Imagine this: one minute you’re playing quietly in your room, and the next you’re hurt without knowing why. You go to school not knowing who you’ll go home to. You don’t know if you’ll be fed.
This is the reality for too many children. And when children dissociate to manage that kind of overwhelm, their awareness of what’s happening becomes limited. They end up with a fragmented understanding of the world, reinforcing feelings of unpredictability that were already unbearable.
Why Communication Matters
When we started building Mind Of My Own back in 2012-13, everyone on the team came from professional backgrounds in children’s mental health and social care. We’d learned about childhood trauma throughout our careers, and in some cases through our own experience. At that time, the evidence base around the lifelong impacts of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) was only just beginning to take shape.
Over the next decade, the research grew substantially. And one finding came through again and again: trauma has a profound impact on children’s ability to communicate.
Prolonged stress shapes children’s minds and bodies, their reactions to everyday stimuli, and their sensitivity to additional stress. Crucially, trauma and dissociation disrupt a child’s ability to organise, make sense of, remember, retrieve, and narrate their experiences.
This was at the heart of why we created Mind Of My Own. If children are to participate meaningfully in their own lives, to have a genuine influence on the decisions made about them, they may need support with communication. And if they’ve been traumatised, that need is even greater.
What Happens to Language Under Stress
The neuroscience is clear: the areas of the brain responsible for language and the assimilation of new information are suppressed by increased activity in the brain’s stress-response regions. This leads to deactivation of language centres, impacting processing, memory, comprehension, formulation, and expression.
What this means in practice is that a child’s communication difficulties after trauma go far beyond having a limited vocabulary. The very processes that underpin communication, from paying attention, to storing information, to making sense of sequence and cause-and-effect, are all disrupted.
Hypervigilance
Trauma leaves children in a state of hypervigilance, constantly scanning for danger. Their listening becomes impaired, with only dangerous or warning sounds getting through while everything else is filtered out. Anxiety disrupts their ability to focus on anything that isn’t survival-related, and they struggle to extract meaning from language unless it connects directly to their safety. This heightened state also makes it hard to read social cues, and because an elevated state of arousal blocks memory processing, facts and learning struggle to be stored, which means they can’t be retrieved later either.
Dissociation
When stress is prolonged and intense, children shut down. Dissociation is a coping mechanism, but it comes at a cost. Children feel apart from their immediate environment, often without realising it. Information is processed in fragments rather than being integrated into coherent knowledge. The ability to understand cause-and-effect and sequencing breaks down, and the acquisition of linguistic information becomes piecemeal.
An important point here is that exposure alone isn’t enough for vocabulary growth. A child could be in an environment rich in language and adult interaction, but if that child is stressed, those opportunities for learning are undermined. Trauma and post-traumatic overwhelm make it difficult for children to attend to interactions and less able to process and store new vocabulary.
The Broader Impact on Language
The effects on language are wide-ranging. Traumatised children often have limited vocabularies, particularly around body-state words like hungry, tired, or cold, and emotional language like happy, angry, or sad. They frequently can’t predict how a story will end or explain why something happened. And the social rules of conversation, things like turn-taking, understanding jokes, initiating and responding, can be very difficult for them to grasp.
The depth of this challenge is captured well in the trauma literature: children are intrinsically vulnerable. They can rarely remove themselves from a scary situation and may not even be aware that leaving is possible. They may be unable to identify that they’re getting upset, let alone explain what scared them. When language is either unavailable or inadequate to describe reality, the child is left with what has been described as “mute hopelessness” about the possibility of communicating. Because words feel both too powerful and completely useless.
The Six Principles of Trauma-Informed Practice and Communication
The UK government’s 2022 guidance on trauma-informed practice sets out six key principles. Each has direct implications for how we support traumatised children with communication.
Safety. Use compassion, not shame. Show kindness in your words, facial expressions, and safe affection. When a child acts out, respond with firm fairness and empathy. See behaviour as communicating pain or unmet needs, not as something to judge.
Trust. Give consistent, sensitive responses to a child’s non-verbal cues. Teaching children to trust that their needs will be met can prevent the withdrawal that often follows attempts at communication, building a baseline of trustworthiness over time.
Choice. Help children choose body-state words like hungry or cold, and affective words like sad or worried. Model narrative skills by explaining the sequence of events to help the child predict what might happen next. Encourage the child to choose a story ending.
Collaboration. Work with the child to stay grounded. Help them pay attention and notice. With young children, this might mean throwing a ball, looking in a mirror, or playing games like musical chairs to notice when sounds start and stop. With older children, try noticing what others are wearing, playing music together, or paying attention to sound and silence. Exchange jokes, play games, and let children know these things are safe.
Empowerment. Help children name their experience. When they can’t find the words, verbalise their discomfort or needs for them. Saying something as simple as “I know you are tired and hungry” is validating. It helps them connect feelings with words, and being relieved of the burden of searching for the right words removes a barrier that can feel insurmountable.
Cultural Consideration. Traumatised children often miss social cues or misinterpret jokes as insults, and cultural differences can make this harder. Practitioners can model social rules like turn-taking, making eye contact, and understanding others’ intent, offering gentle guidance as a way to support the pragmatics of communication.
A Role for Digital Tools
Mind Of My Own was developed to help children be heard, supporting the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC). As a professional practice tool, it’s known for its contribution to children’s participation, safeguarding, and family partnership work across care, child protection, youth justice, and special educational needs.
But the apps can also support trauma-informed practice directly, because they address the specific barriers that traumatised children face.
Traumatised children often have small expressive vocabularies. Digital tools that use icons and prompts can help a child select how they feel, providing the labels they might be missing and helping them connect internal experience to specific words.
Traumatised children often misunderstand the pragmatic aspects of conversation. A digital tool lets a child initiate communication in the low-risk, neutral environment of their own device, removing the fear of an adult’s impatient or angry reaction. Children who might give up or shut down in a face-to-face interaction are in their own space, able to take their time.
Traumatised children often haven’t had adults who narrate for them what they might be feeling. When a practitioner receives a child’s views via an app, they have a clear starting point to reinforce and reflect those words back. This offers validation, a key step in helping a child feel understood and regulated.
And traumatised children withdraw because they lack experience of successful interactions. Digital tools offer consistency, which helps build trust. Children can rehearse expressing their views and feelings safely, and interacting via a device helps them manage overwhelm.
Final Thoughts
Trauma doesn’t just hurt children. It silences them. It disrupts the very mechanisms they need to tell us what’s happening, what they need, and who they are. If we’re serious about hearing children’s voices, we need to understand the specific ways trauma affects communication and build our practice, and our tools, around that understanding.
The children who most need to be heard are often the ones who find it hardest to speak. It’s on all of us to close that gap.