Impacts of trauma
Children who have experienced trauma, looked for comfort and found abandonment. They needed connection and found isolation. They were frightened and needed protection, and they found more threat. They needed to know that someone was in their corner, they needed to be accompanied in their confusion and grief, but they were alone. They were alone in a darkness waiting for safety that never arrived.
(Joe Tucci, CEO of Australian Childhood Foundation.)
What is trauma?
Trauma is a single, cumulative or ongoing experience which is a response to a perceived or real threat that overwhelms our capacity to cope and evokes a physiological or a psychological response based on fear or avoidance.
As seen in the topic understanding the neurobiology, the brain is the organ in the body responsible for our development, trauma targets the brain and it has a disintegrative impact on the brain’s functioning and development. It reduces the brain’s capacity to achieve complex adaptive self-regulatory states, it changes the architecture of the brain and changes the connectivity between brain structures.
(ACF 2021)
Trauma involves our ability to engage with others by replacing patterns of connection with patterns of protection.
Stephen Porges
When children grow up having difficult experiences that overwhelm their capacity to cope while in their family of origin, some of these experiences are known as the adverse childhood experiences (ACEs). Research findings have shown that the more of these experiences a person have while growing up, the more at risk of having difficult outcomes later in life. These ACEs include:
A parent with a mental health condition.
Being a victim of physical, sexual and emotional abuse
Being the victim of physical and emotional neglect
Exposure to domestic violence
Having a household member with alcohol and substance abuse problem
Parental abandonment through separation or divorce
Having a member of the household being in prison
Childhood trauma poses developmental challenges for a child or young person across a range of domains through their lives including relationships, identity, learning and cognition, memory, regulation, motor skills and emotional functioning.
This document indicates the normative brain functions and how trauma impacts these functions and the impact this has on the body and the brain.
CRITICAL BRAIN SYSTEMS INVOLVED IN PROCESSING OF TRAUMA
Arousal
Arousal is a physiological state that connects the brain and the body.
When it comes to identifying safety from adaptive survival perspective, the “wisdom” resides in our body and in the structures of our nervous system that function outside the realm of our awareness.
Stephen Porges
Hypothalamic Pituitary Adrenal Axis (HPA Axis)
In the body
The hypolathamus secretes the hormone corticotropin-releasing factor (CRF) which arouses the body. The CRF travels of the pituitary gland. The pituitary gland secretes adrenocorticotropic hormone (ACTH). The ACTH circulates in the blood stream, travelling to the adrenal gland. The adrenal gland releases cortisol. Cortisol stimulates many reactions in your body, including a rush of energy and alertness. (ACF 2021)
In the brain
Chronic exposure to elevated levels of cortisol increases the amygdala’s potential to be activated. The amygdala becomes highly sensitised to any signal of real or perceived threat and keeps the adrenaline system turned on causing the child to be in a constant state of readiness for threat
The amygdala comes to associate change with threat, and anything different as potentially threatening. Familiar experiences are sensed as safer even though they may create fear and confusion.
With the hippocampus compromised and unable to provide context, the amygdala does not restrict threatening stimuli to specific examples. (ACF 2021)
Window of tolerance
Regulated arousal: Within the WOT
Dysregulated arousal: Outside the WOT.
Displaying:
Fight or flight: hypervigilant, action-orientated, impulsive, emotionally flooded, reactive, defensive, self-destructive
Freeze: physically immobilised, frozen, tense musculature
Submit: Collapsed, weak, defeated, flat affect, numb, empty, helpless, hopeless
In relationships, one’s ability to regulate themselves will effect other’s ability to regulate themselves.
We can help children stay within their WOT when they are dysregulated and are unable to self-regulate. This is co-regulation. (ACF 2021)
Attention
Trauma focused arousal tunes attentional focus to sensory data relevant only to trauma. This focus bypasses engagement in the here and now. Trauma organised brains use attentional processes as defensive mechanisms.
Outside of conscious awareness, the brain scans the environment for real or potential threat, even when the original threat is no longer present
The brain also scans the environment for possible cues that could re- trigger traumatic memory states
Children may struggle to focus on present experiences and sensations
Avoidance is reflected in distracting and deflecting behaviours of the child from re-experiencing traumatic memory states.
Memory
Types of memories
Implicit memory: Is a non-verbal memory that is active before birth, lacks conscious awareness. It includes sensory memory of visual images, smells, sounds, bodily sensations, mood and emotional states. Templates are formed and generalisations created from repeated experiences.
Explicit memory: develops at 1 year old, after brain systems are in place. It can be semantic or factual (knowledge of the world) and episodic (discrete of events). It is consciously retrieved.
Narrative/autobiographical memory: this develops at 2 or 3 years of age, has to do with the sense of self and time.
When memory is impacted by trauma,
The recurrence and intensity of trauma increases, narrative memory is lost, unable to remember life events and the working memory is paralysed.
Traumatic memories are often experienced as timeless, vivid sensory fragment of the original experiences.
Traumatic memories are not stored explicitly, are insufficiently elaborated and have weak semantic recall.