Help your children develop emotional health

Children’s brains are both particularly vulnerable and particularly resilient. Vulnerability is evident in the fact that events that happen during the developmental years can have lifelong impact on thought, emotion, and behavior. Children are trapped within their homes and are often helpless in situations they encounter there and at school, camp, or in the community.

And yet, in some ways, kids are extraordinarily resilient. For example, in order to survive chronic, painful events, Hashem has allowed the brain to automatically compartmentalize data, filing extremely negative experiences in out-of-reach locations so that the “going-on-with-life” part of the child’s personality can continue to go to school, make friends,  and grow up to become a functional adult.

Functioning with Trauma

Extreme compartmentalization is called “dissociation.” All of us have some level of dissociation, revealed when we react intensely to a situation without consciously knowing why. Whenever we don’t understand our reactions, we’re experiencing a form of dissociation; the reason for our physical and emotional response is buried in a subconscious vault.

However, unlike the rest of us, survivors of childhood abuse tend to have intense levels of dissociation. In episodes that caused a child to feel combined terror and helplessness (like watching a sibling get beaten by one’s father) the hippocampus, the area of the brain responsible for preparing information for memory storage, is suppressed due to the chemistry of threat. Instead of recording a story in sequential order (“when my father saw the broken window, he grabbed my brother and…”) the child’s brain is left with memory fragments: the feeling of panic, glass on the floor, the sounds of shouting and crying.

These sensory memories can get triggered throughout life (e.g., when someone raises his voice or makes a particular movement) and reexperienced along with panic that “makes no sense,” causing the sufferer to feel crazy. Even when the story gets stored correctly, the brain often fails to process it to the very end — that is, to the place where safety is restored. Instead, the brain records it without an end point, so the feeling of being in danger is ever-present.

This can result in a neurological position of permanent on-guardedness. Many symptoms arise out of this state such as trouble sleeping, frequent nightmares, chronic irritability, panic attacks, anxiety, feeling numb, depression, emotional overwhelm, chronic pain, feelings of worthlessness and shame, hypervigilance, and mistrust.

People with these symptoms often adopt a range of coping mechanisms to deal with their off-balance body-minds, such as attempting to numb agitated feelings through addictions and compulsions, developing eating disorders, and engaging in self-harming activities.

Dissociation (the mental and emotional blocking off of traumatic experiences) also produces relationship consequences, the most intense of which will inevitably play out in our closest relationships (i.e., marriage and parenting). Those with high levels of dissociation often experience an acute difficulty with not being listened to or understood, a fear of being abandoned, a feeling of being unlovable, an inability to set boundaries, a feeling of mistrust that prevents full sharing, an intolerance to being touched, an inability to be apart, feelings of suffocation, an inability to tolerate the anger or even mild displeasure of the other person, a tendency to feeling rage when hurt, and many other symptoms.

Unfortunately, these symptoms can develop in the absence of actual familial abuse; they also arise in children parented by grownups who aren’t emotionally mature enough to parent, such as those who are highly anxious, phobic, addicted, depressed, shut down, withdrawn, or for any other reason, not steadily available, and attuned to their children.

In Our Power

Parents don’t set out to burden their children with an unhealthy nervous system and painful emotional and relationship processes guaranteed to make their entire lives hard. In order to help prevent the development of such symptoms, parents must be conscious of their impact.

We don’t have to beat our kids in order to damage them; we can just routinely engage in behaviors such as yelling instead of speaking normally, showing intense negative emotion and displeasure (drama) in everyday life, and failing to acknowledge and address our children’s feelings.

Simply continuing to study and implement healthy parenting strategies can go a very long way to helping our children be free and healthy. We don’t have total control over our children’s health, but there are things we can do to help or hinder their wellbeing.

(Originally featured in Family First, Issue 744)