If you looked at the lives of these kids in England, searching for a signature traumatic event, you wouldn’t find it. You might expect to see early childhood losses that would cause them to react with such nervousness and distrust, such lack of resiliency and hypervigilance. What I came to realize, however, was that there were enough of the little stresses, a consistent baseline of stress and insecurity to add up. These little stresses accrue to the point that it makes psychological “sense” for kids to acquire and adopt compensatory behaviors.
