with as basic science and as much analogies as possible, please explain why does childhood trauma carries on into adulthood and even at a later age, even when it’s not happening anymore later on.

Question

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?

In: 39

Answer 1

Here is an analogy for how trauma changes the neurological pathways in your brain, and it occurred to me once when I was making balloon animals:

You know those long skinny balloons they use to make balloon animals?

You have to leave a certain amount of skinny, uninflated balloon left at the end (the “tail”) when you inflate it. If you fill it all the way, it will pop when you try to twist it.

Suppose I was supposed to leave a 6” tail, but I filled it all the way to the end. Even if I let some air out of the balloon, it will just be a skinnier balloon, but y hat 6” tail won’t come back.

Suppose I let all the air out of the balloon, and start over. Since I’ve already stretched out the balloon by blowing air in it the first time, every time I re-inflate, it will inflate all the way to the end. It will go from skinnier to fatter, but I can never get back the skinny tail at the end.

Think of the balloon as a neutral pathway in your brain. Think of the air as a traumatic event. Once the trauma has been experienced at a young age, the balloon inflates to the end. From then on, even small things will inflate the balloon all the way to the end, because it has been stretched into that shape.

This analogy might be easier to understand, and is more accurate to the physiology of the brain:

When you’re born, your brain is like a grassy lawn. You can walk anywhere.

The experiences you have are like a crowd of people walking through the field to their various destinations. Over time, dirt pathways will appear where people walk most frequently. Everywhere else, the grass will grow taller.

Babies are born with a zillion neural pathways in their brains. The ones that get used frequently become the highways. The ones that don’t get used go away. (Literally.)

If you have traumatic experiences in your childhood years, you’re making a highway through poison ivy, briars and mud puddles. When you grow up, you don’t want to use that path any more, but you have to because the other pathways have grown over and disappeared.