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When infant-children do not receive what they need NOT TO CHANGE their development in response to early trauma, well, their body-brain-mind-self has no choice but to change!  These changes then have no choice but to appear as altered patterns of being in the world, including patterns of verbal exchange.

This post concerns a posted comment and my reply to it.

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COMMENT FROM:  Randy Webb, aztraumatherapy.com —  2010/01/08 at 6:58am

TO:  *Chapter 3a Symptoms

“I’ve noticed anecdotally that my clients who have reported experiences of trauma seem more likely than others who have not reported trauma to indicate “black and white” and relatively more “rigid” views of religion, definitions of happiness or success and other people’s behavior. Could these be indications of relatively less CNS plasticity and an indication of something getting “frozen” instead of “completing” some cycle of recovery in response to trauma?”

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REPLY:

Your comment and question relate in my mind to my December 28, 2009 post:

+ATTACHMENT – HOW WE ARE WHO WE ARE

While the kinds of thinking you are describing can be reflected in cultural attitudes in the form of biases, prejudices and their resulting stereotypical thinking, because you are specifically noticing them in relation to traumatized people I will suggest that the nature and quality of early attachment experiences might lie at the root of what you are describing.

We are not used to thinking about what people say as being representations of the patterns of communication that exist on the molecular, physiological level of the body, they are.  Our earliest infant-child interactions with our mothering caregivers create us at these fundamental levels, and determine how our genetic potential manifests itself.

These interactions, which signal to our growing and developing body-brain-mind-self the condition of the world as being mostly either safe, secure and benevolent, or as being mostly unsafe, insecure and malevolent, will determine how we receive and process all information from the world around us.  The patterns of signaling communication in our body will eventually show itself both in the quality and nature of the ‘trauma dramas’ we experience for the rest of our lives, and in the patterns of spoken and unspoken communications – including our thoughts – that we use to describe ourselves in relation to the world we live in for the rest of our lives.

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The connection you are making in your own thoughts that led to your question are fascinating:   “Could these be indications of relatively less CNS plasticity and an indication of something getting “frozen” instead of “completing” some cycle of recovery in response to trauma?”

If we think about communication patterns in terms of how they were influenced and formed during our earliest developmental stages, CNS plasticity as it connects to how our immune system interpreted the quality of our experience and then signaled all our developmental pathways, yes, you are completely correct.

It becomes essential that we think about people’s traumas in terms of ‘age at first onset’ (see link to 12-28-09 post above).  People, who were formed without severe relational traumas in infancy, have a completely different CNS (including the brain and Autonomic Nervous System (ANS) homeostatic set point.  They formed a ‘trauma centered’ body-brain-mind-self from the beginning which limited and changed the range of possible ‘free choice’ options for response they will have in and to the world.  Their body has taken over for them far more aspects of ‘being alive’ that non-early traumatized people’s body do.

When people seem to be struggling with recovery from adult trauma, the most important first step we need to take in order to most help them is to determine the quality and nature of their earliest attachments during their early growth and development stages.  While birth to age one is the most critical stage, these critical windows of development continue certainly through age 4-6 while a person’s Theory of Mind is forming.

We can listen to adults talk about their lives and begin to hear disturbances in their ability to tell a ‘coherent life story’.  Unresolved trauma will show itself in disturbances in our patterns of processing information on all levels within the body.  The earlier the traumas happened, most certainly before the age of 2, the more an appropriate, flexible, and coherent ability to converse verbally about one’s experiences in their life will be absent.

If early trauma did not build a person’s body-brain-mind-self, the ‘frozen’ interruptions in signaling communication – as they appear as you say in decreased CNS (body) plasticity – can hopefully be overcome.  The more usual approaches to resolving these traumas will allow the ‘lessons’ from the trauma to begin to unfold and take hold – as the hold the unresolved trauma has on a person will lessen its hold over them.

HOWEVER, if trauma built a person’s body-brain-mind-self from the beginning there is no ‘recovery’ to be made in anything like the normal sense of this process.  Because our earliest experiences of attachment form us, these patterns (such as you are describing) are hard wired into us on all levels, including our CNS-brain.

People who suffered what I refer to as Trauma Altered Development are evolutionarily altered people, built in, by and for a malevolent world of deprivation and trauma.  All their communication signals have been adjusted on their most fundamental levels in response to this kind of a world.  All later traumas they may experience will be processed by their trauma altered body-brain.  These people are most likely not to be able to respond with the ‘plasticity’ or resiliency that non-early traumatized people can.

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If infant development has been sent of course through early relational deprivation and trauma, the later stages leading to a plastic, flexible, adaptive, resilient and accurate Theory of Mind will not occur correctly.  Early trauma will show itself in patterns of behavior for these survivors, including thought and verbal communication, for the rest of their lives.

Treating trauma effectively in these survivors requires a detailed understanding about how trauma altered all aspects of their development from their beginning.  They have altered patterns of attachment to the world, to their own self, and to everyone else.  These physiological alterations have been permanently set into place.  They receive different information from the world in different ways and process this information differently.

I would say that while healing trauma in these survivors IS POSSIBLE, ‘recovery’ in the usual sense is not.  The trauma-changed body has no pre-trauma state to return to.  Their healing can utilize all the resilient powers of plasticity contained in the trauma changed body-brain, but these powers have to operate according to how a survivor was formed from their start.  Recognizing early trauma changes through the attachment signaling patterns they create is the first step.

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