TRAUMA NEEDS
Van Der Kolk says, “If a mother cannot meet her baby’s impulses and needs, ‘the baby learns to become the mother’s idea of what the baby is.’” This means that child learns to discount its own inner sensations and tries to adjust to the caregiver’s needs, thus perceiving there is something wrong with the way it is. This lack of physical awareness leaves the child vulnerable to shutting down and disassociating with the feedback from their own bodies and are unable to get in touch with pleasure, purpose or direction.
What this means is that abused children are very sensitive to their surroundings, like changes in voices and faces and create responses to those in order to attempt to lessen the negative outcomes they have determined are surely to come. In ensuing years, instead of seeing these changes as cues they perceive them as the threats they were in childhood and their learned responses kick in. These responses are usually huge, whether they blow up in an attempt to be bigger and scarier than their “attacker” or they ball up in the fetal position hoping to withstand the barrage that is surely to come.
It is interesting to note here that people need to feel connected either through positive interaction (work, friends, family), or through negative interaction (illnesses, lawsuits, or family feuds). The outcome is the same to these damaged people, they are connected somehow. This is connected to how parents relate to their children, especially in the early stages. There are patterns that are seen that start as infants and continue as an adult. One of those is called “avoidant attachment.” This manifests itself as infants look like nothing really bothers them, they don’t cry even when the parent goes away and they ignore them when they come back, especially the mother. This is referred to as dealing but not feeling because in this state the child has a chronically increased heart rate and are in a constant state of hyperarousal. These infants tend to become adults who are out of touch with their own feelings and those of others. Another pattern would be referred to as “anxious or ambivalent attachment.” In this pattern the infant draws negative attention to himself by crying, yelling, clinging or screaming. They are felling but not dealing. They have determined that no one will hear them unless they make themselves big. These infants tend to grow into anxious adults. Then there is “disorganized attachment.” This is when the caregiver is a source of distress to the children. The child is confused as should they reach out to the caregiver (because they understand that they need them for survival) or should they not (because they are a source of stress). These children may be intensely affectionate with strangers or may trust nobody.
As you may already be able to tell, children that don’t feel safe in infancy have trouble regulating their moods and emotional responses as they grow older. Since this leads to an inability to discern between safety and danger, it is easy for these infants/children/adults to be set up to be traumatized in subsequent experiences. This most likely results is self-damaging impulsivity in the child’s later years such as, excessive spending, promiscuous sex, substance abuse, reckless driving, binge eating, to name a few.