1.3
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[00:00:00] In this next section we're talking about risk and resilience. And it has formed a lot of the development of the content within this course because it's really about asking what's significant when it comes to mental health and how can we strategically increase the wellbeing of trans people and their families.
Through looking at, the kinds of things that cause trans people to experience greater risk. And when I say risk, I mean risk of very poor mental health or self harm. And what can cause them to experience greater resilience. And when I say resilience, I mean resilience in the sense that they may still experience challenging things or harmful things.
But they are able to bounce back from those things that they, that it doesn't quite affect them so deeply because they have a number of aspects of their life that are supportive and it's useful to think about risk and resilience as separate spectrums. It can be high on risk and also high on resilience and often that's the case because people who've experienced a great hardship [00:01:00] often have a great number of tools that they used to help them.
With that, and you can be low on risk and low on resilience in that you're not currently experiencing a great deal of challenge but if you were to, you wouldn't have a great deal of tools. And obviously the ideal situation is that we're experiencing in our lives and that your child is experiencing in their life, low levels of the kinds of things that cause risk and high levels of resilience.
So when, there are really challenging periods of time, they're able to bounce back really easily, fully, and actually not just bounce back, but greater levels of resilience also cause us to be able to learn and grow through challenging experiences.
And in the research, it's often referred to as post traumatic growth,
So, we will just fly through this because these things are woven through all of the course content that we go through
One of the risk factors is, of course, physical and verbal abuse, and so that's the distal stressor that we talked about the first, the number one of the three minority stressors, and exposure to discrimination, again, number one, social isolation [00:02:00] is certainly an external stressor
Low self esteem, which I think we can understand as number three, internalized transphobia, or it might be that it's not just internalized transphobia, there's other. Self beliefs that are also causing them to not feel confident. Weight dissatisfaction or body image issues comes up a lot in the research and I think that is very much linked to the final one of dysphoria because dysphoria greatly increases people's weight dissatisfaction so those are the risk factors. We are going to be exploring dysphoria in great detail. During one of the modules, and I think almost everything that we talk about touches on self esteem.
We're briefly going to be talking about body image stuff in the dysphoria week because some of the things that support someone to experience less dysphoria also support them to experience less weight dissatisfaction, but they are separate issues and it's not A really strong focus of the course, and then physical and verbal abuse and exposure to [00:03:00] discrimination and social isolation are the final two weeks really about community and advocacy and giving you really practical tools to help you
foster peer relationships for your child. And advocate for their spaces that they exist within to be safer. And will directly be providing guidance on how to respond if they come to you with a story of having experienced some form of discrimination or transphobia
now, when I say risk of poor mental health and self harm, this is the only, this next slide is the only part of the course where we specifically talk about mental health stats. I don't like to spend too long here because I find it just simply unhelpful and there's a number of reasons why, and I'll explain that but it is useful to get a snapshot really briefly from one piece of research that's Australia based, this is a study of Australian young trans people between 12 and 25 years old and their experience of poor mental health and it says that they're 10 to 13 times more likely to experience poor mental health than that of [00:04:00] the broader young Australian population.
And 72. 2 percent of young people at the time that they were surveyed in this study had ever been diagnosed with anxiety and 74. 6 percent had ever been diagnosed with depression.
So let's balance all of that by talking about what the resilience factors are. Parent connectedness. is the first one, and one that is very core to this program, and we'll explain why. It seems obvious, but there are many reasons. The next one is connection to supportive community. And in week, I think it's six, we're going to go through the idea of community and break it down a little bit more because it can be kind of vague.
There's plenty to say about that, so we'll begin to give that its whole own module.
School safety and belonging, this is very much linked. But for people who are school aged they simply just spend so much time at school. So it's really important that they feel [00:05:00] safe, that they are safe, but also very importantly, that they feel safe at school and they have a sense of belonging.
And for adults, if they're in work, that they have a sense of safety and belonging in their workplace. The ability to choose one's own name. To use one's own name, chosen name, I should say..
I would add very emphatically that pronouns is also included in that. This one is counterintuitive for many people and it's the awareness of oppression. And that this is saying that when people are aware of Structural and systemic and social inequality that they're experiencing. buT also how inequality functions and how.
They may be experiencing one form of inequality or oppression, and other people are experiencing other forms of inequality and oppression, and some people are experiencing multiple forms of inequality and oppression, it's so important for people to have some form of, conceptualization and understanding theoretically around this so that they have a way [00:06:00] to make sense of their experiences that isn't then believing something is wrong with them,
it's counterintuitive because often parents want their child to feel safe in the world, and because they want their child to feel safe in the world, they might minimize or avoid or omit information that causes the child to feel as though the world is unsafe. But what ends up happening for trans young people in particular is that when they experience something in their life that is a manifestation of inequality and oppression, that they will then internalize that at a much greater depth or much greater level as a problem with themself because they don't have that theoretical understanding of why this is likely to be occurring And even to go a step further than that, it can cause trans people to have more discernment, less internalized transphobia, but even less anger towards other people at an advanced level because they're understanding that everyone is simply acting on the absorption of messages that, that none of us are free of and we're all in a process of just some degree or another challenging [00:07:00] that.
Parental connection is the single most important protective factor in why it's so incredibly wonderful that you're here doing this course. It's the single most important resilience factor because all other resilience factors are enabled and increased or have the capacity to be increased through parental connection and all risk factors, can be decreased or removed entirely through parental connection, or that there's the capacity for parents to have an influence.
over risk and protective factors if there's parental connection. Because it's one thing to know what is significant and another thing to have an influence over those things.
And if you have the greater connection you have, the greater influence you have over those things. So,
parental connection
increases your capacity to support your child. And parental support reduces risk factors and increases resilience factors. The actual [00:08:00] outcomes of parental connection and support for trans people are incredible and profound, far greater than any parent actually foresees.
. The changes that are possible are usually shockingly rapid and can be drastic.
And so I want to give you a glimpse of what's on the other side. wiTh parental support, with strong parental support, which is what we're here to support you with Trans people experience lower levels of depression and self harm. Their perception of the burden of being trans is reduced. So the way that they feel about being trans and how difficult they expect that to be is reduced.
They have, they experience lower substance use issues The black text is from research. The blue I've added based on my own clinical experience. They also experience far less internalized transphobia and [00:09:00] dysphoria.
That's all so much already, but they also experience greater levels of life satisfaction, just generally how they feel about their life, self esteem, resilience. And from my clinical observations, they experience also far greater peer connections, not just because the parent is often enabling those connections, but also because they have more confidence and self esteem.
To go and seek those connections and to to be able to connect with others really meaningfully they also experience greater levels of self exploration and reflection. And by that, I mean, if we're not having to defend against the views of others, then we can take a less rigid.
of ourselves. if Our identity is being questioned, then we don't have the opportunity to question it ourselves. You don't have the [00:10:00] opportunity to think not only, yes, I feel like a woman, but what kind of woman do I feel like? And, oh, I have a doubt today. I'm going to explore that and I'm going to figure out where that doubt is coming from.
And is that A misunderstanding and a myth about trans people, or is this a real doubt and I want to talk to a psychologist about it or something like this. They're not able to explore the diversity within their internal experience if their energy is focusing on what other people think about them and whether or not they're accepted by other people and simply defending.
Their position. So that's what I mean by that. The good news is that the stats that we talked about earlier, your child is not well represented by those stats. that's because you're here. So, if you think about the fact that 65. 8 percent of young trans people report experiencing a lack of family support, [00:11:00] simply by being here indicates, to me at least, that there's a certain level of support already.
Potentially quite a high degree of support and at the very least a willingness to look into how support might look that means that given that parental support and parental connection is the number one resilience factor, your child is already far better off than the average.
young trans person.
Your connection with your child will likely grow through grow stronger through enacting this support, which in turn will enable you to support them. better. And for those of you who have an adult child or a child that lives independently of you, this is a really useful quote.
I think it says the impact of parental, the impact of parental influence on a child's development across the lifespan cannot be underestimated. Understated. Although the effect of other influences such as peers, school and media increase in maturation, they never fully supersede the power parents have over the child's development [00:12:00] trajectory.
What that means is, you remain the most significant influence over their development, even as they grow and continue to evolve into adulthood.
