Children, and their brains, adapt to survive. When a child grows up in an environment where there is abuse or neglect, their brains will be shaped by those experiences. These brain changes may not lead to an immediate mental health problem. Rather, they may help the child survive in that environment. However, these changes may make a child more vulnerable to developing mental health problems in the future in everyday environments.
Key Definitions:
Latent Vulnerability: The unseen link between childhood trauma and later mental health problems. Latent vulnerability means that a child is at greater risk of harm than may be immediately obvious to carers or professionals. Whilst it is cause for concern, latent vulnerability does not determine anyone’s future.
Fight-or Flight Response: Or ‘stress response’ is a physiological reaction triggered by the release of hormones either prompting us to stay and fight or to run away.
Hypervigilance: A state of heightened awareness and watchfulness. You’re extremely sensitive to your surroundings.
Childhood Trauma and The Brain
The brain is a learning organ, this means that prior experiences shape brain development in ways that can help with future challenges. When children face traumatic experiences, like abuse and neglect, the brain can adapt to help them cope.
Neuroscientists have observed these brain changes in a number of brain systems. Here we focus on the main three: the threat, reward, and memory systems.
The Threat System
The threat system in the brain allows us to detect and respond to danger. We all need to activate a fight-or-flight response at times to keep us safe, but abuse and neglect create a world where danger is frequent and unpredictable, and punishment can be extreme.
Exposure to ongoing domestic violence, neglect, and physical abuse can lead to long lasting changes in how the brain responds to perceived danger. This can lead to hypervigilance to threat and/or excessive avoidance.
Effects and Difficulties for Children
• Struggling to pay attention to other things making it harder to learn and develop other important skills.
• An increased intensity with their interactions with others.
• Reduced ability to regulate emotions.
• Finding everyday challenges and stressful events harder to manage than their peers.
• Increased reactivity to social rejection.
• Withdrawing or feeling anxious even in safe environments, reducing opportunities to learn new things and build relationships.
• An increased risk of symptoms of anxiety and depression.
The Reward System
The reward system helps us to learn about positive aspects of our environment, motivates behaviour, and guides decision making. From the earliest years our brain is able to learn what is rewarding and how to elicit rewards.
Abuse or neglect create a world where rewards such as these are inconsistent or absent. This may reduce the brain’s responsiveness to rewards.
Effects and Difficulties for Children
• An increased risk of depression, particularly in adolescence.
• Difficulty in successfully negotiating everyday social interactions and maintaining stable social support networks.
• Problems in reward learning, that is learning about new sources of reward.
• Reduced motivation to pursue daily activities.
• Reduced ability to experience pleasure.
The Memory System
The memory system allows us to learn new things and store information about our past to help us with new challenges in the future. All of us rely on our memory of past experience to deal with situations we face in our daily lives – this is our autobiographical memory. We also rely on the ability to learn associations between new things – this is our associative memory.
Memory is important for our ability to plan, solve problems, make decisions, regulate our emotions, and develop a positive sense of self. Experiences of neglect and physical abuse can create negative memories that can be overwhelming and also influence how we create new memories.
Effects and Difficulties for Children
• Problems recalling the details of everyday positive and negative personal memories.
• Changes to emotional learning mechanisms, including how children learn about threat and reward in their environments. These changes may increase the risk of mental health problems over time.
• Difficulties with planning, making decisions, and social problem solving compared to peers.
• A tendency to focus on negative memories and thoughts. This may increase the risk of developing a negative self-concept.
The Three Pathways to Mental Health Difficulties
Research tells us that mental health problems after abuse and neglect are not inevitable. Many children show a resilient outcome, yet a substantial number do not.
Risk and resilience are created over time and maintained through our everyday experiences and relationships. The interaction of protective as well as risk factors, especially the relationships around us, shapes our development and how we think and feel about ourselves, other people, and the world around us.
Stress susceptibility, stress generation, and social thinning are three pathways by which mental health problems can be understood to develop over time following abuse and neglect.
Stress Susceptibility
Everyday challenges or stressors, such as taking an exam, moving school, or making new friends, can be difficult for anyone. However, a child who has experienced neglect/abuse may find these situations even more difficult to manage. This in part might be because of a heightened response to stressors, as well as a poorer ability to deal with stressors when they occur.
Effects and Difficulties for Children
• Brain systems may adapt to cope with a threatening or unpredictable world in ways that are not helpful in more ordinary environments.
• A child may expect the world to be dangerous, and other people to be untrustworthy. This is taxing and can contribute to ongoing stress.
• Even spending time with a group of friends or joining a new sport club can create anxiety.
• Over time, toxic stress can also impact the immune system and a child’s physical health.
Stress Generation
Children who have experienced abuse and neglect have already experienced significant stress in childhood. However, we are learning that these children continue to experience new stressful events more frequently than their peers, even into adulthood.
One possibility is that changes in the brain’s threat, reward, and memory systems lead children to behave in ways that we may find challenging. How peers and adults respond to this behaviour influences whether new stressful experiences are created for this child.
Effects and Difficulties for Children
• A child who has experienced abuse and neglect is likely to experience more stressful events than their peers. Small difficulties can escalate sometimes leading to conflict.
• One possibility is that brain changes may be associated with misinterpreting or overreacting to situations, compromising social skills or increasing difficulty in regulating emotions.
• There is an increased risk of bullying, experiencing relationship problems, or being excluded from school.
• Experiencing stressful events is associated with an increased risk of anxiety and depression symptoms.
• Adults’ ability to step back and reflect and consider how to respond is crucial as they may contribute to generating new stressful events.
Social Thinning
Supportive relationships are key to our wellbeing. They help us regulate our emotions and think through everyday worries and problems. Adults also have a key role to plau in creating opportunities for learning and growth in children.
Studies show that abuse and neglect in childhood can lead to reduced social support over time, even into adulthood. With fewer friends and relationships with adults who can support them, children become more vulnerable to mental health problems.
Effects and Difficulties for Children
• Over time a child who experienced abuse and neglect is at greater risk of losing friends and relationships with supportive peers and adults. This social thinning reduces access to sources of support when they experience future stressor events.
• Social thinning can also lead to fewer opportunities for a child to develop new skills and competencies.
• The development of self-confidence and a sense of agency, both of which are particularly important during adolescence, are dependent on healthy social relationships.
• Helping a child to develop skills and confidence in their social functioning, especially in relation to resolving social and relationship difficulties, is an important task for intervention and prevention programmes.
Promoting Resilience and Recovery
There is no quick as every child is different. However, science and clinical practice have come together to highlight a number of importance principles that can guide professionals and carers.
1. The Brain is a Learning Organ
We know that early experiences of abuse and neglect can influence brain system development in unhelpful ways. Equally, the brain can adapt again in response to new positive experiences. Exploration, play, and relationships can create opportunities for the brain to keep learning.
2. Brain Adaptations May Contribute to Behaviour We Find Challenging
Sometimes a child behaves in ways that are not typical or expected. This can make it hard to know how to help them because we can feel rejected or pushed away. Having insight into how early experience influence brain development can help us adopt a more open and curious mindset in our relationships with children who have experience trauma.
3. The Brain Learns Through Trusting Relationships
If we are with people we know and trust, our minds are more open to new experiences. The capacity of the brain to learn in everyday life depends on the relationships with trusted others. A lack of trust can make us feel isolated and disengaged. For children who have experienced abuse and neglect, a lack of trust may be one factor that explains their greater difficulty in learning. A child who does not trust those around them needs to be vigilant and wary, taking their focus away.
4. Stepping Back to Reflect Can Create New Ways of Thinking
There is great value in stepping back for a moment rather than reacting instinctively and jumping into respond. Pausing gives us time to reflect, creating space for a new way of thinking. Such reflection may in turn lead to a different action. The result could be a response that positively impacts relationships under strain, one that can have a positive impact on a child’s long-term outcome.
5. Behaviour as Communication: What Does it Mean?
When a child behaves in a way we find challenging, we need to look beneath the surface. The behaviour may have had an adaptive value for the child’s survival in the past or it may be a coping mechanism for them now. If we can uncover their worries, fears, or doubts hiding beneath their behaviour, it is easier to make a connection with the child.
Simon Dowling Therapy
I am dedicated to providing compassionate and specialised care for individuals who have experienced childhood abuse and/or trauma. I offer a safe and supportive environment where clients can explore their experiences and begin the healing process, utilising evidence-based therapies to address the psychological, emotional, and physical effects of abuse. I’m committed to helping survivors regain their sense of self, build resilience, and achieve a better quality of life.
If you’re struggling with the on-going effects of childhood abuse or trauma, counselling and therapy can help. Get in touch and we will work through your healing together.