A trigger might make you feel helpless, panicked, unsafe, and overwhelmed with emotion. You might feel the same things that you felt at the time of the trauma, as though you were reliving the event.
These details could be anything, such as emotions, sights, or smells. Since your brain does not recognize that the danger is in the past, encountering these trauma triggers can bring back the feelings or memories of the traumatic event.
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).
Attachment Issues: Traumatic experiences in childhood can lead to insecure attachment styles in adulthood. This may manifest as a fear of abandonment, resulting in clinginess in relationships (anxious attachment), or as a fear of intimacy, leading to emotional detachment and self-isolation (avoidant attachment).
Surviving abuse or trauma as a child has been linked with higher rates of anxiety, depression, suicide and self harm, PTSD, drug and alcohol misuse and relationship difficulties.
Experiencing a traumatic event as a child negatively impacts mental health, cognitive function, the ability to form satisfying relationships, and an individual's sense of self-worth.
Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
Children and adolescents with PTSD have symptoms such as persistent, frightening thoughts and memories or flashbacks of a traumatic event or events.
Symptoms of negative changes in thinking and mood may include: Negative thoughts about yourself, other people or the world. Hopelessness about the future. Memory problems, including not remembering important aspects of the traumatic event.
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.
So, does PTSD ever go away? No, but with effective evidence-based treatment, symptoms can be managed well and can remain dormant for years, even decades. But because the trauma that evokes the symptoms will never go away, there is a possibility for those symptoms to be “triggered” again in the future.
Extreme stress experienced between ages 5 and 8 poses a higher risk of poor adult mental health, according to a new study of U.S. brain scans conducted by Duke University. Such adults typically showed less brain activity in the parts of their brains linked to motivation, positive moods and depression.
Young Children and Trauma. Children can experience trauma as early as infancy. In fact, young children between the ages of 0 and 5 are the most vulnerable to the effects of trauma since their brains are still in the early formative years.
Signs of PTSD
To determine whether you or a loved one may have PTSD that stems from childhood trauma, the following are some of the more common symptoms: Reliving the event over in your mind or nightmares. Becoming upset when there's a reminder of the event. Intense and ongoing fear, sadness, and helplessness.
Smiling is a way to “protect” therapists.
By downplaying their pain they are attempting to minimize the upset they believe they are causing. Laughing while recounting something painful says, “I'm OK, you don't have to take care of me. ' Instead, clients are actually attempting to take care of their therapists.
If the trauma is left untreated, one can experience nightmares, insomnia, anxiety, depression, phobias, substance abuse, panic attacks, anger, irritability, or hopelessness.
For some people, the tremors are big movements in the muscles. For others, they are tiny contractions that feel like electrical frequencies moving through the body. TRE® is not painful—in fact, most people enjoy the sensations.
Childhood trauma can cause adults to have a difficult time managing stressful situations. As a result, it is common for people to turn to food, drugs, or alcohol as a coping mechanism. They use these substances to help them deal with their strong emotional responses to triggering people or situations.
There is evidence that childhood trauma can cause PTSD, loss of personal identity, self-esteem, attachment, and higher levels of stress. Some traumas include sexual, physical, natural disasters and dysregulation. However, traumas, not only childhood, can affect someone's life and change it in an instant.
Exposure to trauma during childhood can dramatically increase people's risk for 7 out of 10 of the leading causes of death in the U.S.—including high blood pressure, heart disease, and cancer—and it's crucial to address this public health crisis, according to Harvard Chan alumna Nadine Burke Harris, MPH '02.