Glossary
plain language for complex ideas
— Linda Landum
“Naming what happened is not the end of healing, but it is often the beginning.”
— Shrewd Wit
In brief
Direct answer
Use this glossary to understand the terms Shrewd Wit uses when discussing childhood development, trauma, healing, relationships, and education. Definitions are concise, non-diagnostic, and connected to deeper guides.
Key takeaways
- Definitions explain concepts without labeling or diagnosing readers.
- Core public-health terms link to primary official sources.
- Every term connects to a related Shrewd Wit guide or service.
- Trauma risk is never presented as destiny.
Definitions
- Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs)
Potentially traumatic experiences before age 18, including abuse, neglect, violence, or household instability, that can affect lifelong health, opportunity, and well-being. ACEs describe exposure and risk; they do not determine a person’s future.
- Attachment
The emotional bond through which a child learns whether care, comfort, and connection are available. Early attachment patterns can influence adult relationships, but they can change through safe relationships, reflection, and skilled support.
- Childhood emotional neglect
A pattern in which a child’s emotional needs are repeatedly unnoticed, dismissed, or unmet. The injury is often defined by what did not happen—comfort, validation, protection, or emotional guidance—rather than by a single event.
- Developmental trauma
The lasting effect of chronic or repeated adversity during important stages of childhood development, especially when a child lacks reliable safety and supportive relationships. It can affect regulation, identity, learning, trust, and connection.
- Ecological systems theory
Urie Bronfenbrenner’s framework for understanding development through interacting layers of environment: immediate relationships, connections between settings, indirect institutions, culture and policy, and change over time.
- Emotional literacy
The ability to notice, name, understand, express, and respond to emotions. Emotional literacy helps people communicate needs, regulate distress, and make meaning of their internal experience.
- Intergenerational trauma
The ways unresolved trauma can affect later generations through family patterns, stress responses, silence, social conditions, and learned beliefs. The term should be used with care: families also transmit culture, protection, resistance, and resilience.
- Racial trauma
Emotional and physiological harm connected to racism, discrimination, racial threat, and repeated exposure to inequity. It may be direct, witnessed, collective, historical, or cumulative.
- Resilience
The capacity to adapt, recover, and continue developing in the presence of adversity. Resilience is not a demand to endure harm alone; it grows through supportive relationships, skills, resources, culture, and safer environments.
- Toxic stress
Excessive or prolonged activation of stress-response systems without enough supportive relationships to help the body recover. Toxic stress can disrupt development, but responsive care and safer environments can buffer its effects.
- Trauma-informed care
An approach that recognizes how trauma may affect people, responds through policies and practices, and works to avoid retraumatization. It asks what a person may have experienced and what safety requires, rather than reducing them to a behavior.
- Unmet childhood needs
Core needs for safety, stable care, belonging, emotional attunement, autonomy, identity, and encouragement that were inconsistently or inadequately met. Naming a need clarifies what repair may involve without assigning blame to a child.
Important distinctions
Is developmental trauma a diagnosis?
The phrase describes a pattern of chronic adversity and developmental impact. It is not itself a diagnosis in the DSM-5-TR. A qualified clinician can assess symptoms and determine whether any recognized diagnosis applies.
Do ACEs predict exactly what will happen to someone?
No. ACEs are population-level risk indicators, not a personal destiny or a complete measure of childhood. Protective relationships, culture, community resources, later experiences, and individual differences all matter.
What is the difference between trauma-informed education and therapy?
Trauma-informed education changes how learning environments interpret behavior and create safety. Therapy is clinical care delivered by a qualified mental-health professional. A trauma-informed classroom does not diagnose or treat students.