REACTING TO TRAUMA
Understanding the Mindset
Many people just give up. In animals they refer to this as learned helplessness. Do you ever wonder when you see an elephant tethered to a tree or stick of some kind, how they don’t just break the tether and go on a rampage? Well when the elephant was young it could not physically break the tether. As it got older, they simply gave up trying to break the tether as their mind had been programmed that it could not break it. However, now a full-grown elephant and it is more than likely that they can break the chains that bind them, they just cannot mentally imagine breaking the bondage at this stage in their development. We as humans are very similar. We have been beat down so much, we just accept whatever is given to us and believe that we deserve nothing better. We no longer risk doing things differently for fear of the unknown, of being ridiculed, of being wrong, etc., the list is endless.
Interestingly, the brains response to the traumas we have suffered is to continue to secrete large amounts of stress hormones into our bodies long after the trauma is gone. This puts our body into a constant state of stress for the rest of our lives. This is why you see traumatized people have huge reactions to relatively minor stimuli. This also oftentimes lead us to choose mates that resemble our parents because we are “returning home” so to speak and find some sort of comfort in the behavior that we are accustomed to being a part of. So, when people say, “you married someone just like your mother/father,” this is not always a good thing.
Here is the dichotomy of all this stress coursing through our bodies. We tend to seek more and more chaos invoking behavior because it keeps us engaged and stimulated. Without it, we find ourselves being bored or empty. This is where pharmacology comes into play. In order to stay engaged and feeling, doctors have decided that prescribing medication is the key. Now, I am sure there are those body of people that need it to move away from very scary thoughts, suicidal ideations, etc. However, a majority of people need to embrace their traumas and sit with them for a while if they are to heal from them and thus get on a path of living and not just surviving.