Neurotraumatized
Finding Language for a Lived Experience
Photo by Cristina Gottardi on Unsplash
Most days, I feel like I fail at fitting neatly into most categories of I understand what it means to be human. I’ve been told innumerable times that my brain works differently than most folks. That “most folks” includes friends and acquaintances living with ADHD and autism.
The Elephant
The behavioral and emotional implications of chronic childhood experiences of caregiver misconnections and many medically diagnosed mental health disorders (particularly depression, anxiety, ADHD, and Autism Spectrum Disorder) have an absurd amount of overlap. Complicating matters is that the social expectations of children experiencing ADHD and autism often lead to those children experiencing trauma.
My path to a more embodied and ensouled life has been long and arduous. It’s included more than a decade of working with mental health professionals without a trauma-focused lens. It wasn’t until I sat with a teacher who listened to my early childhood experiences and then kept our conversation focused on my experiences that my path into my humanity became clear enough to walk.
The Role of Human Connection in Development
The things we experience in our formative years create the conditions from which our storytelling souls craft our guiding truths.
Attachment theory suggests that when our primary caregivers are able to connect and repeatedly guide our systems into a sense of safety, our guiding truths take root in soil that fuels beliefs that we will be OK and the world is generally safe. Folks with connective skilled support systems where the caregivers can meet most of their needs well enough are more likely to experience fulfilling, connective relationships as adults.
When our primary caregivers are unable to connect with our systems in a way that leads to safety, our guiding truths take root in soil that fuels beliefs that we are solely responsible for keeping ourselves alive and the world is always unsafe.
This misconnection can have many causes. Abuse, addiction, and separation represent the more easily identified factors in shaky connections between a caregiver and a child. Less widely discussed in the literature are temperament mismatches, where the caregiver provides support that, for whatever reason, fails to satisfy the child’s needs.
Our primary emotional needs as infants and young children are affirmation, affection, attention, and acceptance. When the majority of our connections to our caregivers don’t allow for those emotional needs to be met, we also start to fear that our basic survival needs will not be met.
As adults, this leap from not having my emotional needs met to not being able to survive may seem simplistic or drastic. Today, many of us know how and why things were the way they were. When we were little kids, our brains hadn’t developed enough to see from a perspective outside of what we directly experience.
As such, repetitive experiencing of not getting our needs met leads us to live and grow in survival mode. In adding a belief that we’re ultimately responsible for our survival to the project of developing into adults, we often end up living as adults with the daily experiences of living with developmental trauma.
Developmental Trauma’s Neurobiological Changes
The long-term neurobiological effects of developmental trauma have been shown to include the following:
Increased difficulties making decisions.
Deficits in long-term memory storage and spatial navigation due to smaller than average hippocampus.
Easily activated threat response system due to an enlarged amygdala.
Increased challenges with sensory processing due to an impaired thalamus.
Impaired executive functioning due to reduced prefrontal cortex and hippocampus neural capacity.
Misconnection Informed Internal Guiding Truths
When you combine long-term exposure to living in a survival state with a young child’s perspective of the world, which is defined by who they are and what they do, it makes sense that the internal guiding truths differ from those folks who experienced more connected childhoods. Developmental trauma spawns a multiplicity of challenging guiding truths. Four of the most common ones I’ve seen are:
I am responsible for my survival and if I’m not connected to anyone, I’ll die are flip sides of a common guiding truth for folks who spent much of their childhood concerned with how they made it until tomorrow. On the one hand, carrying the sole responsibility for our survival leads to hyper-independence — often cutting ourselves off from connecting to supportive folks. On the other hand, our impulse to connect highlights the relationships we identify as critical to survival, and we do everything we can to keep those relationships — often denying or adopting harmful behaviors to maintain a connection.
I am not enough and I am unworthy are variations of the story we tell ourselves to explain why our caregivers aren’t meeting our needs. The long-term implications of these stories vary from person to person. My responses have included: shapeshifting to match the context, avoiding people and groups because I know I won’t be accepted, and habitual over-extending of my time and energy to meet the needs/desires of others in an attempt to earn my place.
Effects of Neurobiological Changes and Misconnection Informed Internal Guiding Truths
The footprint each of these effects leave on our life varies from person to person. Those variations include the context in which the effects are most pointed, the frequency at which they impact our experience, and the intensity we experience these effects. A non-inclusive list follows:
Challenges with impulse control.
Heightened responses to emotional situations.
Avoiding distressing situations.
Messiness.
Losing stuff a lot.
Random physical moments to self-soothe.
Becoming overwhelmed by too many stimuli.
Memory issues.
Hyper-independence.
Clinginess.
Social avoidance.
Fixating on what others need/want.
Inability to start/finish projects.
Jumping from task to task to keep folks satisfied.
Shapeshifting.
Black and white thinking.
Disappearing from social groups for long periods to recover.
In reviewing these neurobiological changes and misconnection-informed internal guiding truths during my trauma recovery coaching training, I was struck by how much these symptoms overlap and interconnect with many of the most common mental health disorders.
Because of when developmental trauma happens, the effects get baked into how we understand and walk in the world. There are pieces and parts we can shift and change. And the amount of time and effort that goes into making each shift is unknowable.
So, folks like me are stuck with brains that work differently and no short-hand for describing their lived experience.
My lived experience includes obvious hyper-independence combined with internalized demands for shapeshifting and accommodation, a well-disguised lack of impulse control, a rigid emotional regulation system, chronic social avoidance, and messiness.
In talking to folks, I know that for those who experienced supportive childhoods, many of these things pop up occasionally. And they’re not regular occurrences. Disqualifying me from describing myself as ‘normal.’
In the age of the proliferation of ADHD and Autism explainers on social media, it’s no wonder I end up asking myself if I have either. I don’t. Because while regular, when my system is sufficiently supported with nourishment, connection, and rest, most of the behaviors indicative of ADHD or Autism decrease to rates comparable to those without developmental trauma.
Since ‘all the stuff’ has long proven to be an insufficient description of my quirks, the word I used to describe my neurological differences is neurotraumatized.
Neurotraumatized
A portmanteau of neurological and traumatized, neurotraumatized indicates someone experiencing neurological differences in a person’s brain likely caused by trauma, most often developmental trauma.
Neurotraumatized is intended to be a non-medical umbrella term to acknowledge that those of us who experienced extended periods of misconnection in childhood now understand and experience the world differently than folks with connective support systems. These differences include changes to our neurobiology and the creation of internal guiding truths.
This bit of word smashing acknowledges that I walk through the world differently than most and the cause of those differences.
Living Recovery
For those of us in the process of recovering from neuro-traumatization, the long-term impacts can be mitigated and shifted in ways that allow us to live more embodied and ensouled lives. Because the damage caused by missed connections first occurred when we were young, it can feel impossible to change. In fact, we may not want to change all of them.
And it’s possible through our experiences with folks who hold space safely with curiosity and compassion. We can identify and shift the pieces of how we walk in the world that were shaped by missed connections so they’re less reactive and more aligned with how we want to walk in the world.
