Trauma and the Developing Brain - College of Education & Human ...

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Handout for Trauma, The Developing Brain, Healing and Emotional Regulation Seminars Karina A. Forrest-‐Perkins MHR LADC, 2011 normal range of experience, there will be a variety of mental attempts to process and "master" this event. The traumatic event will play itself out in the mind of the child again and again. A host of intrusive images related to the trauma may swamp the child's thinking. This set of re-‐living and re-‐experiencing phenomena may include telling the story over and over again to friends. The child may act this event out in play and drawings (see below) or experience intrusions (flashbacks or nightmares). In essence, these children have created memories of the traumatic memory. Living With Created Memories The death of a loved one, for example, is a trauma that can influence memory. Over the six months following the loss, children (as well as adults) will often experience unusual visual, auditory, or tactile sensations. A child may think they hear the deceased person's voice, or they think they saw them in a crowd, or out of the corner of their eye they may see their reflection in a window. At bedtime or when awakening, these misperceptions are more common. Such "memories" may be disturbing to parents, caregivers, and the child. The child needs to be reassured when these memories of the loved one occur. These "visions" are often interpreted in context of a religious belief system ("They came back to tell me it was OK" or "They are still with me"). This can be important for the child and there is no reason to undermine these feelings. These "hysterical materializations" are common and often mislabeled as visual or auditory hallucinations. These types of memories are complex. Traumatic memory involves the storage and recall of information at several levels. The brain stores not only traditional cognitive information, such as who, what, when, and where, but also emotional information: feelings such as fear, dread, and sadness. The old adage that "the body remembers" is referring to motor-‐vestibular information. An example of this might consist of a memory of the body's position during the rape. Finally, the brain contains a state memory, such as vigilance or physiological hyperarousal. A Difficult Process The normal and predictable mental mechanisms that are used to process all experiences will, at times, fail in the attempts to master and understand a traumatic event. Because traumatic events have features that are so outside the range of normal experience, there are very few internal experiences with which to judge or make sense out of the event. The more outside the range of the normal experience and the more life-‐threatening the experience, the more difficult it will be for the normal mental mechanisms to work efficiently to 24
Nov. 19, 2007 Handout for Trauma, The Developing Brain, Healing and Emotional Regulation Seminars Karina A. Forrest-‐Perkins MHR LADC, 2011 process and master that experience. The inability to control elements of the traumatic event, or the intrusive thoughts that follow, lead to a set of predictable mental and physiological responses. Trauma may alter the stress response, even in healthy people, Cornell study shows By Susan Lang Researchers have known for years that psychological trauma that results in post-‐traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) or depression can change how a person responds to stress. Now, Cornell researchers report that rapes, sudden deaths of loved ones, life-‐threatening accidents and other such traumas may result in long-‐term changes even if the survivor doesn't develop a clinical disorder. "The findings suggest that there may be persistent differences in the stress response in some trauma-‐exposed people, even if they do not exhibit PTSD or depression or both, and even if their trauma was years in the past," said Barbara Ganzel, Cornell M.S. '99, Ph.D. '02, a lecturer in human development in Cornell's College of Human Ecology. Ganzel led a team of Cornell researchers, whose study is published in a special issue of the Journal of Traumatic Stress on the biology of trauma. They assessed a group of women before and after they took their medical admissions tests (MCATs), a stressful experience for most people. Measuring levels of a stress hormone in saliva (cortisol), they found that women who had experienced trauma earlier in life (but who did not have PTSD or major depression) had lower levels cortisol leading up to and after the MCAT exam. In addition, they found that the women who had experienced trauma kept a negative mood after the test, compared with other women, whose moods lifted significantly after the exams. Ganzel suspects that the stress response system in these women have compensated or changed over time. The trauma-‐exposed women showed lower rather than higher levels of cortisol, Ganzel theorized, because "stress initially boosts cortisol output but after the stressor is over, cortisol falls below normal. These data suggest that, in some people, it may fall below normal and stay there, or that it develops a chronic tendency to dip lower than normal under stress." The other co-‐authors are John Eckenrode, Pilyoung Kim, Elaine Wethington, all in human development at Cornell; 25
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