Understanding Developmental Trauma

A Crash Course In Childhood Development + What Happens If Babies Don't Bond With Their Birth Mothers Appropriately

For those of you interested in understanding how our boundaries get wounded- and how we can heal them, it’s essential to learn about healthy childhood development. That way, we can recognize where we might have unmet developmental needs and gain more compassion for the parts of us that simply did not get to mature through the developmental stages optimally. Not to scare you, but if you’re a parent, it’s also essential to understand how interfering with your child’s developmental stages can traumatize them and set them up for rougher lives. If we’re educated about healthy child development, we can help our kiddos progress through the stages, rather than sabotaging their efforts to grow up. (Note to parental perfectionism parts- you don’t have to get this perfect. You just need to be a “good enough” parent. Kids are remarkably resilient!)

Okay, so let’s nerd out for a bit.

Boundaries can get wounded in obvious external ways that have little to do with parenting- through Adverse Childhood Experiences like physical or sexual abuse from people outside the home- or by growing up in a war torn or natural disaster-ridden country, for example. Such shock traumas can severely wound our boundary development in ways that may have little to do with how well we were parented. But because boundary development starts in early childhood, the majority of boundary injuries happen because parents are human, and we make mistakes in our parenting, interrupting the natural process of healthy childhood development and putting children at risk of developmental arrests that may never get healed without proper treatment.

Boundary injuries can happen at any phase of childhood development, and people tend to get stuck in the phase that got interrupted and may never outgrow that phase unless their boundary injuries get treated. Margaret Mahler, MD, a Hungarian-born American psychiatrist, elucidated the phases we now understand as part of healthy childhood development, so let’s unpack the first phase of childhood development through a trauma-informed lens and sort out how interference in the “normal symbiosis,” or “bonding” phase can wound a child’s boundaries if this phase naturally enmeshed phase doesn’t go well.

Just so you don’t think I’m presenting some “holier-than-thou” parental perfectionism, and just so those of you who are parents understand how hard it is to meet this developmental needs at this time in the Western world- and can be gentle with yourself, your kiddos, and our own inner kiddos- let me start this discussion of childhood developmental phases by being vulnerable with you all and telling you how bonding with my infant got interrupted at the time of her birth- and why she’s likely in therapy now, at 17, dealing with the developmental impact of events she doesn’t even remember-but her little baby psyche does, on some level.

*I get a bit teary writing about what I’m about to share, so I think I’ll protect my own vulnerable mother parts- and also my daughter’s parts- by putting the next part behind a paywall, just to protect our privacy a little bit. Many thanks to those of you who pay to support this education I’m hoping will help a lot of you. I really appreciate my paid subscribers here (and also all the rest of you who support me by reading.) I can’t thank you enough.