Healing Developmental Trauma

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1. protoman3000Jan 2024
   Hi,

   thanks for your comment. Your story touched me immediately in my heart.

   I can recommend you this book on your quest to get more insights and ideas for healing:

   "Healing Developmental Trauma: How Early Trauma Affects Self-Regulation, Self-Image, and the Capacity for Relationship" from Laurence Heller, PhD

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2. yamrzouDec 2021
   Healing Developmental Trauma: How Early Trauma Affects Self-Regulation, Self-Image, and the Capacity for Relationship — By Laurence Heller and Aline Lapierre

   The Courage to be Disliked — By Fumitake Koga and Ichiro Kishimi

   Le monde sans fin, miracle énergétique et dérive climatique — An eye opening French comic book on energy and climate change, by Jean-Marc Jancovici and Christophe Blain

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3. febelingJul 2021
   I believe one of the best keywords for starting to address the modern epidemic of depression, inability to build relationships, excessive focus on materialist goals, and other problems is developmental trauma.

   The cause for this trauma is unmet needs in the formative years of the nervous system until about 5 years. Key among them are needs for autonomy and connection. Those are in natural conflict, and have to be balanced. When those aren't met, survival strategies are developed that undermine us when we are grown up. As a result excessive focus on independence or, the other extreme, over-adaption to others make relationships hard to attain or maintain, and feelings of hopelessness ensue.

   Good starting point for reading is the book: Heller, Laurence, Aline LaPierre: Healing Developmental Trauma. How Early Trauma Affects Self-Regulation, Self-Image, and the Capacity for Relationship, 2012

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4. waterbadgerMay 2020
   I’m sure you are trying to be helpful so I’m not trying to criticize you personally or devalue what you are sharing! More of a general gripe for me:

   Anger and sadness are both very helpful, understandable and ok emotions. There is nothing wrong or dysfunctional about either of those feelings.

   I think the cultural norm that certain emotions are “bad” and that we can “change” our emotions is extremely destructive for many people.

   We can control (and our responsible for) our thoughts and actions.

   I don’t think people can actually control their emotions however and making people feel ashamed or unhealthy because of their emotional reactions is unfair. This is actually one of the symptoms of abusive parent-child relationships that I think many people have unavoidably internalized.

   A lot of people have experienced serious emotional trauma due to cultural norms and an unhealthy value system about how parents treat their children (as well as by being parented by traumatized people who have grown up in similar circumstances)

   There are a lot of good books about it if you search for Complex PTSD. One that I think covers a lot of information holistically is “Healing Developmental Trauma” by Laurence Heller and Aline LaPierre

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5. yamrzouJan 2022
   > If we assume that lots of attention, licking, and grooming are the natural state of affairs and that lower levels of attention are a form of neglect, we can use this model to explore some of the biological consequences of neglect or abuse in children. Low rates of maternal attention decrease the production of thyroid hormone by the rat pups. This, in turn, decreases serotonin in the hippocampus and affects the development of receptors for the stress hormone glucocorticoid. Since corticosterone, one of our primary stress hormones, is kept in check by a complicated feedback mechanism that depends on these same stress hormone receptors, their inadequate development increases the risk of an excessive stress hormone response to adversity. For this and certain other reasons, lack of maternal attention predisposes the animals to have a heightened level of fear and a heightened adrenaline response. Some of the consequences of this are altered metabolism and suppressed immune and inflammatory responses, neuronal irritability, and enhanced susceptibility to seizures.

   This is consistent with what I've read in the book Healing Developmental Trauma by Laurence Heller and Aline Lapierre:

   “When, for a child, this need-satisfaction cycle is significantly interrupted, healthy development is disturbed, and the environmental failure triggers both tension and bracing in the musculature and activation and imbalances in the nervous system and biochemistry—all of which sets the stage for symptoms and disease. When basic needs are not met and the protest to get those needs met is unsuccessful, children come to feel that something is wrong with their needs; they cannot know that it is their environment that is not responding adequately. Therefore, they internalize caregiver failures, experiencing them as their own personal failures. Reacting to their caregivers’ failure to meet their needs, children come to feel various degrees of anger, shame, guilt, and physiological collapse. Tragically, to the degree that there is chronic lack of attunement to their core needs, children do not learn to attune to the needs within themselves. When basic needs are consistently left unsatisfied, the need-satisfaction cycle is interrupted, and nervous system dysregulation and identity distortions are set in motion that often have a lifelong negative impact.”

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6. aalhourDec 2021
   Would you recommend Healing Developmental Trauma to non-therapists? I am interested in the topic of trauma and how to heal it but have zero training on the subject.
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