I really hate it when I see something in the WWW and forget to note where I found it, but this is something that makes so much sense to me and it's tied to "developmental trauma disorder" sort of, although I don't thik it's Van der Kolk. So here Sunny, maybe this speaks to a couple of your excellent questions.
to all (and sorry about the fonts, I have no idea)
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There is a special and sad vulnerability for children. During early development, the brain enters a hyper-alert phase as part of the learning and growing process. Children absorb an amazing of information in a short time. They learn walking, talking, communication, and how to control information. Children learn the difference between their actions and themselves. They learn to separate themselves from their environment. They build their identities. One pictures that alert little amygdala busy processing all that new information from the world, storing up experiences, defining rules, figuring out language and the power of words (that’s the terrible twos.), figuring out society, and “look! See what happens when I drop the ball – it falls to the floor and makes a noise and rolls away. Will it do that again? Let’s see.” Children are wonderful scientists and natural experimenters. It must be an exciting time for the brain.
What if there is trauma? Trauma can push this alert state to such extremes that there is damage to the brain cells (PTSD). If the child stays this way for an extended time, then memories that might have become long term (and therefore retrievable later to the adult brain) are never connected. She loses her memory of childhood. And she never fully builds an integrated personality. This is not necessarily a multiple personality, although in the most extreme cases, the child can develop the Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) that results in multiple personalities. Some people have improperly characterized all such injuries as DID. Far more common than DID, however, is the injured, traumatized personality that develops PTSD.
In the case of a young child this is especially serious. It seems as if children are born with a brain filled with templates, some complete, most needing some input from the environment to complete their structure. The child fills in these templates as she grows and learns human behavior. At some critical point the child integrates all the templates into an executive control, an identity, a self. The safer the environment the healthier the final product. Probably by the age of six, the templates are complete enough to define a whole person.
If the child completes the integration, then she/he can endure a lot of physical and mental attacks and not lose her identity. She/he will develop her own strategies for survival. If however the trauma is severe enough, then depending upon the trauma and when it occurred, one or more particular templates may remain incomplete; she does not integrate. Sadly, she does not know this has occurred. The painful future, the misunderstandings to come, the failures and confusions, these will all make little sense to her. She thinks that her brain is operating the same way that everyone else’s brain does. She thinks she has the same genetic templates and the same completed personality. She does not understand why she has problems.