# How long-term trauma and PTSD harm us

The psychological term for PTSD is literally a *Disorder* of *Stress* from *Post-Trauma*, and everyone has it in some non-clinical form:

1. Every person alive has suffered in a way that felt unfair.
2. Every child and most adults are at least somewhat unaware of [effective emotional management](mind-awareness-feelings.md).

We all experience trauma. It's an inevitable reality of life that started when we were small children.

- Irrespective of whether it [legitimate abuse](hardship-abuse.md) or imagined, it was pain over a thing we [wanted or needed](purpose.md) we couldn't have.
- Further, PTSD only has to be [imagined](mind-imagination.md), and doesn't have to be a [legitimate](reality.md) need or want.

For most people, the worst trauma happens in their childhood.

- At a young age, [children](people-family.md) are the weakest people in [society](groups-member.md) in every form.
- That weakness makes them more severe victims of [unjust treatment](morality-justice.md).
- This doesn't mean it can't happen later in life (especially in a severe experience like [abuse](hardship-abuse.md) or a [war](people-conflicts-war-why.md)).

APPLICATION: If something hurts a small child, it likely can hurt anyone. The only difference is that most adults harden themselves to that pain and learn to ignore it.

When we experience trauma later in life, the scope of it creates several pathological patterns at once:

1. A [moral](morality.md) shock over how unclear good and evil can become.
2. Self-awareness of our personal capacity for evil through our enhanced skills and strengths.
3. Feelings of helplessness and [shame](mind-feelings-shame.md) over terrible things we can't or couldn't control.
4. When applicable, a constant [awareness](mind-awareness.md) of [death](hardship-death.md) and its finality.

If we hold onto that trauma, we feel [stress](mind-feelings-happiness-stress.md) from [remembering it](mind-memory.md).

- The memories of the event, until we've released it, will repeatedly replay the pain in our [imaginations](mind-imagination.md).
- To the degree we keep imagining it without finding [closure](stories-why.md), we relive it as if the experience were happening again.

We hold onto our memories because we still feel we have a [purpose](purpose.md) for it, which only categorizes a few possible ways:

1. We must hold on to that information to deliver appropriate [justice](morality-justice.md).
2. We must still [learn](education.md) from that information, since those events may affect future [decisions](mind-decisions.md) we must make.
3. We must remember that information to [create](creations.md) something with it, which is a bit like justice but more focused on our efforts than on the cause of the trauma.

Either way, we must eventually [released](hardship-forgiveness.md) the trauma or it will destroy us.

While everyone experiences trauma along similar pathways, each person will have uniquely different responses to it:

- Some people will try to use [persuasion](power-influence.md) or [force](power.md) to create [results](results.md) they want.
- Others will [pursue something else](mind-creativity.md) to meet their needs.
- Many people broadly complain about their pain until they've [released the stress from it](hardship-forgiveness.md).
- In extreme cases, people will tell themselves they don't need something they legitimately need.

Replaying memories is a subconscious habit, so everyone who has felt [pain or fear](mind-feelings-fear.md) has been disrupted from [perfect wellness](people-goodlife.md), even though they typically don't know it.

## Detecting

When we're unaware of something in our mind, we have no control over its influence. The very essence of replaying trauma is because our subconscious [decided](mind-decisions.md) that the pain of directly confronting the issue is worse than coping unconsciously with it.

Once you've spent a few weeks observing someone's baseline behavior, you can usually detect their most overt past trauma responses. The trauma-associated topic will make them behave in some disproportionate way compared to their standard behavior (e.g., stiffening, twitching, going silent, lashing out). This behavior will often be self-reflective in a way that creates a "loop" that doesn't involve others' feedback at all.

This odd behavior isn't technically "their" behavior. They're reacting with the [methods](habits.md) from when the trauma happened, which were survival impulses that are no longer necessary. Their behavior may have been *decades* ago when they were much [younger](maturity.md) and [understood](mind-understanding.md) the world differently.

There are also more subtle forms of trauma. This can include perfectionism, cutting off other people while they're speaking, shutting down all body language, constantly monitoring feelings, constantly keeping busy, and trying to please others.

There is no external way to stop someone from going through a trauma loop. Literally *anything* can set it off, even a string of completely random [information](values.md).

Further, when left unresolved, trauma often frames a type of executive dysfunction, where a person's capacity to [perform work](success-4_routine.md) is severely diminished. Even when they want to be more productive, they'll often use [substances](addiction-substances.md) to numb the pain, which takes scarce resources away from important tasks they must do.

In an extreme way, we *can* halt someone else's trauma loop by doing something very audacious and unexpected. However, this may create a more convoluted set of behaviors from someone if that person is unwilling to [change](people-changes.md).

## Shadow self

This aggregate of all our trauma and past pain blends into our ["shadow" persona](people-personality.md). It's not the authentic, sensible, modern version of us, and is an aggregate of every painful and [forbidden](morality-taboo.md) part of us from our past. This persona is held together by unpleasant [feelings](mind-feelings.md). Irrespective whether a person's motivations are [selfish or selfless](morality.md), their persona is never very effective at [doing anything](results.md) because it's a limited [perspective](mind-understanding.md) with obsolete information.

Since unawareness causes the least short-term pain, most people stay unaware of their shadow self by default. They'll hurt people, destroy others' [happiness](mind-feelings-happiness.md), and do [malicious](morality-evil.md) things, all to fulfill a misaligned sense of [justice](morality-justice.md).

- Further, when given [power](power.md), they *will* use it, even if it doesn't make sense. One example of this is the employment of [language](language.md) on [social media](cs-networks-social.md).

However, even without a qualified therapist, someone with [experience and wisdom](maturity.md) will usually notice patterns from how others react to their [influence](power-influence.md). Of those, a select few will do some [soul](humanity.md)-searching and slow their [reactions](habits.md). If someone can integrate their shadow, they will have a vast wealth of wisdom to draw from.

When trauma is severe enough, that person will have *layers* of their persona to untangle. That person may shift from behaving like a 5-year-old to acting like a teenager, then to the reasoning skills of a baby. These shifts can happen in minutes, hours, days, or weeks.

In particularly traumatic instances, the victim will wander in an alternate state of [identity](people-identity.md). Their past persona can be more thin-skinned, bitter, commanding, demanding, anxious, and ambitious than their present self. Taken far enough, it can split a personality entirely where the person can't even access [memories](mind-memory.md) from different states.

## How trauma changes us

Our core, unaltered [human essence](humanity.md) is carefree, fun-loving, adventurous, curious, [funny](humor.md), easily entertained, and easily distracted. Trauma stops it from expressing as a self-defense mechanism.

However, accepting the trauma alone isn't healthy either. Consciously [identifying](people-identity.md) with trauma forces us to accept an unbalanced persona that's various degrees more fearful, anxious, hypersensitive, or angry than our genuine self.

APPLICATION: Some of the worst archetypes of people come from this hardened trauma:

- [Obsessive bureaucrats](bureaucracy.md)
- [Overbearing parents](parenting-3_teenagers.md)
- [Social justice warriors](politics-leftism.md)
- [Religious](religion.md) zealots
- [Yellow journalists](stories-storytellers.md)
- [Attorneys](people-rules.md)
- [Lobbyists](mgmt-badsystems.md) and [activists](groups-member.md)
- [Hyper-intellectuals](mind-understanding.md), especially [post-modern philosophers](philosophy.md)

FURTHER APPLICATION: We should pity these people. They're oblivious to their motives, even while many of them [destroy society](politics-leftism.md). If we condemn them, they become self-proclaimed martyrs. If we venerate them, they [hold to their persona](people-identity.md) more than their true selves.

FURTHER APPLICATION: Of course, to pity someone disadvantages them because you're implying they have a problem they haven't fixed and don't have the [power](power.md) to fix. Expect them to [self-preserve](mind-feelings-fear.md) and attack you if you're not careful.

While identifying a problem is a good start, it's *more* destructive without a [reasonable chance to overcome it](success-1_why.md) than never having seen the problem in the first place.

## Denial and projection

there are four major reasons people get stuck in the past:

1. They lack genuine [repentance](people-changes.md) over any of their wrongdoing.
2. They're afraid of what other people may think or do.
3. They don't want to leave their habitual [evil](morality-evil.md).
4. They don't [understand](mind-understanding.md) that they can find redemption if they move on.

Unfortunately, when we don't release trauma by working through it, we will often re-experience its consequences. Anything that isn't completely resolved in our mind *will* come back to haunt us:

- Memories of an event will force the mind to relive the shock over and over again, even after decades.
- Post-traumatic stress makes us react impulsively against something that [triggers](habits.md) a memory.

In some ways, every unresolved trauma is a [debt](money-2_debt.md) that must be forgiven, and will come payable when we act on it if we don't. In other ways, exposure to it is our psychological conditioning toward managing [fears](mind-feelings-fear.md).

APPLICATION: When an experience is severe, people can't fully recover from others' [evil](morality-evil.md) without intentional [release](hardship-forgiveness.md). However, complete recovery will still show psychological scars that never fully disappear.

Sadly, most people will stay unaware and form a convoluted [reasoning](mind-imagination.md) for their continued misery. If they're unaware of the way other people [feel](mind-feelings.md) about their behaviors, they'll presume everyone is reacting to something unrelated to themselves. Most of them will form theories on [human nature](humanity.md) that are entirely wrong.

After enough time with someone, a trauma victim will usually blame specific things on specific people with little evidence. Because of its implications, they'll hold to their theory harder than [reality](reality.md) and, over time, will lose touch with it as a result.

We tend to incorrectly redirect past trauma through several possible pathways:

- Overly personalized: making a broad thing too personal
- Overly broad: making a general rule out of something specific
- Permanent association: making a permanent rule out of something temporary
- Non-association: treating the experience as *completely* unrelated to legitimately relevant things

The only solution is to patiently expose ourselves to experiences that relive the trauma until we remove the harsh emotional ties to our past. While each person has their own way to fix it, there likely only one very specific way to release it that *all* trauma release mechanisms employ:

1. Relive the trauma directly, then consciously [release associations with it](hardship-forgiveness.md). The easiest way to do this is through [self-reflection](mind-awareness.md) to learn the *precise* damage that harmed us, which may include continued exposure through experience.
2. Discover for ourselves, plainly, what constitutes [the good life](people-goodlife.md) for ourselves if freed from trauma.
3. Clarify to ourselves with *exact* [wording](language.md) the things that [trigger](habits.md) our trauma, which is typically a very specific and simple experience that gets in the way of our well-being.
4. [Find a way](mind-creativity.md) to [circumvent](purpose.md) those tasks while performing all the aspects of a [good life](people-goodlife.md).
5. Spend lots of time in that [dynamic life](people-goodlife.md) (at least a few years to a few decades) to permit our [experiences](maturity.md) to grow us.
6. Once we've experienced more and better life, along with worse [hardships](hardship.md), our faded memories of past struggles were comparatively trivial upon recollection.

APPLICATION: We must [push back on traumatic behavior](hardship-ptsd-release.md) to break the loop, whether it's with ourselves or others:

- Perfectionism: try making mistakes
- Shutting down or cutting people off: slow down a conversation before severing connections
- Emotional monitoring: demonstrate how others' feelings don't technically matter
- Constantly busy: work through feelings instead of actions
- People pleasing: accept that we can't change anyone but ourselves

APPLICATION: The emotional hardening skills from trauma don't usually go away even though someone has overcome their hardship. For that reason, most people who suffer trauma and overcome it are *way* [stronger](power.md) for the experience than those who never went through it at all.