Emotional Responses They often internalize and/or externalize stress reactions and as a result may experience significant depression, anxiety, or anger. Their emotional responses may be unpredictable or explosive. A child may react to a reminder of a traumatic event with trembling, anger, sadness, or avoidance.
Living with traumatic stress can make you highly reactive, constantly stressed, incredibly anxious, impulsive, and irrational at times. All of these changes are symptoms that occur because of the way traumatic stress affects the brain. Experiencing traumatic events can change the trajectory of our lives.
Childhood trauma has been strongly linked to depression, substance use disorder, anxiety, eating disorders, and other mental health disorders that are present in adulthood.
Childhood trauma in adults also results in feeling disconnected, and being unable to relate to others. Studies have shown that adults that experience childhood trauma were more likely to struggle with controlling emotions, and had heightened anxiety, depression, and anger.
Some of the symptoms of trauma in children (and adults) closely mimic depression, including too much or too little sleep, loss of appetite or overeating, unexplained irritability and anger, and problems focusing on projects, school work, and conversation.
Other manifestations of childhood trauma in adulthood include difficulties with social interaction, multiple health problems, low self-esteem and a lack of direction. Adults with unresolved childhood trauma are more prone to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), suicide and self-harm.
Learning problems, including lower grades and more suspensions and expulsions. Increased use of health and mental health services. Increase involvement with the child welfare and juvenile justice systems. Long-term health problems (e.g., diabetes and heart disease)
Children who had experienced such verbal abuse were three times as likely as other children to have borderline, narcissistic, obsessive-compulsive or paranoid personality disorders in adulthood.
The trauma can come in any form but the development of split personality, better known as dissociative identity disorder, is a result of trying to escape or hide from a trauma. Sometimes trauma is so severe that our brain creates an escape for us so that we can endure it better.
Without treatment, repeated childhood exposure to traumatic events can affect the brain and nervous system and increase health-risk behaviors (e.g., smoking, eating disorders, substance use, and high-risk activities).
Maltreatment can cause victims to feel isolation, fear, and distrust, which can translate into lifelong psychological consequences that can manifest as educational difficulties, low self-esteem, depression, and trouble forming and maintaining relationships.
Ages 5 through 8 identified as crucial period in brain development and exposure to stress.
Initial reactions to trauma can include exhaustion, confusion, sadness, anxiety, agitation, numbness, dissociation, confusion, physical arousal, and blunted affect. Most responses are normal in that they affect most survivors and are socially acceptable, psychologically effective, and self-limited.
Cognitive Signs of Unhealed Trauma
You may experience nightmares or flashbacks that take you back to the traumatic event. Furthermore, you may struggle with mood swings, as well as disorientation and confusion, which can make it challenging to perform daily tasks.
lack of emotional support during difficult times or illness. withholding or not showing affection, even when requested. exposure to domestic violence and other types of abuse. disregard for a child's mental well-being.
In short, childhood trauma creates a fractured foundation for the individual for the rest of their lives. The way we are raised and the sense of security it creates (or shatters), all impact the emotional, and sometimes physical path, we take as adults.
Early childhood trauma generally means trauma between birth and the age of six. A child's brain grows and develops rapidly, especially in the first three years. Young children are also very dependent on the caregivers for care, nurture and protection. This can make young children especially vulnerable to trauma.
“Child trauma” refers to a scary, dangerous, violent, or life threatening event that happens to a child (0-18 years of age). This type of event may also happen to someone your child knows and your child is impacted as a result of seeing or hearing about the other person being hurt or injured.
Neglect is also traumatic, and so is the loss of a parent, a serious childhood illness, a learning disability that left you doubting yourself, too many siblings, a detached, emotionally unavailable, or anxious parent, even your parent's own childhood trauma.