Developmental trauma is not yet a recognised diagnostic classification but it is a term that is more and more frequently used to describe the collection of difficulties that children traumatised by abuse and/or neglect frequently experience.
The term alludes to the profound impact that abuse and/or neglect in infancy has on children’s development due to the experience dependent nature of brain and personality development. Developmental trauma is also sometimes called complex trauma and relational trauma.
The proposed criteria for identification of developmental trauma are:
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A. Exposure
- Multiple or chronic exposure to one or more forms of developmentally adverse interpersonal trauma (abandonment, betrayal, physical assaults, sexual assaults, threats to bodily integrity, coercive practices, emotional abuse, witnessing violence and death).
- Subjective Experience (rage, betrayal, fear, resignation, defeat, shame).
B. Triggered pattern of repeated dysregulation in response to trauma cues Dysregulation (high or low) in presence of cues.
Changes persist and do not return to baseline; not reduced in intensity by conscious awareness:
- Affective;
- Somatic (physiological, motoric, medical);
- Behavioral (e.g. re-enactment, cutting);
- Cognitive (thinking that it is happening again, confusion, dissociation, depersonalization);
- Relational (clinging, oppositional, distrustful, compliant);
- Self-attribution (self-hate and blame).
C. Persistently Altered Attributions and Expectancies
- Negative self-attribution
- Distrust protective caretaker
- Loss of expectancy of protection by others
- Loss of trust in social agencies to protect
- Lack of recourse to social justice/retribution
- Inevitability of future victimization
D. Functional Impairment
- Educational
- Familial
- Peer
- Legal
- Vocational
