Childhood Trauma and Hypervigilance: What’s the Connection?

Find Help for Treating Childhood Trauma and Hypervigilance

Do you feel like your body and mind are constantly on edge, scanning the room for the exit points and making a plan for how to escape? Childhood trauma and hypervigilance are intricately connected, and they might indicate a post-traumatic stress disorder diagnosis. But what’s the link here?

Hypervigilance simply means that your body is on high alert all the time. It’s an important criterion for a PTSD diagnosis and surfaces more in adults who experience trauma as children. When you endure the adverse childhood experiences researchers measure, you’re at greater risk of developing this symptom.

Icarus Behavioral Health in Nevada is uniquely equipped to help you heal hypervigilance and PTSD. If you’re ready to get symptoms under control, let us help you. Keep reading to learn more about the ways hypervigilance might impact you today.

Understanding the Link Between Hypervigilance and Traumatic Events

Before diving into the link between hypervigilance and traumatic events, it’s important to have a working definition of hypervigilance. This is the term that’s used by mental health professionals to describe the overwhelming feeling that your body is constantly on high alert.

Your brain cannot settle and looks for threats everywhere, every moment of the day.

Hypervigilance affects each person differently, but there are a few common symptoms:

• Being aware of potential threats and scanning your surroundings for danger
• Increased startle reflex
• Inability to concentrate and focus on tasks
• Difficulty sleeping
• Overthinking simple situations or ruminating on things gone wrong
• Feeling irritable, on edge, or anxious most of the day

Unfortunately, there is a strong link between hypervigilance and childhood trauma survivors. It’s one of the hallmarks of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) outlined in the diagnostic criteria in the DSM-V (the ultimate textbook for psychological disorders).

Why Hypervigilance Surfaces in Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder

With all of that in mind, you might wonder how the two conditions are linked. Mental health services in your local area can tell you if you have more than one of the PTSD symptoms, but maybe this definition of hypervigilance seems to resonate with you. There is a strong correlation between the two.

Most of the time, dangerous or life-threatening situations in childhood are not under the child’s control. However, your brain develops differently due to traumatic events and tries to tell you what precipitated it to prevent it from happening again. You may notice small details that give you great anxiety.

In fact, many people who have PTSD initially come into therapy for other mental health conditions, such as anxiety disorders. It’s only under the tutelage of a skilled therapist or mental health professional and therapist that they realize how their childhood trauma impacts them.

The goal is for your brain to avoid the likelihood of experiencing yet another trauma, but it can seriously impede your ability to function.

Adverse Childhood Experiences and Hypervigilance

Maybe you think that what you went through in childhood wasn’t truly traumatic enough to cause you to become hypervigilant. You may be surprised by what your adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) show once you enter into treatment.

ACEs are designed to pinpoint specific traumatic events that you may have lived through already. They serve as a quick measurement and recap of your childhood in just ten areas. If you experienced abuse, neglect, violence in the home, mental health issues, or substance abuse in your family, then you might have an ACE in your background.

The question is: what prompts ACEs to trigger hypervigilance in the body and brain?

Differences in Brain Development

Suppose you were a victim of child abuse in your formative years. This is a source of ongoing stress for millions of kids in the United States annually. You never know when abuse will strike or what you can do to prevent it or sidestep a parent’s rage.

The problem is that this ongoing trauma can eventually rewire the brain and cause developmental shifts that hinder you, including the need to be on high alert at all times. While you may also be predisposed to a generalized anxiety disorder, it’s more likely PTSD hypervigilance.

Depending on when your trauma surfaces, you may also be at greater risk for co-occurring disorders in addition to complex PTSD. This creates vulnerability and may make your symptoms more challenging to treat later on down the road–difficult but not impossible for the right clinician!

Decreased Social Interactions and Support

One of the reasons that ACEs are so challenging to treat during those formative years when the brain is still developing is that social support is lacking. Kids often feel isolated due to the nature of their home lives or their life-threatening experiences such as car accidents or natural disasters.

An increase in social interactions leads to a protective buffer around the child who has minimal coping strategies to deal with ongoing stress. However, this isn’t typically the case.

That’s not to say that you’re doomed without social support as a child. Instead, you might be proactive in securing a reliable support system as an adult. This could include a therapist or a trusted friend. As long as you feel safe with them, then you can undo some of that anxiety that has you in knots.

Treatments for Hypervigilance Due to Childhood Trauma

It might seem like there’s no hope for healing your post-traumatic stress disorder this far after the fact, but that isn’t true. Hypervigilance can improve with exposure to the right kinds of therapy regardless of when the initial trauma occurred. Here are a few novel approaches to PTSD symptoms.

Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing Therapy (EMDR)

EMDR follows a strict protocol that allows you to process trauma without ever having to speak it aloud. If you carry a lot of guilt and shame over what happened to you, this may be an ideal choice among all treatment options.

This eight-step process allows you to relive trauma in a safe environment and gives the brain the tools it needs to reprocess it. Once you have tapped or used the bilateral eye stimulation to reprocess trauma, you can instead associate positive affect with a specific trigger that used to bother you.

When you find that one specific situation tends to trigger your hypervigilance, this is a great therapy to minimize those negative self-conceptualizations.

Meditation, Mindfulness, and Progressive Muscle Relaxation

Another tool we can add to your toolbox is dialectical behavioral therapy. This is where most people find the practices of mindfulness and meditation. Simply by focusing on your breathing and the sensations that come up for you in your body, you can make positive changes to your thought patterns.

Progressive muscle relaxation is a great option for someone who wants to dip their toes in the water of a mindfulness routine. This method is very easy to do on your own at home and helps you feel where you might be storing the tension and negative experiences of your childhood trauma.

Medication-Assisted Therapy for Other Mental Health Conditions

In some cases, medication may be a solid option to help you get symptoms under control quickly. When you struggle with overwhelming anxiety disorders or depression and mood disorders, medication fills in the gaps while you learn and practice the other treatment modalities.

It’s best to be in a safe space when you start a new medication. Icarus Behavioral Health in Nevada can offer you a spot in our inpatient program, where our medical team will monitor you 24/7 for reaction and improvement on a new medication regimen. Sometimes, this will be temporary, but some people need long-term help with MAT.

Keep in mind that medication-assisted treatment is rarely the first-line treatment choice. You should consider other treatments simultaneously with MAT to get the most benefit from the program. Still, medication can help lessen anxiety and depression to allow fuller participation in treatment programs.

Why Seek Help with a Mental Health Professional?

Seeking help for traumatic events is never a sign of weakness. Instead, it should be characterized as a display of great strength. Getting the help you need here and now will help you to live a more satisfying and fulfilling life on the other side of childhood trauma and hypervigilance.

Clinicians Trained in Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)

Icarus Behavioral Health in Nevada offers a team of experienced clinicians to anyone struggling with the effects of post-traumatic stress disorder. Not every clinician is equipped to handle a PTSD diagnosis. If you want cutting-edge treatments like exposure DBT and EMDR, we can help you push past trauma.

Dual Diagnosis Treatment

We even assist with dual-diagnosis clients if you also need to face a substance use issue. According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), there is a substantial overlap between people who will get a PTSD diagnosis and those who will continue to struggle with substance abuse.

The problem is not just that dual diagnosis is more difficult to treat. It also presents unique issues that are best left to trained and experienced professionals. For example, you may have less social support and more somatic symptoms that take center stage over your mental health issues.

Comprehensive Care at All Levels

From residential treatment programs to outpatient options, we offer different levels of help to meet the needs of each client. We’ll help you with cognitive and dialectical behavioral therapies, activities like art, yoga, and exercise, and a calm environment where you can begin healing.

Many of our clients start out with residential or medical detox (if they have a substance use issue). As they progress in their treatment, they can graduate to an outpatient program where they spend the day receiving services and practice new coping skills in their evenings at home.

Call Today to Reserve a Spot at Icarus Behavioral Health Nevada

When childhood trauma impacts your daily life, it’s time to get the help you need. Our enrollment team is ready and waiting to answer your questions about which program is the right fit. During an initial intake call, we can also verify your insurance benefits and let you know what to expect financially (if anything).

Don’t let another day go by as you struggle with post-traumatic stress disorder from childhood abuse or trauma. Let Icarus Behavioral Health walk you through the first steps to recovery now!

References

1. Smith, N. A., Voisin, D. R., Yang, J. P., & Tung, E. L. (2019). Keeping Your Guard Up: Hypervigilance Among Urban Residents Affected By Community And Police Violence. Health affairs (Project Hope), 38(10), 1662–1669.
2. Sareen J. (2014). Posttraumatic stress disorder in adults: impact, comorbidity, risk factors, and treatment. Canadian journal of psychiatry. Revue canadienne de psychiatrie, 59(9), 460–467.
3. Austin, A. E., Lesak, A. M., & Shanahan, M. E. (2020). Risk and protective factors for child maltreatment: A review. Current epidemiology reports, 7(4), 334–342.
4. Herzog, J. I., & Schmahl, C. (2018). Adverse Childhood Experiences and the Consequences on Neurobiological, Psychosocial, and Somatic Conditions Across the Lifespan. Frontiers in psychiatry, 9, 420.
5. Calhoun, C. D., Stone, K. J., Cobb, A. R., Patterson, M. W., Danielson, C. K., & Bendezú, J. J. (2022). The Role of Social Support in Coping with Psychological Trauma: An Integrated Biopsychosocial Model for Posttraumatic Stress Recovery. The Psychiatric quarterly, 93(4), 949–970.
6. Gainer, D., Alam, S., Alam, H., & Redding, H. (2020). A FLASH OF HOPE: Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) Therapy. Innovations in clinical neuroscience, 17(7-9), 12–20.
7. Torrico TJ, Mikes BA. Posttraumatic Stress Disorder in Children. [Updated 2024 Apr 20]. In: StatPearls [Internet]. Treasure Island (FL): StatPearls Publishing; 2025 Jan-. Available from:
8. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. (2025, January 30). Trauma and stress. National Institutes of Health.