Why can’t the brain simply forget about it since it’s from a long time ago and still end up having some form of mental health issues later on in life because of it?
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Childhood is important part of your life… It’s where your personality develops (among many other things). Lot of tiny decisions have huge effects down the line in life.
Analogy: do you know Play-Doh? That toy you can shape into anything? But after a while it hardens into the shape you left it in? That’s the best analogy I could come up with at 1am 🙂
Back to science… Childhood trauma interrupts basic and natural development of brain. Trauma and responses to it become core memories and bases for your personality.
Second thing is our pattern seeking and wanting to survive nature of our brain. Really simply said. If for example dog bit you, your brain will forever associate dogs with danger… This is to protect you. You can sometimes slowly overcome it, but it takes effort.
If take a young tree and carve your name into the tree will still grow, and it will grow new branches, but your name and the stump will always still be there. The neurons in your brain and like trees with roots and branches sending signals that talk to each other. When strong memories happen the brain has a flash mode that comes from your amygdala that like a camera flash for the memory freezes and forms a strong imprint on your neurons. The brain then has to grow around that, it won’t replace it.
If I take a jar full of water and place it in the freezer, with an object in the middle of it, it begins to freeze around the object. If I take the object out before the water is fully frozen, the ice will be all fucked up, there’ll be a half full hole leftover where the object was, the surface of the ice won’t be smooth, etc.
Why doesn’t the ice just forget and make itself smooth?
I built a tower. I messed up on the first floor and used shoddy materials, and now it’s starting to sag. Why can’t the higher floors just forget the lower floors and stay upright?
During childhood, your brain is growing a lot. As it grows, it is making a lot of connections and establishing baseline behaviors that will continue throughout your life. This obviously applies to commonly used physically and mental skills, but also to who we think and feel in most situations. If one learns that speaking and drawing attention to one’s self will result in getting a beating, even once they are out of that situation, the learned behaviour of not speaking up from yourself still continues into adulthood. Or, if one learns that doing things that a child shouldn’t be doing is the only way to get any kind of attention from the people in your life, that behaviour will continue into adulthood as well. It’s also important to understand that these behaviours and situation appraisals are not things that these people are fully aware of or in control over. A lot of what modern therapy is about is helping people to learn how to identify these kinds of behaviours and develop new ways of action in those kinds of situations.
Trauma changes the way your brain works. Childhood trauma means that all future memories are built on an unstable foundation.
You break a bone when you’re little. It’s a small fracture. It heals completely and it doesn’t bother you as an adult. You remember it happening, but it doesn’t hurt anymore.
You break a bone really badly. Maybe something really bad happened and the bone is broken in several places. Maybe you injured the growth plate and didn’t get it treated properly so the bone grows crooked. Now, as an adult, it may hurt only when it rains or it’s cold, or it may hurt all the time. You might have arthritis and you may not be able to participate in certain activities. Doing certain things may cause the pain to flare.
You break the same bone several times throughout your childhood. Maybe the first time it wasn’t a bad break, but you kept breaking it or spraining it over and over. Now as an adult you have chronic pain in that area. Even though many of your other bones developed just fine, the part that was injured will never be fully healed and you will always need to be careful with that limb.
There’s a book called *The Body Keeps The Score* by Bessel van der Kolk, which is all about why trauma is expressed in the body.
Looks like my Play-Doh was traumatized too, it’s still in the shape of a pancake! #ChildhoodMemories
Ok, I’ll simplify it a lot but this is not that difficult to grasp.
Traumatic experiences are a bit more than just a sad memory. They are difficult to forget or ignore because trauma changes your brain. It rewrites thinking patterns. Episodes of anxiety or stress can be triggered by anything associated to the trauma.
That is to say, memories become stronger through repetition. Memories from traumatic experiences are often haunting and intrusive. These memories reinforce themselves through episodes of anxiety and stress, remaining more vivid and painful for much longer.
This effect is stronger when trauma is acquired young because young brains are developing and maleable, they are in “learning mode”
When trauma happens to a brain on learning mode, it is more difficult to let it go, as it learns it just like it does anything else.
That said, plenty of people first experience trauma as adults and the same basics apply.
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