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In some of the experiments the duration of the stress was only minutes long, involving just a few moments of human handling of rat pups (baby rats), which is highly stressful for them. But this very brief stressful experience, at a key time in the development of the brain, resulted in alterations in stress hormone systems that lasted into adulthood.
For our purposes there are four major parts of the brain: the brainstem, the diencephalon, the limbic system, and the cortex.
We share similar organization of our lowest brain regions with creatures as primitive as lizards, while the middle regions are similar to those found in mammals like cats and dogs. The outer areas we share only with other primates, like monkeys and the great apes.
Brain organization
The brainstem, for example, mediates our core regulatory functions such as body temperature, heart rate, respiration, and blood pressure. The diencephalon and the limbic system handle emotional responses that guide our behavior, like fear, hatred, love, and joy. The very top part of the brain, the cortex, regulates the most complex and highly human functions such as speech and language, abstract thinking, planning, and deliberate decision making.
Additionally, the stress response systems are among only a handful of neural systems in the brain that, if poorly regulated or abnormal, can cause dysfunction in all four of the main brain areas—just
Memory is the capacity to carry forward in time some element of an experience.
Further, all of us have probably had the experience of physically jumping up before we even figured out what it was that startled us in the first place. This happens because our brain’s stress response systems carry information about potential threats and are primed to respond to them as quickly as possible, which often means before the cortex can consider what action to take.
One of the most important characteristics of both memory, neural tissue, and of development, then, is that they all change with patterned, repetitive activity.
What struck me especially was that, although the experiences that had scarred adults with PTSD were often relatively brief (usually lasting for a few hours at most), their impact could still be seen in their behavior years—even decades—later. It reminded me of what Seymour Levine had found in those rat pups, where a few minutes of stress could change the brain for life.
Unfortunately, the prevailing view of children and trauma at the time—one that persists to a large degree to this day—is that “children are resilient.”
sensitization and tolerance,
Drug sensitization vs tolerance
Indeed, if moderate, predictable and patterned, it is stress that makes a system stronger and more functionally capable. Hence, the stronger muscle in the present is the one that has endured moderate stress in the past. And the same is true for the brain’s stress response systems.
This also means that as a result of the strengthening effect of previous moderate and patterned experience, what may be traumatically stressful for one person may be trivial for another. Just as a body builder can carry weights that untrained people cannot even move, so too can some brains deal with traumatic events that would cripple others.
Negative emotions often make things even more memorable than positive ones because recalling things that are threatening—and avoiding those situations in the future if possible—is often critical to survival.
First, your brain makes you stop thinking about irrelevant things by shutting down the chatter of the frontal cortex. Then, it focuses on cues from others around you to help you determine who might protect or threaten you, by letting the limbic system’s “social cue reading” systems take over. Your heart rate increases to get blood to your muscles in case you need to fight or flee. Your muscle tone also increases and sensations like hunger are put aside. In thousands of different ways your brain prepares to protect you.
Fear quite literally makes us dumber, a property that allows faster reactions in short periods of time and helps immediate survival.
Dissociation
We have come to understand that many post-traumatic psychiatric symptoms, in fact, are related to either dissociative or hyperarousal responses to memories of the trauma.
Learned helplessness
To restore its equilibrium, the brain tries to quiet our sensitized, trauma-related memories by pushing us to have repetitive, small “doses” of recall. It seeks to make a sensitized system develop tolerance. And, in many cases, this works.
Fear chemicals and process
And with prolonged fear there can be chronic or near-permanent changes in the brain. The brain alterations that result from lingering terror, especially early in life, may cause an enduring shift to a more impulsive, more aggressive, less thoughtful, and less compassionate way of responding to the world.
If safe, familiar, and capable caregivers were available to children, they tended to recover more easily, often showing no enduring negative effects of the traumatic event.
three prime directives:
As we had hypothesized and other researchers have also confirmed since, post-traumatic stress disorder is not signaled by a constellation of new symptoms that develop long after a stressful event but is, in many regards, the maladaptive persistence of the once adaptive responses that began as coping mechanisms in response to the event itself.
In fact, the research on the most effective treatments to help child trauma victims might be accurately summed up this way: what works best is anything that increases the quality and number of relationships in the child’s life.
“failure to thrive.”
When the infant’s brain gets signals from inside the body—or from her external senses—that something is not right, these register as distress. This distress can be “hunger” if she needs calories, “thirst” if she is dehydrated, or “anxiety” if she perceives external threat. When this distress is relieved, the infant feels pleasure.
Without love, children literally don’t grow.
Mama P.
Amazing
This split between verbal and performance scores is often seen in abused or traumatized children and can indicate that the developmental needs of certain brain regions, particularly those cortical areas involved in modulating the lower, more reactive regions have been not been met.
An environment of such intermittent care punctuated by total abandonment may be the worst of all worlds for a child. The brain needs patterned, repetitive stimuli to develop properly. Spastic, unpredictable relief from fear, loneliness, discomfort, and hunger keeps a baby’s stress system on high alert.
Autism and other minds
Sociopaths and empathy
Unlike people whose response to trauma is to get stuck in a highly sensitized state in which any stress at all triggers a massive response, sociopaths’ systems appear to have gotten stuck at the other end of the spectrum, in deadening—and sometimes deadly—numbness.
A foundational principle of brain development is that neural systems organize and become functional in a sequential manner. Furthermore, the organization of a less mature region depends, in part, upon incoming signals from lower, more mature regions. If one system doesn’t get what it needs when it needs it, those that rely upon it may not function well either, even if the stimuli that the later developing system needs are being provided appropriately. The key to healthy development is getting the right experiences in the right amounts at the right time.
We would then use enrichment experiences and targeted therapies to help the affected brain areas in the order in which they were affected by neglect and trauma (hence, the name neurosequential).
Heart rate modulation
Sociopath or not, factors that matter
A number of genetically influenced factors matter.
Intelligence is another critical factor, one that is often poorly understood.
Another factor is the timing of the trauma: the earlier it starts, the more difficult it is to treat and the greater the damage is likely to be.
But perhaps the most important factor in determining how these children fare is the social environment in which the child is raised.
Many people still spend hours in therapy searching for the “Rosetta stones” of their personal histories, trying to find the one memory that will help their lives make sense and instantly resolve their current problems.
The problem with traumatic memories tends to be their intrusion into the present, not an inability to recall them.
In one study we conducted in the mid-1990s, we found that children with supportive families who were assigned to therapy to discuss trauma were more likely to develop post-traumatic stress disorder than those whose parents were told to bring them in only if they observed specific symptoms. The hour per week that the children assigned to therapy spent focusing on their symptoms exacerbated them, rather than exorcised them.
Because of how memory works, such rumination can also lead you to recall old, ambiguous memories in a new light, one that, over time, becomes darker and darker until it eventually becomes a trauma that never actually occurred.
