Have you ever reacted to something in a way that felt like it came out of nowhere?

Have you ever reacted to something in a way that felt like it came out of nowhere?

Or been powerless to stop addictive habits like overeating or drinking when you're upset? Well, that inexplicable reaction or those unhealthy habits might be driven by trauma. Trauma is difficult to understand and treat because it's often invisible, even to ourselves. If you experience abuse or neglect as a child, those experiences shape your interpretations of the world and how you respond to stress. But if you're not conscious of the trauma, then you won't be able to confront it head-on.

Suppose She experienced neglect, abuse, and physical assault in her childhood. Understanding this trauma was key to freeing herself from her destructive coping mechanisms, like people-pleasing and overeating. Let’s explore how to increase the visibility and understanding of trauma and how it affects young people's lives. These article synthesize the key insights from different conversation, providing innovative ways to understand trauma and the brain, and practical strategies to apply in your own life.

Our brains are shaped by our unique childhood experiences.

Clearest childhood memory is of a feeling, a feeling of intense loneliness. Even as a young child, she knew she was unwanted. Her mother was very young, a teenager. She didn't have the money or the emotional resources to care for her daughter. So she spent her childhood in the care of different family members, bouncing among households.

These relatives only made matters worse. They not only neglected her, they often beat her severely. All these experiences formed her view of the world. They shaped her expectations of the people around her. They shaped how she saw herself. And they literally affected the formation of her brain.

The rational part of a child's brain, the cortex, takes years to develop. About three years to be exact. People sometimes think this means that young children don't absorb much, that abuse or trauma experienced by, say, a two-year-old doesn't count. The opposite is true. In fact, the younger a child is, the more damaging trauma is for their brain.

A baby's brain develops at an astounding rate, 20,000 new neurons per second. And every experience is logged in a personal codebook in the brain. Later, traumatic experiences may manifest as complex memories that can't be understood rationally. Take the example of a boy. As a child, he was physically abused by his father. The abuse only stopped after he was removed from his father's care by Child Protective Services.

After a turbulent few years cycling through foster homes, he moved into a group home. There, he got the support he needed and was progressing well. Then he got a new teacher, and suddenly he started acting out at school, becoming aggressive and withdrawn. Teacher was mystified by this behavior until teacher witnessed a visit from his father. The man was wearing a strong cologne, Old Spice. In a flash, he realized that the teacher also wore Old Spice.

His behavior suddenly made sense. The aroma awakened terrifying sensory memories, causing him to act out as if he were under attack. In the end, the solution to his problem was simple. His teacher changed his cologne, and his behavior changed too. When we're trying to understand trauma, there is one essential question to ask. What happened to you?

And especially, what happened to you when you were very young? That's a question that's been central to her life as she's worked to heal her childhood trauma. Deciphering your own personal codebook will help you to understand seemingly inexplicable reactions and survival mechanisms that evolved to help keep you safe.

You can’t treat trauma without understanding how the brain works.

His girlfriend tried to help him, but he lashed out blindly, hitting her in the process. It took ten minutes for him to come out of it and start thinking clearly again. What had happened? A car had backfired, its exhaust pipe emitting a loud popping sound. The noise was similar to gunfire, and it activated a traumatic memory of when he had been in the Korean War 30 years before.

His survival responses instantly went into overdrive, and he dived to the ground as if he were hiding from a sniper. Traumatic memories lodge in the brainstem as well as in the cortex. The brainstem processes stimuli first. Then it feeds the information into the higher and more developed parts of the brain, the parts associated with relationships, beliefs, and meaning.

But when people are traumatized, they have a sensitive stress response that activates their survival systems very quickly. This is what happened to him. Rationally, he knew that a backfiring car didn't pose a threat and that he didn't live in a war zone anymore. But because the gun-like sound instantly activated his survival system, he didn't have a chance to access the rational part of his brain. It's essential to tailor therapeutic approaches to how different parts of the brain process trauma.

To make this tailoring easier,  a guideline was created for therapists and educators. It's called the Neurosequential Model. The model argues that before anything else, you have to help the person deal with his sensitized survival systems and get regulated. For example, to calm yourself down and become less reactive to triggers.

Let’s help him create better sleeping patterns and encouraged him to exercise regularly and get massages. These approaches improve his overall well-being, calmed his brain, and reduced his sensitivity to stress. It was only then that he is truly able to access the cortex, the part of the brain responsible for rational thought and logic.

Learning positive regulation strategies is essential for dealing with trauma.

When she was starting out as a journalist, she routinely worked 100-hour weeks, doing everything she could to excel at her job. She was exhausted and stressed, but she ignored all the signals her body was sending her that something was wrong. The abuse she'd experienced had trained her to be a skilled people-pleaser. She completely ignored her own boundaries, trying to fulfill everyone else's needs instead. And she numbed her feelings with her favorite drug, food.

Whenever we become uncomfortable, whenever we become stressed, it means that we're out of balance. But, many trauma survivors have been trained to ignore the signals. And they haven't learned positive strategies for regulating themselves and re-establishing balance when they're stressed out. Everyone's brain has an inbuilt self-regulation system.

This system is made up of core regulatory networks, or CRNs for short. These networks are designed to keep us in balance. One network controls the stress responses known as fight and flight. Another involves relationships and connections. And yet another controls the brain's reward circuits. Together, these networks form a tree of regulation.

When a baby's caregivers consistently meet her basic needs with tenderness and care, her CRNs grow resilient, and the child acquires vital tools for regulating herself as she grows up. But if her caregivers are inconsistent or if they're abusive, then a child's tree of regulation becomes impaired. The technical term for this is dysregulation. If a child's tree of regulation is dysregulated, then her stress responses become sensitized. She becomes hypervigilant for threats in her environment and panics easily. Because her caregivers were so negligent, she'll associate people with threat and disappointment, and struggle to establish human connections.

This will make it harder to find positive ways to regulate herself as she grows up. She'll be more vulnerable to addiction. Drugs, alcohol, self-harming behaviors like cutting and eating disorders can all provide temporary relief from distress. The relief feels good and lights up the reward circuits in the brain, increasing the likelihood that the relief-giving behavior will be repeated.

As she worked on healing from trauma, she learned to identify the stress signals from her body. She started creating healthy boundaries and learned how to say no if something didn't work for her. Most important, she found healthy ways to soothe herself when she was distressed. Even if you didn't grow up with good strategies for regulation, you too can learn positive ways to get back into balance.

Working with our natural rhythms is key to healing from trauma.

Put your hand over your heart for a moment and get very quiet. You'll feel it beating steadily against your chest. A heartbeat is the first, most primal rhythm we hear. We hear it in the womb. Our mother's resting heart rate of 60 to 80 beats per minute becomes our baseline, indicating safety and continuity.

That's why babies are instantly comforted by a rhythmic rocking motion. And as we grow up, rhythm remains important to our mental health. For millennia, humans organized their lives around the rhythms of the natural world. But this has changed. We no longer structure our days according to the rising and setting of the sun.

Instead of eating food when it's in season, we can eat anything at any time. And our soundscapes now include a cacophony of noises we can't switch off. These loud and arhythmic conditions can be especially jarring for people with sensitized survival systems. Suppose she has certainly struggled. Due to her violent, abusive past, she constantly felt on edge. Being alone at night was especially hard.

Despite living in a building with a doorman and security, she was convinced that someone would break in and attack her. She had trouble sleeping and would startle with every sound. Eventually, she realized that her survival systems had become so sensitized that they wouldn't turn off, even in her sleep. So, over time, she's learned how to calm her brain by getting back in touch with her own natural rhythms. She regularly makes time to walk outdoors, concentrating on the rhythm of her breath and marveling at the natural world. She's also cleared one day a week, Sunday, for resting.

No matter how frenetic the world is, these strategies allow her to stay in touch with herself. Walking, dancing, and singing are all rhythmic activities that can help us regulate ourselves and deal with stress. The rhythmic strokes of a massage can be particularly healing for trauma survivors. And, of course, we can take a leaf out of this girl’s book and head outside. The natural world has reassuring rhythms that can anchor our days. As we walk, we tune into our own natural rhythms and are able to have a break from the noise and stimulation of our busy lives.

Learning how to form positive relationships is key to healing trauma.

 How do you know how to love someone? If you grew up with doting caregivers, this will sound like a strange question. The capacity to love seems as natural as the capacity to breathe. But actually, it's something we have to learn from our earliest days. If you've never been loved, you simply won't know how to do it.

That was the experience of Gloria, a young mother who had grown up in a series of foster homes. She wanted to love and nurture her daughter Tilly, but she had no idea how. In the end, Tilly was taken into care because she wasn't being looked after properly. Usually, women like Gloria are demonized as bad mothers. No one takes the time to look at what happened to make them that way. Gloria's story took a turn that most don't. She was able to get support from social workers and therapists who understood what was motivating her neglectful behavior. Instead of punishing or ostracizing her, they treated her with love and respect. Experiencing love showed Gloria how to give it to her own daughter. Eventually, she reached a stage where she was able to care for her again.

Learning how to form positive relationships is the most important skill you can develop in dealing with trauma. Data compiled from 70,000 case histories of trauma in 25 countries. They examined both the trauma and the adversity that people had experienced and the strength of their social relationships with family and community. They found that relational health was a bigger indicator of mental well-being than a history of trauma. To put it another way, human connection mitigates the effects of trauma. But cruelly, the people who most need social connections often lack the skills to build them.

Think of a child in a classroom seeking attention by acting out, or someone whose experiences have been so negative that they disconnect in social settings. The good news is that, like Gloria, anyone can learn how to form relationships. Just as we can learn to play the piano, we can learn to connect. Our brains have neuroplasticity. They can learn new things through practice. But we can only learn through our own experiences.

In other words, you can't learn how to ride a bicycle by reading a book. You've got to go ride a real bicycle. And you can't learn to love by reading a manual. You have to receive love in order to give it.

Stress can help build resilience – in the right doses.

Stress gets a bad rap. We read scare stories every day about how much stress affects our physical and mental health. But did you know that experiencing stress in small doses is a vital part of human development? Every time we have a new experience or do a work project that stretches our abilities, we experience stress. Managing that stress successfully is like lifting weights.

Afterward, we're stronger and more resilient. Children who grow up in stable, loving homes have a healthy capacity for stress. They're constantly exploring, experiencing new things, and then returning to their familiar home base. Stress only becomes a problem when it's chronic or extreme. And it's especially hard to deal with when it's erratic or unpredictable. Let’s explore  a group of children who'd been rescued from a violent cult. Their everyday lives had been filled with chaos and terror. What's more, they'd been taught from an early age that everyone outside the cult was out to get them. It was realized that imposing intensive therapy would only increase their sense of powerlessness and amplify their stress levels. So an environment was created that was as predictable and safe as possible.

The children were free to make choices about what to eat and what to do in their free time, and could interact with staff when they felt like it. With that safe baseline, the children slowly began to open up to staff, reliving their traumatic experiences and short encounters that they controlled themselves. Over time, they built resilience and were able to deal with stress on their own terms. When traumatized children are forced to perform in classrooms and therapy rooms like neurotypical children, the experience can just compound their trauma. Children who have experienced trauma often have a developmental age that is far younger than their actual age. They don't always have the ability to express their feelings in words or conform to a long day of classes.

They don't have the emotional resources to make connections, so they end up acting out from frustration and distress. Or they disassociate and end up checking out of the situation. Such behaviors can lead to misdiagnosis. For instance, a child might be thought to have ADHD, when in fact the real cause of his trouble is trauma. To build resilience, the challenge needs to match the child. It should be a healthy stretch, not an impossible feat.

The trauma of systemic racism is transmitted across generations.

Imagine you’re walking across the road with your mother when you pass a big dog. You feel your mother stiffen next to you, and suddenly you start feeling afraid. Emotions are contagious, especially for children. They soak up their parents’ thoughts and feelings like a sponge. In that way, trauma can be passed down through generations. So we don’t only have to ask, What happened to you? We also have to understand what happened to them – what happened to your parents and their parents, and what did you inherit from them?

Let’s go back to the example of the dog. Your mother may have responded fearfully because of a bad personal experience. But her fear is also reinforced by decades of inherited trauma. Dogs were trained to hunt and attack enslaved people. Many generations later, dogs were used as weapons against civil rights protestors in the American South. And today, dogs are used by police who use disproportionate force against Black people. So if you’re Black, your fear of dogs is partially inherited. It has a long history.

Trauma is passed on in stories and gestures and through emotional contagion. But it also has the power to affect our very genes. Someone born into slavery had to deal with brutal systemic violence. His survival system would have been on high alert, shaping his core regulatory networks. Early research has shown that these modifications can actually be passed onto future generations genetically, even if their environments don’t contain the same threats. 

Understanding these histories of trauma can give us empathy for the experiences of our parents and grandparents, and for our own seemingly irrational fears. It’s also an essential component of trauma-informed care. The trauma of nonwhite people doesn’t occur in a sociopolitical vacuum. It occurs in the context of centuries of violent colonization, enslavement, and racism. Today, race affects the levels of violence that Black, brown, and indigenous people experience every day. It also affects their treatment by state institutions. The children of people of color are much more likely to be removed from their families, overmedicated, institutionalized, or labeled as “problem children.” 

Any institution, whether school, hospital, or foster organization, can adequately support trauma survivors only if they also embrace antiracist work. That means interrogating their bias, and examining how their institutions perpetuate racist practices. Trauma-informed care can only be effective if trauma is seen as a societal problem, rather than an individual problem – a problem that we have to address together. 

We can overcome traumatic experiences with the right support.

Almost half of the children living in the United States have had a serious traumatic experience. And 60 percent of adults report having at least one traumatic incident in their past.

Given what we know now about how trauma affects the brain, imagine the effect of these experiences on our broader communities and country as a whole. If so many people have sensitized stress responses, is it any wonder that so many lash out with violence or with intolerance of difference? Is it surprising that adults aren’t able to give their children the support they need to regulate themselves? 

Trauma always leaves a scar. People love talking about how resilient kids are. They like to imagine that children don’t absorb violence the way adults do, that they have some innate capacity to bounce back from terror and abuse. We now know that this is completely untrue. Children’s brains are malleable. They will be affected by trauma, even if you can’t see it on the outside. 

Perhaps they’ll still do well at school, but doing so will take much more energy than before. Or their physical health will deteriorate. For example, stress can affect children’s neuroendocrine systems, increasing their risk for conditions such as diabetes. 

Trauma survivors need support – not only in the days and weeks following an incident, but well into adulthood. They’ll need appropriate care from providers who understand the unique challenges of working with a traumatized brain. 

But, just as importantly, they’ll need ongoing support from their communities.

It’s no coincidence that healing own trauma has also involved creating community. Over the last few decades, the young girl who was so lonely and isolated has made a career out of connection. She’s interviewed tens of thousands of people, and taught millions more that they’re not alone in their experiences of trauma and abuse. In a sense, she’s created the community she never had. 

We all need support from our communities to heal. Not only support from therapists or our families, but from our schools and workplaces and justice systems and places of worship. We need trauma-informed communities. With the right support, we can all learn how to live with trauma, and draw post-traumatic wisdom from our experiences.

Traumatic experiences literally transform our brains, especially when we’re very young. They affect how we respond to stress and how quickly we bounce back from adversity. While we can’t erase traumatic experiences, we can cultivate resilience in the face of them. By developing our connections to other people and learning positive strategies for regulation, we can train our brains to respond differently to triggers. Trauma isn’t an individual pathology. It’s the result of destructive experiences, such as racism and poverty. As a society, we need to address trauma together. 

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