The link between Developmental Trauma and Complex PTSD

Psychoanalyst Alfred Adler once said, “A lucky person's lifetime is cured by childhood, while an unlucky person's lifetime is spent curing childhood.”

When a person’s lifetime is spent curing childhood, they may have experienced childhood trauma, or developmental trauma, which is often a result of multiple exposures to adverse childhood experiences, for a prolonged period, such as physical, emotional, or sexual abuse, neglect, abandonment or witnessing domestic violence or death. In the early years of life, children need a safe and secure environment and loving and attentive caregivers for their brains to grow in a healthy and normal sequence. 

 Neuroscience explains that the lower part of the brain is responsible for functions related to ensuring survival and responding to stress; and the upper part of the brain is responsible for executive functions, such as making sense of our experiences, language, regulating our thoughts, emotions and behaviours, reasoning, and decision-making, amongst many others. When a child is repeatedly exposed to distressing or traumatic situations, then the stress response in the lower part of the brain is repeatedly activated, and the normal sequential neurobiological development in the upper part of the brain is disrupted. 

Therefore, children who experience developmental trauma are at risk of significant impairment in the following areas:

• cognitive (eg confusion, dissociation, derealisation, depersonalisation)
• emotional (eg anxiety, depression, fear, panic, anger)
• behavioural (eg re-enactment, aggression, self-harm)
• physical (eg learning difficulties, speech delay)
• relational (eg clinging, distrustful, compliant, difficulty forming relationships)
  

  Watch this video which explains the link between childhood trauma and the brain
  

Developmental trauma disorder (DTD)

Research tells us that most children who experience developmental trauma(s) in the early years do not meet the criteria for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and often get misdiagnosed with other mental health or behavioural disorders. Similarly, in adulthood, childhood trauma survivors who have significant difficulties to cope with their symptoms often get a diagnosis of personality disorders, not recognised within the context of interpersonal trauma. Furthermore, they may experience a range of physical health issues, including severe obesity, diabetes, heart disease, cancer, stroke, and COPD.

However, in recent years, there has been an increasing level of awareness of the long-lasting detrimental effects of adverse childhood experiences on the developing child, and on the adult self later in life. Due to an accumulating body of research linking developmental trauma to mental health and physical health problems throughout life, child psychologists and experts now recognise that formalising disorders, as developmental trauma disorder (DTD) or chronic PTSD, are more helpful because these account for the negative impacts of childhood traumas and therefore facilitate better treatment. 

The diagnosis of DTD is specific to children; however, children who do not get a diagnosis or are misdiagnosed in the early years will often receive a complex PTSD diagnosis in adulthood, as it is now recognised by many experts that developmental trauma is the essence of CPTSD. Thus, understanding developmental trauma is important for understanding complex PTSD.

Watch this video to learn more about the impact of Adverse Childhood Experiences on the developing brain, body and behaviour

If you experienced childhood developmental trauma and think that you may have PTSD or CPTSD and would like to get psychological support, please do get in touch here.