Trauma and Children
When a child experiences safety, nurturing, and attachment, the brain organizes to expect safety, love and protection, resulting in the ability to explore, create, and take appropriate risks; and to develop trust, empathy, conscience, and self-efficacy.
When a child experiences neglect, abuse, and/or trauma, the brain organizes to expect danger, lack of protection, and threat, resulting in an elevated heart rate; hypervigilance; an impaired ability to explore and create; difficulty trusting others; impaired empathy and conscience; feelings of incompetence; defensive, aggressive, or disorganized behavior; impaired self-soothing skills; depression and/or anxiety; vulnerability to substance abuse; and, in extreme cases, an increased likelihood of cruelty and destructive behavior.
Because of the sequencing of normal brain development, trauma sustained during childhood trauma affects and is processed at “lower” levels of brain: the limbic, diencephalon, and brainstem levels. These parts of the brain are responsible for attachment, emotional reactivity, sexual behavior, and bodily functions/sensations. This may help to explain how self-injury (cutting), fighting, headbanging, etc may be soothing to child or adult functioning at subcortical level—it releases endorphins that help child feel better.
Children and Persistent Stress
Repeated or persistent stress or trauma tends to play out in three different ways with children:
Hyperarousal: Normally, our bodies respond to stress, then return to a state of rest or equilibrium. If the stress continues, or is persistent, we don’t return to resting state – we remain hyperaroused, which increases the potential for PTSD. The areas of children’s brains responsible for arousal are hypersensitive, so that physical processes become personality traits. The hyperarousal leards to alertness, hypervigilance, and a constant anticipation of threat.
Dissociation: Dissociation is a lack of feeling or awareness, a sense of feeling distant from onself. (Normal dissociation is being lost in a daydream, or even a good book. Abnormal dissociation is separate feelings from events. People may remember the event but not the feeling, or have strong memories of the feeling, but no conscious memory of the event. Dissociation is a form of self-protection; girls are more likely than boys to dissociate.
Pervasive Anxiety: When a child feels out of control, he or she may “freeze” and be unresponsive to adult instructions. )This can be misinterpreted as Oppositional Defiance Disorder (ODD). This freezing and anxiety can lead to dissociation.
PTSD Symptoms in Children
- Nightmares, sleep problems, bedwetting, regression, food issues, provocative behavior, behavioral reenactment, withdrawal
- Hyper-arousal symptoms: anxiety, oppositional defiant, depressive reactions, phobias (esp. to new things)
- Often misdiagnosed as AD/HD or ODD
- Girls more dissociation, boys more hyper-arousal
- Key is avoidance as a behavior pattern—organize life around trauma
PTSD and Substance Abuse
When children who have been traumatized, particularly by maltreatment, grow up, they are at higher risk for substance abuse. Often times, the lack of familiar self-soothing devises lead to substance use. In other cases, the alcohol and drugs balance off, or soften the edges of hypervigilance and/or dysphoria.
Learn More
You can also learn more about children and trauma by checking out the following resources:
