If you want to know what is going on in a child's mind, the best thing to do is hand them a crayon, not talk to them.
In her article for Psychology Today, "When Trauma Happens, Children Draw: Part I", Cathy Malchiodi, an art therapist, discusses why it's easier for children to draw a traumatic experience than it is for them to talk about it. Brain scans have shown that Broca's area (one of two language areas in the brain) shuts down when trauma survivors try to tell what happened to them. That explains a lot.
This is one of the reasons I utilize play therapy, in addition to art, when working with traumatized children. Play therapy isn't just letting children play. It is the art of providing them with the tools they need to express what has happened to them. Toy ambulances, fire trucks and police cars may help children express a domestic violence situation. Toy beer cans or drug paraphernalia, toy hospitals, toy coffins and toy figurines are utilized for similar situations. What is fascinating is to watch a child who was previously nonverbal suddenly come alive when presented with toy representations of what they have experienced. They are suddenly presented with a way to express what has been going on and they come to life. A child I'm working with now has a parent whose close relative who recently died. The father has been greatly affected by this death. The first day I met with the child after the death the child immediately gravitated toward the toy coffin and staged a funeral. He couldn't tell me who the funeral was for or what it was about, but he played it out in front of me. I've seen this happen again and again with vastly different situations and parents tell me the children seem to benefit greatly from being able to express themselves in this way.
Art and play is not only for children. I once worked with a heavily traumatized, middle aged woman. Upon her first visit to my office she immediately homed in on the toy figurines and asked if they were only for children. "Of course not", I answered and encouraged her to use them. She spent the next several weeks playing out elaborate themes of abuse in my office. There was a repetitive theme of a mean, old man who was always torturing other characters or wreaking havoc and she readily identified him as representing her very abusive father. Watching the stories play out in front of me provided me with a much deeper and vivid understanding of what her childhood had been like and how she currently viewed the world. The figurines gave her a way of expressing what had happened to her more than words ever had.
I've seen the same thing occur with drawing and art. This same woman could draw the most elaborate pictures I've ever seen. And the stories she told about them were both cathartic and enlightening.
Our culture weighs heavily the value of the spoken word and of intellectual thought. But emotions, as expressed through art and play, can sometimes be a thousand times more powerful. Where trauma is involved, the old saying can be especially true; "a picture is worth a thousand words".