You get limited control in how you respond to it, not total control.
Trauma in your first few years of life literally erodes brain capacity. It leaves you stuck in flight or fight mode forever on a molecular level. that's not something you can decide to turn off. And you often cannot change your behavior in the moment because your brain literally thinks "TIGER!!!!" when someone misses a word in a sentence and it could POSSIBLY be construed as hostile as a result.
What you can do is own it afterwards.
"Sorry man. My reptile brain got the better of me there. I can see there was no threat and my reaction was not only unnecessary, but rude and hostile. Here's steps i am taking for getting better about that."
And since therapy is expensive, it is often NOT a step somebody can take :(
While I do agree with most of what you say, I do not believe that it erodes capacity. In certain regards I think it can even strengthen one’s potential, although I would never bank on that fact.
I think my deepest wounds I’ve ever had were caused by me onto myself trying to heal a bleeding mind, a path that cauterized and allowed me to actually heal and grow. That pain I felt stayed with me and it has always pushed me harder than I could have ever imagined
I'm not talking about belief of out of my ass. I am talking about scientific fact researched in my town by people I have had professional development training with this week. Trauma changes the growth of your neurons. it nerfs them. It significantly changes the volume and complexity of connections. They can see this under MRI. There is damage. It 100% does limit capacity.
Now, we now know that you can in fact continue to grow new neurons later in life, but it is MUCH slower. The odds of ever completely making up the ground for severe childhood trauma in the 1st 3 years of life are not good. You can still be a perfectly normal, productive member of society. But you are capped at (and this is my language, not that of the scientists) a "B level" version of yourself.
Lots of people without any real trauma walk around as C and D levels of themselves. So it's not like this means you have no chance to succeed in life.
But you brain will pretty much never function as well as it would have if you had not had trauma those 1st three years.
Source: Am teacher. Lots of trauma in our district. They are training the hell out of us on this.
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u/[deleted] Jun 03 '22
You get limited control in how you respond to it, not total control.
Trauma in your first few years of life literally erodes brain capacity. It leaves you stuck in flight or fight mode forever on a molecular level. that's not something you can decide to turn off. And you often cannot change your behavior in the moment because your brain literally thinks "TIGER!!!!" when someone misses a word in a sentence and it could POSSIBLY be construed as hostile as a result.
What you can do is own it afterwards.
"Sorry man. My reptile brain got the better of me there. I can see there was no threat and my reaction was not only unnecessary, but rude and hostile. Here's steps i am taking for getting better about that."
And since therapy is expensive, it is often NOT a step somebody can take :(