Ashok Gupta explains that childhood trauma doesn't damage the brain but increases connectivity between emotional centers and the prefrontal cortex, making people more reactive to chemical triggers. Neuroplasticity means this sensitivity can be reduced with the right tools.
Can trauma in childhood build the possibility to get damage and then get chemical sensitivities? It's not that the brain gets damaged if we've had a challenging childhood, if we've been exposed to what they call ACEs, adverse childhood events. So that's the kind of official psychological term. It's not that the brain gets damaged. It's that we know that people who are exposed to childhood trauma, they have a lot more connectivity from the emotional centers of the brain, like the amygdala, back through to the conscious brain to the prefrontal cortex. So it means that we're more emotionally reactive to our environment. We also know that the amygdala and the insula are involved in these kinds of reactions. So therefore, it makes sense that it's difficult for the conscious brain to then control these chemical reactions in the same way that, like all of these danger responses. So no need to think that your brain has been damaged as a result of childhood trauma. It's simply that it may be a little more sensitive, but through all of the tools in the program, we can reduce that sensitivity and bring the brain back to balance. So it's perfectly possible to not see our childhood as our destiny. Instead, we have that free will to shift and change our neuroplastic brains the way that we want them to be.
