Complex Trauma: Social World Impact

Welcome

• This guide shares the latest research findings for those supporting children who have experienced complex trauma from maltreatment.
• A previous guide covered how childhood trauma affects brain development, leading to mental health problems.
• This unpacking focuses on how brain changes impact a child's social world and its importance in understanding the mental health of children who have experienced maltreatment.
• Supportive social relationships are essential for good mental health.
• Maltreatment affects social relationships, impacting brain development and how a child interacts with others.
• This can result in a stressful social world with fewer trusted relationships, increasing vulnerability to mental health issues.
• Understanding these effects can help in developing effective ways to build and maintain supportive relationships, reducing the risk of mental health problems.
• Adults and systems, including social workers, foster carers, adoptive parents, teachers, policymakers, funders, and commissioners, can help build a better social world for children.

Jon and Jasmine

• Jon and Jasmine are fictional characters introduced in a previous guide, experienced maltreatment.
• Their stories offer examples of how early trauma affects a child's social world, raises the risk of mental health problems, and possible interventions.

Jon

• As a young child, Jon witnessed and experienced violence after his mum got a new boyfriend.
• There was a serious incident which meant his mum had to be taken into hospital, after Jon's 10th birthday.
• He was often angry and powerless.
• As Jon grew older, he began to really enjoy sport.
• At 15, he joined the school's senior swim team, and found the social side challenging.
• He experienced stress and conflict in his social relationships, even with his friends.

Jasmine

• Jasmine was neglected and often missed school as a young child and left her to fend for herself at home.
• She moved to a different area and a new school, when she was 8 years old to go into foster care.
• Jasmine found it difficult to begin or hold onto friendships with other children, which left her feeling increasingly lonely.

Why the Social World is Key to Mental Health

• The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the importance of social relationships for mental health and wellbeing.
• Loneliness, stressful social relationships, and fewer supportive relationships increase the risk of mental health problems.
• Maltreatment can make it harder for a child to build and maintain supportive relationships and increasing stress.

Impact on a Child's Social World

• Children with a history of maltreatment often face difficulties with social relationships.
• They are more likely to be rejected by peers, experience bullying, have fewer social relationships, and experience stress, violence, and conflict in adult relationships.
• This can result in social relationships being lost, of poor quality, or never formed.
• Being aware of potential social difficulties can help support affected children and young people.

Two Pathways to Mental Health Problems

• These are stress generation and social thinning.

Stress Generation

• Children who have experienced abuse and neglect face significant social stress, continuing into adulthood.
• In childhood, they are more likely to be victimized or bullied.
• In adulthood, they are more likely to experience conflict and violence in relationships
• Individuals may contribute to stressful events, known as stress generation, not deliberately causing stress in relationships but responding in ways that increase the risk of problematic interactions.

Social Thinning

• Individuals with a history of maltreatment may experience differences in relationship quality and quantity.
• Less social support from family and friends is reported by as adults with a history of maltreatment.
• Those with a history of maltreatment are more likely to experience loneliness and social isolation.
• The potential network of social relationships diminishes over time is known as social thinning.
• Fewer trusted social relationships increases the impact of later stress, and the risk of mental health problems.

Role of the Brain in Building Social World

• Traumatic experiences, like abuse and neglect, can change a child's brain development.
• Brain adaptations may make a child more susceptible to mental health issues, even in safer environments, is referred to as latent vulnerability.
• Maltreatment affects brain systems involved in processing social information.
• Brain system examples include threat, reward and memory systems.

Threat System

• This allows us to respond to danger.
• Abuse and neglect can lead to enduring changes in how the brain responds to perceived danger, even in safe environments.
• Hypervigilance can develope which is the tendency to notice and react to any potential threat in the environment.
• This can also lead to avoidance, so a person avoids places or situations because they experience them as potentially threatening.
• A child who is hypervigilant to threat is more likely to jump to the conclusion that someone is out to cause them harm which compromises their friendships or increases the risk of being isolated, excluded or bullied by peers
• Adults who punish may lead to further social exclusion.
• An oversensitive threat system can also lead to withdrawal from potentially enriching relationships and activities.

Reward System

• It helps us learn about positive aspects of our environment.
• When a child experiences abuse or neglect, rewards are inconsistent or absent which may reduce the brain's responsiveness to rewards later in life.
• A reduction might mean adults and other children then try less hard to interact with and engage the child, heightening their experience of isolation
• If a child is less motivated may alienate and frustrate the peers and adults around them.

Memory System

• Autobiographical memory helps us plan, solve problems, regulate our emotions and develop a positive sense of self.
• Experiences of neglect and abuse can create overwhelming negative memories that influence how memories are stored and remembered.
• Maltreated children tend to be vaguer and give fewer specific details.
• A pattern of overgeneral autobiographical memory effects how a child navigates the social world.
• As result, they are less able to come up with helpful solutions to social problems, which may in turn make it harder to deal with everyday social interactions.

Helping Children Build Support

• Brain changes after childhood trauma can lead to social and mental health difficulties, but it is not permanent.
• Adults, including foster parents, social workers, and teachers, can help children grow and adapt after maltreatment.
• Adults need to be interested and curious about an individual child's strengths, weaknesses, likes, dislikes, and early relationships and experiences.

Changing Systems Around Child

• Formal systems can undermine recovery or inadvertently cause further trauma which requires relational quality centre stage.
• Developing approaches that foster trusted, stable, and supportive relationships as well as providing training and support for carers and professionals is a factor.
• Systems around the child should prioritize social experience, develop policies and approaches that foster supportive relationships.
• Teachers should avoid moving vulnerable children between groups or classes unless there is a good reason to do so.
• Providing support for parents, carers and professionals to help caring effectively.
• Actively investing in and promoting formal systems of ongoing support and evidence-based training is a good idea.
• Children have a say in shaping their own social lives to build a more positive social world.
• Support and interventions should be done with, and not done to, them.

Changing Adults' Thinking and Behavior

• Adapting responses to a child's social behavior reduces the chance of stress generation and social thinning.
• Considering the impact of childhood trauma on brain development improves emotion and behavior regulation understanding and remembering that early experiences shape brain helps adults adopt a more curious and open attitude.
• Pausing and considering behaviors have been necessary might of given children limited ability to navigate social relationships.
• Adults can respond in a come and supportive way that can help the child learn about how to better navigate social relationships.

Helping the Child to Help Themselves

• Adults can support developing new social competencies for a more adaptive social world.
• Teaching social skills can improve wellbeing and reduce mental health difficulties, with social problem-solving and communication skills following maltreatment as well.
• Adults can help a child integrate and make sense of their every day experiences and better navigate future social situations.
• Adults can help children develop healthy ways of responding to their emotions.

Importance of Trust

• Trust is based on whether we believe someone has good intentions towards us, and how much we are able to be open with them as a result.
• Difficulty with trusting others is often seen in individuals with a history of maltreatment. These will often show unpredictable behavior that actively causes them harm.
• Difficulty with trusting others can contribute to stress generation and social thinning.
• Helping children to trust the people around them can help them build exactly the kind of social relationships that are needed to support positive mental health.

Summary

• Maltreatment affects how a child interacts with others, leading to a cycle of stress and social thinning.
• This pathway is not fixed, and adults can build a better social world for children.
• Concerted effort across many individuals and organizations the importance of helping every child who has experienced adversity to build a positive and protective social architecture.

Glossary

• Avoidance changes behaviour to keep away from situations, activities or people
• Autobiographical memory allows us more effectively negotiate new challenges and social situations.
• Brain development are the processes that generate and shape the nervous.
• Brain Systems work together to give rise to a specific function.
• Complex Trauma involves interpersonal threats or harm during childhood or adolescence
• Hypervigilance is a heightened state of sensory sensitivity
• Latent vulnerability adapt in response to abusive or responses
• Maltreatment encompasses all acts of commission or threat, as well as all acts of omission or deprivation
• .Mental health problems are difficulties in thinking feeling and behaviour
• • • Neuroscience** the structure or function of the nervous system
• • • Resilience** a relatively positive outcome
• Reward system is a group of brain regions and neurotransmitters.
• • • Social thinning** constrains a reduces a childs network of supportive relationshipts