Everybody deals with stress at some level. It’s what causes your heart to pound when running late, or lets you leap out of the path as a car races past. But when stress starts to be your constant companion—not only a transient response but a way of life—then what? Children that go through trauma often end up dealing with just this. Designed to keep them safe temporarily, their stress response system gets stuck in overdrive. If we want to understand childhood complex trauma, we must first get our heads around the stress concept.
Let’s start with the fundamentals: why is the stress response so important?
What Is the Stress Response System?
The body’s built-in alarm mechanism is called the stress response. It’s how your brain and body react to protect you when threatened. Here’s how it functions:
- The Brain’s Alarm: Your amygdala, a little but mighty area of your deep brain, alerts your hypothalamus when it senses threat.
- Command Center: The two primary components of your autonomic nervous system—sympathetic (fight-or-flight) and parasympathetic (rest-and-digest)—are triggered by the hypothalamus.
- The Hormonal Surge: Your hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis activates to produce cortisol and adrenaline. Your pulse accelerates, your muscles tense, and your senses sharpen as these hormones equip your body to react.
When you’re in real danger, this system is quite efficient. It’s not supposed to remain active all the time though. Stress comes and goes for kids living in safe surroundings. Children growing up in dangerous surroundings have a much different story.
Stress in Childhood vs. Adulthood
Adults have fully formed brains and, ideally, coping strategies for dealing with stress. But children are still growing—physically, emotionally, and neurologically. This renders them far more sensitive to the consequences of chronic stress.
The main distinction is that grown-ups can usually remove themselves from trying circumstances. Kids cannot. For safety and emotional regulation, they depend entirely on caregivers. When caregivers cause stress—or fail to offset it—a child’s stress response system gets overburdened. This is the way childhood chronic stress becomes toxic.
Real-Life Example: Witnessing Domestic Violence
Imagine a 7-year-old child growing up in a home where a caregiver frequently engages in violent behavior. The child hears yelling one evening along with the sound of something shattering. Their body responds instantaneously: their heart races, their breath quickens, and they freeze, attempting to make themselves invisible.
This is their stress response reacting like it should. The trouble is that this is not a one-time occurrence. It continues on a regular basis. In response, even when there’s no immediate threat, the child’s body starts to remain on high alert. Difficulty sleeping, regular stomachaches, or trouble focusing in the classroom may develop, all of which are indicators of a stress response gone wild.
Years later, this same child can develop into an adult still prone to anxiety, struggles to trust others, or suffers with chronic illness. The signature of childhood complex trauma is these long-term consequences.
How the Stress Response Becomes Dysregulated
Repetitive early-life activation of the stress response system alters brain and body functioning. This is what could occur:
- Overactive Alarm System: The amygdala becomes hyperactive, hence even in cases where none exist it is constantly searching for threats.
- Weakened “Brakes”: Under long-term stress, the prefrontal cortex—which controls emotions and calms the amygdala—does not develop as it ought.
- Memory Impairment: The hippocampus, which stores memories, shrinks and makes it more difficult to tell past trauma from present reality.
Two often occurring states in trauma survivors can result from this dysregulation:
- Hyperarousal: Constantly feeling on edge, anxious, or quickly triggered.
- Hypoarousal: Feelings of numbness, disconnection, or shutdown.
Why This Matters
To understand trauma, you need to know how the stress response system works. Childhood complex trauma is about how such experiences rewire the body and brain, not just about painful memories. The good news is one can restore what has been rewired. Survivors can start the healing process by learning how to regulate their stress response system.
Final Thoughts
Our bodies’ natural means of ensuring our safety is achieved through the stress response system. For children in unsafe surroundings, though, it can actually become harmful. The first step toward recovery is realizing how trauma is shaped by ongoing stress. We’ll discuss in the next post how persistent stress becomes trauma when protective elements are absent, and the importance of understanding these hidden dynamics.
Remember that healing is possible, even if your stress response seems to be locked in overdrive. Because of its resilience, the body can change. Balance can be regained with the correct tools and support.