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Experiencing trauma at an early age can rewire your brain.

Experiencing some stressful situations as a child, like going to school for the first time or going to their first birthday party alone and meeting new people, is often good for developing coping skills to deal with difficult emotions. However, as a child experiences toxic stress or trauma that they cannot process effectively, the trauma can have adverse impacts on not only mental health but also on the wiring in the brain.

Harvard University reports prolonged toxic stress can send the parts of the brain that deal with fear, anxiety and impulse into overdrive. The main culprit is the stress hormone, a chemical known as cortisol. For young people whose brains are still developing, the release of cortisol overburdens the channels that regulate stress responses in the brain. The channels become hyper-adaptive making children more sensitive to stress as the age.

Bonding is how we attach to another person. It is the glue of relationships. Healthy bonding takes place through high trust, love, play, nurturing, healthy touch and hugging, and shared activities.

Bonding can, however, be achieved through toxic bonding or ‘trauma bonding’. This refers to emotional attachment to another person/family member through repeated toxic or abusive patterns There is usually a highly seductive reward that keeps a person loyal and staying bonded despite abusive toxic behaviours.

Psychotherapy may use exposure therapies to help with desensitization. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) helps challenge negative thoughts and behavior patterns; EMDR or Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing uses the strategies of cognitive reprocessing that allows the survivor to reprocess memories and events. Body focused therapies use the body to process trauma. These include Somatic Experiencing and Sensorimotor Psychotherapy. Hypnosis, mindfulness, trauma-sensitive yoga, art therapy, and play therapy can also help. And last, many people use medications – primarily antidepressants and anti-anxiety medications – which can make symptoms less intense and more manageable while working through the healing process.

If you or I dropped a computer from a seven- or eight-foot height, we might find that the trauma of that impact may affect the effectiveness of how the computer processes and remembers. Our brain is like a super computer. If it experiences trauma, either from a blunt head trauma or an emotionally charged and unexpected event, it does affect the functioning of the brain. In actual fact, the brain begins to regress to very simple methods of recording signals and encoding traumatic memories as pictures and bodily sensations. This process is referred to as dissociation. This is splitting the memories and experiences into fragments. These split off past pieces of memories, smells, and feelings that become embedded like shrapnel in the mind and body, blocking the natural processes of present-day events. The memory and events do not get processed and stored in the correct files. This affects concentration, memory, processing and impulse control.

Trauma can cause our memory processing system to malfunction: the declarative explicit memory system fails, so the traumatic memory isn’t logged and stored properly.