Posted by SLS on June 7, 2012, at 1:46:19
In reply to Re: What's The Purpose?, posted by Phil on June 6, 2012, at 22:13:24
Hi Phil.
I am very sorry for your loss.
> Childhood abuse and neglect devastates a child's spirit
Yes. I totally agree with you.
This describes very accurately my childhood experience. Such a scenario results in developmental PTSD. While I was a research patient at the NIH, I scored very high on the "prisoner of war" sub scale of the MMPI. My doctors found it remarkable.
I found this article interesting as an introduction to the phenomenon of developmental PTSD.
----------------------------------------------------http://www.positivehumandevelopment.com/developmental-ptsd.html
"Neglect, emotional, physical and sexual abuses have all demonstrated detrimental impacts on the developing brain. Countless empirical studies in neuroscience, psychology, and medicine have been able to demonstrate distinct consequences to brain maturational processes involving executive functions, emotional regulation, fear-response systems, attentional capacity, learning systems, and social cognition."
----------------------------------------------------
Am I to understand that the chronic abuse and neglect experienced in childhood influences the psychobiology of the developing brain in such a way as to render an individual depressed and emotionally dysregulated?Question: Once chronic pathological psychosocial stressors alter the development of a growing brains structure and function in children and adolescents, do these altered neurodynamics persist to become entrained and self-reinforcing?. Does this dysregulation of brain circuitry persist, even when the psychosocial stressors are removed through psychotherapeutics? In other words, does the pathological brain that results from developmental PTSD establish persistent altered patterns of dysfunctional psychodynamics. Once these dynamics are corrected through psychotherapy, that which remains is the deeply entrenched set of neurobiological aberrations and dysfunctional interactions between systems that are often beyond the awareness of the patient and can bear little resemblance to the original traumas. Among the presentations that developmental PTSD can display is chronic depression possibly evaluated as being TRD. The chronically assaulted and altered brain comes to act autonomously to produce depression and anxiety in the absence of environmental stressors. (kindling?). Is adult PTSD plastic? I dont know. It seems more elastic to me. However, I think that early intervention in neglected and abused children can profit from the plasticity of the young, developing brain.
> and when they are finally on their own, they are beat down and exhausted and too tired to figure out how to live
The world was too big for me. I was unprepared to navigate it. I was overwhelmed. My psyche was too involuted for any psychotherapist to penetrate. Fortunately, I was able to developed a healthier mind through reductionist deconstruction, followed by the rebuilding of my psyche from the ground up. It remains an ongoing process. I like to think of my goal as a human being to attain self-actualization
Is the bottom line regarding developmental PTSD-depression that it eventually becomes free-running through the induction of persistent biological changes, and is no longer dependent upon psychosocial stress in order to manifest?
- ScottSome see things as they are and ask why.
I dream of things that never were and ask why not.- George Bernard Shaw
poster:SLS
thread:1019315
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20120522/msgs/1019369.html