How Becoming a Parent Changes Your Brain | #vicarioustrauma #burnout #ptsd #cptsd

Added: 2026-05-05

[00:00:00]I have seen some folks suggest that parents are at a higher risk of secondary traumatic stress because a parent is naturally going to be thinking about and worrying about and preoccupied with protecting and nurturing and attending to the safety of their kids, the next generation. There's also a way that when an individual becomes a parent, particularly mothers when they give birth to a child, that the flood of hormones in the brain leads to changes in the amygdala and that the amygdala becomes something like 30 or 50% larger and gets more blood flow and becomes more sensitive to be able to detect threats in the environment. And this is certainly going to impact how parents and mothers are impacting to or responding to vicarious trauma and secondary traumatic stress.