Developmental Trauma in Adults. How Early-Life Wounds Shape the Present

RELATIONAL TRAUMA • April 26, 2026

Last reviewed: June 2026 by Annie Wright, LMFT

In short: Developmental trauma results from chronic early-life conditions that disrupt nervous system formation and attachment patterning, producing adult wounds that single-incident trauma models don’t fully explain.

The Bathroom Floor at 2 A.M.

Rina is thirty-eight years old. She runs a $40 million company. She’s the one who stays calm when her board panics, the one who builds the spreadsheet that makes sense of the chaos, the one who sends thoughtful Saturday emails that show she’s already three moves ahead. People who work with her use the word “visionary.” People who know her professionally describe her with a quiet kind of awe that she finds both gratifying and profoundly isolating.

Last Tuesday, her partner said, “I need a little space tonight.” He wasn’t cold when he said it. He wasn’t punishing her. He was, by any reasonable measure, doing something healthy. Articulating a need, setting a gentle boundary. But Rina didn’t register “healthy.” She registered something else entirely. She registered abandonment. She went to the bathroom, sat down on the cold tile floor, and cried in a way she hasn’t allowed herself to cry since she was a child, which is to say: she cried with her whole body, the kind of crying that doesn’t feel like sadness but like falling.

She didn’t understand what had happened. She still doesn’t, not entirely. “I know it was irrational,” she tells me in session, her words precisely chosen in the way of someone who has learned to manage the way she is perceived. “I know he just needed an evening to decompress. But something in me just. Cracked open. And I had no idea why.” What Rina is describing is not an overreaction. It is not immaturity or neediness or, as she’s privately feared, some fundamental defect in her character. What she’s describing is developmental trauma surfacing in the present through the very kind of small relational cue. A partner withdrawing. That her nervous system learned, long ago, to experience as catastrophic.

In my work with clients, I see this gap constantly. The vertiginous distance between how capable these women are in the world and how young, raw, and unmoored they feel in the privacy of their closest relationships. If you recognize yourself in Rina’s bathroom floor moment, this guide is for you. There’s a name for what’s happening, a science behind it, and. Critically. A pathway through it that goes deeper than any productivity hack or communication script. Understanding developmental trauma is the beginning of that path.

What Is Developmental Trauma?

The word “trauma” tends to conjure a specific image: a single, identifiable event. A car crash. A violent assault. An acute loss. Society has given us a clear, legible category for this kind of trauma. And it is real, and it matters. But developmental trauma operates on an entirely different logic. It isn’t defined by a dramatic incident so much as by a chronic pattern. By what was absent, by what was inconsistent, by what kept happening in a context that was supposed to be safe, during years when the brain was still being built.

Bessel van der Kolk, MD, psychiatrist and trauma researcher, founder of the Trauma Research Foundation and author of The Body Keeps the Score, spent years attempting to get “Developmental Trauma Disorder” recognized as a formal DSM diagnosis. A separate category that would capture the distinct presentation of children exposed to chronic interpersonal harm during their formative years. His proposed diagnostic criteria, submitted to the DSM-5 task force in 2009, included chronic disruption of basic self-regulatory systems (affective, somatic, behavioral, relational, and attentional), not just the intrusive symptoms and avoidance characteristic of classic PTSD. The proposal was rejected. The review board concluded that the notion of early adverse experience causing substantial developmental disruption was “more clinical intuition than research-based fact.” Van der Kolk, and the thousands of clinicians who treat these clients, would vigorously disagree. But the result is that developmental trauma remains a clinical reality without a formal DSM home, which means that millions of adults carrying it are often misdiagnosed with depression, anxiety, ADHD, or personality disorders instead.

It’s crucial to distinguish developmental trauma from what it’s sometimes conflated with in pop psychology: “childhood trauma” as a generic umbrella, or single-incident events that happened to occur in childhood. Developmental trauma is specifically about the disruption of formative developmental processes. The chronic absence or distortion of what the developing brain requires to wire itself properly. It’s less about what happened and more about what was consistently missing, or what kept happening, during windows when the brain was exquisitely sensitive to relational input.

Jonice Webb, PhD, clinical psychologist and author of Running on Empty, has written extensively about childhood emotional neglect. The invisible wound of what didn’t happen. As she puts it, emotional neglect isn’t an act of commission but of omission: the parent who was physically present but emotionally absent, who provided material care but couldn’t attune, who didn’t hit but also didn’t see. This “nothing happened” quality is one of the reasons developmental trauma is so often unrecognized by the adults carrying it. They don’t have a story to point to. They have a feeling they can’t explain and a pattern they can’t stop. If you’ve ever said, “My childhood was fine, nothing bad really happened, but something feels fundamentally wrong with me,” you may be describing exactly this kind of developmental wound. Read more about these patterns in our complete guide to relational trauma.

The Neurobiology: How the Developing Brain Wires for Survival

The reason developmental trauma is categorically different from adult-onset PTSD isn’t philosophical. It’s neurobiological. The brain is not equally plastic at all stages of life. During early childhood, particularly in the first three years but continuing through adolescence, the brain passes through what neuroscientists call “sensitive periods”. Windows during which specific neural systems are under accelerated construction and exquisitely responsive to relational input. The caregiving environment during these windows doesn’t just influence the child. It literally builds the brain.

Allan Schore, PhD, clinical faculty member in the Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences at UCLA and one of the world’s foremost researchers in the neuroscience of attachment, has spent decades documenting precisely how early relational experience shapes the developing right brain. In his landmark research, Schore has shown that the right hemisphere. Which develops first, before the left-brain language systems come fully online. Is the seat of emotional regulation, implicit memory, social cognition, and the internal body sense. It’s the brain that runs beneath our conscious awareness, organizing how we feel, how we read faces, how we interpret whether a room is safe or dangerous.

When the early caregiving environment is chronically misattuned. When the parent is depressed, absent, rageful, anxious, or simply unable to reliably perceive and respond to the child’s emotional states. The developing right brain wires around that deficit. It builds survival architecture instead of connection architecture. The child learns to suppress emotion rather than express it (because expressed emotion brought danger or abandonment). The child learns to read the caregiver’s face for signs of storm rather than for signs of warmth. The child’s internal working models. Those subconscious templates for how relationships work, which Daniel Siegel, MD, describes as encoded in neural firing patterns across the right hemisphere. Are built on the assumption that attunement is unreliable, that emotional needs are inconvenient, and that safety is something to be earned through performance rather than simply given.

These right-brain templates don’t stay in the childhood home. They travel with the child into every subsequent relationship. Into adult partnerships, into professional dynamics, into the very relationship that adult woman has with her own body and its signals. When Rina’s partner says “I need space,” her left brain hears a reasonable statement. Her right brain. The one that runs faster, beneath language. Fires the old template: Withdrawal means abandonment. Abandonment means I’m too much, or not enough. I’m not safe. The bathroom floor isn’t an overreaction. It’s the right brain doing exactly what it was built to do.

Bruce Perry, MD, PhD, neuroscientist, senior fellow at the Child Trauma Academy, and author of The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog, offers another essential frame through his Neurosequential Model of Therapeutics. Perry emphasizes that the brain develops from the bottom up. Brainstem first, then limbic system, then cortex. Adverse early experiences don’t just affect thinking; they alter the foundational regulatory systems laid down before conscious memory even begins. Children who grow up in chronically chaotic or neglectful environments often have stress-response systems that are set to hyper-alert or shutdown by default. Not because of a character flaw, but because these systems were calibrated during a period when hyper-alert or shutdown was actually the accurate response to the environment they were in.

This is why trauma-informed therapy for developmental trauma can’t simply address cognitions or narratives. It has to meet the nervous system at the level where the wiring actually lives.

How Developmental Trauma Shows Up in driven women

What I see consistently in my practice is that developmental trauma in driven women often looks nothing like what popular culture has taught us trauma “should” look like. There’s no obvious history of dramatic abuse to point to. There’s no broken life, no failed career, no visible unraveling. Instead, there’s a woman who has built a beautiful exterior life. Precisely because the exterior became the armor she wore over an interior that didn’t feel safe.

Angela is a labor and employment attorney, forty-one, the daughter of parents who immigrated with almost nothing and who built a life of quiet dignity and significant financial sacrifice. Her parents weren’t cruel. They worked. They provided. They had no room, emotionally or materially, for the complicated feelings of a sensitive child who needed more than food, clothing, and the implicit message that gratitude was the appropriate emotional response to survival. Angela was told, in a thousand wordless ways, that her emotional needs were a luxury the family couldn’t afford. So she learned to need nothing, and to perform needing nothing, with extraordinary skill. She became the first in her family to attend law school, then made partner at thirty-four. Her emotional self went underground decades ago. She isn’t sure it’s still there.

In my office, Angela has difficulty identifying what she’s feeling in the moment. Not because she lacks intelligence. She’s one of the sharpest people I’ve worked with. But because the neural circuitry that would have allowed her to track and name her internal states was never given the relational conditions it needed to develop properly. This is called emotional neglect, and its signature is an adult who can analyze everyone else’s emotions brilliantly while remaining a stranger to her own. She can write a brief about emotional damages with precision and empathy. She cannot, when I ask, tell me what she notices in her body right now.

Other patterns I see regularly in women carrying developmental trauma include: chronic relational anxiety that bears no relationship to the actual safety level of the current relationship; a deep, pervasive sense that they are fundamentally different from other people. Not in the way high status makes you different, but in the private way of feeling inherently defective; difficulty self-soothing (reaching for work, alcohol, scrolling, food, or another person at the first sign of discomfort rather than having a reliable internal capacity to settle); somatic symptoms. Chronic tension, jaw clenching, gut irregularity, a persistent low-level anxiety in the body. That have no clear medical origin; fearful-avoidant attachment patterns in intimate relationships, oscillating between desperate closeness and sudden withdrawal; and a chronic inability to trust their own perceptions, particularly in interpersonal contexts, because the early environment taught them their perceptions were wrong, too much, or irrelevant.

That last one is worth pausing on. Women with developmental trauma. Particularly those whose caregiving environment included emotional invalidation, parentification, or chronic gaslighting. Often carry a deep uncertainty about whether what they perceive is real. They double-check their interpretations constantly. They apologize for reactions before they’re even sure they’ve had them. They have a finely calibrated external antennae and a scrambled internal compass. The very intelligence that makes them exceptional in their professions. The capacity to read a room, to anticipate other people’s needs. Was forged in the fires of having to read a room to survive. It’s a superpower with a shadow side: they’re so good at tracking others that they’ve lost the ability to track themselves.

If you recognize yourself here, I want you to also read our guide to childhood relational trauma in adult women. It speaks directly to these patterns and their developmental origins.

The Still Face and the Roots of Self-Regulation

To understand why the absence of attunement is so damaging, we need to look at one of the most striking experiments in developmental psychology: Edward Tronick’s Still Face Paradigm. Edward Tronick, PhD, distinguished professor and director of the Child Development Unit at Harvard University, designed a deceptively simple experiment in the 1970s that continues to reverberate through every field that touches infant development.

In the original study, a mother and her infant engage in a warm, playful interaction. The mother smiling, vocalizing, responding in real time to the baby’s cues. Then the experimenter instructs the mother to present a neutral, unresponsive “still face”. To look at her baby without expression, without reaction, completely flat. What happens in the next few minutes has been watched by hundreds of thousands of researchers, clinicians, and students, and it never stops being difficult to witness.

Within seconds of the still face, the baby notices something is wrong. She looks at her mother, reaches for her, attempts to engage. When the mother doesn’t respond, the baby escalates. Bigger bids, louder sounds, more urgent attempts to re-establish connection. When those fail, the baby eventually turns away, posture collapsing, affect flattening. She withdraws. She tries to self-soothe by sucking her thumb, looking away, going still in a way that looks like shutdown. When the mother resumes normal interaction, it takes time for the baby to trust the re-engagement. She’s been disrupted. She needs repair.

What Tronick’s research reveals is not simply that babies need warmth. It reveals that the infant’s capacity for self-regulation is, at the beginning, entirely co-regulatory. The developing nervous system doesn’t have the internal infrastructure to settle itself, read cues accurately, or return to baseline after distress. It borrows that infrastructure from the caregiver’s nervous system. The attuned caregiver’s face is, literally, the baby’s first nervous system regulator. This is what Schore means when he writes about “right brain to right brain” communication between caregiver and infant: two nervous systems, in sync, the developed one lending its regulatory capacity to the developing one.

When the still face is the chronic experience of childhood. Not an experimental protocol that lasts two minutes, but the emotional reality of growing up with a depressed, addicted, dissociated, anxious, or simply emotionally unavailable parent. The child doesn’t develop the internal infrastructure for self-regulation. She develops work-arounds. She learns to manage dysregulation through control, achievement, self-sufficiency, or disconnection from feeling. And she carries those work-arounds into adulthood, where they function beautifully in many contexts and catastrophically in others. Like a bathroom floor at 2 a.m. Like a partner who just needed an evening alone.

Understanding Tronick’s work changes the question “What’s wrong with me?” into something far more accurate: “What was the relational environment in which my nervous system was built, and what did it teach my body to expect?” That reframe isn’t a bypass. It’s the beginning of genuine accountability to yourself. You can’t repair what you can’t first see clearly.

Both/And: Early Wounds Shape Your Nervous System AND Your Adult Life Is Yours to Author

When I walk through this material with clients. The neurobiology, the sensitive periods, the right-brain wiring. A specific fear tends to surface. “So you’re saying my childhood made me this way, and there’s nothing I can do about it.” The fatalism is understandable. If the wound is architectural, if it was laid down before conscious memory, if it lives in the body rather than in a thought you can correct. What is the leverage point? What is left to work with?

This is where we have to hold the Both/And. And I’m using that phrase deliberately, because the tendency of driven women in particular is to want a clean either/or. Either my past is determinative, or my present is fully mine to shape through force of will. Both of those positions are ways of avoiding the discomfort of the actual truth, which is more complex, more hopeful, and harder to live with.

Your early developmental environment shaped your nervous system. That is real. The right-brain templates that were laid down during your sensitive periods are not fiction. They are the operating system through which you run every day, most of the time without knowing it. When Rina’s partner says he needs space, it isn’t her logical brain that responds first. It’s that thirty-year-old right-brain template that still runs the initial scan. You didn’t choose that. It isn’t a character flaw. It’s how developmental trauma works.

AND. Your adult life is yours to author. This is also true, and neuroscience is no longer equivocal about it. The same plasticity that shaped the brain in early childhood persists. Differently, and requiring more sustained effort. Throughout adulthood. Daniel Siegel, MD, has written extensively about neuroplasticity and what he calls “integration”. The brain’s capacity to form new connections across previously isolated systems, creating coherence where there was fragmentation. Earned secure attachment. The concept developed by Mary Main, PhD, developmental psychologist at UC Berkeley. Demonstrates that adults who had insecure, disorganized, or traumatic early attachment can develop secure internal working models through sustained, attuned therapeutic relationships. The wiring is not permanent. The templates can update. The story can change.

Ana is a physician. An intensivist who manages the most medically complex patients in a Level I trauma center. She came to therapy because she was struggling with what she called “not trusting her own mind.” She had grown up with a narcissistically organized mother who systematically invalidated Ana’s perceptions. “That didn’t happen,” “You’re too sensitive,” “You always exaggerate.” Ana entered adulthood with extraordinary clinical acumen and a near-total inability to trust her own interior experience. She could read an arterial blood gas in seconds. She could not, when a colleague dismissed her, trust that her hurt was real and warranted.

Over three years of depth-oriented, somatically-informed therapy, Ana has not erased her history. She has not arrived at a place where her mother’s voice no longer echoes. She has arrived at a place where she can hear that echo, recognize it as old rather than current, and choose to trust her own perception anyway. That’s what earned secure attachment looks like in practice. It’s not silence where there was once noise. It’s the capacity to hear the noise and not be run by it. Her past shaped her nervous system AND she is learning to author her responses, her relationships, and her relationship with herself. Both of those things are simultaneously true. That’s the work.

If you’re navigating the early stages of this recognition, consider Fixing the Foundations^™, my signature course for relational trauma recovery. It was designed specifically for women who are beginning to name what they’ve been carrying and who need a structured framework for understanding and beginning to repair it.

The Systemic Lens: Developmental Milestones Culture and Achievement as Armor

There’s a particular cultural layer that sits on top of developmental trauma for driven women, and it’s worth naming it explicitly because it makes the wound harder to see and much harder to get help for. We live in what I’d call a developmental milestones culture. A world that has become extraordinarily sophisticated at tracking and celebrating external developmental benchmarks (first words, reading level, college admission, career ladder, net worth) and almost entirely silent on internal developmental milestones (the capacity to tolerate distress, to trust one’s own perceptions, to rest, to receive care, to feel emotions fully and let them pass).

This silence serves the developmental trauma perfectly. A woman who cannot identify what she’s feeling is invisible to a culture that doesn’t ask. A woman who can’t self-soothe finds an entire economy organized around external substitutes. Productivity tools, achievement metrics, optimization frameworks. That will happily substitute for the internal regulatory capacity she was never given the relational environment to develop. The driven woman’s developmental arrest, her interior injury, is not just tolerated by the culture. It is actively rewarded. She gets promoted. She gets funded. She gets quoted in articles about leadership. The very thing that is quietly destroying her private life is generating her public success, and the culture sees no contradiction in this, because the culture is not tracking the internal milestones at all.

Consider the woman who, at thirty-five, is by every external metric thriving. She hits every professional milestone. Partnership, promotion, recognition, revenue. She reads the right books, takes the right courses, has a therapist she sees once a month and describes as “helpful.” But internally, she’s running on the same nervous system that was built by a ten-year-old who had to be a parent to her own parents, or a six-year-old who learned that big feelings were dangerous, or an adolescent who discovered that achievement was the only thing that reliably produced warmth from the adults in her life. Her external development continued. Her internal development, in specific domains, got arrested at the moment the wound was made.

Pete Walker, MA, author of CPTSD: From Surviving to Thriving, describes this as the developmental arrest of the inner child. The way that an emotionally neglected or traumatized child stops developing in the domain of feeling, relating, and self-knowing even as other developmental arcs continue normally. The adult who emerges may be forty, or fifty, but in certain relational contexts she’s still operating from the eight-year-old who learned that her job was to manage everyone else’s feelings, not to have her own.

The systemic piece matters because it explains why these women don’t get help sooner. The culture gives them no language for interior struggle and no permission to prioritize it. They’re told, implicitly and explicitly, that their interior is a personal problem that should be efficiently managed. Medicated, workshopped, or outrun by the next achievement. What they need instead is the genuine, sustained, relational work of trauma-informed therapy. Therapy that doesn’t just manage symptoms but actually addresses the developmental deficit at its root. And they need a cultural story, which we are slowly beginning to build, that names interior developmental milestones as real and as important as any external one.

For further reading on how the culture of overachievement intersects with relational wounding, I’d also recommend exploring childhood relational trauma in adult women. And consider trauma-informed executive coaching if you’re navigating the intersection of your professional life and these deeper patterns.

The Path Forward: Developmental Repair, Not Just Trauma Processing

Here is one of the most important clinical distinctions I can offer: treating developmental trauma requires more than trauma processing. Standard trauma therapy. The work of processing discrete traumatic memories, reducing hyperarousal, building distress tolerance. Is necessary, but it isn’t sufficient for developmental trauma. The reason is that developmental trauma isn’t only about what happened that needs to be processed. It’s about what didn’t happen. The developmental experiences that were absent. That now need to be actively provided.

This is the concept of developmental repair, and it changes the entire frame of the therapeutic endeavor. If the wound is that you never had a consistent experience of your emotions being witnessed and accurately reflected back to you, the healing isn’t just about processing past events. It’s about having the experience, for the first time, of being accurately witnessed and reflected. If the wound is that you never learned to self-soothe because the co-regulatory experiences that would have built that capacity were missing, the healing isn’t just insight. It’s actually developing, slowly and painstakingly, the internal regulatory infrastructure that wasn’t built the first time around.

This is why the therapeutic relationship is not merely a vehicle for delivering interventions. In developmental trauma work, the therapeutic relationship is the primary intervention. The attuned, consistent, honest, boundaried relationship with a trauma-informed therapist provides the corrective relational experience that was absent in development. And over time, with enough repetition, it literally updates the right-brain templates that were built in that earlier context. It’s not a metaphor. It’s neurobiology.

Several modalities are specifically suited to this kind of developmental repair work. Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy (AEDP), developed by Diana Fosha, PhD, is organized explicitly around transformative relational experience rather than symptom management. The idea that healing happens when the client has the direct experience of being fully, non-judgmentally seen. Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, developed by Pat Ogden, PhD, founder of the Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Institute, addresses the somatic legacy of developmental trauma through direct attention to the body’s posture, sensation, and movement. Recognizing that the body carries developmental injury that narrative therapy alone can’t reach. Internal Family Systems (IFS), developed by Richard Schwartz, PhD, offers a map for reaching the exiled, wounded younger parts of self. The ones who learned to hide while the capable, managing parts ran the show. And bringing them gradually into the light of Self-led compassion.

Bruce Perry, MD, emphasizes through his Neurosequential Model that effective treatment for early developmental trauma must address regulatory deficits at the level of the brainstem and limbic system before it can effectively address cortical patterns. This means that somatic work. Movement, breath, body-based regulation. Is not supplemental to developmental trauma treatment. It’s foundational. If your body is still running a survival program from 1993, no amount of cognitive insight will override it. The body has to be included.

What does developmental repair actually look like in practice? Here’s what I’ve watched unfold with clients like Angela, Rina, and Ana:

First, there’s the naming. The moment when the pattern gets identified and connected to its developmental context, which creates what Siegel calls “mindsight” (the ability to see your own mind clearly). This is not the healing, but it’s the necessary precursor to it. Second, there’s the stabilization. Building the regulatory capacity that was missing, through both somatic practices and the gradual experience of the therapeutic relationship. Third, there’s the grieving. The profound, often underestimated grief of acknowledging what the developmental environment didn’t provide, and releasing the magical belief that if you just achieve enough, or fix yourself enough, you’ll eventually get what you needed back then. That grief is not weakness. It’s accuracy. And it’s the prerequisite for building something new. Fourth. Slowly, non-linearly, through rupture and repair cycles that mirror the healthy attachment process. There’s the actual updating of the internal working models. The right-brain templates begin to hold more complexity: not just “connection is dangerous” but “connection is sometimes dangerous AND sometimes genuinely safe, and I’m learning the difference.”

The timeline is not short. Anyone who promises a weekend transformation for developmental trauma is offering something other than repair. Meaningful developmental work typically unfolds over eighteen months to several years of consistent, depth-oriented therapy. That timeline isn’t a failure of the modality. It’s appropriate to the scope of the work. The brain took years to build these templates. It requires sustained, repeated relational experience to update them. If you’re ready to explore what this looks like, I invite you to connect with our team for a conversation about fit. Or if you’re in the early stages of recognizing these patterns, the relational trauma quiz can help you begin to map your specific terrain.

To Rina, still on the bathroom floor at 2 a.m. in your mind: You’re not broken. You’re wired. And wiring can change. The fact that you feel it so acutely. The gap between who you are in the world and who you feel inside. Isn’t a sign of defect. It’s a sign of clarity. It means you haven’t fully anesthetized yourself to the distance. There’s something in you that still knows it doesn’t have to be this way, that keeps sending the signal. That signal is the beginning. To Angela, who built a life of extraordinary precision and doesn’t know what she feels: your interior didn’t vanish. It went underground, because underground was safer. It can come back. To Ana, learning to trust her own perceptions: every time you choose to believe your own inner knowing over the old voice that told you you were too much. That is the rewiring, one moment at a time. The work is real, it’s hard, and it’s the most important work you’ll ever do. Not because the world needs a more regulated version of you at the top of your field. But because you deserve a life that feels as real on the inside as it looks on the outside. That life is possible. The science says so. And so does everything I’ve watched unfold in this work, year after year, with women just like you. Join us at the Strong & Stable newsletter. A weekly conversation for women doing exactly this kind of interior work.

Related Reading

1. Siegel, Daniel J. The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are. 3rd ed. New York: Guilford Press, 2020.
2. Schore, Allan N. “The Effects of Early Relational Trauma on Right Brain Development, Affect Regulation, and Infant Mental Health.” Infant Mental Health Journal 22, no. 1, 2 (2001): 201, 269.
3. Tronick, Edward. The Neurobehavioral and Social-Emotional Development of Infants and Children. New York: W. W. Norton, 2007.
4. Perry, Bruce D., and Maia Szalavitz. The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog: And Other Stories from a Child Psychiatrist’s Notebook. New York: Basic Books, 2006.
5. van der Kolk, Bessel A. “Developmental Trauma Disorder: Toward a Rational Diagnosis for Children with Complex Trauma Histories.” Psychiatric Annals 35, no. 5 (2005): 401, 408.
6. Webb, Jonice. Running on Empty: Overcome Your Childhood Emotional Neglect. New York: Morgan James Publishing, 2012.
7. Walker, Pete. Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving. Berkeley: Azure Coyote, 2013.
8. Main, Mary, and Judith Solomon. “Discovery of an Insecure-Disorganized/Disoriented Attachment Pattern.” In Affective Development in Infancy, edited by T. B. Brazelton and M. W. Yogman, 95, 124. Norwood: Ablex, 1986.

References

Peer-Reviewed Research (Vancouver)

1. van der Kolk BA, Wang JB, Yehuda R, Bedrosian L, Coker AR, Harrison C, et al. Effects of MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD on self-experience. PLoS One. 2024;19(1):e0295926. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0295926. PMID: 38198456.
2. Reisz S, Duschinsky R, Siegel DJ. Disorganized attachment and defense: exploring John Bowlby's unpublished reflections. Attach Hum Dev. 2018;20(2):107-134. doi:10.1080/14616734.2017.1380055. PMID: 28952412.
3. Ogden P, Pain C, Fisher J. A sensorimotor approach to the treatment of trauma and dissociation. Psychiatr Clin North Am. 2006;29(1):263-79, xi-xii. PMID: 16530597.
4. Schore AN. The Interpersonal Neurobiology of Intersubjectivity. Front Psychol. 2021;12:648616. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2021.648616. PMID: 33959077.
5. Iwakabe S, Edlin J, Fosha D, Thoma NC, Gretton H, Joseph AJ, et al. The long-term outcome of accelerated experiential dynamic psychotherapy: 6- and 12-month follow-up results. Psychotherapy (Chic). 2022;59(3):431-446. doi:10.1037/pst0000441. PMID: 35653751.
6. Brenner EG, Schwartz RC, Becker C. Development of the internal family systems model: Honoring contributions from family systems therapies. Fam Process. 2023;62(4):1290-1306. doi:10.1111/famp.12943. PMID: 37924221.

Books & Cultural Sources (Chicago Author-Date)

• Walker, Pete. Complex PTSD. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2013.

Medical Disclaimer