how forgotten traumas from infancy can have an impact on us as adults.
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They can make you subconsciously avoid situations, types of people, physical places, social settings, etc. etc. that are close to the situation you were traumatized in.
Something that reminds you of the thing that traumatized you, can trigger a flashback or bout of dissociation. Since the memory of the traumatic situation is encapsulated, being reminded of it sends your body in the same huge state of stress and panic you experienced back then. Normal memories are something you can put to words and tell others while being aware of it being a part of the past, but bumping into an encapsulated memory feels like it’s happening again and is in a way beyond words.
Babies don’t form specific memories that they can recall later in life, but they are learning basically 100% of the time they are awake. If they have a traumatic experience, there will be an association made in their brain, and when they experience something similar to the trauma later in life, the backbrain will send the “hey, this is bad!” signal.
I have a dissociative identity disorder. I have a number of traumas that are repressed and I have limited or no knowledge of them. They seep through to your everyday thinking, without you becoming aware of them.
For instance, I get anxiety when I walk beside a road with fast moving traffic. I never understood why, but I worked with it. I’d avoid large roads and wear hoodies with headphones so I couldn’t see or hear the traffic.
In my mid-thirties, I had a series of terrible, repeating nightmares of being stuck in a car doing high speeds. Turns out I’d been in a high speed car chase whilst younger: the driver was intoxicated. It was a situation where I had no control – a recurring theme of my traumas.
Whether you know it or not, your brain’s perceived traumas will effect your subconscious in a variety of different ways. I have so many of these little traumas that my mind is unable to keep them all bundled up: they leak out.
When I encounter an unexpected trigger, my brain deletes the memory of it and I am physically removed from the situation, by a protective brain function that we all have (mine is just trigger happy). I simply wake up somewhere else, having never re-experienced the trauma my brain is avoiding.
Faulty house foundations will require much more maintenance and work over the years… That’s the same with our brain and the way it handles traumas in our childhood.
We also have to remember that a “new/young” brain doesn’t handle things like an adult and is still under construction.
There’s enough evidence to say the cry it out parenting technique is detrimental. Babies left to cry through their problem have higher levels of cortisol in their blood (stress horomone). This seems to contribute to adults having greater (more stressful) responses as an adult. Cortisol as an adult makes you fat / and turns you hair gray, stuff like that.
Stress shapes how your brain handles any given situation. As humans, we are reinforcement leaners.
If you had a traumatic experience around say, intimacy at a young age, your brain will quite literally rearrange your personality to lower the likelihood of that stressful situation happening again. If that means avoiding or being afraid of intimacy, so be it. Your brain doesn’t know what you actually want socially. It’s just responding to stimulus. If you have repeated trauma around intimacy, then by the time you’re an adult, you’re probably in a situation where you just feel really uncomfortable being intimate, or you just straight up go out of your way to avoid it.
From your brains perspective, it’s done a great job! It’s avoiding potential stressful situations. But in the real world, you are suffering because it’s more difficult to maintain a relationship like this, which makes you depressed.
The thing is, these brain shaping events are happening all the time. They stack on top of each other. It’s how people can have such destructive personalities. Because those personalities have been reinforced over the course of their entire life by one event or another.
It’s worth reading the CDC study on ACEs or adverse childhood experiences. That shows in detail how childhood trauma affects adults. The Nadine Burke Harris TED talk is worth a watch too
An infant’s brain is forming constant connections and associations. A traumatic infancy, even if they don’t remember the particulars of the events, wires their brain in anticipation of a lifetime of constant danger. For modern society, an ideal brain is one that thinks things through deliberately and makes sound long-term decisions, rather than going straight to bludgeoning their problems to death with a club.
Babies and humans are one big chemistry set. A babies chemistry set is put into action by mothers pheromones. Keep a baby from human contact and watch it’s chemistry set fail to “start”. ask couples how many times they have arguements while a woman is on her period, and it may have nothing to do with her being grumpy.. he’s just as grumpy because his testosterone is being raised as her progesterone levels are raising.
It can happen even in the womb. Studies have shown that children of mothers who undergo stress while pregnant (e.g., car crash) are way more prone to anxiety and depression in later life
E. G. Markham, J. A., & Koenig, J. I. (2011). Prenatal stress: role in psychotic and depressive diseases. Psychopharmacology, 214, 89-106.
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