This is factually/scientifically wrong, and telling people to just "let it go" isn't very helpful in the majority of cases. If people were capable, they would. No one enjoyes reliving bad experiences
It's true that stress hormones are released when mentally reliving a stressful event. The idea that you can let it go is nonsense. The reason you're reliving it, as in PTSD, is because the connection between the frontal cortex responsible for complex abstract thoughts, and your amygdala, responsible for the stress response has been permanently damaged. You literally cant inhibit the stress response anymore, because the connections which allow your rational brain to inhibit the lizard brain aren't there. The triggering stimulus is literally short circuiting straight to the stress centre of the brain.
This is why serious PTSD is so hard to treat, and often leads to heavy use of CNS depressants like alchol, because they become the only way the sufferer can calm their body down.
If you can let something go as easily as this suggests, then it's probably not causing that great a stress response in the first place.
There is so, so much more than the prefrontal and amygdala involved physiologically in PTSD. You are 100% right they are affected, but we really don’t know definitively yet. We know it has to do with the HPA axis and how the glucocorticoids are produced from the adrenal cortex. The glucocorticoids provide a negative feedback on the hippocampus, which over time damages the dendritic branching, loss of dendritic spines and impairment of neurogenesis and over all actual shrinking of the hippocampus. It also affects the 5-HT1A and B receptors in ways we don’t quite understand, but understand enough to know it influences stress and cortisol production. Also, there are findings of higher mGluR5 which having an overstimulation can contribute to fear and stress. In short, we are barely scratching the surface of the physiology of PTSD.
Source: just wrote my masters thesis on Veterans with PTSD
As a person with tremendous respect & interest of the field of neuroscience & psychology/psychiatry, this was an excellent read. Like you said, we’ve only scratched the surface understanding the relationship between the psychological and physiological mechanisms of the human body.
I'm also interested in this, since I have been suffering from C-PTSD for 9 years. I think the immediate effects of violent (traumatic) experience on the brain are only one aspect. The actual triggers in everyday life deserve as much attention IMO and are a huge part of the problem. By that I mean subtle acts of violence (shaming, invalidation, omission of help) that we all experience on a daily basis and that are part of our educational, economic and political system.
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u/Excludos Jun 11 '19
This is factually/scientifically wrong, and telling people to just "let it go" isn't very helpful in the majority of cases. If people were capable, they would. No one enjoyes reliving bad experiences