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

Imagine you open a store.

In the first month you have someone bust in wearing a motorcycle helmet and they rob the store.

What is your response? Probably to make a rule to about not wearing motorcycle helmet into the store.

Trauma occurs when something bad happens to a human. We imprint that bad event into our amygdala and we desperately do anything to avoid it.

But the amygdala is an ancient part of the brain. We see fight or flight and Trauma in many other animals too, so we know it evolved a long time ago.

What that means though, is its not very well adjusted for modern humans. The Amygdala can deal with survival threats that can be solved by running or fighting. Anything else? Well…can we fight it or run away from it? No? Well lets do it anyway.

The key to remember is humans are the ultimate survivors. Our ancestors went through some shit. We are “designed” to survive an enemy tribe killing all the men in your tribe and kidnapping the women and children and stuff like that. We are not adapted to survive social situations which have only existed for a few thousand years.