Russia The Conversation
*Howard Allan Stern is a well-known American personality who contributed to television and radio and worked as a producer, actor, author and photographer.
With society's awareness of the importance of mental health, combined with advances in neuroscience and psychiatry, much-needed attention to trauma and childhood trauma is slowly being created.
In a recent interview with Anderson Cooper and his latest book published on May 14, Howard Stern discussed childhood difficulties and trauma. Both men also discussed their exposure to parental stress and how their reactions as children shape their behavior as adults.
As a trauma psychiatrist, I'm glad that such famous people are willing to talk about their experiences, because it can help us raise public awareness and reduce stigma.
Childhood: Learning about the world and yourself
A child's brain is a sponge in terms of learning how the world works and who they are. We humans have evolutionary advantage in having the ability to trust the elders and learn from them about the world. This leads to the accumulation of knowledge and protection against difficulties, which only those who have experienced them know about. A child acquires patterns of perception of the world, relating to others and to himself by learning from adults.
But when the initial environment is extremely difficult and unfriendly, then the child's perception of the world can be formed around violence, fear, insecurity and sadness. The brain of those adults who experience childhood hardship, or even poverty, is more prone to spot danger, the cost of the villa is the disregard of positive or neutral experiences.
Some who experience difficulties during childhood must mature more quickly and become caregivers or provide emotional support to siblings or parents at an age when they themselves need to be cared for. They may end up carrying those patterns of relating to others throughout their adult lives.
The traumatized child may also perceive himself as unlovable, guilty, or bad. An unconscious child's brain might think: If they're doing this to me, there's something wrong with me, I deserve it.
The small world that people experience during childhood shapes the way they perceive the big world, the people and individuals we are as adults. This will shape how the world reacts to us based on our actions.
A world filled with trauma
Childhood trauma is more common than you might think: Up to two-thirds of children experience it at least one traumatic event. These include serious medical illness or injury, directly experiencing or witnessing violence or sexual abuse, neglect, harassment, and the newest addition to the list: mass shootings.
Unfortunately, when it comes to domestic violence and sexual abuse, it often is chronic, repeated exposure, which can be even more harmful to the child's mental and physical health and behavior.
Ongoing civil wars and refugee crises also expose millions of children at extremely high levels of trauma, which are often ignored.
How do children react to trauma?
To understand a child's response to trauma, their developmental level of emotional and cognitive maturity must be taken into account. Most of the time, confusion is the reaction: The child does not know what is happening or why it is happening.
I often hear from my adult patients that when they were molested by a relative like a five-year-old, they didn't know what was going on or why a supposedly trusted caregiver was doing it to them. Fear and terror, accompanied by a feeling of lack of control, are often "friends" of this confusion.
There is also guilt, as the child may believe they did something wrong to deserve the abuse, and often abusive adults claim they did something wrong to deserve the abuse. Unfortunately when it comes to sexual abuse, sometimes when parents are told about it, they choose to deny or ignore the incident. This further exacerbates feelings of guilt and helplessness. When trauma is happening to the parents, such as the frequent abuse of a mother by an alcoholic father, children are "stuck" between two people who need to be loved. They may be angry at the father for his violence, or angry at the mother for not being able to protect herself and themselves.
They may try to grow up in order to protect the mother from the father or from her sadness. They may feel guilty for not being able to save him, or having to raise their siblings when their parents fail to do so. They learn that the world is a wild and unsafe place, a place where someone is abused and someone is the abuser.
Signs of childhood trauma in adults
Scientific research is ever-evolving that suggests the long-term impact of childhood trauma: not only can such experiences vary the way one perceives and reacts to the world, but they also have lifelong consequences academically, professionally, health mental and physical. These children may have lower intelligence and school performance, higher anxiety level, depression, substance use or physical problems involving autoimmune diseases.
Adults who have experienced childhood trauma are more likely to develop it post-traumatic stress disorder when exposed to new traumas and show higher levels of anxiety, depression, substance use and WHY. Physical health consequences in adults who have experienced childhood trauma include but are not limited to obesity, chronic fatigue, cardiovascular diseases, autoimmune diseases, metabolic syndrome and pain.
Not everyone exposed to adversity in childhood is permanently damaged, and the latest research on childhood damage also includes the anticipation of risks and the ability to bounce back (resilience).
For example, there is genetic variations which can make a person more or less vulnerable to the impact of trauma. I often see those who were lucky enough to turn their trauma into a meaningful cause, with the support of a good mentor, therapist, grandparent or positive experiences grow and develop more power.
This, however, does not mean that those with long-term effects were weaker or tried less. There are a number of genetic, neurobiological, family, support, socio-economic and environmental factors, in addition to the severity and how chronic the trauma is, that can lead to the breaking of the strongest people when exposed to trauma.
How to cope with childhood trauma
We as a society can do a lot: reduce poverty, educate and empower less privileged parents with the support they need to raise their children (although child trauma also happens in privileged families); take children's reports of abuse seriously, remove the source of the trauma or remove the child from the traumatic environment; psychotherapy. When needed, medication can help.
Good luck to all of us, the latest developments in neuroscience, psychotherapy and psychiatry have provided us with powerful tools to prevent negative impact on the child and greatly reduce negative impact on adults, if we choose to use them.
*Citizens Channel /EN/
