Anyone can experience a traumatic event. This applies to adults, but also to children. Children are also exposed to accidents, disasters, abuse or war. Trauma has to do with boundaries being crossed. Everyone deals with this in their own way. Little is known about what trauma means for children. Children are developing physically and mentally. Dr. Martine Delfos wrote a book from her scientific and therapeutic background entitled “Trauma from a developmental perspective”. In this book she presents a model in which the characteristics of child development and the associated developmental tasks of the brain are applied to traumatic experiences.
Martine Delfos and her psychological research into trauma in children
Dr. Martine-France Delfos (1947) conducts scientific research in clinical psychology as a biopsychologist. Has had its own practice since 1975. She studied clinical research psychology and French language and literature. She obtained her PhD for psychological and literary research on the bereavement process in French writers. As an author she writes about psychology. She also writes children’s books about autism emotions and trauma. In 2010 she was in Bosnia and Herzegovina for the first time to help set up autism care. There she discovered that autistic behavior can be the result of traumatic experiences. Based on that insight, she has designed a model of how trauma affects a child’s development. In 2015, her book trauma from a development perspective was published in the Netherlands.
A traumatic experience
A traumatic experience is an event that evokes a strong stress response. If someone has experienced a trauma, this person often suffers from anxiety, avoidance of situations associated with the trauma and a negative, gloomy mood. A person often recovers within the foreseeable future due to their own resilience and support from their environment. Unfortunately, that doesn’t always work. Then post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) develops. Specific psychological treatment is necessary for this.
The child and trauma
There are many children who experience trauma. In children, trauma can be very complex, such as family violence and sexual abuse. These traumas are often done to them in secret. Major traumas in childhood such as sexual abuse and physical abuse are often not recognized and acknowledged. This complicates the diagnosis and treatment of these children.
The TOP model – trauma from a developmental perspective
To gain insight into what a traumatic experience means for a child, Martine Delfos has developed the TOP model. TOP stands for T rauma from a Development Perspective. This model aims to describe the experience of trauma from the perspective of the child at a specific age. At every age the child has its own developmental tasks to fulfill. Trauma can cause a child’s development to stagnate in a certain area. This may manifest itself later. A traumatic childhood experience can make a person stuck in a certain area. A fully blossomed adult then suddenly reveals the vulnerable traumatic child.
The stages of development in children
In general, it is assumed that during each stage of development the child has specific developmental tasks. In her top model, Martine Delfos uses five stages of development and how they are relevant to traumatic experiences. In her book she elaborates on the developmental perspective on war trauma and trauma resulting from sexual abuse.
The first stage of development (0-4 years)
In the first stage of development, a child is very focused on the senses. Its task is to discover the world. This is mainly done through the senses; hearing, seeing, smelling and feeling. This stage is called the sensorimotor stage. At the end of this stage, an important milestone occurs: language development. At this stage the memories are sensory in nature and are evoked by a smell, sound, taste, touch or an image.
Trauma at this stage is also experienced and stored in memory through the senses. As a result, memories cannot be easily recalled. Throughout life, memories of the trauma tend to surface through a certain feeling of depression and anxiety without the person understanding why that feeling arises. The memory is often not recognized because the traumatic experience is not captured in words and cannot be placed in a broader context. Traumatic experiences from that time are difficult to process. People who have had a traumatic experience in early childhood can be controlled by intense feelings, sometimes fragments of images, without being able to place them.
The second stage of development (5-8 years)
In the second stage the child learns the meaning of important concepts such as death and family. Children think about these concepts and ask many questions about them. They gain more and more insight into the meaning of words and concepts. This affects the way they perceive the world. When the child begins to read and write, the adult world becomes more accessible. The memories are increasingly stored in words and are therefore more accessible later.
A child who experiences a trauma in the second phase of development will try to get a grip on this experience with words. Because the child does not yet have a well-developed worldview, traumatic experiences can overwhelm the child . For example, children do not yet have a sense of what is the rule and what is the exception. This means that for younger children, a traumatic experience becomes part of the rule, not an exception to the rule. The child may form a distorted image of reality. The world will come to be experienced as an unsafe place. An adult with the same traumatic experience would find this experience exceptional. It will be a shocking experience, but it will not fundamentally change his perspective on the world in general. That does happen with children.
The third stage of development (8-11 years)
In the third stage of development, peers and friends become important to the child. Children in this stage are focused on making friends. They begin to understand the reciprocity of relationships. During these stages of development, children experience the world and trauma through the eyes of their friends. They see what they experience in the light of friendships. Traumatic experiences can put pressure on friendships, such as in a war situation. Martine Delfos gives as an example a quote from Maya Kulenovic who experienced the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina: Friends became enemies, and strangers ended up helping others. As a result of that war, children were hindered in the development of friendships. The experience of sexual abuse puts pressure on trust in fellow human beings. As the child becomes aware of the injustice at this stage, he will experience strong anger and fear. This can become a major source of aggression and conflict.
The fourth stage of development (12-14 years)
During this period, children build their own identity. It is important to them what other people think of them. It is important that they experience being loved and not rejected in response to their adolescent behavior. In this phase they seek information about how the world works. If a child experiences trauma at this stage, he or she will try to understand what happened. It will try to distinguish between good and evil. Due to the developmental changes in the functioning of the brain, the memory of a traumatic experience can quickly surface from this age.
The fifth stage of development (15-18 years)
At this stage, dependence and independence is a central theme. It is a period of experimenting with autonomous behavior. People want to solve problems independently of parents and make their own choices. Young people in this age are looking for their own identity. In this search for oneself, loneliness can be experienced. This search creates the need for a soulmate and intimacy. Traumatic experiences can be disruptive in this search. Due to the loss of their sense of security, they do not dare to behave independently. This can result in long-term dependence. During this phase it is difficult for young people to recognize sexual abuse. Seeking sexuality can result in the abuse being viewed as a negative experience rather than as abuse. Feelings of guilt and shame can damage the natural development of the young person.