Trauma, Development, and Spirituality
Clayton Newsome
Dr. Pamela Todd
Counseling 502
September 11, 2014

Introduction
People can suffer from many different situations throughout their life time. Trauma is one effect that can cause a person to do things out of the ordinary. When a person suffers from trauma it can affect them for the rest of their life. In this essay I will discuss how trauma can affect a person through development as well as spiritually.
Neural Development
Trauma can affect a child’s neural development and will attack their fine motor skills in a way where it is hard for them to function. In young children, gross motor, fine motor, and cognitive development are intertwined processes related to the maturation timetables of the central and peripheral nervous systems. Neurons are migrating, proliferating, and making more complex connections. Children become capable of more sophisticated communications with the production of neurotransmitters. Myelination, the sheathing of neurons in protective layers of fatty and protein substances, increases the rate of neuronal firing and facilitates faster, more complex signals between brain cells and from the brain to the rest of the body (Roehlkepartain, 2006).
Children who are tested for ADHD are normally given a false reading, which causes a since of not know for sure how many children have the disorder. There are drug treatments for this type of disorder such as Ritalin or Dexadrine. However, some studies suggest that after a few years, children treated with drugs do not perform any better academically than untreated children with ADHD (Feldman, 2014).
Trauma and Spiritual Development
Spiritual development is the process of growing the intrinsic human capacity for self-transcendence, in which the self is imbedded in something greater than the self, including the sacred. It is the developmental