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

During childhood, your brain is growing a lot. As it grows, it is making a lot of connections and establishing baseline behaviors that will continue throughout your life. This obviously applies to commonly used physically and mental skills, but also to who we think and feel in most situations. If one learns that speaking and drawing attention to one’s self will result in getting a beating, even once they are out of that situation, the learned behaviour of not speaking up from yourself still continues into adulthood. Or, if one learns that doing things that a child shouldn’t be doing is the only way to get any kind of attention from the people in your life, that behaviour will continue into adulthood as well. It’s also important to understand that these behaviours and situation appraisals are not things that these people are fully aware of or in control over. A lot of what modern therapy is about is helping people to learn how to identify these kinds of behaviours and develop new ways of action in those kinds of situations.