Emotional numbing is the inability to feel emotions. In DDD patients, this may be observed on a spectrum. It often manifests as a loss of affection, pleasure, fear, or disgust. Sometimes it's an absolute inability to experience emotional states and other times it's a more subtle impairment (unable to experience emotional feelings that normally color perception and mental activity). An inability to perceive objects or concrete situations with emotional feeling, rather than a general inability to experience emotional states is also seen. Cognitive empathy is intact, but affective empathy is impaired.

Emotional Numbing

- Children can identify with animals because, like children, they are small and "helpless". The perception that animals can trust the therapist may lead children to be more inclined to trust the therapist
- The therapist can openly talk about all of the animal's characteristics and show love and acceptance for all of them. For example, an animal who bites would still be shown love. Children can learn that these parts of themselves are acceptable too.

Animal Assisted Therapy can help Children with Developmental Trauma

People with complex ptsd may go through depersonalization. Completely detaching from their past self. This often leads to difficulty in maintaining relationships.

dissociation

Walter Cannon's theory posits that in response to a perceived threat, the body activates the sympathetic nervous system, triggering a cascade of physiological changes. Cannon viewed this response as a fundamental, built-in mechanism for maintaining homeostasis, the body's stable internal environment. He considered it an adaptive function that prepares an individual to either fight or flee, enabling them to adjust to environmental threats and ultimately enhance their chances of survival.

Cannon's Fight or Flight Response Theory

- emotional numbness
- dissociation may occur when either fight or flight fails to protect or is not an option
- hiding the emotions or the abuse itself from self/others

Santa Clara University

- difficulty in establishment of the therapeutic alliance
- shame
- presentation of false self to others
- loss of touch with self

Barriers to treatment for children with developmental trauma

Parish-Plass, N. (2021). Animal-assisted psychotherapy for developmental trauma through the lens of interpersonal neurobiology of trauma: Creating connection with self and others. Journal of Psychotherapy Integration, 31(3), 302-325. https://doi.org/10.1037/int0000253

Animal-assisted psychotherapy for developmental trauma through the lens of interpersonal neurobiology of trauma: Creating connection with self and others.

Children may project certain feelings, perceptions, expectations and sensitivities from past relationships which may have been abusive. This can make it difficult for them to trust the therapist and create the therapeutic alliance.

Barriers to treatment for children with developmental trauma: difficulty in establishment of the therapeutic alliance

- shame can often result in delay of disclosing the abuse, the failure to process it and the maintenance of PTSD symptoms
- the victim/child may feel like the shame is unbearable and that they need to hide it from others and themselves
- the victim/child may present a false self to others in order to hide the source of the shame/emotional pain. this results in a lack of authenticity and again perpetrates the lack of disclosure. 

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