ABSTRACT
This chapter starts with a vignette exemplifying how a baby’s medical condition can add a significant stress to the parents’ already challenged relationship, preventing them from supporting each other. It demonstrates how to approach and organize the psychotherapeutic treatment to support the family and child, starting with establishing a link between the child’s experience of physical pain and his development. This chapter addresses the baby’s experience and memory of pain through a discussion about events that can expose the young child with medical complexities to develop traumatic reactions. There was a time in recent history when it was thought that babies did not remember pain or any preverbal experiences. More recent work in trauma and post-traumatic stress disorders (PTSD) has demonstrated that traumatic experiences, including early childhood traumatic events, are stored in lower parts of the brain, and can be triggered by multisensory stimulations many years later. A thorough review of the literature and research focusing on trauma substantiates this focus. How these theories and research particularly relate to the baby’s experience of her illness, treatment, pain, and memory development is elucidated in this chapter.
