by Kerry A. McDonald-Cady, Esq.
THE CHILDREN’S CORNER
Looking to Science to Help Keep Children Safe...
Understanding the Neurobiology of Trauma
About a year ago, I had an experience
in the family division juvenile docket that
caused me to ask a difficult question regarding my role as a juvenile prosecutor:
are we really making a difference? I had just
begun reviewing an affidavit from a Department of Children & Family Services investigator who was seeking an emergency care
order, when I read the mother’s name and
instantly had a flood of memories come
rushing back to me. I had co-chaired the
criminal prosecution of the sexual assault
case involving the same mother who was
abused by her father when she was an eleven year-old girl; the prosecution ultimately
resulted in his conviction and incarceration.
I also handled the Child in Need of Care
and Supervision (CHINS) petition involving
that mother, which brought her into DCF
custody for well over a year, eventually reunifying her with her own mother. So now,
thirteen years later, I was seeking to take
the infant child of the same mother away
from her for neglect, despite this mother
being the recipient of all types of counseling and services when she was once a
young girl in DCF custody.
It wasn’t until I attended the recent
“Shield Our Children from Harm Professional Conference—Understanding Childhood Trauma,” presented by the Children’s
Hospital at Dartmouth that I began to rethink my original question: can we really
make a difference with the child impacted
by trauma when, most likely, his or her parents were also children affected by trauma?
Do we first need to understand how trauma actually changes us before we can truly
make a difference?
During the conference, keynote speaker David Lisak, PhD, from Placitas, New
Mexico, addressed this very topic of the
“Neurobiology of Trauma” and gave an
overview of the critical brain structures in
the human fear system and how trauma
impacts the brain. In brief summary, the
amygdala is the orienting portion of the
brain where there exists precursors to a potential harm. The cortex is the part of the
brain where hundreds of millions of neurons capable of learning exist. It is this part
of the brain that develops so dramatically
after birth through early childhood, when
an infant begins his or her journey of learning movement, speech and language, all of
which affect neural connections in the corwww.vtbar.org
tex. Finally, the sensory thalamus is the part
of the brain where all the senses exist, with
the exception of smell.
Interestingly, trauma does not tend to
exist in the cortex of the brain, but is often
found in the sensory thalamus. This made a
lot of sense when I thought about how often a young victim of abuse appears shut
down, unable to speak about his or her trauma—who caused it and what happened—
but a certain sound, or visual image or sensory touch may provoke unexpected reactions of anger, opposition, or inattention in
the same child. It is critical that professionals working with children who have experienced trauma correctly identify these unexpected reactions as clues of trauma rather
than misdiagnosing them as problems such
as attention deficit disorder.
When a young child experiences trauma, there is an actual change in the development of his or her brain. The brain
reacts to stress and trauma by triggering a release of four chemicals that flood
the brain: (1) catecholamine, which starts
the “fight” or “flight” response; (2) cortisol, which has a direct effect on metabolism, increasing supplies of circulating glucose and converting body protein to sugar to give us energy to respond; (3) opiates, which help the body deal with pain;
and (4) oxytocin, which increases positive
feelings.1 Chronic elevations of these hormones prompt the brain to adapt, resulting in emotional numbing and hyperarousal.2 Children who experience trauma physically have a reduced capacity to return to
a baseline of a calm state, thus resulting in
children who are hypersensitive to threats
of fear and who are constantly monitoring
their environment for cues of danger. In essence, childhood trauma results in dysregulation, where children don’t experience
fear but are coping with terror, and don’t
experience anger but are coping with rage,
because the frontal cortex, where impulse
control is learned, has been altered by the
trauma experience.
So if we can und