Your Child’s Vulnerable Brain

Children’s brains are both particularly vulnerable and particularly resilient. Vulnerability is evident in the fact that events that happen during the developmental years can have lifelong impact on thought, emotion, and behavior. Children are trapped within their homes and are often helpless in situations they encounter there and at school, camp, or in the community.

And yet, in some ways, kids are extraordinarily resilient. For example, in order to survive chronic, painful events, Hashem has allowed the brain to automatically compartmentalize data, filing extremely negative experiences in out-of-reach locations so that the “going-on-with-life” part of the child’s personality can continue to go to school, make friends,  and grow up to become a functional adult.

Functioning with Trauma

Extreme compartmentalization is called “dissociation.” All of us have some level of dissociation, revealed when we react intensely to a situation without consciously knowing why. Whenever we don’t understand our reactions, we’re experiencing a form of dissociation; the reason for our physical and emotional response is buried in a subconscious vault.

However, unlike the rest of us, survivors of childhood abuse tend to have intense levels of dissociation. In episodes that caused a child to feel combined terror and helplessness (like watching a sibling get beaten by one’s father) the hippocampus, the area of the brain responsible for preparing information for memory storage, is suppressed due to the chemistry of threat. Instead of recording a story in sequential order (“when my father saw the broken window, he grabbed my brother and…”) the child’s brain is left with memory fragments: the feeling of panic, glass on the floor, the sounds of shouting and crying.