In trauma management approaches we talk about the fact that we have resources to manage stress and those resources can be physical, emotional or intellectual and or a combination. But the trauma happens when those resources are overwhelmed. I use the example of when I go to buy the groceries. I don’t want to make 3 or 4 trips back to the car so I load up all those bags of groceries, whether they be paper bags, plastic bags or recyclable bags and load them all up and put my resources under some level of stress. So my muscles, ligaments, tendons, and bones are put under some stress. But those bags that I have loaded up onto my fingers which aren’t really designed to carry weight in that form, those ligaments, blood vessels and nerves in my fingers are put under a lot of stress. But when I get into the kitchen and put those bags down, those bones, ligaments, tendons and muscles in my arm and the rest of my body instantly release, but I may have to rub the blood supply back into my fingers or the feeling back into the nerves depending on how much I have been carrying.

Of course at some point I could pick up something that’s too heavy and when I do I could tear a muscle or snap a ligament or break a bone so I have overwhelmed the resource in an instant and I have had a significant trauma. Or if I keep carrying things under my resources that are not designed for it I can actually create trauma that way from a build-up of excessive stress for resources that weren’t designed for it. And I could end up with damage to my nerves or my blood supply or the ligaments in my fingers. Either way whether it’s a one-off overwhelm or a gradual build-up of overwhelm once I have overwhelmed those resources a trauma occurs. So extrapolating out of from that all the other education and blogs that I have written and spoken all deal with all of that. But now when I extrapolate that out even further it actually comes out to be everything in life.

Recently I had a friend who is going through a bit of tough time financially so she is managing her resources, the financial resources, particularly and she has got little kids. The other morning, she had got them all ready, they had had breakfast and were all ready for school and she was off getting dressed and ready for work herself and she could hear the food processor going and she immediately yelled out, “What are you kids doing?” And they were making pancakes. Now as a rule the kids come her and ask her “Mum is it ok?”

Now sometimes we make children ask so we can be controlling, or we force our partners to ask permission for things. But usually what we are doing when we are asking someone to check in with us is that we are trying to manage resources. In this instance, the mother was concerned that the children had used up 3 eggs as she had planned to use those 3 eggs for dinner. So now the kids had used the resources and she was in a little bit of overwhelm as she probably wasn’t able to get more groceries until the next day.

If we can talk to children in a way that they understand that adults will help to manage resources for them, (because children aren’t meant to have a level of awareness around those resources), over time we are helping them to develop resources. This would help them to have an awareness of “Oh Mum is cooking this for dinner so I won’t use it” or maybe when they are older they are going to cook it themselves. So if we can start having conversations with our children about managing resources by the time they get to a point they will be able to manage their emotional resources themselves. This is particularly important as they go through puberty and the early years before puberty and into early adulthood. If we can already have been having those conversations with our kids we are setting them up as adults who are not only thinking about how do we manage resources now for ourselves but how do I manage my own resources when I am under stress or maybe even further out how do we manage the resources of the country or the resources of the world?

At the moment we are all concerned about global warming or climate change and we are concerned that a lot of our resources – the use of them is actually contributing to these issues. We know that most of those resources are finite and yet part of the problem is that we feel that they are not being managed well.

So management of resources on every level is an important thing for us to have an awareness of. And everyone who is reading this will already be good at managing their own resources to some degree particularly maybe some people are good at managing their financial resources or their energy resources but other people aren’t good at that so if we can start to view it from a generic perspective it gives us a way to talk and to learn how to manage ourselves and our children when times are adding to our level of overwhelm when our fast pace of life is using up our personal resources, our time, our energy and if we can learn to watch that and then work with it we are actually able to choose where we devote those resources.