Erik Erikson, a famous psychologist, hypothesized that all humans go through distinct phases of life with corresponding internal battles at each stage He called this framework for life the Psychosocial Stages of Human Development. Erikson hypothesized that if a person did not completely resolve issues at earlier stages it would hinder them from fulfilling future stages successfully. For instance, in infancy a person is trying to figure out a basic understanding of the world and must determine if the world is ultimately “trustworthy or untrustworthy.” If a persons primary caregivers are predicable and consistent then an individual would learn to have hope for the future. However, if mistrust begins from an early age then that person would struggle to form bonds over their entire lifetime, until adequately addressed at a later time. This framework of psychosocial development helps many people better understand what they need to work on from a personality perspective in order to have a more healthy and productive relationship with the world around them.

• FACT: When a trauma event happens at a young age, cells in the brain’s hippocampus (learning center) can overheat and die, causing the brain to only remember fragments of the event. Trauma also impacts an individual’s dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (timekeeper)in the brain causing them to think the the event is occurring in the present instead of the past.

• TAKEAWAY: Therapy can help individuals with trauma see how the event fits into the individual’s life timeline, thereby allowing their brain to distinguish that they are safe “now” even if they weren’t safe “then.”