How do childhood memories cause trauma if you can’t remember them?
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Trauma doesn’t just affect your brain, it affects your body as well. The body always remembers even if the brain doesn’t, because your nervous system is affected. This results in trauma responses: flight, fight, freeze, and fawn. Any person can be stuck in one, or cycle through all of them depending on various situations.
An example of my own: I have dental trauma from when I was a child, maybe 5. Any time I went to the dentist afterwards, I would cry uncontrollably, and I had no idea why. Just a couple years ago, I remembered just enough of the memory to piece together the fact that I was traumatized. I was unable to go to the dentist for 11 years of my life, because my mom passed when I was 11, we lost her disability. That’s another trauma for another time, though. We were poor so it wasn’t prioritized. I was finally able to see a dentist just this year because of my husband’s insurance through his job. I even had a tooth extracted today, and my legs were very shaky, because the body needs to shake to release trauma.
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