this post was submitted on 17 May 2025
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I have children. The amount of trauma a two year old would experience losing their family, being transported to a foreign country and adopted by different people would be ~~traumatic~~intense as hell.
A two year old is not a newborn. That's their entire world blowing up.
Yeah you can basically completely disregard any other aspect in this study, right? 'massive trauma in early life has strong impact' is the real finding here, and that's hardly a new one
Luckily it's very local, time wise. I don't remember a thing from like 5 and earlier.
Just because a person doesn’t have a memory of a traumatic event doesn’t mean it doesn’t affect them. Kids can have lasting trauma effects even from things they were too young to remember.
That's true. But I imagine a lot has to do with how they are received and how they deal with it. If the adopting parents handle it gracefully, then the child is in a good place to deal with their trauma, whether it's consciously or subconsciously. At least I hope.
During the communist regime in Romania there was a ban on abortion and the state encouraged people to have lots of kids (sound familiar?). This lead to A LOT of kids in orphanages and not enough resources to properly care for them. Conditions were atrocious, to say the least.
But, that lead to a lot of research data by following the lives of kids who got adopted from those orphanages. It was determined that 4 month old was the cut-off point from where kids can still recover from traumatic experiences. Kids adopted younger than that did fine, but kids adopted after that age were affected for the rest of their lives. The fact that they didn't actually remember things consciously did not matter.
That's very interesting. I'm curious about how it affected their lives.
(And yes, sounds very familiar... 🚩🇺🇸🚩)
Your anecdotal experience doesn't have anything to do with this if you weren't traumatized at a young age.
My parents were divorced when I was about 2? Not "trauma" maybe, but you'd think it might be something I might remember. I dunno.
I would not think that, no.
Makes sense, if I don't remember it. But maybe it was just a calm separation.
Trauma doesn't always come with memories. You might have some form of PTSD response to the stressors the divorce caused.
Significant trauma are frequently suppressed in memory.
Could be that, too. I have a great relationship with both my parents though so I doubt it's PTSD in my particular case. Or at the very least I've had great support in subconsciously dealing with it, if anything. But still, yes!
Interesting. I've got very distinct memories from back then, though they've almost become memories of memories now.
From what I understand, this is how memory works. Every time you remember something, you're actually remembering the last time you remembered it.
The medium in which memories are stored isn't exactly digital or isolated from stimulus. If something disturbs the memory, or the memory gets taken over by some other shit you learn, then I imagine the memory will take on another shape. So in essence, you are recalling a current snapshot of the memory. But the more often you recall it, the more recent and solidified/consolidated the memory will be. Just like muscle memory. The brain will make strong connections for things it uses often, because it is implied that those things are important for survival.
I'm no expert(!) but I imagine this is how it works.