This Is Your Brain On Life - Tumblr Posts

Here’s a simplification of our brains on trauma.  Trauma is, at it’s core, shit that we weren’t prepared for when it happened. Sometimes that means going out to our car and finding a bear. Sometimes that means being punched.  Sometimes that means having unexplained (or explained, cause fuck why not) physical pain. Sometimes that means someone leaving (by their choice or not). Sometimes that means not being allowed to join a group.  Sometimes that means someone calling you stupid, or anything else, or even just the tone they used.  If you weren’t emotionally prepared for it, even if the rest of the world magically was, it’s traumatic.  This matters because our brains remember traumatic things differently than they do little everything else.

When something bad happens that we weren’t prepared for, we don’t know what matters.  Our brain doesn’t know why there’s a bear there.  And if it doesn’t have context for the thing that happened it isn’t able to predict whether it’s going to happen again, which means no way it can control it happening again.  And that shit’s not cool.  We want to be able to predict and control insignificant things, that goes times 1000 for things that can or did hurt us in any way, shape, or form.  So our brain locks that memory down.  It’s tries to remember every little thing in as high fidelity as possible because it doesn’t know what matters.   It doesn’t know if the colour of our car or the sound of a motorbike going by or the smell of barbecue was ‘the thing’ that would let us predict and control wether we ran into the bear or not.  Our logical mind might say “holy shit dude, my car being red didn’t matter, the bear was only here because it was eating the berries on that bush, y’know, the ones that feel off when it snowed.”  But our emotional mind takes one look at the red of our car and goes “BEAR! THERE’S A MOTHER FRACKING BEAR HERE! FIND IT! BEFORE IT FINDS YOU!”

In case anyone wants some perspective on how utterly random triggers can be. I haven’t lived in a house with a garage door in four-ish years. Right now at this moment, I honestly can’t recall what they sound like, except something metallic moving and rather clanky.

There was one on tv. I wasn’t even paying attention to it, I had my headphones on and was actively trying to tune the show out. My ears picked up on the sound of the garage door, and a jolt of adrenaline shot through my body as I grabbed my laptop and moved to get out of my seat and run to my room.

I realized what happened after about two seconds.

The sound is gone from my ears, but my heart is still racing and I’m waiting for the door to the house to open, to hear the jingling of my mother’s keys and her footsteps moving through the house. My muscles are still tense and I’m fighting the urge to run to my room and stick a board in front of the door.

For years, the sound of a garage door was my warning to pack up what I was doing quickly and retreat to my room if I was out of it.

I can’t remember the sound of the garage door right now, but I can’t tell my brain to stop trying to react to it.