Posted by Daisym on April 22, 2007, at 0:47:03
In reply to question about PTSD vrs. spliting *maybe trigger, posted by Happyflower on April 21, 2007, at 23:38:07
here is a little of what I know, if this helps at all:
PTSD is a collection of symptoms from a traumatic event. The event could have happened once or many times. A split is a dissociative event because the stress or pain in the moment is too much. The mind closes off in order to protect the psyche from a complete break. But the event is stored in a variety of places - body, brain, and gut. People who experience PTSD may or may not have hidden trauma. Most people are aware of the traumatic event they experienced and want to reprocess it over and over again. Splitting happens when you can't process it again. So splitting is a symptom of PTSD.
I think you are asking if a person can have PTSD from trauma caused when children are preverbal. And can this trauma cause splitting in an adult, without becoming conscious? The answer is yes. A stimulous that reactivates the trauma response can cause the cascade of cortisol that triggers the flight, fight or freeze response. The freeze usually looks like a dissociative event - splitting. It can be very upsetting to adults to know they are leaving and yet not know why. They feel the fear (the amygdala doing its job) but don't have a neo-cortex explanation to go with it.
Young children make meaning out of everything in their world or they try to. So even if they don't have the cognitive ability or symbols to explain what has happened, they still try to make meaning of it and they store it as memory. The memory is attached to whatever meaning they made of it. Which also means, btw, that children may not view something as traumatic as we do and vice versa.There are studies that show that a person can have trauma from something that happened to them inutero.
Look up Bruce Perry's work. He has a model of the brain that shows how we operate from our mid-brain when we have an emotional response to things instead of our higher brain.
You ask a great question, I hope I understood it right. It is the premise of all the early childhood work I am doing.
poster:Daisym
thread:752269
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20070419/msgs/752302.html