Children deal with trauma through dissociation or hyperarousal – these responses are designed to keep themselves safe, yet they are labeled negatively. It can be difficult to understand their behavior because when children are unable to achieve a sense of control and safety they become helpless – which they deal with through compliance or defiance. If they are unable to grasp what is going on and unable to change it, they go immediately from (fearful) stimulus to (fight/flight/freeze) response without being able to learn from the experience. Subsequently, when they are exposed to reminders of a trauma (sensations, physiological states, images, sounds, situations) they tend to behave as if they were traumatized all over again. These efforts to minimize the threat and regulate emotional distress are often seen as problem behaviors. Unless caregivers, teachers, therapists understand the nature of such re-enactments they are liable to label the child as “oppositional”, “rebellious”, “unmotivated”, and “antisocial”.
