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So this probably doesn’t need to be said again by now, but trauma’s most devastating effect is probably feeling like you’re going batshit insane, per all the cognitive disorders we’ve already discussed.

It’s bad enough to be consistently depressed, anxious, and isolated. It’s another thing when those symptoms start combining into a dizzying daily executive control failure that begs the question of;

“Am I losing my fucking mind, though?”

“Do I have less personal capacity than before?”

“Is my brain actually different from the way it used to be highly functional?”

Well, you know, in a way, yes. As in, you’re losing CONTROL of your fucking brain. Which is surprisingly easy to do, and probably constitutes 50% of expected, “normal,” human existence at this point.

But it has nothing to do with losing control permanently, or losing your “Self.”

Which is a way to say, nothing is irreversible, you aren’t stuck like this forever, and it all means nothing about your inherent worth as a living organism.

So, right away, let’s just say “don’t worry about it so much. I know it feels terrifying and shame-worthy, but it’s not. It’s not your fault. And it’s all fixable.” That’s why we talk about plasticity for trauma recovery on the show all the time now.

Today, in this recap miniseries episode, though… Let’s just talk about how YOUR brain running off unsupervised is possibly creating more dramatic results than when (let’s call them) less-cognitively-extreme folks have the same thing happen. As in, why other “traum-normie” people don’t have to watch their thoughts or guide their brain processing quite so much.

It’s because:

1) your head is full of more garbage-quality automatic learning than theirs is,

2) that information is littered with survival responses, and

3) because a lot of that trash-learning has set you up for having less human-functioning capacity.

So. Let’s take a step back and put the brain into place. Understand the limitations of this meat organ and the ways to actually work WITH it. My favorite topics these days.

Cuz, no, you aren’t your brain. You aren’t your past. You aren’t broken, sick, or damaged if your mind is mixed up or caught in a processing spiral.

But your head WILL determine your personality, your perspective, your belief in your self, and therefore… the rest of your life.

Seems worth understanding better, if you want that rewiring thing to happen.

At the crux of it, we need to realize that our brains are only SO capable.

They do incredible things, but they’re also just biological organs – auto-organizing sacks of chemicals controlled by electrical gradients – designed to pick up details about your environment in order to create emotions and behaviors. Sticky pieces of tape connecting event to event, trying to help you remember “oh, this strategy works under these conditions,” and “oh, shit, this is absolutely not the right thing when these variables are present,” so you can make decisions.

And, also to be primed to make these reactions and discriminations very fast. You know, like every other animal does.

All of this is contained in nothing more than neuronal cells. They somehow encode data bits into synaptic firing rates, in vast networks of brain cells that get strung together, in order to create stories in your head about every situation, broken down into before – during – and after. Or, antecedent, behavior, consequence, if you want to get behaviorally scientific.

Then your brain uses perceptions of this data which you’re automatically picking up and sticking somewhere in your thinking box – not necessarily accurately or realistically sorting that information into the right piles, just putting similar trends in similar piles – to make faster-than-the-speed-of-light decisions for you.

Stop and think about that for a second, already.

You’re encoding everything you meaningfully experience – whether that meaning is correct or not, you have no idea, because you’re asking your head to make judgments about everything already contained within itself, in order to make judgments about new information… and you never know if the original data was corrupted in the first place. Get what I’m saying?

Your brain is the conduit between the world and your actions. But that conduit might be constructed completely wrong.

And THEN, every day, you activate those potentially-inaccurate neural connections faster than we can actually comprehend, make micro-second decisions based on which links are the easiest to engage and which patterns are closest to the forefront of our minds… and hope for the best.

Best case scenario, you’re right and that realistic set of neural connections is strengthened.

Worst case scenario, you’re wrong. You make a mistake. You don’t get the result you were hoping for. Now you spend a long while embarrassed, shameful, and ruminating, trying to build a new behavioral program contained in a set of new synaptic connections for next time, while also having to re-write all the instructions which have been proven incorrect through this recent failure.

It’s really an overwhelming feat, being a brain that has to encompass and logically encode every happening you ever experience. And that’s why I think our stupid fucking brains need to be cut a little slack.

From the start, your brain is just doing a lot of information grabbing, organizing, and guesstimating, you know?

As much as we put it on a pedestal, your head isn’t infallible in interpreting your environment or history or future. It makes up stories to do so. It predicts events as quickly and accurately as possible, but the instructions or translations of events it contains might be flawed from the start… You know what I’m saying?

Think of your brain like a lint roller, scooping up everything that makes you have an emotional or attentional response… and only later coming to the wise understanding of what matters and how.

All of which can only be done through repeated trials that confirm or deny the original hypothesis, therefore leading to idea solidifications or reconsolidations. All of this will take years to conduct. And on a continual basis your neural connections will still have to be audited and edited to match with continually-newly-available data, which is exhausting and disorienting.

ALL of that being said, our brains have the potential to spin out of control if we’re not managing them. Keeping them clean. Re-organizing the information they’re automatically collecting. Re-examining our thought processes and emotional responses, as we jump from neuron to neuron, and regulating our lower-brained automatic reactions to be in line with higher-level goals.

And this can only be more problematic when you have a history of trauma that leaves you with unprocessed, upsetting neural connections as well as a lot of unhealthy information about how life can possibly progress (based on what you’ve already seen).

Obviously, this is where triggers come from.

Let’s get into the more trauma-specific talk.

We traditionally talk about triggers as trauma-pinging environmental details that bring up unwelcome, unprocessed, overwhelming information and sensory events that are half-contextualized in the brain. Flashbacks, hallucinations, panic attacks, and major dissociative events take place in this manner.

And it is this simple. If you see the color purple and it sufficiently reminds you of the purple at your grandma’s house the day she beat you with a switch, you’re going to be triggered into diving down the corresponding neural pathway that encodes all that information, and recalling those painful, still half-alive, memories in vivid detail.

The only connection? Purple here in current life. And an obscure memory of purple from however many years ago that just so happened to get stuck into that shitty old story from grandma’s house.

That’s enough of a pattern to light up a certain synaptic firing code – you’re suddenly swimming in that neural network, as though it’s happening right now.

Makes sense on a trauma basis?

Yep, all those sensory triggers and times when your emotions tumble into more emotions… explained.

And the thing is, we can also trigger ourselves into… any brain pathway.

Every single stimulus in your environment, essentially, is a trigger to activate some neural network – whether or not it’s a destructive cognitive influence just depends on the questions “is this a survival situation, do you have good information contained in those connections, how cleanly are the synapses organized, are they strongly connected, and how often are they utilized?”

So, if your head is filled with unhealthy information cultivated across a whole lifetime – such as calling yourself worthless, having reasons for fearing other people, and narratives from others that include your eventual failure in a diverse set of circumstances – well, you’re probably going to feel like you have a very hateful, depressed, defeated, demotivated, and out of logical control brain in an equally diverse set of situations.

If every environmental trigger leads you back to “I suck,” but you rightfully don’t connect the narrative to that event from 24 years ago… you won’t feel like there’s a reason for your rapid emotional and cognitive change… and you won’t feel like you’re really directing the show. Depression feels untreatable. And your shitty self-analysis (which is actually probably someone else’s imposed analysis from all those years ago) becomes more of a core belief than an occasional self-effacing moment set-off by one random brain connection.

So, I’m saying… Really, it’s not “you” and it’s not “your brain” that’s the problem.

It’s the information and that information arrangement.

The data you’ve accidentally picked up over a lifetime needs to be examined, sorted, disputed, and culled.

What are really YOUR observations, and what have others impressed upon you? What’s really going on here right now, and what’s your potentially off-base interpretation based on a historical filter contained at the root of your neural connections?

So there you go, the information matters.

The next thing to worry about is how your neural networks are organized.

If the brain cell linkages are incestuous, overgeneralized, or too compartmentalized, you’re going to end up with problems.

You can find yourself accidentally over-connecting an informationally-incorrect, self-destructive pathway, to basically every situation, for example. All or some roads, again, could be accidentally programmed to lead back to the cells that say “this is hopeless, I’m worthless, and there’s no point in trying.”

Is it correct? No. So why does it exist? Honestly, just because you’ve thought about it a lot before. You’ve stitched these brain cells together through repeat, sequential, activation, that has puzzle-pieced historical events into this now-well-established thought pathway, making it feel like a FACT. And, to make matters worse, you accidentally wired these self-hating synapses with tons of potential triggers in your daily life, by connecting thoughts with environmental details.

So… IS there a cost for “just thinking shitty thoughts that your brain needs to work out?”

YES. There is.

You’re making them stronger, easier to turn on, and harder to escape once you’re in the full throes of it.

And if that doesn’t explain, like, half of our cognitive problems and concerns about “losing it,” I don’t know what does.

Living in toxic environments and social communities will create toxic neural information nuggets connected by rapidly-shaming linkages that have been applied to tons of daily situations you can’t avoid. Later, when you can’t avoid them, you wonder why your subsequent thoughts feel like poison and your behavioral output isn’t exemplary.

You also probably have the tendency to overthink and analyze things, which is only making those neural linkages all the more potent… and then wonder why your thoughts tend to be stubbornly negative and defeating. Rapidly changing. Difficult to predict.

This is why.

Great. Now let’s explain some other traum-phenomenon.

Implicit in this talk has already been the pervasion of shame, anxiety, and fear spirals. You ping a cell that leads you down one of your over-generalized terror-pathways and the next thing you know, you’re trapped there.

I like to think of this as a dense cluster of neural cells, intertwined and redundantly connected to each other with a lot of glial cell helpers to keep the signal concentrated in one area. Keep the energy contained, keep activating those cells.

IS this how it works? I have no idea if it’s 100% correct, but it’s in line with what I know so far… and it’s sure how it feels.

When you accidentally trip down a thought pathway that leads to this area, which, honestly, is probably a bit of a popular destination in your mental landscape, you create an energetic “hot spot,” in a way.

Energy is flowing through these cells, triggering them in a circular and signal-propogating fashion. The terminals of one neuron containing negative information that induces a fear response lead back to another neuron that does the same, but possibly from a slightly different perspective or a deepening of information to really make you freak out further.

And then, we just spin around in these shitty synapses, getting increasingly upset as they also start activating associated pathways.

In what other situations have you felt this terrible or seen something equally upsetting? Well, your brain is going to start automatically activating some of those connections, too.

Again, it’s just a neutral biological organ absorbing your environment. It tends to group “like” information with “like” information. It doesn’t know whether or not the similar data is actually relevant or not. It doesn’t inherently judge “good or bad.” But it wants you to be aware of all of it.

This is how you wind up

1) panicking

2) being unable to break the panic and

3) getting sucked into a recollective hole of all the times that are similarly panic-worthy while

4) seemingly unable to turn the circuit off, because it’s a bit masterbatory in the way it sustains its own activity at the opportunity cost of… you know… having other logical, calming, realistic thoughts.

No prefrontal cortex access here, friend.

Does that explain half of the time you’re trying to sleep at night? You’re welcome.

You aren’t losing your mind, you’re just running on poorly programmed cells and having trouble deactivating them because your supervisory cells aren’t available right now. They’re tired and they want the assholes who live below them in the “lower level brain” to shut the fuck up. But can’t make it happen when they have no energy left.

This is your executive functioning being totally zapped, so you can’t regulate your own brain.

What else can we cover? How about addiction and bad habits?

Do you WANT to keep using booze, cigarettes, and recreational drugs to kill time? Probably not.

But do they feel like automatic processes, more than choices you’re making each time you pick up a pack? Probably yes.

This is just a stress-relief solution contained in neural connections that your brain has likely overgeneralized to too many situations from an emotionally common trend. As in, when you get stressed or riled or sad – whether it’s at work, at home, at your mother in law’s house – you activate cells that lead from “physical response” to “put a bottle in your mouth, you’ll feel better.” And this functions as a distractive, energy conserving measure that feeds itself with a dopamine bump.

You’d rather engage THAT neural pathway, which leads to some sort of positive bodily reinforcement through your own feel-good chemicals, than to keep activating THIS neural pathway, which is causing punishing uncomfortable feelings.

The “craving” kicks in when you’re in a state of distress. You don’t LIKE what you’re doing, but your brain WANTS to keep doing it.

Plus, it’s easier to activate a heavily-utilized, physically relieving, cognitively distracting set of neurons, than it is to synthesize new connections from difficult information.

That disturbed, uncomfortable feeling you get when you’re confused or approaching an unknown set of conditions? I like to think that’s the sensation of needing to build new brain connections. It’s energetically costly, it requires re-examining old neural synapses, and we hate it, because we’d rather just run on automatic programming than consider what we’ve done wrong so far.

So, every time we hit an energetically-costly wall where we need to reorganize or integrate linkages in our heads?

Not only is dopamine going to create addictive outcomes. But we’d rather just skip down this neural “escape” exit over here that brings us away from the cloud of confusing details and leads, instead, to the sweet chemical relief of whatever you use to numb out your brain and body. And stop trying so hard to reassess life.

Again, in a way, you lost control of your brain in this case of bad habitry… but only because you’re following biological programming, learned instructions, and biochemical voltage gradients.

Don’t be so hard on yourself, just understand WHY your head loves to self-sabotage. Catch the feeling leading up to it, and you can stop the behavior before it gets too heavily craved.

And, quickly, as long as we’re talking self-sabotage and bad habits… let’s also mention that there’s a dissociative event often taking place during these times. Especially if we start discussing self-harm.

As we’ve said, during extreme emotional upheaval, we’ll flip into our survival system activation and lose access to our fancy frontal brain where logic happens.

What takes place then? We’re operating on survival hormones, survival responses, and animal instincts. And all of those biological drivers just function based on sensory input and relief of sensory input.

So. WILL those bodily, animal instincts sometimes tell you to do things that your human brain would not agree with? Yes.

WILL we turn to physical comforts? YES.

WILL we sometimes turn our aggression inward, to impart physical pain we can better understand than emotional pain? YES.

WILL I eat an entire jar of peanut butter in a dissociative event and not even notice what I’m doing? YES.

If you find yourself self-sabotaging or self-harming on a regular basis, you might also want to consider how often you’re dissociating and pinpointing the triggers that push you into an unintegrated animal versus human brain.

And that’s our lecture on brain programming feeling like losing your grip on reality.

Actually pretty simple, right? At the root of it, your brain just isn’t as smart or self-supervisory as we like to think it is.

A human brain is more advanced than animal brains, yes. But it’s really not that different. We need to stop glamorizing the prefrontal cortex as the omnipotent source of all accurate knowledge and regulation abilities, because that compartment isn’t always available to us.

I think we drive our Selves halfway to insanity, trying to identify with a sack of fat, water, and protein powered by salt that just makes up stories for us to function semi-smoothly based on what we think we understand about what we’ve seen so far.

Just saying. Celebritizing the brain so much has not helped humanity.

But, overall, I think the part that will really fuck you up in this whole discussion of brain functions is when all of these poorly-trained thinkbox events are happening at once. When you’re having depressed thoughts, repeat survival system triggering events, addictive behaviors, intrusive and spiralling cognitive traps, all at one time… all of which inherently come with a loss of executive function such as planning and decision making… you know, it feels like going completely off the deep end when you don’t recognize your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors as your own, and you have no capacity to make them start or stop.

But to answer the question posed by this whole post…

You know, you may have accidentally made some bad connections or created some shame-spiralling superhighways with inescapable traffic circles that keep you obsessive…

But you CAN regain mental control again.

And, uh, honestly, that’s what I talk more about these days. Less “diving into the past,” more “understanding Your Stupid Fucking Brain for the sake of rewiring it.” So you don’t have to live in trauma responses with flawed data forever. You can be the captain of your own brain, and therefore, your own life.

Right now, we’re talking about the hierarchy of brain processing and how that obviously relates to the process of trauma recovery. Hit up patreon.com/traumatizedmotherfuckers to get the full brain story so far and the continuing contributions from – yeah, my bio-obsessed self – but also from MFs like you, around the world.

Get the education, validation, support, and acceptance you need… that maybe your head hasn’t been experienced before.

Til next time, when we talk about the lifelong trauma trap of avoidance, rigidity, and isolation of “safe trauma bubbles”…

Try to see your brain for what it is – a well-meaning, automatic learning machine that can only function with the information and context it’s experienced so far.

And cut your Self a goddamn break already.

Cheers, well-meaning but often-wrong brains.