What is Trauma?

Sometimes it feels like my 9-year-old son is in a persistent state of dysregulation...and in my efforts to undertand where all this is coming from (depsite what I try to rationalize as my best efforts to create a calm and predictable routine for him)...I was re-reading from BCLC and wanted to share these parts in hopes that others might also benefit from tyring to see things from a different perspective. I confess that I don't even know the extent of trauma my son experienced before his adoption at age 2-1/2. We were told that he had been healthy and well cared for, and our impressions of the orphanage were that it was probably nicer than most. His caregivers knew him by name, and during our stay, we lived with the family of the cook at the orphanage. I felt like he had been in good hands...but I will never know what his prenatal development was like, and I do know that for the first 6 or 7 months of his life, he was in a hospital while paperwork was processed to admit him to the orphanage. I have no doubt that he missed out on a lot of the nurturing he needed...and that perhaps he felt the emotions of his mother during her pregnancy. I thank God that she didn't terminate her pregnancy, but I wonder what her thoughts and emotions were while she carried him to term. No doubt he felt the effects of her fears and stress.

I may never really understand or fully appreciate the depth of trauma my son has experienced, but I have seen how it affects his day to day living and coping. His fears run deep...maybe deeper than I can reach...but I want very much to help guide his healing.

Information in this post taken from Beyond Consequences, Logic, and Control: A Love-Based Approach to Helping Attachment-Challenged Children with Sever Behaviors Vol. 1 By Heather T. Forbes, LCSW and B. Bryan Post, PhD, LCSW (pages 4-8)

EXAMPLES OF CHILDHOOD TRAUMA

--Physical Abuse
--Sexual Abuse
--Emotional Abuse
--Neglect
--Adoption
--Foster caer
--Surrogacy
--Frequent Move
--Automobile Accident
--Pre and Peri-natal Birth Trauma
--Loss of Caregiver
--Depressed Parental Care
--Prolonged Experiences of Unmet Needs
--Bullying
--Domestic Violence
--Medical Trauma

While this list is comprehensive, childhood traumas certainly are not limited to those soley on this list.

When a child experiences trauma, the child's ability to develop a sufficient regulatroy system is severly compromised. In cases of severe trauma, the child's life is literally at risk. For these children, their internal survival mechanisms then become activated, dedicating all the body's resources to remain alert in "survival mode." These children perceive the world as threatening from a neurological, physical, emotional, cognitive, and social perspective. They operate from a paradigm of fear to ensure their safety and security. Hence, what is seen as an overly stressed-out child who has difficulty interacting in relationships, who struggles to behave in loving ways, who quite often cannot think clearly, who swings back and forth in his emotional states due to an underdeveloped regulatory system. While perceived ny most professionals as dangerous, a child of trauma is essentially a scared child--a stressed child living out of a primal, survival mode in order to maintain his existence.

These traumatic experiences are stored, and for most children are buried, as unprocessed and unexpressed memories within the body/mind system. According to neuroscientist Bruce Perry, M. D. we have four levels of memory: cognitive, emotional, motor, and state. It is in the deepest levels of memory, the state memory, that these experiences are stored. The significance of this is that, when our state memory is activated, it directs all of our responses. It has the ability to dominate over the other three memory states. ......

STATE: The state level of memory is the level of memory most associated with your personality traits, It lies in direct reference point to your brainstem. In other words, it is located in your lower limbic system or your reptilian brain. This area of the brain is not a part of your rational brain but rather a part of your emotional brain. It is responsible for processing raw data from the environment and sending immediate signals of fight, flee, or freeze. This holds great significance for traumatized children due to the fact that traumatic memories get stored at the state level. When a person reaches a heightened state of stress, this state memory gets triggered, thereby releasing all prvious relevant memories into the upper memory banks. In this manner, when a child with a traumatic history is confronted with a situation that heightens his stress level, the child's state memory becomes activated. Rapid-fire communications to the other areas of memory system are initiated, informing the child that the current situation is threatening. Additionally, this rapid-fire communication is also telling the child that this situation is almost guaranteed to work out like a previously stored experience. In other words, in the midst of a stressful or perceived threatening event, this child, due to his or her cognitively distorted state of mind, is likely to believe, "If I don't convince this person right not that I am telling the truth, then in all likelihood I might be abused, abandoned, neglected, or worse, I migth die!" Faced with this looming threat, the child is most likely going to tell a lie, despite his understanding at the cognitive level that lies are morally and ethically wrong. In the midst of stress and threat, the state memory can completely override all other memory states. ......

The majority of early development and interaction for a child is emotionally driven; hence, the majority of childhood engagement is unconscious. Considering this, we must understand that when a child feels stressed or threatened to any degree, his behavior will arise from an unconscious place. There is no such thing as willful disobedience or manipulation without first the seeds of fear and stress. ......

Stress causes confused and distorted thinking: therfore, if a child has done or is doing something that you know is not in line with a loving relationship, the child must obviously be coming from a place of stress and fear. And certainly if the child had the conscious ability to recognize such a state, he would begin making attempts to do so; however, with such behavior being unconscious, in that moment, the child is doing the best he feels that he can to survive.