Are there different types of childhood trauma? How does childhood trauma explain issues people experience in adulthood?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There are numerous types of childhood trauma. Unfortunately, each of these traumas can have lifelong effects. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Read more about the different types of childhood trauma and how they can affect people in adulthood. <\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
In 1990, a massive study of Adverse Childhood Experiences (known as the ACE study) revealed that childhood dysfunction and t<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Types of childhood trauma — including abuse, neglect, and parental absence — are highly correlated with mental, emotional, and physical problems later in life. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
First, the researchers found that so-called adverse experiences are seldom isolated; if you have a parent in prison or witness your mother being abused, other issues are also present. And the more of these adverse experiences are present, the higher the so-called ACE score, and the worse the effects in many types of childhood trauma. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Patients who had higher ACE scores were more likely to have<\/p>\n\n\n\n
One of the researchers in the ACE study, Vincent Felitti, saw a pattern in his own work of morbidly obese patients who had suffered childhood incest and other traumas. He determined that for these patients, they had become obese as a solution<\/em> to their traumas, because it made them feel safer to be physically larger or to be considered less attractive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Without understanding the root of the patients\u2019 obesity, doctors look at the solution they developed years ago as the problem<\/em>. This misunderstanding leads most of these patients to ultimately fail in their weight-loss efforts (or gain the weight right back); the same often happens in addiction recovery, because the addiction is covering up the real issues. <\/p>\n\n\n\n With many types of childhood trauma, looking at children who have severe behavior issues as a result of abuse, there are elements of both nature and nurture; life experiences can affect your genes, making them react differently to emotions and experiences. In other words, stressful experiences can make you more susceptible to subsequent stress.<\/strong> (The genetic modifications that result from life events can also be passed on to your children, which is known as epigenetics.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n What\u2019s more, these trauma-cased genetic modifications can have a stronger influence on behavior than pre-existing genetic abnormalities, meaning that the role of nurture is at least as strong as nature.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n In a study of rhesus monkeys (which have 95 percent of their genes in common with humans) researchers observed monkeys with anxious and aggressive personality types — born with abnormal levels of arousal, stress hormones, and brain chemicals — and found that the monkeys\u2019 genes affected their behavior and social interactions into adulthood. However, they also observed that if monkeys with no genetic predispositions were raised away from their mothers, they developed abnormalities that were even more severe than their genetically predisposed peers. <\/p>\n\n\n\nNurture Trumps Nature in Childhood Development<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n