  out to mom and was just never able to reach her again. And uh,
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  what ended up happening was that that the child would would do every manner
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  of thing to avoid being with me. And uh, you know, I
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  tried so many different things. He would He's the only he's the only kid,
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  the only person I've ever worked with that could with some frequency just fall
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  asleep. He would fall asleep during the sessions and not wake up until the
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  end of the session. It was. It was a very unusual treatment.
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  Um. And then other times he would go to the bathroom and he would
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  stay there. I would say the most the most substantial contact he and I
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  ever had was passing notes under the bathroom door. Wow, yeah, it
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  was that was that was actually Ah, those moments actually gave me hope.
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  But um, I ended up having to refer him out to a higher level
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  of care, which I do think was appropriate. But I think I ended
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  up feeling pretty disappointed with how the treatment had gone, and the father was
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  understandably disappointed as well. And I think my big mistake was not really understanding
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  the importance of the mother's role in all of it. Uh, And I
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  did I did wonder. I mean, I still wonder if if mom was
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  kind of coaching the child before he was to come a session, to come
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  to the sessions with me after the CPS callum, which which is not wouldn't
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  be the first time that that that's happened in my experience. But I think
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  the root of it was was I didn't understand the mother's value in the treatment,
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  and because I was kind of I hadn't really worked through or really I
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  had a good understanding of my own emotional response to her, which was what
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  you said, it was strong, But can you be more specific? Sure?
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  Sure? Yeah, I felt I felt pretty put off by her.
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  I felt it was hard for me to like her, and um, you
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  know there was I could list particular characteristics, but you know, I think
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  some of it was just you know, the good old fashioned unresolved counter transference
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  of my own that at that time I wasn't I wasn't aware of its impact.
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  So, Mika, what's what's the takeom here? For the for the
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  people listening? Who um, yeah, just period. What what would you
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  say you'd like to takeom is? Yeah, I mean spending time spending time
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  on counter transference, spending time thinking about of course, in consultation, in
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  supervision, thinking about and processing you know what what my own experience is and
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  was and something that I do much more now. It's you know, it's
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  it's a part of you know, I work at a mental agency now have
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  a terrific supervisor, and that's that's a part of it's it's always a part
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  of our dialogue. Is my my own experience in relation to you know,
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  my patients, the little ones and the parents as well. Let's talk a
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  little more about how you work specifically. Um, you know, you're specializing
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  in early childhood. What you've obviously you've talked a little bit about, you
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  know, working with parents and the kids. But let's let's kind of put
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  a magnifying class on that, magnpane lens rather on that, and talk to
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  us about what that might look like for those listeners who maybe aren't really sure
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  sure, Yeah, you know, it's it's a good question. Sometimes I
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  forget that the whole field. I mean, many even therapists don't even know
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  about early childhood mental health. So you know, it's sort of like,
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  typically, if I'm able to have a child and parent in the room at
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  the same time, a lot of the work is geared towards strengthening that that
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  bond and making it more dynamic, especially if there's if there's trauma involved with
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  it, which they're frequently is. It's helping the parent be aware of their
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  their child's emotional communications related to the trauma. It's helping the parent become aware
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  of their own emotional communications related to the trauma and helping the child, helping
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  both the child and parent perceive the parent as as somebody who's strong enough and
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  secure enough and safe enough to help the child process the trauma. Many times,
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  whether or not the parent was involved, say, for example, if
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  there's a sort of a discrete traumatic moment, which in my experience there there
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  often is that even if the parents not involved, that can damage the child
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  parent relationship because it upsets you know, people's including the child's assumption of safety
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  and relationships, and so the parent often has to work to help the child
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  feel safe again. And it gets even more complicated if the in some way
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  the parent was either perpetrating or complicit in the actual trauma. So what it
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  actually looks like often is that the child and parent come in and I,
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  you know, I meet them in playrooms or in a clinic or in my
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  private practice, or UM I'll go to their home or even sometimes meet them
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  in the community and the child will be will be offered um to play with
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  toys and UM I help the child and parent play together. Invariably the child
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  will will bring up the child or their parent will bring up uh you know
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  what ails them meant, whether whether that be a trauma or not, and
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  I will help them to try and have some form of a dialogue, whether
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  it be an actual dialogue with words, or a play dialogue or even um
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  you know, playing with toys or playing with just you know, doing doing
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  other games. So you know, it's a fifty it's a fifty minute session
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  in the office. It's often longer when I'm in the community or in the
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  home because as you can understand, there are a lot of distractions and other
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  demands in the home. So there are times where things, uh feel very
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  informal in the home, the frame for therapy is very different. But you
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  know, ideally with an hour and a half, sometimes longer, there are
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  we at least have moments where we can dedicate time to to sort of working
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  on the reason for a referral. You talked earlier about you know, when
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  you were working with adults, and uh, you were like, well,
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  I want to find out where this started in a sense, you know,
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  how people got to this point. In addition to that, what, in
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  addition to that curiosity? UM, what do you think it is about yourself
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  that allows you to do this work effectively? Oh? You know, I
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  think Uh, I mean I think this is true for for probably most therapists.
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  I mean it would have to be. I'm just I've always just really
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  loved people. I think I think we're all pretty pretty fascinating when when we're
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  able to share our story. And um, I'm also interested in just the
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  the wide array uh of ways that we communicate with each other. And um,
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  you know, kids are are really interesting because uh they you know,
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  as most parents and child therapists know, they do so much communicating with their
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  their actions um as compared to their words, even when they've got a great
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  command of language. UM, their movements, their behaviors there, you know,
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  their tantrums, their attacks there. Uh you know, their joy on
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  the playground is all that communicates so much of you know, their important moments,
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  and uh, I feel I feel drawn to that. I feel drawn
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  to that kind of Um, I don't know, detective work. I think
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  you know, I mentioned earlier that I spend so much of my week confused
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  or titing about about what what a child or a parent is trying to communicate.
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  Um, but but I enjoy that, I mean, I feel I
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  mean, it's it's you know, it's some low level suffering in the moment
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  because because I really do want to help understand, help the child understand what's
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  going on for them and the parent as well. But um, you know,
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  there's something really rewarding about that process that will always, for me,
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  involve a significant amount of uncertainty. I don't know, there's there's something thrilling
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  in that. There's something thrilling. Yeah, I mean I worked with kids
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  for a little bit, and there's I mean, it demands a lot of
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  patients, you know, a lot of kind of a natural process of an
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  unfolding I mean, not unlike working with adults, but with kids, like
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  you said, there's that nonverbal stuff and things are gonna really happen on their
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  own time frame. And um uh to me, you know, and the
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  way, uh what I know of you, you sound like you're really well
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  well suited for it. And I think a lot of people might be listening,
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  are out there and going, yeah, you know, that sounds like
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  I might, it might be something I want to try, and other people
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  like mmmmmm, yeah, you know, but that's just the way it goes,
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  right, I mean, but you know, thank God we have people
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  like you doing this doing this work. You know a lot of the people
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  who I've met and doing this work, a lot of people came from,
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  um, you know, being preschool teachers or having some other involvement with you
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  know, very young children. Um. I didn't. I didn't have that.
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  Uh. But you know, when when you and I were starting out,
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  my main interest because in part because I had worked with kids for so
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  long, my main interest was working with adults. I was interested in working
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  with high functioning you know, people that kind of worried well, that were
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  you know, psychologically minded and sort of able to pay a private practice fee
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  out of pocket. And you know that that was my sort of naive vision
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  of things. I didn't I didn't have like any real other real life experience
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  of working with very young children. It just ended up being something that just
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  really captured me and has allowed me to have kind of a pretty diverse experience
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  even within that specialization because I regularly meet with parents for collateral sessions. I
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  do it weekly if possible. And that collateral session is kind of interesting too,
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  because for me, it's sort of, uh, it's sort of half
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  consultation half therapy. So it's it's consultation because we're talking about, you know,
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  some of their child's development. Um, we're talking about some of the
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  things they can actually do to you know, some some behavioral things that they
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  can do to improve the child's self regulation or sense of safety even and then
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  it's therapeutic in that you know, these parents, they really they get into
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  it and we talk about we often will talk about their past as it relates
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  to their child. And I'm sure you've heard of the whole idea of you
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  know, intergenerational transmission of trauma, and that is just such a profound reality
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  for the work that I do. And sometimes I even get you know,
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  as we're talking about this, I'm just thinking more about, you know,
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  the privilege of this role that I have. Some times I've even been able
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  to meet grandparents and that yeah, meet grandparents and I get three three generations,
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  you know, in a session, and um, it just is so
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  helpful for understanding you know, what happened to the parent? Um to you
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  know, to the extent I can, of course, and what has happened
• 28:22
  with this child? Nice? Let's um talk about your what you got going
• 28:32
  on your website? It's um the good Enough Parents dot Com. And I
• 28:36
  love your kind of tagline here, which is be better than perfect, be
• 28:38
  good enough. I love that. Umah yeah, So just quickly so Mica
• 28:44
  can be reached at the good Enough Parents dot Com. It's all one word.
• 28:48
  UM. So, what's what's going on with you at your website?
• 28:52
  Um? People are going to go there, what can they expect to find?
• 28:57
  Uh? Well, right now, what I have in this very moment,
• 29:00
  I have a blog. And so this website is dedicated to parents of
• 29:07
  children roughly ages zero to six who are just looking for some you know,
• 29:14
  generally speaking, it would fall into the category of parent education and looking for
• 29:19
  some ways of sort of similar in some ways similar to the therapeutic work that
• 29:26
  I do, but it's this is more for a non clinical population, parents
• 29:30
  who are really trying to understand their children's behavior, who are who are struggling
• 29:34
  with you know, toddler tantrums, uh, the whining the interrupting, the
• 29:41
  aggression. Um, all the sorts of things that you see in the earliers
• 29:45
  there, they're they're normative, you know. Um. So one of my
• 29:51
  big hopes was to demystify early childhood for parents and give them the kind of
• 29:57
  information that they need to be able to to respond in a way that most
• 30:02
  parents want to respond. The reason that the tagline is be better than perfect,
• 30:07
  be good enough. That's drawn from a psychoanalysts without the whole website is
• 30:14
  actually the name of the website is drawn from a Donald winnicon and he had
• 30:19
  this idea and wrote a you know, a seminal paper about the good enough
• 30:25
  mother, and his developmental model held that over the course of the first year
• 30:33
  of life, as a child is developing a sense of self that is separate
• 30:37
  from the mother, that the mother over the course of the first few months
• 30:42
  has to be really kind of obsessed with the child and you know, highly
• 30:48
  highly responsive to the child's needs in part because of their just incredible dependence.
• 30:55
  But that over the course of that year, that that kind of obsession or
• 31:00
  preoccupation that the mother has with the child slowly decreases such that she becomes somewhat
• 31:07
  less responsive, and in that decrease of responsiveness that facilitates the child healthy normative
• 31:15
  development of a self. So one way of putting is the mother actually has
• 31:19
  to fail sometimes she can't be perfectly responsive to the child, or else the
• 31:26
  child's sense of self might be compromised. So I made the joke to some
• 31:32
  colleagues other day that this is this is a kind of anti narcissism website.
• 31:37
  I want parents to understand, especially parents who are nervous and who um you
• 31:45
  know, might fall into the category of being a helicopter parent, that that
• 31:52
  they can they actually do help their child's development in some situations when when they're
• 31:57
  not perfect. Well, that feels good. That's the that's the point that
• 32:05
  feels all right. Um, let's share a kind of book recommendation here and
• 32:13
  then we'll we'll say goodbye. What do you have for us? Um?
• 32:16
  So for the work that I do, the two of the biggest most influential
• 32:21
  books for me have been, um uh, Parenting I'm sorry Psychotherapy with Infants
• 32:29
  and Young Children, and that's written by Alicia Lieberman and Patricia Van Horne,
• 32:36
  and they're really uh, I mean, they're there. They of course had
• 32:39
  teachers before. Infant mental health has been around for decades. But that's really
• 32:45
  the seminal book on the what what is called child parents Psychotherapy And go ahead,
• 32:52
  I was just gonna say, so psychotherapy with infants and young children repairing
• 32:57
  the effects of stress and trauma on early attachment. Okay, which horn,
• 33:01
  We'll have that linked up at the show notes page. And we're going to
• 33:04
  say something else off another book too, yes, okay, just because and
• 33:08
  it's again it's by Alicia Lieberman and her team at the Child Trauma Research Project
• 33:15
  in San Francisco. UM, it's called Losing a Parent to Death in the
• 33:20
  Early Years. Now, this is like very specific work, right, we're
• 33:25
  talking about a child who's lost a parent. But UM, I've just found
• 33:31
  it so instructive in such a guide because that kind of work when when a
• 33:37
  parent dies, especially by you know, violent means. Um, it's just
• 33:42
  a really really heavy heavy case and you need you need as much support as
• 33:46
  you can and that that book is a great place to start. Wow.
• 33:49
  Okay, So both of these books will be up at the show notes page
• 33:53
  at the Trauma Therapist podcast dot com, um Mica can be reached. What's
• 33:59
  the best way for will to reach you. What would you what would you
• 34:00
  like there? Uh? Um, you know, the it can reach me.
• 34:05
  I actually have two websites. One is the good Enough Parents dot com
• 34:07
  and the email associated with that is Mica m Iica at the good Enough Parents
• 34:13
  dot com. I respond to that one. And also my private practice website
• 34:19
  is dr as Indoctor Mica Gonzales dot com. M I C A g O
• 34:23
  n Z A l e z dot com. And my website is dr dot
• 34:29
  Mica dot Gonzalez at gmail. Can I just squeezing one other thing about them?
• 34:34
  Of course? Of course? UM. I also wanted listeners to know
• 34:38
  this. You know, this may be relevant for any parents that they're seeing
• 34:43
  in their practices, um, or any listeners who are parents themselves that I
• 34:47
  am actually, within the next couple of weeks going to be launching a free
• 34:52
  online course thirty five thirty five to forty minute course on parenting tough Tabblers.
• 35:00
  And they can go to the website and sign right up subscribe. Nice.
• 35:05
  Okay, so do you have that link? Can you shoot me that link?
• 35:07
  Or is that is that up? Now? It's it's right, it's
• 35:09
  right, well, uh, it's right, got it? Yeah, got
• 35:15
  it, got it, got it awesome, can't can't miss it, all
• 35:17
  right man, Well, uh, thanks so much Mika for your first sharing
• 35:22
  your expertise and passion. Um it was. It was awesome talking to you
• 35:27
  man. Yeah, likewise guy, thanks a lot,