Psychology Archipelago

Childhood Maltreatment and Adulthood

Childhood is a time of blissful ignorance of the adult world, a time of maturing and infinite curiosity. That’s how it should be. But there are still thousands of children who are abused every year. In 2012, “686,000 children were found to be victims of maltreatment by child protective services.” There are four main types of abuse: physical abuse, sexual abuse, emotional abuse (actions harming the child’s sense of self-worth such as name-calling), and neglect.

Childhood is, unsurprisingly, a vital period for growth as an individual. Maltreatment can thus lead to a variety of issues such as diminished cognitive skills, depression, attachment disorders, and PTSD.


Furthermore, it seems that people with childhood maltreatment and psychiatric disorders respond to treatment differently. Most standard contemporary treatments for diagnosis work less well in individuals with childhood maltreatment, which is often seen in depression. On the other hand, there seems to be some treatments that work better for people who were exposed to maltreatment. It is thus important that we take childhood maltreatment with special attention.

In addition, childhood maltreatment has long-term physical consequences. It has been linked with a vast array of health problems down the line, including diabetes, cancer, stroke, and heart attacks.

These issues ultimately arise from adaptation. In response to abuse and its resulting stress, the brain has to adapt. For example, maltreated individuals often have decreased or increased recognition of negative facial emotions, depending on the type of abuse and the time of exposure. Emotional abuse seems to lead to an increase in recognition while emotional neglect seems to lead to a decrease in recognition. From a developmental perspective, children who suffer from emotional neglect are not exposed to emotions from their parents and are thus less attuned to facial emotions. On the other hand, children who are exposed to emotional abuse are acutely aware of facial emotions because of the repetitive exposure (sometimes misinterpreting ambiguous faces as negative).
An example of the types of faces that might be shown.
These adaptations, once they leave the environment of abuse, can become maladaptive, possibly seeing negative facial emotions where there is none, or not recognizing negative facial emotions. Even in accelerated aging, another consequence of childhood maltreatment, can be viewed as adaptation, since it may be advantageous evolutionarily, allowing for earlier childbirth for people who might die younger. Using these examples, it is clear how a variety of adaptations that may be beneficial during childhood could become harmful in adulthood. 

People can even change at the genetic level from abuse, whether in the actual DNA sequence or in how their body reads the DNA. These changes caused by the environment may even be passed down to children, though the research is not conclusive. However, if there is maladaptation from the environment, it follows that these changes are also reversible depending on the environment. Just because there might be a genetic factor does not mean that creating a loving, caring environment does not matter. 

In fact, having a stable family (or at least one stable caregiver) and or friends are major factors in recovery. Recovery in some children but not others seems to point to some being more “resilient.” Resilience seems to be improved by “future orientation,” the degree to which an individual anticipates the future and plans for it. Future orientation luckily looks to be changeable depending on the environment, meaning that proper support and a stable environment will likely have positive effects. However, there does not seem to be enough research to see what types of environments in particular have the greatest effect on improving future orientation.

Resent research has also begun to uncover the biological mechanism behind resilience. It seems that resilient individuals actually have similar brain structures to those who did not recover from their trauma. To compensate, they were actually less efficient in the connections in their neurons in the brain, specifically in the right amygdala and right subcallosal gyrus. 

At a very basic level, the amygdala is involved in the regulation of emotions while the subcallosal gyrus is responsible for inhibiting motor neuron activity. However, the subcallosal gyrus seems to also play a role in suppressing the fear response of the amygdala, in addition to regulating emotion and socially appropriate interactions. 

It seems that dampening the activity of these regions actually serves to improve mental health and foster resilience from early childhood adversity. However, using this knowledge in treatment is still a tall order. It is not a simple task to easily activate or reduce activation in specific regions of the brain. What has been shown is that environmental factors such as financial sufficiency play a role in changing the physiology of these brain regions.

There is a lot that we do not know about childhood maltreatment, and how to fix it. As the most important preventable risk for mental illness, helping those with childhood maltreatment is of vital importance to improving mental health in general. Childhood maltreatment is a complex problem of environment, genetics, personality, and biology that requires collaboration and integration across all of these fields. But regardless of these advances in sciences, it will always require empathy and understanding, creating caring environments and strong relationships that foster resilience.