Trauma and the child’s body

After being traumatised a child’s relationship with his or her body often becomes formless, chaotic and overwhelming; the child losses a sense of his internal structure and nuance.  As the body freezes, the “shocked” mind and brain becomes stifled, disorganised and fragmented, they cannot take in the totality of experience and learn from it.  These children who have become “stuck” at some point, along a once meaningful and purposeful course of action, engage in habitually ineffective and often compulsive patterns of behaviour.  These often play out in symptoms like those of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder or obsessive compulsive disorder.  The child’s uncoordinated fragmented efforts are not registered as normal, explicit, narrative memories but rather are encoded in the body as implicit, procedural memories including discomfort, constriction, distress, awkwardness, rigidity, flaccidity and lack of energy.  Such memories are encoded not primarily in the neocortex (upper brain) but, instead, in the limbic system (lower brain) and brain stem.  For this reason behaviours and memories cannot be changed by simply changing one’s thoughts. One must also work with sensation and feeling – really with the totality of experience.

Sensations actually become the bedrock for a child’s gradual maturation toward authentic autonomy and independence.

Peter Levine :  In An Unspoken Voice : How the Body Releases Trauma and Restores Goodness