Hannah Blomdal stood in her darkened front yard, trying to surmount her fear. Her family’s suburban home looked calm, even bucolic, on the April evening. But the 17-year-old’s thoughts were agitated.
A few months earlier, the Redwood City, California, front yard had been the scene of an assault that sent Hannah to the hospital with a broken jaw, a skull fracture and bleeding on her brain. She had almost no memory of the attack, yet felt profoundly unsafe in the yard, especially at night. Her vigil alone there, plotted in advance with her psychotherapist at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital Stanford, was part of a treatment program intended to help her brain exercise control over the danger signal.
Subconscious tripwires such as Hannah’s fear of her front yard are a long-recognized feature of post-traumatic stress disorder, but we are just beginning to understand the damage inflicted by living with these internal alarms. That’s especially true when intense stress starts early in life. People traumatized in childhood, research now shows, can suffer decades of harm to their physical and mental health.
[For more of this story, written by Erin Digitale, go to http://stanmed.stanford.edu/20...beyond-behavior.html]
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