Vermont Bar Journal, Vol. 40, No. 2 Summer 2014, Vol. 40, No. 2 | Page 45

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