Approximately a month ago, I had the pleasure of presenting at the Partners Behavioral Health Summit (PBHM), Teens in Toxic Times. The goal of the summit was to generate conversations about topics impacting today's adolescent youth. Participating in these conversations were individuals from of various systems who interact, advocate, and provide services to adolescent populations.
During my presentation, Understanding the Impact of Childhood Traumatic Stress on Adolescents, I presented what we call the "cake example". Which I would later find out, through audience feedback, was very helpful. The cake example is an analogy that is easy to understand because of the "commonsense-ness" of the metaphor. I know that when training on the brain development, it is very easy to lose people. Maybe because of the complexity of the subject or the sheer amount of anxiety one feels by the statement "Today we are going to talk about the impact of trauma on brain development", which causes people to shut down completely.
The cake example was a way to combat people shutting down by making complex processes seem as easy as baking a cake. Cake ingredients are equivalent to neurons and the recipe ("how much salt?", "how much sugar?") is comparable to our development of neural pathways (degree of knowing the recipe= number of neural pathways developed).
In the first part of the picture, you see that you have all the ingredients you need to bake this cake. However, without a recipe, it is just mounds of ingredients. This is like an infant having all their neurons present at birth, however, without neuronal connects, they neurons are just sitting there.
In the second part of the picture, more neural connections are like learning a bit more of the recipe. This allows you to measure out the ingredients, mix them in order, bake for the appropriate amount of time and at the right temperature. Each additional component of the recipe is like forming a neural connection which eventually allows you to bake the cake successfully.
However, if you never get the recipe and just leave your ingredients sitting there, eventually they will rot and deteriorate. This is the same way our brain cells deteriorate if they are not used; in a process called pruning. We see this when children are not stimulated or do not receive affection from their caregiver leading to poor attachment or emotional regulation skills.
Throughout the day I heard how the cake example helped clarify things people were seeing in those that they served. One of my favorite quotes was from a counselor who discussed a child that hoarded food and said, "Yes, this really helped put it into perspective, it's like because of her trauma, she doesn't know what to do with the eggs yet". Another participant discussed how she realized that due to neglect, one youth struggles with socially interactions. She commented that, "It's like his ingredients are spoiling", and realized that working with the youth to put more supports could be put in place would be helpful in making sure that his cake was baked successfully.
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