I'm finally delving back into the Massachusetts Advocates' report of the Impact of Trauma on Learning. This is a long document and it may take a while to digest it all. But there are some important things just in Chapter 1.

It explains the basic trauma reaction to violent events and that trauma is not an event-- but a response to the event. For children who have been traumatized -- fear becomes a way of life. They see any and all events through "trauma glasses". "Unable to regulate heightened levels of arousal and emotional responses, they simply cannot turn off the survival strategies that their brains have been conditioned to employ." And the report cites that childhood trauma is not limited to physical abuse episodes, but includes emotional maltreatment, abandonment, neglect and devastating loss -- which brings us back to many adoptive children who have endured such losses.

It points out that age may be a factor in how traumatized a child is by an event. I frequently get adults who marvel at the thought that an infant can be traumatized by abandonment or neglect. But the trauma experts tell us that children who don't have language to help them verbalize their feelings about traumatic events are often more severely impacted, because they don't have the language to process their feelings.

Trauma impacts learning in the following ways:

1. Language/Communications Skills. Children often can not process or recall information presented when they are in a heightened state of hyperarousal. And teachers may not even recognize that the child is in a state of hyperarousal, until they call upon the child - who may appear to be restless, inattentive or daydreaming. Brain scans show that there is something neurologically going on here -- when the limbic system is activated (the area of the brain that processes emotions) the language center (Broca's area) is less active. Have you ever been too afraid/shocked/surprised to talk? That's the sensation.

2. Social/Emotional Communication. Traumatized children have a relationship to language that is different from others. If children have come from a background where language was not used to share feelings and ideas, but was used just as a tool to convey orders and control the child's behaviors -- "stop that", "eat this", "sit down" - the child's brain does not learn the social/emotional aspects of language. And they have little ability to process the nonverbal communication so important to social interaction.

3. Problem Solving Skills. Traumatized children often have a difficult time picking out the main ideas of verbal or written materials - or making inferences.

4. Organizing Materials. Traumatized children may have problems with their sequential memory -- and if they can't remember things in sequence, organizing materials for learning becomes very difficult.

5. Cause & Effect. Most children start to grasp this concept as toddlers when they move around effecting their environment. Children from violent or neglected situations may not have had the same exploration opportunities and often have poor ability to determine cause and effect.

6. Taking Another Person's Perspective. Because traumatized children are so busy reacting to the perceived dangers in the world around them they really are not able to develop an adequate sense of self -- of their opinions, thoughts, etc. So trying to take another person's perspective becomes even harder -- they often have trouble with lessons that call for thinking about what others would do or say.

7. Attentiveness to Classroom Tasks. Many traumatized children are diagnosed with ADD or ADHD. They may indeed have ADHD, but the trauma effects are often overlooked. Hypervigilance and an inability to attend to classroom tasks are symptoms of trauma.

8. Regulating Emotions. Traumatized children do not have the ability to regulate their emotions - and are at risk for poor impulse control, aggressive behaviors, and dissociating.

9. Executive Function. Goal setting, anticipating consequences and carrying out plans are all executive functions. Again, brain scans show that the prefrontal cortex, the area that controls our executive function ability, is greatly impacted by trauma.

More later...