This is part of the miniseries breaking down our complex trauma learnings so far.

For the podcast version of this post, hit up the public podcast platform wherever you stream @ traumatized motherfuckers.

Cheers Fuckers.

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Hey, my name’s Jess, but I know that’s not why you’re here. You’re here to find out why your life has been this way and what you can do about it.

And, spoilers, that starts with understanding your brain. So let’s just get into this neural nonsense and talk about moving on from trauma.

We’ve really made Trauma into a big word with a lot of negative connotation, qualification, and over-complication. I don’t know a single person who hasn’t shamefully uttered the phrase “but I wonder if that’s really bad enough to count as trauma, when other people have had it worse.”

So let’s stop right there and clear up the fact that trauma has nothing to do with being in the top 1% of human tragedy.

That’s not how this works.

That’s not how any of this works.

There’s no threshold for Trauma. Trauma, actually, is nothing more than a splitting of your brain’s memory systems.

So. You know you kindof have two brains. A fancy human one and a basic animal one, right?

Well you also have two memory centers. One handles narrative memories. The Explicit memory system. The logical, human, stories that we tell ourselves about what’s happened to us. The other handles visceral memories. The Implicit memory system. The emotional, sensory, experiential recollections surrounding events.

It’s like remembering what words SAID on a page and how they link up to your lifelong experience, versus remembering the visual, emotional, and auditory conditions that were present when SEEING them. Your brain handles those memory tasks differently. Obviously, because they’re very different.

The problem with having two memory systems (besides the fact that we focus on narrative memories and poo-poo experiential ones) is having them controlled by two different brain operational systems.

Your reasonable, story-telling, sense-making, narrative memories operate with your human, logical brain. The frontal cortex and all the high level, integrative and predictive things we think of as being “uniquely human.”

Your sensory, emotional, experiential memories are more in line with your basic, bodily, animal brain. The equipment in the back and center of your head that looks a lot like every other animal brain in the evolution of brains. What we think of as your “rudimentary survival system.” The thing that keeps you alive, even if your reasonable brain was destroyed.

When we have a traumatic event take place, it just means that something happened in which your survival system was activated to the extent that your human brain went offline. Something questioned your immediate or future safety that caused a neurotransmitter release that threw you into a sympathetic system response.

This happened so you could divert energetic resources to the “keep me alive” functions rather than the “let’s sit down and understand what and why this happened” operations.

And, as you might imagine, this messes with your ability to sort, process, and file away the information that you’re absorbing during the upsetting time. Because your animal brain is in control, your human brain doesn’t have a chance to analyze and interact with the data bits that are flowing in.

Then, the event passes. But your head is backlogged with data that hasn’t been dealt with, and those informational points aren’t hanging in the same place so you can stitch them together. Without the ability to have a cohesive storyline about what the fuck just took place, you can’t “clear the cache” of new information that your head has recently acquired. The memories are put in a “deal with it later” pile, so you can get your ass out of the line of fire and continue with daily functioning to the best of your abilities.

And this is the basis of trauma.

Unresolved experiential memories that need to be incorporated with narrative memories, so your head can throw them in the historical file, knit the events into a continuous timeline, and stop treating them like they’re currently happening.

This re-activation of neurons that don’t have a logical story attached to them is where you get your flashbacks, your nightmares, even your sensory hallucinations at some points.

Boom. Trauma mechanism of the brain and the most disturbing downstream events, explained.

Now, shouldn’t it be simple to just… pull up those experiential memories, give them some context and move on? Put the memory systems back together and be over it already?

Maybe. Except for the fact that recalling them has a tendency to make your brain kick into survival mode again when it wrongly believes it’s still in danger.

This is where you get panic attacks and survival responses in line with the 4 Fs (fight, flight, freeze, and fawn) that – again – deactivate your human brain and make your rudimentary animal system take the wheel. You’re more likely to re-dissociate as you swim through sensory flashbacks and then enter a stage of blankety brain fog, as your body flips into preparing to escape before exhausting itself and pooping out on exhaustion.

Thereby, taking away your ability to put those split memories together.

And THIS is also why you end up with nervous system dysregulation, on top of your memory and cognitive dysregulation, in the aftermath of some real fucked up shit. You keep telling your brain it’s fight or flight time, but really you’re sitting in a cubicle igniting your own survival responses with disorganized memories.

THIS is why a therapist who can re-ground you – as in, convince your entire system that you’re here, now, in these safe circumstances – is critical in trauma recovery therapy. Don’t talk to someone who doesn’t understand this fact, or they’re only going to drudge up your worst memories and experiences and leave you drowning in them. Thanks, therapist I saw in college.

So, if you can feel physically, presently, safe… can’t you just throw the thoughts together and be done NOW?

Well, this is the other trying part of trauma – the cognitive obsession it creates.

So, besides having these experiential memories floating around without a home, you also have the natural impulse to try to make sense of them with that logical brain. You don’t normally have to TRY to put things in the right filing cabinet in your head, right? The data that you observe in your environment – upsetting or not – normally, naturally, gets incorporated into your neural connections for better or for worse, without any concerted effort on your part.

But not so much with traumatic events. For a really simple reason.

The information doesn’t align. The neurons that you’ve already strung together via a lifetime of learning don’t correspond with what you’ve just observed (or, with your interpretation of what you’ve just observed). Your perspective on life (which you’ve carefully curated over your whole existence, as you try to make sense of past events and predict upcoming events in your world) no longer explains what you’ve seen here. And you can’t smash the puzzle pieces together.

Essentially, you had one set of beliefs – one set of neural connections that it operated on daily, probably without ever questioning them – and this new information streaming in doesn’t correspond with what you previously knew.

To visualize it, think of a branch of neural connections, like a tree branch. Let’s say there are several limbs heading in a horizontal pattern… and now you just tried to incorporate several NEW limbs that are also designed in a horizontal fashion… but they’re parallel to each other with massive gaps in between. The tips of the branches aren’t touching. The connections aren’t there.

You have a “before times” structure and a “this new thing just happened” structure. The two separate branches of neural linkages (which contain your memories, thoughts, and behavioral instructions) that can’t seem to make contact with each other to form one complete tree.

So, you can think about your “past” and you can think about your “one traumatic event” (if you’re so lucky to only have one), but you can’t seem to put them together for a cohesive cognition that incorporates both.

This is where we get “stuck” in compartmentalized neural networks (I think) that explain things like intrusive thoughts, ruminations, obsessions, and lifetimes of “its unfair” anger.

The difference between expected events and actual events will make a brain drain all its energy trying to logically mash the two together, making a lot of upset as related emotions are brought up, as it also tries to create a set of predictive instructions for what’s to come in the future.

Here we get thrown into the past, for the painful – literally, often physically painful – recollections.

And into the future, for the terrifying – literally, often physically terrifying – predictions for future survival instructions.

Not to mention… into the present. Where we’re probably just one big pile of shame, looking forwards and backwards and everywhere in between, and trying our best not to be found out by our social comrades who would most definitely think less of us for showing this mental mishap.

Or so we think. Because we love to punish ourselves.

We’ll talk about shame another time, but just know that it’s your brain’s attempt to explain unwanted events by blaming yourself. The “what could I have done differently,” and “if I just wasn’t in this place at this time,” and “maybe I made that happen, or I deserved it” thoughts are your head’s innocent attempt to find a reason for the unreasonable.

Unfortunately, shame results in a lot of shutdown. We obsess over hating ourselves and stop feeling motivated to do anything for our selves. We also want to hide away from the rest of the species, because we feel unfit.

For a lot of us, shame is also a new form of dissociation, which can be seen as further trauma to the brain. We hate the “version of our Self” that “brought on the trauma” and we also often find that we “don’t recognize who we’ve become.” In this way, we continue to fragment our memory systems as we build obsessive interpretations of our selves and then compartmentalize those neural structures from the rest of our available brain connections.

Because, you know, AGAIN, these new impressions really don’t align with any of the historical perceptions.

This is that whole “dissociative identity” conversation, in a nutshell. We’ll come back to it.

But, on trauma, what haven’t we covered so far?

The rest of your brain, body, and life disturbances that go along with PTSD are going to be explained by what we’ve already discussed here today. Triggers, anxiety, ADHD, insomnia, depression, avoidance, survival responses, survival personalities, loss of identity, learned helplessness, self-harm, self-abandonment… that’s the rest of the talk. The downstream effects that create functional disturbances and (if you let them) tragic biographies.

But you don’t have to let them.

If you ask me, you can make changes to overcome whatever your well-meaning, but disaster-programmed think-box is trying to do. You don’t have to let its automatic processes define your daily existence and lifelong trajectory. You DO have to help it clear the backlog so you can create a new set of instructions moving forward. “Rewiring” they call it.

And for that, it helps to have some idea of what’s going on in your stupid fucking brain.

For some people, accomplishing that means revisiting and re-understanding what may have already happened early in your stupid fucking life, for context and for problem pattern identification.

And that’s where we’ll pick up next time. Talking about the more specific niche interest of a lot of listeners. Now that we know what TRAUMA is. Let’s talk about what the shit it means when we get diagnoses of COMPLEX trauma. Which are, unsurprisingly, just more complicated stories about the same mental shittery, stretched over your formative years.

See you there.

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If you liked this brief talk on trauma… good news, there’s a lot more. I’ve already put out two full episodes on defining “trauma” and the distinction from “complex trauma,” as well as the four-hundred horsemen of mental illness that tend to ride alongside. Find those anytime you’re ready by checking out the t-mfrs.com website for the blog versions OR patreon.com/traumatizedmotherfuckers to get access to the full backlog of prior podcast episodes for a few bucks.

If you’ve never heard anyone talk about your brain like this before, you might want to hit up the TMFRs private discord community. There’s a free version (warning, it’s the wild west) available through t-mfrs.com and a more focused, intimate version available while you’re checking out the Patreon. Reminder, the Patreon, itself, is also a safe place to commune. Comment on the posts, answer the poll questions, and hear the real-life reflections of more Motherfuckers than just yours truly.

See you there, at t-mfrs.com and patreon.com, search “traumatized motherfuckers.” Plus, don’t forget to hit up the instagram account at traumatized.motherfuckers, where you can get bite-sized bits of this conversation “plus” snarky memes. Because this fucked up life can still be funny.

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Cheers

Jess

Like my shit drawings? Hey, at least my brain is capable of creativity again, after a long stretch of dissociation into a heavily intellectualized, “human,” network. No time for feelings when you have the crushing weight of human expectation on your shoulders.

Wonder what it’s like to podcast about trauma, learn about brains, and watch your own mental faculties get torn apart… concurrently… in an inescapable abusive living situation? Welp, it’s the story of this show so far. Until the day you finally escape from the zoo.

Check that account of slipping into insanity out whenever you’re feeling upset that “you can’t keep your brain afloat” (Uh, that’s not how automatic programming works.) on that annoying patreon page I keep talking about.

For now, I’m just happy to wake up and feel like doing anything my old self enjoyed again. Even if it’s objectively… “meh.” You know the life.

<3 Yer not alone.