When Care Feels Dangerous: How Early Threat and Neglect Shape the Developing Mind
What Are Awakening Experiences?
For most children, a parent’s voice, face, or touch signals safety. These cues regulate distress, anchor attention, and provide a secure base from which the world can be explored. But for some children, the very presence of a caregiver carries a double meaning: comfort entwined with fear. Recent developmental neuroscience is beginning to show how profoundly such early experiences can shape the brain – and why threat and neglect, though often grouped together, leave very different psychological footprints.
A new study published in Developmental Science offers compelling evidence that early exposure to threat fundamentally alters how children’s brains respond to their caregivers. Importantly, it suggests that threat, more than deprivation or neglect, may load the caregiver relationship with heightened emotional and bodily significance. This distinction has far-reaching implications for education, caregiving, and psychotherapy – and resonates strikingly with ideas articulated nearly a century ago by depth psychology.
The study: when parents trigger alarm rather than calm
Researchers studied 148 children between the ages of four and nine, examining neural responses while children viewed images of, or listened to recordings of, their parents. The children varied in their early life experiences, particularly along two dimensions that developmental researchers increasingly distinguish:
- Threat: experiences such as abuse, domestic violence, or frightening and unpredictable caregiving.
- Deprivation: neglect, emotional unavailability, or lack of cognitive and social stimulation.
The findings were striking. Children with higher exposure to threat showed increased activation in the insula – a brain region involved in interoception (awareness of bodily states), emotional salience, and attention to biologically important stimuli – when exposed to parental cues. In contrast, children who experienced deprivation alone did not show this heightened response.
In other words, for children exposed to threat, the parent was not a neutral or calming presence. The parent’s voice or face registered as something that demanded vigilance.
This is a subtle but crucial distinction. It suggests that early threat does not simply dysregulate children in general – it specifically reconfigures the meaning of caregiving itself.
Two kinds of adversity, two developmental pathways
For decades, adverse childhood experiences were often treated as a single category, with cumulative ‘dose’ being the primary concern. More recent work, however, shows that how a child is harmed matters just as much as how much.
Threat: danger within the attachment bond
Threat-related experiences teach the child’s nervous system a painful lesson: the source of safety may also be the source of danger. From an evolutionary perspective, this creates a powerful imperative for heightened attention. The brain cannot afford to ignore the caregiver, because the caregiver’s emotional state may signal imminent risk.
This helps explain why threat exposure is often associated with:
- Hypervigilance.
- Heightened bodily arousal.
- Anxiety and trauma-related symptoms.
- Disorganised or conflicted attachment patterns.
The increased insula activation seen in the study reflects this embodied alertness. The child’s body is preparing for action, not rest.
Deprivation: absence rather than alarm
Neglect and deprivation, by contrast, tend to shape development through absence. The child may receive little stimulation, feedback, or emotional attunement. Rather than learning that caregivers are dangerous, the child may learn that they are irrelevant, unreliable, or simply not there.
Deprivation is more strongly linked to:
- Delays in language and executive functioning.
- Difficulties with motivation and reward processing.
- Reduced social cognition.
- Problems with curiosity, play, and exploration.
These outcomes are serious and enduring, but they do not necessarily involve the same kind of heightened emotional charge around the caregiver.
Why does threat imprint so deeply on the body?
The specificity of the neural findings is important. The insula does not simply track fear; it integrates bodily sensations, emotional meaning, and attention. When it becomes hyper-responsive to parental cues, it suggests that the child’s relationship with the caregiver is encoded not just cognitively, but somatically.
This aligns with clinical observations: individuals exposed to early threat often report visceral reactions – tightness, nausea, sudden alertness – when interacting with authority figures, partners, or therapists who unconsciously resemble early caregivers.
The body remembers before the mind understands.
A Jungian lens: the caregiver as a charged complex
This is where the findings resonate powerfully with the work of Carl Jung.
Jung described complexes as emotionally charged clusters of experiences, images, memories, and bodily responses that operate semi-autonomously within the psyche. They are not merely ideas; they are lived, embodied patterns that shape perception and behaviour.
In typical development, the caregiver complex forms around experiences of protection, soothing, and reliability. When activated, it tends to calm the nervous system and foster trust.
But when caregiving is intertwined with threat, this complex becomes conflicted. The parent occupies the core of a paradox: the same figure who provides care also evokes fear. The complex becomes highly energised, easily triggered, and resistant to conscious control.
From this perspective, the heightened neural response to parental cues observed in the study looks very much like a complex being activated – autonomously, emotionally, and bodily.
Neglect, in contrast, may lead not to a conflicted complex but to an impoverished or fragmented one. There may be less emotional charge, but also less internal structure to support regulation, meaning, and relational depth.
Is parental threat more ‘dangerous’ than neglect?
The question naturally arises: if threat produces such strong effects, is it more harmful than neglect? The most accurate answer is: they are dangerous in different ways. Threat tends to be especially disruptive to:
- Emotional regulation.
- Sense of safety.
- Stress physiology.
- Relationship patterns in adulthood.
Neglect tends to be especially disruptive to:
- Cognitive and language development.
- Motivation and agency.
- Identity formation.
- Capacity for play and exploration.
What threat does uniquely is distort the meaning of care itself. When care and danger coexist in the same relationship, the child must remain alert even while seeking closeness. This internal conflict can persist long after the original environment has changed.
Implications for education and caregiving
Understanding this distinction matters deeply in real-world settings.
In classrooms and childcare environments, children with threat histories may:
- Appear oppositional or withdrawn.
- React strongly to tone of voice or facial expressions.
- Seek closeness while simultaneously pushing adults away.
These behaviours are often misread as defiance or immaturity. In reality, they may reflect a nervous system that has learned that adults are emotionally significant – and potentially dangerous.
For these children, trust is built less through explanation and more through:
- Predictability.
- Consistent routines.
- Calm, regulated adult presence.
- Repair after rupture.
The goal is not to force reassurance, but to allow safety to be experienced repeatedly at a bodily level.
Implications for psychotherapy
In psychotherapy, the findings underscore the importance of trauma-informed, relationally sensitive work.
Clients with early threat exposure may find the therapeutic relationship itself deeply activating. The therapist, like the parent before them, becomes emotionally salient. Insight alone is rarely sufficient.
From both neuroscientific and Jungian perspectives, healing involves:
- Recognising when caregiver-related complexes are activated.
- Working at a pace that does not overwhelm bodily regulation.
- Allowing emotionally charged material to emerge gradually into awareness.
- Integrating, rather than bypassing, the bodily dimensions of experience.
In this sense, therapy becomes a space where a once-dangerous complex can slowly be re-experienced under safer conditions.
Bridging neuroscience and depth psychology
What makes this research particularly compelling is not just its methodological rigour, but its conceptual reach. It offers empirical support for an idea long held in depth psychology: that early emotionally charged relationships leave lasting imprints on both mind and body, shaping how we perceive, feel, and relate long after childhood.
The language has changed – from complexes to neural circuits, from affect to insula activation – but the core insight remains remarkably consistent.
Early experiences do not merely teach us what to think about others. They teach our bodies how to respond to them.
Conclusion: different wounds, different paths to healing
Early threat and early neglect are not interchangeable forms of adversity. They carve different pathways through development, leaving different vulnerabilities and strengths in their wake.
Threat sensitises. Neglect impoverishes. One charges relationships with fear and meaning; the other drains them of stimulation and structure.
Recognising this distinction allows parents, educators, and clinicians to respond with greater precision and compassion. It reminds us that when a child reacts strongly to care, the problem is not too much feeling – but a history in which feeling was once inseparable from danger.
And it suggests that healing, at its deepest level, is not just about understanding the past, but about slowly teaching the nervous system that care no longer needs to hurt.
References
- Murgueitio et al. (2026). Neural responses to caregivers after early life threat experiences. Developmental Science, 29(1), e70104.
- Jung, C. G. (1921/1971). Psychological Types (H. G. Baynes, Trans.; R. F. C. Hull, Rev. ed.). Princeton University Press.
About the Author
Dr John O’Brien is a senior Jungian psychoanalyst and executive coach supervisor whose work bridges analytical psychology with leadership practice. He holds a Doctor of Philosophy in Psychology and a Diploma in Analytical Psychology from the C. G. Jung Institute Zürich, where he also contributes as a lecturer, examiner and training analyst.
John’s professional path began in vocational guidance, education, and counselling, before evolving into psychotherapy and psychoanalysis. Alongside his clinical work, he has extensive experience in individual and team consulting with major corporations and social service organisations, focusing on how psychological dynamics influence leadership, collaboration, and organisational change.
As both a practitioner and independent researcher, John seeks to integrate academic insight with lived human experience. His writing and teaching emphasise the relevance of Jungian thought for contemporary challenges, whether in individual development or in complex organisational systems. Through this work, his aim is to support processes of growth, reflection, and transformation at both personal and collective levels.
