Children growing up in Complex Trauma feel that they can never relax and constantly feel on guard.

If a child is in a situation where they are in trauma up to the age of five, it affects the development of the brain. The thinking and emotional part of the brain has to develop – as opposed to the brain stem which controls breathing, heartbeats etc, and it develops based on your circumstances and experiences. If you grow up in trauma the fight, flight response – fear – becomes overdeveloped, and explains why you can go from nought to a hundred in reaction to circumstances.

We have two parts to the brain – left and right which is important to understand in trauma. The right brain costs of emotional memory – your non-verbal world. The left brain in the explicit memory. In trauma, two things have happened – the right brain – emotions have overdeveloped and the left brain has probably not developed. Hence traumatised people have difficulty in remembering parts of their childhood.

In the development from ages zero to five the brain is in overdrive developing A) motor skills and speech, B) Identity and C) Relationships. The brain is very busy developing and complex trauma interferes with this development. The brain is busy filtering information and deciding what to retain and what to forget. In a traumatised brain its learning to pay attention to fear, danger and always be on alert.

Complex Trauma means that you tend to be more influenced by your emotions rather than by reason. Trauma needs to be dealt with otherwise your emotions will always override thinking and logic.

Complex trauma really means living in stress and two chemicals are released, cortisol and adrenaline resulting in toxic stress which never goes away. The brain is not meant to handle to the constant release of cortisol and results in lack of concentration, learning and thinking in depth. Typical, symptoms of ADHD.

This also causes chemical imbalances in life later on and results in depression and anxiety. It also affects you physically by way of high blood pressure, diabetes, thyroid, heart disease, compromised immune system. All because of complex trauma. Complex Trauma can affect you for the rest of your life and in order to maintain good long term mental health, it needs to be dealt with.

Your brain can always develop more and you can get healthy. Please phone me if you think that you need help.