Bones Broken Become Stronger: A Case Study
Bones Broken Become Stronger
Johannes Kieding
Simmons School of Social Work
In order to develop into fully functioning adults, children need to pass through a series of developmental stages and milestones. An optimal developmental trajectory results in an organism capable of great complexity – of the ability to satisfactorily manage internal and external demands, contribute to the world, while also leaving room for play, creativity, and enjoyment. In a perfect word the organism experiences just the right amount of stress and frustration to prepare the system to handle the hardships and disappointments of living, while allowing the developing person to take in, assimilate, and integrate information in an ever unfolding march towards …show more content…
When a child encounters a threatening environment, the “stress response” is activated, which prepares the child to freeze, fight, or flee. When environmental threats are severe and frequent, this stress response can become chronic, even when external threats go away. Susan Cole, et. al., In Helping Traumatized Children Learn (2005), puts it this way, “Unable to regulate heightened levels of arousal and emotional responses, they [traumatized children] simply cannot turn off the survival strategies that their brains have been conditioned to employ (Cole et al., 2005, p. 17). Hyperarousal, one of the main symptoms of the trauma-response and central to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) comes to …show more content…
The trauma response appears to create a split between these two functions, so that anxiety-reactions, somatic symptoms, and other trauma-related symptoms appear to “come out of left field” without any clear narrative or perspective on the experience. The hippocampus is responsible for declarative memory and otherwise seems involved in the act of putting words to emotions and other experiences, which explains why involving this function as well as other higher order executive functions via the frontal lobe/prefrontal cortex is typically done in treatment of traumatized individuals (Cole et al., 2005, p. 24, 31). Helping traumatized individuals find words and make meaning of their experiences is typically very
Johannes Kieding
Simmons School of Social Work
In order to develop into fully functioning adults, children need to pass through a series of developmental stages and milestones. An optimal developmental trajectory results in an organism capable of great complexity – of the ability to satisfactorily manage internal and external demands, contribute to the world, while also leaving room for play, creativity, and enjoyment. In a perfect word the organism experiences just the right amount of stress and frustration to prepare the system to handle the hardships and disappointments of living, while allowing the developing person to take in, assimilate, and integrate information in an ever unfolding march towards …show more content…
When a child encounters a threatening environment, the “stress response” is activated, which prepares the child to freeze, fight, or flee. When environmental threats are severe and frequent, this stress response can become chronic, even when external threats go away. Susan Cole, et. al., In Helping Traumatized Children Learn (2005), puts it this way, “Unable to regulate heightened levels of arousal and emotional responses, they [traumatized children] simply cannot turn off the survival strategies that their brains have been conditioned to employ (Cole et al., 2005, p. 17). Hyperarousal, one of the main symptoms of the trauma-response and central to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) comes to …show more content…
The trauma response appears to create a split between these two functions, so that anxiety-reactions, somatic symptoms, and other trauma-related symptoms appear to “come out of left field” without any clear narrative or perspective on the experience. The hippocampus is responsible for declarative memory and otherwise seems involved in the act of putting words to emotions and other experiences, which explains why involving this function as well as other higher order executive functions via the frontal lobe/prefrontal cortex is typically done in treatment of traumatized individuals (Cole et al., 2005, p. 24, 31). Helping traumatized individuals find words and make meaning of their experiences is typically very