with as basic science and as much analogies as possible, please explain why does childhood trauma carries on into adulthood and even at a later age, even when it’s not happening anymore later on.

Question

Why can’t the brain simply forget about it since it’s from a long time ago and still end up having some form of mental health issues later on in life because of it?

In: 39

Answer 1

So when you’re a kid, your job is to experiment. Think about how toddlers live to put things in their mouths, or how kids are always asking what’s that or poking at new things. You want to try new things and find out what happens so that as an adult you have that info and can follow those patterns. Childhood is for trying, adulthood is for doing. It’s more efficient to follow those paths you explored as a kid and do the same things, rather than make things. That’s because the younger you are, the more moldable your brain is. Each pattern in your brain gets really engrained — think about what’s easier, walking on a paced sidewalk, or walking through the woods with no paths. When you’re doing something you’ve done since childhood, your neurons are following that clear paved path. When you try to change ingrained paths, you are making a new path through the woods, and it’s harder to follow or find. This works fine, unless the patterns you make as a child are based on warped info (ie, shouting and hitting are the only ways to get attention — no one cares about me — other people aren’t stable or safe.) Your brain as a child is trying to survive, and if the skills you need for survival demand certain patterns, they will become very ingrained.

You know how AI is dependent on the information you feed it? Ie, if you only fed it pictures of cats and dragons, that’s the only animals it would be able to identify. It doesn’t “know” that dragons aren’t “real,” or that dogs exist, so it’s not going to do a good job identifying other things. When you are emotional, your brain goes back to that childhood storehouse of information. If you grew up in a traumatizing situation, your storehouse of info is warped, so when you get into situations as an adult, you see something normal (like an airplane), but you can only identify it as something in your childhood experiences (ie a dragon). If you trained an AI on only images and words of war, it wouldn’t be able to properly interpret or make predictions about a peaceful situation. Growing up with a lot of adverse childhood experiences trains your brain to be in a war zone, but not to be a peaceful and healthy adult.