Childhood Trauma Changes the Brain

Consequences can be hard to overcome, but there is hope

Photo by Zhivko Minkov on Unsplash

The following is excerpted from my book The Minds of Mass Killers: Understanding and Interrupting the Pathway to Violence (McFarland, 2021). Available through all booksellers.

How the brain adapts to trauma

The fight/flight response is the nervous system’s natural response to a perceived threat and results in the flooding of the stress hormones adrenaline and cortisol that affect the entire body. This system is designed to help us survive danger in the short term. However, when the threat is sustained, the developing brain makes permanent adaptations, which continue long past the traumatic events.

Children who experience abuse or neglect experience changes in three different brain systems: the threat system, the reward system, and the memory system.

• Changes in the threat system result in a heightened threat sensitivity called hypervigilance. Hypervigilance can cause one to misinterpret everyday events as threatening as well as misperceive others’ intentions. A person with increased sensitivity to threats may be prone to paranoid thinking.
• Neglect from caregivers causes changes in the brain’s reward system, which is what motivates our behavior. Over time, the brain responds less actively to positive…