Adversity's Brain-Shaping Impact

Adverse experience shapes the architecture of our brain.

Reviewed by Abigail Fagan

Key points

• Trauma of any magnitude can "over-wire" the brain, making us reactive even to harmless situations.
• Children exposed to adverse experience suffer developmentally and are prone to the early onset of disease.
• Stable, satisfying relationships protect our health and are prophylaxis against exposure to adversity.

Many of my boyhood memories, like most people’s, are laced with threads of happy, play-filled images. When I recall them, the joy spawned by my original experience snaps back immediately, warming my heart all over again. Although other memories trigger the very opposite.

Hauntingly, a black cloud of dysphoric memories hovers over me. It's composed of ugly "snapshots" of my parents locked in heated battles over what to put on their grocery list, including ice cream, items my mother insisted on buying but my father stubbornly dismissed as “unnecessary.”

Fragile Minds

At first glance, this issue may seem commonplace, perhaps even trivial. But to me, as young, frightened and certainly unwilling witness to my parents’ bitter quarreling, the stability of my world was rocked. To this day, I harbor subtle, disquieting rumblings when discussions turn to the costs of things that fit my father's definition of "unnecessary." Happily, however, the tasty delights of ice cream now eclipse its negative associations with my past, regardless of its cost.

Sadly though, countless others are subjected to adverse circumstances far worse than my parent's "ice cream wars." Ironically, and often worse, many suffer further adversity by the very thing designed to protect them.

Negative Bias

Specific memory-preserving areas of our brain, particularly the bilaterally located amygdala, are predisposed to take a firm, unremitting grip on threatening or dangerous experience while virtually ignoring what is not. For reasons of survival and safety, our brains keep an active surveillance trained upon what potentially or actually threatens us, thus making it difficult to downplay, sidestep, or deny it.

Unfortunately, for those who've suffered trauma experience, this same region of the brain often over-warns, like a false alarm that needlessly triggers unnecessary suspiciousness or exaggerated reactions to danger where none exists. Indeed, for many, the brain's alarm system can blare so loudly that trauma victims avoid, detour, or otherwise misinterpret benign or even beneficial experience.

Developmentally Derailed

Worse still, because their brains are developing and therefore malleable and vulnerable, for children exposed to prolonged adverse experience, the volume of this negative bias gets cranked up so loudly the child's development itself can be severely diverted from its optimal expression.

For instance, an abundance of studies consistently finds that children subjected to adversity don't thrive as well socially and academically as those more fortunate. These hapless victims are also susceptible to drug addiction and are significantly more likely to populate the prison system.

Adversity, a Contributor to Disease

Besides the overelaborated and therefore easily activated nerve bundles in the amygdala, other areas of the brain undergo structural change as the direct result of prolonged exposure to intense, overwhelming experience. The HPA axis—the neural circuitry integral to our fight or flight response—when chronically activated by adversity, lowers the efficacy of our immune system making us more vulnerable to infectious and other disease processes. Then when our immune system gets suppressed, our autoimmune system activates disposing us to a range of related disorders including type 1 diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, fibromyalgia, lupus and Graves' disease, etc.

For decades, research has confirmed the devastating impact of adverse childhood experience. Alarmingly, the Adverse Childhood Experience Study conducted by the CDC and the Kaiser Foundation involving 17,000 participants, found that 67% of the population experiences some degree of abusive experience. One can only imagine the hefty cost of adversity to individuals and thus, society at large.

Adversity's Many Faces

Adversity, in any form, is a flagrant misunderstanding or a violation of the child's fundamental needs and feelings. For example, the metrics of parental misunderstanding can be measured on a continuum ranging between micro misunderstandings, those of lesser magnitude, through macro misunderstandings or, perhaps more accurately, abuses of a greater magnitude.

Consider a common example of a parent reflexively rebuking ("disciplining") their child in the aftermath of their child's angry outburst. Duty bound, the parent blurts out the familiar injunction, "That's not appropriate behavior." But by quickly jumping to discipline what's most conspicuous, that is, the child's outburst, the parent commits an act of abandonment when failing to acknowledge the child's underlying needs and feelings that fueled the outburst.

Not feeling understood, the child is essentially left alone with the issues that precipitated their outburst and also the additional burdensome problem of what to do in the vacuum of parental non-understanding. To come to grips with both problems, the child must rely upon their own underdeveloped coping strategies.

Examples of macro misunderstandings or violations of a child's fundamental needs are infamous, widespread and easily recognized, neglect, especially prolonged neglect, physical, emotional and sexual abuse. Again, these profoundly gross infringements on the child's needs and their deleterious impact on the child's developing brain, strongly predict future maladjustment including mental disorders, addiction, social and academic maladies and more, the early onset of physical disorders.

Solid Relationships, the Most Powerful Preventative Medicine

Good relationships, starting with our parents, buffer the harmful effects of adversity. In the child's case, to the extent parents take on a comprehensive and "moral," obligation to their children, they "see" or validate the emerging needs and feelings of their children while administering in a timely and age-appropriate way the "vital emotional supplies" few others, if any, can provide.

"Good enough" parenting equips the developing child to identify, legitimize and effectively represent their needs as they move into the larger world. Moreover, such fortunate children are prepared or "immunized" against the inevitable adversity they'll face over the course of their lives. Rather than floundering, fragmenting or otherwise succumbing to stress, optimally parented children, now as adults, are more likely to remain intact, adaptive and well-functioning, despite adversity.