Resolving Trauma and Loss

Siegel: The resolution of trauma or loss is a really important area. When we’ve experienced a loss or a trauma in our life, there is a massive disruption in the usual sense of reality that we have. I’ll give you an example. I worked with a little boy whose father died. For a year after the death, he seemed to be okay, but when Halloween came around, he fell apart. It turned out that he was having an imaginary relationship with his deceased father all the time, who used to walk him around on Halloween. When Halloween was actually coming he realized that there was no father and he started, literally, just fragmenting. That would be an example, since its lasted for a year, of at least delayed grief. If it had gone on longer than that we would call it unresolved grief, or unresolved loss. What that little boy needed to do was to take the mental models, or what we call schema, in his mind – that I have a dad who loves me and who is here for me, I’m safe, and we have a relationship I can rely on. That’s what existed before his father was killed in this accident. Then the father is gone. That whole model in the boys mind had to be readjusted, but it wasn’t. So, if it persisted for more than a year, we would call that unresolved. The treatment there had to be where he had to face the reality of what had happened, which he was able to do, and he’s done fine. But without doing that, it remains basically where you’re just not accepting what happened and making sense of it.

Let’s talk about trauma. If someone’s been overwhelmed by an event where they can’t embrace its fullness, if it was an attack on your body, or if it was an attack on your psyche, if there were other things that happened emotionally or sexually. All sorts of things you could imagine. Someone tries to not deal with that – just tries to forget it and moves forward without embracing what happened, and what its impact was on their relationships. Let’s say it was a caregiver doing this traumatic thing to them. What happens is that’s a set of memories that remains in their mind. I’ll give you an example. Let’s say I’m the father and I had an alcoholic mother, and she used to chase me around with a butcher knife, and one time she hung me up in a closet, threatening me. This is the king of thing that happens. Unfortunately, it’s not rare. So, now I’m a father and let’s say now I have a two-year-old child who gets very upset and agitated. He won’t brush his teeth. He’s just really adamant and he doesn’t want to brush his teeth. The moment he’s agitated and he has that look on his face of what I call going down the low road, what you would call an emotional hijacking, his going on that emotional hijacking low-road state will start to resonate with me. If I haven’t worked through what happened when my mother hung me in that closet, I’m going to look at her agitated drunk face in my memory, only it’ll come back as a flashback. So, I’m with my two-year-old trying to get him to brush his teeth. He’s agitated. I’m agitated. I activate in my brain aspects of the unresolved trauma. Now I start chasing my son and I throw him in a closet. I didn’t mean to do that. But in my own low road emotional hijacking state what’s called implicit memory is activated. These memories of the past that have a pure form that when they get activated, it’s not as if I’m remembering. So, what I need to do is get some help because that form of lack of resolution can obviously scare my son and lead to his own disorganized attachment.

Goleman: Doesn’t the same thing happen with other patterns? If you’ve been imprinted in childhood, so to speak. If something comes along in your adult life – someone talks to you in some way that resonates with the way you were talked to. Or, because emotions are so powerfully contagious, if someone’s in an emotional state that’s just like your parent used to be with you. Does that then trigger in you a reaction as though what happened then were actually happening now?

Siegel: Absolutely. Yes. This is where making sense is so important for everyone. In fact, these low road events, these emotional hijackings, can happen to anyone. It may be with unresolved trauma and unresolved loss, the speed at which low road hijackings occur, the intensity that they occur, the behavior that you do, the frequency, even perhaps how you recover from them or your capacity to make a repair, those all may be more or less intense. This is where the neural aspects of unresolved trauma and grief may be just a little bit different than the other areas. But you’re absolutely right. The way memory works is that any kind of stimulus can trigger a retrieval of things we’ve encoded in all sorts of memory – in behavioral memory, emotional memory, things like that. So making sense really means bringing that up. Now you’ve asked a second part of the question, which is how do we actually address brain development throughout a child’s life. I’ll give you a very brief overview of the state of the art we’re at now with brain development. It goes like this.

In the womb, genes have a huge responsibility for how neurons get connected to each other in the nervous system, the largest collection, of course, being in the brain. At birth, and even a little bit before birth, a shift happens, because now experience will also add to the impact of genes on the connections among neurons.

From birth to about three years of age, genes continue to push for an excess production in synaptic connections, independent of experience in the sense that genes are going to make a huge number of synapses, a lot of which we’re not going to use. Experience then does two things. It reinforces those synapses that perform from the genetic push, and it’s going to help create new synapses as well. Then from three to around eleven, the density of synapses actually stays roughly constant, but you’re creating some, getting rid of some. You’re really learning like a sponge, you’re just learning, learning, learning.

Goleman: This is the period of sculpting, because you’re creating many but you also said you lose some you don’t use, presumably.

Siegel: Yeah. It’s a certain kind of sculpting, and maybe better than saying the density is constant, let’s say that the number of neurons may remain constant, but the connections are constantly changing. But at eleven, there’s resurgence in the growth of synapses, like the earlier period. That’s where you see kids getting out of sorts, and what the research shows is that some of the cognitive functions they perform at nine actually get worse at eleven. When you have a lot of excess synapses, your functioning isn’t as efficient.

Goleman: Like what?

Siegel: Like paying attention in a certain way. Like retrieving words, putting together a story. They can be kind of out of it. You see this in your own kids, and it’s nice to know what’s going on in their own brains. From eleven, twelve, this prepubertal period – this is when you have re-growth in synapses, that new growth. From twelve onward to about twenty-five as you pointed out, there’s a period of what’s called parcellation or pruning. What this means is that neurons and their connections that are used will remain, but there’s a huge push, probably genetically, and exacerbated by stress, to actually destroy synaptic connections, and possibly even neurons. We have not clarified that yet, but there’s a big change, especially in that prefrontal region which is responsible for so many things: for regulating emotions, empathic relationships with others, even morality. All these things are shifting, and that’s why you take a thirteen-year-old and compare it to a twenty-three-year-old – the way that person thinks and feels, their whole attitude, philosophically, psychologically, interpersonally, is changed because these important areas of the brain are undergoing massive change. You know there’s a joke that goes around which is, the only people who knew at twenty-five years of age is really when the brain matured were rental car companies, because they never allowed you to rent a car if you were less than twenty-five. That’s right on the money, that’s when we think the brain really reaches its full maturation.