There are enormous misunderstandings about the way in which babies and young children “remember” their experiences. We assume that pre-verbal children can’t possibly retain trauma in their memory. For example, it is all too common to hear, in situations of children’s exposure to domestic violence, something along the lines of “well at least they weren’t old enough to have known anything about it”.
Based on an excerpt from Why Can’t My Child Behave? Dr Amber Elliott.
This is an understandable idea but it is based on a misconception about human memory and as soon as the frightening, chaotic internal worlds of, even well looked after, babies, becomes apparent, then this idea simply doesn’t make sense.
Quite the opposite of being preserved from trauma, babies absorb traumatic experiences not as events but as part of their reality and use them to develop their way of being. Babies have neither the ability to talk, nor even to think in an organised enough way to think using words. Their memories are stored in a non-verbal, procedural way. Think of babyhood as a time for learning how to “do relationships” and, in fact, how to “be a person” just as driving lessons are a time for learning how to drive. How to “be” isn’t something most people would be able to talk about or even consciously “know” about, just as they couldn’t talk accurately or coherently about the intricate sequence and pattern of subtle actions, reactions, thoughts, emotions, perceptions, sights, sounds and motivations needed to evade an overly confident cat on a busy, icy road. Even in adults, who otherwise have the ability to organise their experience using words, memories created in times of extreme stress cannot be stored in a way that enables them to be accessed verbally. These sensory memories are completely different from verbal memories and stored in an entirely different part of the brain. However, they are as powerful, if not more powerful, than verbal memories. The fact that they are beyond conscious, verbal access and their power (particularly when they are traumatic) makes them far more important and influential than verbal memories.
If this understanding of trauma memory is applied to a traumatised child it starts to become clear why their behaviour is very difficult for them to consciously understand and explain in terms of their past traumas. All of the child’s abuse and/or neglect experiences will have been remembered but not necessarily in a way that they can access via words. Have a think about when you have smelt a perfume or heard a song that vividly brings back a memory that you just didn’t know you had, or a feeling that might have no context. I remember once catching a whiff of something that reminded me of the very distinctive smell of Panini stickers (for those who don’t know, these were collectable stickers that were very popular during my childhood in the UK). This sent me hurtling straight back to hoping for “shinies” (metallic stickers) and the buzz of building up my collection. Much of the power of that memory is not accessible enough to me to describe it now let alone enable me to acknowledge the importance of this memory prior to noticing the smell. I can’t remember what the subject of the stickers was, or remember a specific incident of buying or being given stickers, yet it was very emotionally provocative.
This should start to explain why emotional outbursts can seem to come without trigger and why reward-punishment thinking won’t help foster carers and adopters to understand them. One exercise you might like to try is to think in terms of flashbacks. Imagine that a traumatic, procedural memory flashback has popped into your child’s mind. That intangible memory causes the child to have an explosive, aggressive outburst. The behaviour makes total sense as a reaction to the memory, though it may not make sense as a reaction to what we can see around the child. Once you have imagined this then try to imagine punishing or ignoring the behaviour whilst not attending to the trauma memory that caused it (as we would using reward-punishment thinking).