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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So when you’re a kid, your job is to experiment. Think about how toddlers live to put things in their mouths, or how kids are always asking what’s that or poking at new things. You want to try new things and find out what happens so that as an adult you have that info and can follow those patterns. Childhood is for trying, adulthood is for doing. It’s more efficient to follow those paths you explored as a kid and do the same things, rather than make things. That’s because the younger you are, the more moldable your brain is. Each pattern in your brain gets really engrained — think about what’s easier, walking on a paced sidewalk, or walking through the woods with no paths. When you’re doing something you’ve done since childhood, your neurons are following that clear paved path. When you try to change ingrained paths, you are making a new path through the woods, and it’s harder to follow or find. This works fine, unless the patterns you make as a child are based on warped info (ie, shouting and hitting are the only ways to get attention — no one cares about me — other people aren’t stable or safe.) Your brain as a child is trying to survive, and if the skills you need for survival demand certain patterns, they will become very ingrained.
You know how AI is dependent on the information you feed it? Ie, if you only fed it pictures of cats and dragons, that’s the only animals it would be able to identify. It doesn’t “know” that dragons aren’t “real,” or that dogs exist, so it’s not going to do a good job identifying other things. When you are emotional, your brain goes back to that childhood storehouse of information. If you grew up in a traumatizing situation, your storehouse of info is warped, so when you get into situations as an adult, you see something normal (like an airplane), but you can only identify it as something in your childhood experiences (ie a dragon). If you trained an AI on only images and words of war, it wouldn’t be able to properly interpret or make predictions about a peaceful situation. Growing up with a lot of adverse childhood experiences trains your brain to be in a war zone, but not to be a peaceful and healthy adult.
The trauma event or situation is a very serious one, that is important, and so gets put into long term memory.
Lets say you get chased by a loud, fierce stray dog while jogging at night.
Long term memory is where the neurons actually grow physical connections to other neurons, hardwiring a path in the mind. Now, the interesting thing about memory, is that the more you think about it, the more it gets reinforced. Like if you walk a path through the grass.
Also, the context in which you remember an event gets connected to the memory. This is why you might remember things about swimming better at a beach, than in a basement. So anytime it’s dark, you’ll have a better chance of remembering, or jogging, or seeing a dog.
So the next day you think about it, while grocery shopping you see a dog, or even just a similar tree, or a scent of mulch…. and you get that surge of panic from the night before. The memory is reinforced, but now the event is very lightly linked to grocery shopping, even if the even happened at night while jogging.
And every time you remember a memory…you not only reinforce it, but modify it too.
So if you remember the event, but focus on the panic, the vulnerability, then this feature gets enhanced…so the event gets magnified.
So the connections get reinforced by remembering it. Remembering it can exaggerate it, and distort it. And every time you remember it, it can be connected to other details, making it more likely to be remembered again…
So its the constant repeating of the memory, digging deeper paths as you go down them, only the worst features getting reinforced, and connected to all sorts of errant memories that make these so persistent.
A lot of therapy involves actually going through the memory again, but in a space that makes you feel calm. And focusing on the other details, not just the raw emotional ones. And work is done to isolate it to that moment, rather than the connections to current relationships or locations.
This broadens the path, allowing you to exit it rather than being trapped in the rut. It also makes it more like your other memories, and less striking.
It’ll always be apart of you, a significant one. but one with paths out of it, and a better grasp of it’s scope and place.
You start running a race, and someone breaks your leg. You keep running on the broken, bleeding leg, and near the middle of the marathon 30 years later you’re nowhere near as fast, healthy, or happy as the other runners.
I think it has to do with how you interpret the trauma. Say a 4yo and a 20yo are traumatized in a similar fashion. The 20yo can use the reasoning they have developed to understand the bad/good. The 4yo has no such experience to deal with the trauma and interprets it differently.
The 4yo experiences are hardwired at the intellectual level of a 4yo. Their brain has made the connection with the negative experience and it remains as the 4yo interpreted.
Much easier to make sense of a violent car accident as an adult then as a child.
Sorry for rambling a bit but this is what I think.
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.
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.
This in an article I read that I feel explains it well:
“In therapy, I learn that the trauma of the attack means that my brain’s usual mechanisms for storing memories have been corrupted. Dr N, the therapist, uses the analogy of cardboard boxes on a conveyor belt, being knocked off one by one, so that they never reach their storage facility. Instead, they have exploded and their innards are all over the shop (this part of the analogy is mine).
Dr N draws me pictures of the brain, showing me the amygdala and the hippocampus. The amygdala is responsible for my fear responses, and you could say that it’s hyperactive. This is why I startle so easily, because it is going into stress mode unnecessarily. The hippocampus is in charge of the storage and retrieval of memories, and helps you differentiate between past and present events. Put simply, mine is damaged, so the past and the present blend together, the attack elbowing its way into my everyday experience without warning or invitation. On a daily basis, I experience the same cascade of chemicals that I did on the night of the attack, when my primitive brain took over during the fight-or-flight terror of thinking I would die.”
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/oct/20/feel-might-die-post-traumatic-stress-disorder-ptsd
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.
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