People often ask me, can children have PTSD? The answer is yes!
They can not only be suffering PTSD-type symptoms, but can also be building the triggers for developing PTSD later in life, and you may have no idea that is happening.
In general, childhood is when we are most vulnerable, especially when we are very young. Babies and young toddlers have no way to protect themselves from trauma or abuse. They can’t run away. They can’t hide. Whatever happens to them is inescapable!
Many people believe babies and young children do not have much awareness of what is going on around them. If you argue in front of them, express fear in front of them, people think babies don’t understand. But the one thing hypnotherapy has taught me, is babies understand everything, and they experience adult emotions, but have no idea what to do with them, so troubling, upsetting feelings get pushed down inside their tiny frame and stored, somewhere!
I know this because, in hypnosis, when a client’s mind is asked to take them back to the very first time they felt destabilizing emotion, they almost always go to an event when they were very young, even tiny, and have a full recall of what is happening around them and how they feel about it.
It certainly makes you think twice, and act differently, as a parent, I can tell you.
If a baby experiences repeated trauma, even if it is secondary trauma, from a parental breakup to severe abuse, all those adult emotions remain inside, deep down, stashed away, if they are not talked about, dissected, and resolved.
That emotional upheaval may not be visible at all in the child for years – until it may come out as anger, anxiety, depression, anorexia or bulimia, or even self-harming.
If you ask the child why they feel the way they do, or why they are acting a certain way, they may have no idea. The memory will have been repressed. But there will be signs, in their past. Things that have happened that would have shredded the emotions of an adult, let alone a child.
If unaddressed, or even medicated away, those feelings can balloon endlessly, exponentially, inside a person until the body can no longer suppress them.
Much later in life, the impact of an original trauma as a young child may burst forth, triggered by something that happens then, and take the form of panic attacks, anxiety, depression, hypertension or hypervigilance, physical symptoms, even paralysis and seizures.
The way to avoid this emotional destruction, potentially spilling over onto partners and children, is to address the trauma in childhood.
All mental health issues, in any form, have an emotional trauma root.
Hypnotherapy works just as well for children, conducted in person or online. Even children as young as five are able to explain what is at the root of their emotional upheaval when allowed to use hypnotherapy techniques to describe it.
So often, young children and teenagers are not even asked what is at the root of their behaviour before being given medication.
There is a pattern, a theme, not only in our responses to trauma but also in what happens to us to trigger it. Stopping that theme in childhood can save decades of emotional difficulty.
Each person who experiences hypnotherapy for PTSD finds themselves aware of something traumatic that happened, generally as a very young child, which explains exactly why they have been feeling and acting the way they have – for years!
The earlier the cause is revealed, the faster it is defused.
If you are aware of a child who may be exhibiting any mental health issues, consider CatchPTSD hypnotherapy first, to help them. It is a gentle, exploratory, revelatory therapy that is far more effective than any potentially dangerous medication. Always try hypnotherapy first.
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