To develop a self one must exercise choice and learn from the consequences of those choices; if the only thing you are taught is to comply, you have little way of knowing what you like and want.
Empathy underlies virtually everything that makes society work – like trust, altruism, collaboration, love, charity. Failure to empathize is a key part of most social problems – crime, violence, war, racism, child abuse, and inequity, to name just a few.
Surprisingly, it is often when wandering through the emotional carnage left by the worst of humankind that we find the best of humanity ad well.
The core lessons these children have taught me are relevant for us all. Because in order to understand trauma we need to understand memory. In order to appreciate how children heal we need to understand how they learn to love, how they cope with challenge, how stress affects them. And by recognizing the destructive impact that violence and threat can have on the capacity to love and work, we can come to better understand ourselves and to nurture the people in our lives, especially the children.
Negative emotions often make things even more memorable than positive ones because recalling things that are threatening – and avoiding those situations in the future if possible – is often critical to survival.
When you drive, for example, you rely automatically on your previous experiences with cars and roads; if you had to focus on every aspect of what your senses are taking in, you’d be overwhelmed and would probably crash. As you learn anything, in fact, your brain is constantly checking current experience against stored templates – essentially memory – of previous, similar situations and sensations, asking “Is this new?” and “Is this something I need to attend to?
Our conscious memory is full of gaps, of course, which is actually a good thing. Our brains filter out the ordinary and expected, which is utterly necessary to allow us to function. When you drive, for example, you rely automatically on your previous experiences with cars and roads; if you had to focus on every aspect of what your senses are taking in, you’d be overwhelmed and would probably crash.
As you learn anything, in fact, your brain is constantly checking current experience against stored templates – essentially memory – of previous, similar situations and sensations, asking “Is this new?” and “Is this something I need to attend to?
Across generations, wariness of new individuals, groups, and ideas was built into the circuits of the human brain’s alarm response because those who had this wariness were more likely to survive to reproduce. It was just safer to assume danger- and expect the worst- than to count on the kindness of strangers.
Social networking sites can link us to distant relatives and friends with whom we might otherwise lose touch. These contacts and the emotions they engage are real. And when online social networks or games add to face-to-face relationships – rather than substitute for them – they can improve our relatedness and compassion.
Although I do not mean to imply that all of these children will be severely “damaged” by these experiences, the most moderate estimates suggest that at any given time, more than eight million American children suffer from serious, diagnosable, trauma-related psychiatric problems. Millions more experience less serious but still distressing consequences.
We ignore familiar patterns in ordinary contexts, so much so that we forget large portions of our days, which are spent doing routine things like brushing our teeth or getting dressed.
In Sandy’s case, milk, once associated with nurturing and nutrition, now became the stuff that spilled from her throat, that her mother “refused” as she lay dead. Silverware was now no longer something used to eat your food, but rather something that killed and maimed and horrified. And doorbells – well, that was what had started the whole thing: the ringing of the doorbell had announced the arrival of the killer.
The fact that the brain develops sequentially – and also so rapidly in the first years of life – explains why extremely young children are at such great risk of suffering lasting effects of trauma: their brains are still developing. The same miraculous plasticity that allows young brains to quickly learn love and language, unfortunately, also makes them highly susceptible to negative experiences as well.
Human social life is built on this ability to “reflect” each other and respond to those reflections, with both positive and negative results. For example, if you are feeling great and go to work where your supervisor is in a vile mood, soon you will probably feel lousy, too. If a teacher becomes angry or frustrated, the children in her classroom may begin to misbehave, reflecting the powerful emotion being expressed by the teacher. To calm a frightened child, you must first calm yourself.
One of the few things I knew for sure by then about traumatized children was that they need predictability, routine, a sense of control and stable relationships with supportive people.
They prefer the certainty of misery to the misery of uncertainty.
Like people who learn a foreign language later in life, Virginia and Laura will never speak the language of love without an accent.
The risks for heart disease, stroke, depression, diabetes, asthma, and even many cancers are all affected by trauma-related changes in the stress response system. Empathy and connection affect physical – not just mental – wellness and health.
Through moderate, predictable challenges our stress response systems are activated moderately. This makes for a resilient, flexible stress response capacity. The stronger stress response system in the present is the one that has had moderate, patterned stress in the past.