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

Ok so I’m no expert but :

We humans are meant to recognise and remember patterns: “This fruit is the same shape and color as the one I liked, it must be the same fruit”

But we tend to remember bad experiences way more than good ones. That’s because to our ancestors, a bad experience was often very dangerous. “This fruit looks like poison, I must avoid it to survive” “This animal attacked me last time, I must avoid it to survive”.

Stress, in our day and age, can become seared in our minds as a life and death matter, even when it isn’t, because it uses the same biological mechanisms that treated life or death situations back then.

Even unpleasant social situations, which pose no death threats, will trigger fight or flight response, because back then, being excluded from your group was actually dangerous.

So that bad breakup will get interpreted by your brain as a sign that your safety was compromised. To make sure you survive, it will give you a strong reaction, like anger or fear that would have saved you from a predator.

And the next time you’re on a date, your pattern recognition will kick in to try and avoid reproducing the past situation : “This person did X, which the last one also did, and they were untrustworthy. So I can’t trust this person”

Your brain actually changes from this behaviour, as neurons will make new connections. And each time you will repeat the behaviour, the information takes the same path in your brain, so the path gets stronger. Like those paths where people walk on grass and the grass stops growing there, so people will take the same path rather than walk on grass.

If you take that path often enough, it becomes much stronger than all the others. So much that it would take work, like therapy, to not take that path automatically. You ‘re stuck in a loop where at every crossroad, you have to take right. So you end up at the same spot. And the path gets bigger everytime.

It’s also scary to go into the unknown, so the bad path that you know feels more comfortable sometimes, than going into the tall grass where you can’t see. Even if that’s where the good things are.

I think that’s the gist of it.

Then, there are still parts of the human mind that we can’t fully understand or predict. Because everyone is different, and will have different reactions to the same situation.