Imagine... Neuroception and developmental trauma - a personal opinion

Imagine, it’s a couple of million years ago, you live in a hunter gatherer society and you’re a new Mum, proud of your little bundle and yet it seems your child is not like most of the other new-borns. Your child suckles more frequently, wakes often, seems highly alert to everything going on, is not babbling like the others but forever listening.

The other mother’s see your child and support you, they tie your baby to their back while they go about their morning chores, allowing you to get that extra bit of sleep so you can function well the rest of the day. The tribe is accepting of your child only liking being held by a few of the tribe and make those individuals available to your child. In fact your child is praised and loved by the tribe. They know that children like these are invaluable to the tribe they sense the wolf prowling while everyone else is unaware they sense the pressure changes in the air and so can predict weather even though there maybe isn’t an understanding of pressure fronts that modern society has.

As the child grows their senses are not only accepted but fine-tuned, praised. What this individual is what in modern days would be called a highly sensitive neuroception.

Fast forward to the modern era, proud new Mum just the same but instead you are bombarded with, “what is wrong with your child?” “Have you tried just drinking more coffee?” “Leave them to cry!” you’re overwhelmed and over-tired, your child is maybe accepted by some, but the support of you getting that extra rest is not only gone, but you are expected to be back to work, after all your income is needed to pay the mortgage, that child is desperate for one of those few safe individuals but is instead peeled off you but someone the child doesn’t trust each morning. Maybe the mother has decided not to work, but is judged for her decision, financially struggling, tired to the bone…

This of course is all imagined.

Now why did I write all of that? I recently listened to a webinar about developmental trauma being at the heart of PDA, and that developmental trauma causes that highly sensitive neuroception, but what if it’s the other way around? What if highly developed neuroception is an evolutionary benefit and it’s our modern society’s reaction to it that causes the developmental trauma?

Does it matter? Maybe not because as long as we understand that the individual has a highly sensitive neuroception and we learn how to support it then it doesn’t really matter whether the chicken of the egg came first. But maybe yes because instead of seeing it as a flaw, we see it as something beautiful, something to be cherished and praised. Just a thought!