For the human brain, the most important information for successful development is conveyed by the social rather than the physical environment. The baby brain must begin participating effectively in the process of social information transmission that offers entry into the culture.
—Don Tucker
Children learn to regulate their behavior by anticipating their caregivers’ responses to them. This interaction allows them to construct what Bowlby called internal working models. A child’s internal working models are defined by the internalization of the affective and cognitive characteristics of their primary relationships. Because early experiences occur in the context of a developing brain, neural development and social interaction are inextricably intertwined.
Early patterns of attachment inform the quality information processing throughout life. Secure infants learn to trust both what they feel and how they understand the world. This allows them to rely both on their emotions and thoughts to react to any given situation. Their experience of feeling understood provides them with the confidence that they are capable of making good things happen, and that if they do not know how to deal with difficult situations they can find people who can help them find a solution. Secure children learn a complex vocabulary to describe their emotions (such as love, hate, pleasure, disgust and aanger). This allows them to communicate how they feel and to formulate efficient response strategies. They spend more time describing physiological states such as hunger and thirst, as well as emotional states than maltreated children.
Under most conditions parents are able to help their distressed children restore a sense of safety and control: the security of the attachment bond mitigates against trauma-induced terror. When trauma occurs in the presence of a supportive, if helpless, caregiver, the child’s response is likely to mimic that of the parent—the more disorganized the parent, the more disorganized the child. However, if the distress is overwhelming, or when the caregivers themselves are the source of the distress, children are unable to modulate their arousal. This causes a breakdown in their capacity to process, integrate and categorize what is happening: at the core of traumatic stress is a breakdown in the capacity to regulate internal states. If the distress does not let up, children dissociate: the relevant sensations, affects and cognitions cannot be associated (they are dissociated into sensory fragments) and, as a result, these children cannot comprehend what is happening or devise and execute appropriate plans of action.
When caregivers are emotionally absent, inconsistent, frustrating, violent, intrusive, or neglectful, children are liable to become intolerably distressed and unlikely to develop a sense that the external environment is able to provide relief. Thus, children with insecure attachment patterns have trouble relying on others to help them, while, unable to regulate their emotional states by themselves. As a result, they experience excessive anxiety, anger and longings to be taken care of. These feelings may become so extreme as to precipitate dissociative states or self-defeating aggression. Spaced out and hyperaroused children learn to ignore either what they feel (their emotions), or what they perceive (their cognitions).
When children are unable to achieve a sense of control and stability they become helpless. If they are unable to grasp what is going on and unable do anything about it to change it, they go immediately from (fearful) stimulus to (fight/flight/freeze) response without being able to learn from the experience. Subsequently, when exposed to reminders of trauma (sensations, physiological states, images, sounds, situations) they tend to behave as if they were traumatized all over again—as a catastrophe. Many problems of traumatized children can be understood as efforts to minimize objective threat and to regulate their emotional distress. Unless caregivers understand the nature of such re-enactments they are liable to label the child as “oppositional,” “rebellious,” “unmotivated,” and “antisocial.”
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