ABSTRACT
The author focuses on some of the different types of childhood trauma. This is a term developed by the Harvard Center on the Developing Child (Shonkoff et al., 2012) to describe stress where the emotional brain centre is overloaded and there is not an available adult to co-regulate with the baby or child. Mirror neurons support attachment as the baby and care giver do the attachment dance. Porges argues that we have an additional parasympathetic branch known as the social engagement system. Porges' model argues that when we feel threatened, our first option to detect safety is attachment, bonding as we search faces for smiles, warmth and connection. Three layers of memory implicit, explicit and narrative form early in our lives. The connection between memory and trauma helps us better understand flashbacks, nightmares and dissociation. Freud published the first case of play being thought about in therapy with the case of Little Hans in 1909.
