What Childhood Trauma Actually Does To Your Brain & How To Heal [mindbodygreen.com]

Carey Sipp 8/3/231:01 PM

By Daniel Amen, Image: Chelsea Victoria/Stocksy, mindbodygreen health, August 2, 2023

Your childhood upbringing plays a major role in your brain development. If you grow up in a happy, functional home, it supports the developing brain. However, when you experience childhood trauma—such as the death of a parent, neglect, sexual abuse, or other traumatic incidents—it negatively impacts the way your brain develops. Sadly, this can have lasting consequences on your mental health and cognitive function.

What are adverse childhood experiences?

Adverse childhood experiences, or ACEs, continue to affect people in adulthood. Many adults with emotional issues don't realize that the traumatic experiences from their childhood are at the root of their problems. And they certainly don't understand that those incidents changed the way their brain functions, which further contributes to their ongoing mental health issues.

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Mike FlaningamMember

The neurobiology of ACEs doesn't get discussed enough, so I appreciate this article. That said, I have a different perspective than the author's, which has more of a pathologizing tone that I like. My Western medicine training is based on the model that the patient I serve has pathology and that they need me to fix them, often with medications, surgeries, or injections. I have used my more recent trauma-informed approach with the PACEs science education I've had to recognize that the person who was exposed early in life to too much adversity without enough support has a brain that adaptively develops in a way to make their body really efficient at responding to potential threats/stressors. This adaptation makes sense, given that babies are born to be experience-dependent in our development. It also reframes the situation in a way that we now are appreciative of the body doing what it can to protect us, as opposed to "there's something wrong with me". A crucial additional point to make is that the traumatic world we all live in now is regularly triggering all of us, potentially more so in people whose brains are efficient at going into survival states.

8/3/231:27 PM

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What are adverse childhood experiences?

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