We all experience trauma. It’s an inevitable reality of life that started when we were small children. It might have been from legitimate abuse, but was pain over a thing we wanted or needed that we couldn’t have, and doesn’t have to be a legitimate need or want.
For most people, the majority of our trauma happens in childhood. At a young age, children are the weakest people in society and harsher victims of unjust treatment. This doesn’t mean it can’t happen later in life (especially in a severe experience like a war).
While everyone experiences trauma, each person responds to it differently:
- Some people will try to use persuasion or force to create the results they want.
- Others will pursue something else to meet their needs.
- Many people broadly complain about their pain until they’ve released the stress from it.
- In extreme cases, people will tell themselves they don’t need something they legitimately need.
If we keep hold of that trauma, we feel stress from remembering it. The memories of the event, until we’ve released it, will repeatedly replay the pain in our imaginations. To the degree we can imagine it, we relive it as if the experience were happening again.
The psychological term for PTSD is literally a Disorder of Stress from Post-Trauma. Everyone has it in some non-clinical form:
- Every person alive has suffered, often in their childhood.
- Every child and most adults are at least somewhat unaware of effective mind management.
Replaying memories is a subconscious habit, so everyone who has felt pain or fear has been disrupted from perfect wellness, even though they typically don’t know it.
Constipated Feelings
Stress has a unique journey into our minds:
- When we trust that everything is fine, we don’t feel any issues.
- At the moment we are afraid of the possibility of a risk to something we value, we feel stress.
- We can sometimes react to the fear to resolve the issue, but society typically forbids it.
- If we don’t react, we must express the feelings in a constructive way (e.g., risk management, creativity, meditation, venting to friends).
- When that doesn’t happen, it slowly infiltrates into long-term feelings that alter our beliefs (e.g., bitterness, depression).
- At that point, we aren’t aware that those feelings drive what we do, and have become victims of our own trauma.
If we don’t work through feelings enough to perceive them, they tend to guide our convictions. We’ll often frame values off those beliefs, which can dramatically affect our purposes.
Over time, not sifting through feelings creates a pent-up set of sentiments, which eventually ferments into worse experiences:
- Sadness becomes depression
- Anger becomes bitterness
- Fear becomes anxiety
- Longing becomes despair
- Guilt becomes shame
Past traumas create constant unspoken prejudices we’re frequently unaware of. The original logic holds from the perspective of when the person made the decision at first, so the habit doesn’t have to make any sense to the person now, even if they’ve grown immensely from then.
There are many clinical terms for our natural self-protection techniques:
- Displacement – not living in the present
- Disassociation – not focusing on reality
- Denial – not acknowledging reality
- Delusions – not living in reality
- Repression – blocking memories
- Forecasting – making idealized fantasy relationships with others
- Transference – using a personal experience of a past person with the current person
- Projection – using personal experience as a broader pattern than it should be
- Counter-transference – using a personal experience of a past person about a current person’s transference
Because of how severe we feel things when we’re young, past traumas rarely provoke a desire for subtle change. Thus, it’s impossible to think rationally when we make decisions.
Nobody experiences trauma the same way, and they express it even more differently. For example, a small boy with a physically abusive, alcoholic father may direct their sentiment a few directions:
- Hatred of alcohol and its paraphernalia, along with anyone in the industry. Taken far enough, will use religion to suppress it.
- Hating his father’s line of work and the people in it. Taken far enough, may vow to educate himself towards a different vocation or even try to render his father’s industry obsolete.
- Hating family members who enabled his father’s abuse, and maybe any groups associated with them.
- Hatred of strong male models, especially physically strong ones. Taken far enough, explores alternative gender identity or becomes a feminist.
The hatred is a habit loop that triggers on anything that reminds the person of the original pain. Those triggers can move far from the original source.
Since our grasp on reality is already pretty uncertain, our memory will deteriorate. Trauma will fill in the details of the stories that match their overall theme. Sometimes, people vividly remember events that never happened!
Most of the time that people experience chronic trauma, they develop an increased pain threshold. They still feel the pain, but they’re unaware of that pain and therefore respond as if it doesn’t exist. This is known as “dysregulation”, and can cause severe health problems long-term.
Thankfully, because of our tendency to anticipate and imagine pain, unawareness of pain means we only experience a fraction of the pain. However, if we ever do become aware of those past sensations again, we go through a retrospective avalanche of feelings proportional to how much we are capable of remembering, along with plenty of anger to deliver retribution for our newly discovered damage.
Detecting
You can usually spot someone’s past trauma if you spend a few weeks around them to get their baseline behavior. Bringing up a trauma-associated topic will make them stiffen, twitch, go silent, lash out, or anything else disproportionate or misplaced from their standard behavior.
There are also more subtle forms of trauma. This can include perfectionism, cutting off other people while they’re speaking, shutting down all body language, constantly monitoring feelings, constantly keeping busy, and trying to please others.
They’re behaving oddly because that’s not technically “their” behavior. They’re reacting with the methods from when the trauma happened, which may be decades ago when they were much younger and identified with different things.
There is no way to stop someone from going through a trauma loop. Literally anything can set it off, even a string of completely random information. If we’re unaware of something in our mind, we have no control over its influence.
While we can halt a trauma loop by doing something a person won’t expect, we must recognize a traumatic loop is running on autopilot from a memory, which may create a more convoluted set of behaviors if the person is unwilling to change.
Shadow Self
This aggregate of all our trauma and past pain is a separate “shadow” persona. It’s not the authentic, sensible, modern version of us. Instead, it’s an aggregate of every painful part of us from our past, lumped together by unpleasant feelings. Whether that persona wants good or bad things, it’s never very effective at doing anything because it’s using old information with a limited scope of perspective.
Unawareness causes the least short-term pain, so most people stay unaware of their shadow self by default. They’ll hurt people, destroy others’ happiness, and do malicious things, all to fulfill a misaligned sense of justice.
However, with experience, they’ll usually notice patterns from how others react to their influence. A select few will do some soul-searching and slow their reactions. If someone can integrate their shadow, they have a vast wealth of wisdom to draw from.
Sadly, most people will stay unaware and form a convoluted cause for their continued misery. Since they’re unaware of the way other people feel about their behaviors, they’ll presume everyone is reacting to something unrelated to themselves. Most of them will form theories on human nature that are entirely wrong.
After enough time with someone, the victim will usually blame specific things on specific people with little evidence. Because of its implications, they’ll hold to their theory harder than reality and, over time, will lose touch with it as a result.
When the trauma is severe enough, that person will have layers of their persona to untangle. That person may shift from behaving like a 5-year-old to acting like a teenager, then to the reasoning skills of a baby. These shifts can span minutes, hours, days, or weeks.
In particularly traumatic instances, the victim will wander in an alternate state of identity. Their past persona can be more thin-skinned, bitter, commanding, demanding, anxious, and ambitious than their present self. Taken far enough, it can split a personality entirely where the person can’t even access memories from different states.
Identifying with Trauma
Our core, unaltered human essence is carefree, fun-loving, adventurous, curious, funny, easily entertained, and easily distracted. Trauma stops it from expressing, and it’s our impulse to run from it.
However, accepting the trauma alone isn’t healthy either. Consciously identifying with trauma forces us to accept an unbalanced persona that’s various degrees more fearful, anxious, hypersensitive, or angry than our genuine self.
While identifying a problem is a good start, it’s more destructive without a reasonable chance to overcome it than never having seen the problem in the first place.
Regret and shame are waste products of reliving trauma. It’s a present desire and feeling to have done things in the past differently, respectively. If we live our lives coated in regret and shame, we’ll often find groups that reinforce it. Instead of learning to cope with it as it arises, we’ll try to control others’ lives.
The silly part about regret is that it’s useless, especially if we did the right thing at the time with the information we had available. No matter what, people make decisions they think are reasonable at the time, so broadly blaming anything is ignoring how something failed.
There are ways to break from trauma, but it’s ubiquitous and influential in society to where each person will have their own way to fix it. This abstracts, however, as likely only one, very specific way to release it:
- Relive the trauma directly, then consciously release associations with it. The easiest way to do this is through self-reflection to learn the precise damage that harmed us, though continued exposure through experience works as well.
- Discover for ourselves, plainly, what constitutes the good life for ourselves if freed from trauma.
- Clarify to ourselves with exact wording the things that trigger our trauma, which is typically something incredibly simple that gets in the way of our well-being.
- Find a way to circumvent those tasks and perform all the aspects of a good life.
- Spend lots of time in that dynamic life (at least a few years to a few decades) to permit our experiences to grow us.
- Once we’ve experienced more and better life, along with worse hardships, our faded memories of past struggles were comparatively trivial upon recollection.
Unfortunately, when we don’t release trauma, we will often re-experience its consequences. In some ways, every unresolved trauma is a debt that must be forgiven, and will come payable when we act on it if we don’t. In other ways, exposure to it is our psychological conditioning toward managing fears.
Application
If something hurts a small child, it likely can hurt anyone. The only difference is that most adults harden themselves to that pain and learn to ignore it.
Because of our memories’ natural tendency to fade, most people who recover from psychological pain are either young enough to clearly recollect their pain before too much time has transpired and precisely get over it, or have learned forgiveness and release about the injustices they’ve suffered.
When the experience is severe, nobody can fully recover from evil unscathed. Complete recovery will still register psychological scars that never go away.
Some of the worst archetypes of people come from this hardened trauma:
- Bureaucrats
- Overbearing parents
- Social justice warriors
- Religious zealots
- Yellow journalists
- Attorneys
- Lobbyists and activists
- Hyper-intellectuals, especially post-modern philosophers
We should pity these people. They’re oblivious to their motives, even while many of them destroy society. If we condemn them, they become self-proclaimed martyrs. If we venerate them, they hold to their persona more than their true selves.
Of course, to pity someone disadvantages them because you’re implying they have a problem they haven’t fixed and don’t have the power to fix. Expect them to self-preserve and attack you if you’re not careful.
The emotional hardening skills from trauma don’t usually go away even though someone has overcome their hardship. For that reason, most people who suffer trauma and overcome it are way stronger for the experience than those who never went through it at all.
We must push back on traumatic behavior to break the loop, whether it’s with ourselves or others:
- Perfectionism: try making mistakes
- Shutting down or cutting people off: slow down a conversation before severing connections
- Emotional monitoring: demonstrate how others’ feelings don’t technically matter
- Constantly busy: work through feelings instead of actions
- People pleasing: accept that we can’t change anyone but ourselves