From Top Ten List: Adopting an Abused Child...

9. Abuse experienced by a pre-verbal child affects the child.

I am always baffled to hear how some people believe that things that happen to a very young child do not affect him. All you have to do is look at a child with reactive attachment disorder (RAD) to know that this is not true. A child develops RAD when he fails to attach to a caregiver before the age of 5. Clearly, the disorder develops when the child is very young.

Many people believe that a young child cannot remember early abuse. That is not true. My own abuse started when I was a toddler, and I have worked through flashbacks from when I was as young as 18 months old. The flashbacks were vivid, and I was able to validate the details in the flashbacks through old photo albums. For example, in one flashback, I sought comfort by hugging a poodle stuffed animal. I had no conscious memory of ever having a poodle toy as a child. I looked back through old photo albums and found some pictures of myself holding that toy poodle when I was two years old.

The things that a child experiences affect him, even when the abuse happens to a child who is preverbal. The younger a child is when the abuse starts, the less capacity he has to make sense of the abuse and “catalog” the memories in his brain. The memories are stored in a different way than other memories. The trauma continues to affect the way the child views and interacts with the world, even though the events are not consciously remembered.

Healing from preverbal trauma is different than healing from trauma that happened at a later age. Many books are available that discuss healing from preverbal trauma. Therapy for patients who experienced preverbal trauma often involves the patient acting out the trauma. Rather than having visual flashbacks, the patient often experiences body memories in which he can feel what happened without having a visual image attached. From what I have read, working through preverbal trauma is very distressing because you are trying to make sense out of traumas that are stored mostly as bodily feelings and very strong emotions. Unlike a visual flashback, where you can make some “sense” out of what is happening, the body memories can make very little “sense.”

Some hopeful adoptive parents choose to adopt children who are very young (under age 4 or 5) because they believe that the children were too young to have aftereffects from the abuse. If a child experienced trauma at a very young age, he will likely have issues to work through, even though the trauma happened very young.

Related Topics:

• Top Ten List: Adopting an Abused Child


• Severe Emotional Issues -- Reactions of a child who endured sexual abuse as a toddler


• Emotional Trauma May Damage Kids' Brains -- Explanation of the damage that abuse causes the brain


• Trauma, Brain & Relationships -- Effects of trauma on cortisol production and damage to the brain


• A Totally Awesome Article on Traumatized Children -- Explanation of the damage inflicted to children who are abused preverbally