Developmental Trauma

After decades of research into the effects of battle traumas on returning war veterans, scientific focus is shifting to the long-term effects of early childhood trauma. The ACEs study precipitated interest in childhood trauma as a direct contributor to health challenges experienced in later life. In explanation of the ACEs study, the Center for Disease Control states, “the original ACEs study was conducted at Kaiser Permanente from 1995 to 1997 with two waves of data collection. Over 17,000 Health Maintenance Organization members from Southern California receiving physical exams completed confidential surveys regarding their childhood experiences and current health status and behaviors.”

ACEs is an acronym for Adverse Childhood Experiences.

More than twenty years after the original ACEs study, a new field of inquiry based on these Kaiser-Permanente findings has generated a diversity of research into what some now call developmental or long-term trauma during childhood. Developmental Trauma and Complex-PTSD (C-PTSD are terms used to distinguish protracted, childhood trauma, often beginning in utero, from the better-known Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) diagnostic label developed during treatment of soldiers returning to civilian life.

While C-PTSD is often used to describe the effects of prolonged childhood trauma, it fails to name the developmental piece. Early trauma interrupts normal physical brain and emotional  development, so that a traumatized toddler of two will not have the same brain scans as a child of the same age who has not experienced prolonged trauma. Developmental Trauma accurately names what happens to traumatized children – normal development is seriously affected.

PTSD is now used as a descriptor identifying the traumatic aftermath in adults who have experienced natural disasters, car crashes, sexual assaults, and other shocking events in which control is lost. Flashbacks, hypervigilance, sleep interruptions, depression, and acute anxiety are almost always experienced by adults as they move into recovery after the unexpected violence they have experienced. Adult cognition, life experiences, and general resourcefulness mean that PTSD survivors have a different base line of understanding and competence when meeting their challenges than do the adults who experienced developmental trauma as children, infants, and in utero. The word developmental points to early trauma’s long-term effects on brain development and function and nervous-system reactivity.

The Kaiser-Permanente ACEs research reveals what many survivors of childhood trauma know through personal experience. Violence and neglect do not stop because we mature physically and leave our early traumatizing circumstances behind; rather, they are our intimate companions until we acknowledge and express in a safe and accepting environment the pain caused by these early experiences. We cannot acknowledge these experiences at the time of their occurrence because of terror, dissociation, lack of vocabulary and cognitive skills, and our dependence upon those who may be unintentionally or intentionally causing our pain. This healing work requires we manage to survive to early, mid and even late adulthood, any time in life when we realize we are not okay and feel ready to find out why. 

The growing research into early childhood trauma by experts in the field helps social workers, psychologists, clinical therapists, and psychiatrists better meet the needs of their adult clients who continue to suffer the fallout from prolonged early trauma. Early trauma fallout may stem from physical and emotional abuse, neglect and abandonment, racism, hunger, sexual exploitation, medical, social, gender, and/or political isolation, and any other sources of prolonged terror. Talk therapy, almost exclusively employed to treat trauma of all kinds, is now known to have little impact on the physical after-effects of early childhood trauma because talking about what happened cannot soothe the physical sensations, muscle memories, and feelings early trauma embeds in the body. When trauma happens before we have the words to describe it and the cognitive development to understand why the suffering we experience is happening …,

the body becomes our story keeper.

Talk therapy is indispensable in understanding the serious nature of what has happened to us, but it cannot release the physical aftershocks trauma causes. Only engaging the body in the healing process through a combination of physical, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual techniques can accomplish this purpose.

I describe my personal experience of developmental trauma and the healing journey it precipitated in

ONCE UPON A BODY

Creating Meaning, Peace and Joy after Early Trauma.