This is number two in my continuing blog for partners of trauma survivors. If our partners could see things clearly, their overwhelming, but unsubstantiated, fears would all just go away. We could live free of there reactivity. I don’t see that happening any time soon, do you? In my last post I talked about how I see the lasting impact of trauma in how it distorts our experience today. I think this is true for all creatures great and small. Painfully, there are many among us who have had senseless and inhumane experiences reinforced so strongly that it’s hard to see how our world view could ever change. Even so, we all know it can. We couldn’t function in our complex social world without assumptions. They help us know what will happen next. Our higher brain is constantly creating a picture of what to expect. It lets us drive cars and carry on fascinating conversations. I think it is what makes humor possible. It is also how our past experiences distort today. I’ve talked before about how our most traumatic experiences occur when we are young, long before our magnificent human brain has completed its nearly 30 year development process. Our brain makes amazing transformations in the kinds of information it can handle in the first 6 years. It evolves more slowly throughout adolescence and the process continues until about 27 years of age. So, your partner’s young, not fully capable minds tried to make sense of things that simply don’t make sense. Survival depended on understanding how to cope. Too often, the only solution was to ignore the craziness. That works. For a while. Even the brightest, most developed human brain could not make sense of that history. But it could add perspective so it knows the difference between that experience and today. Unfortunately I haven’t noticed our grown up brain playing much of a role once our quicker primitive brain has recognized the pattern and made the logical assumptions it learned a long time ago.