This is a series of blogs on what I think I understand about psychological trauma. It is based on my own experience and research. It is mostly intended to help partners of trauma survivors understand and discover the gifts that await them. I’d love to hear how these ideas sound to you. Trauma, or at least its long term impact, is all about distortions we store away in our brain. The primitive parts of our brain are so much faster than the parts that give us our higher reasoning skills. They often makes decisions for us before our grown up brains have a chance to sort things out. That’s great if you put your hand on a hot stove or a bee stings you. The problem is that primitive brain is, well primitive. It can’t keep up with the complexities handled by our mammalian brain. Our brains go through constant physiological modifications and upgrades from before birth until our late twenties. Most of our trauma happens when we are young and relying on that primitive brain to make sense of things that we know are wrong. So those distortions and our reactions to them are tailor made for our primitive brain to reuse again and again. So, then, it is really simple. All you have to do is tell your partner to fix those distortions and everything will be fine! Please don’t try that at home! In fact that word “fix” makes me pretty angry too (my primitive brain goes into panic mode). I’ve got a lot more to say about this over simplification! Until then, leave a comment and tell me what you think?