"Old Before Their Time"- Complex Trauma and The impact of Early Abuse on Development

Thank you very much for having me.

I'm a professor of psychiatry at the University of North Carolina.

By training, I'm a child psychiatrist, a child adolescent here.

And I've been really working for probably close to 50 years now on child maltreatment.

And I got into that sort of through kind of a backdoor route in the sense that I was really interested in working with people who had rapid changes in mental state.

And so I was interested in rapid cycling, depression and bipolar disorder.

And I was interested in panic attacks.

And I was interested in periodic catatonic, places where people very quickly changed mental state.

And it was in that context I ran into dissociative disorder.

patients who were flipping back and forth between these identity states, which was really a really great model.

I was at the National Institutes of Health.

I had basically really access to a lot of very excellent laboratories.

And so we did a lot of work on that, bringing them in and switching and looking at the EEG changes and looking at brain activity changes with different kinds of measures.

you know, became very convinced

this is a very real condition.

And it's really, and also learning how much of a post-traumatic stress disorder this is.

And in the context, I had access to maybe about 15 or so subjects who would come in and do my studies.

And we would sort of sit around waiting for the machines to get ready or whatever.

And we would talk.

And sometimes I had three or four of them together.

And they were always thrilled to meet other people who had this condition.

And

they all told me they had been this way since childhood, that they'd always been multiple, always been.

And it was somewhere around middle, early adolescence.

They learned that they weren't, they were different from everybody.