Unconscious Emotions

An article I came across not long ago made a point about what happens during trauma: the thinking part of the brain steps aside. The amygdala, which handles emotional reactions, fires off, and a person gets swamped with feeling before any thought arrives. We like to imagine we weigh things first and respond second. It doesn't always go in that order.

That ordering helps explain why the cognitive memory of abuse sometimes can't be retrieved while the emotional reaction shows up on its own, uninvited. Someone drowning in feeling can lose the ability to think clearly and be seized by an urge to do something, anything, about it. Where the feeling came from is often a mystery to them. Years and years ago, a boy I was seeing ended things with me while introducing me to the girl who had replaced me. The humiliation was total, and the only thing I wanted was for the feeling to stop. Measured against everything else in a life, the episode was minor. The flood of emotion it set loose was not. It carried me into suicidal thoughts and an attempt I lived through, and I told no one at the time.

So the gaps in memory make sense, and so do the fears people pick up that end up running their lives. Picture something so devastating that there were never any words for it to begin with, only a wave of raw emotion. That absence of language is part of why recovering certain memories stays out of reach for some people. Reaching back for them can be like a surgeon slicing open a healed incision just to check whether the operation left a scar.

I've written before about the don't ask, don't tell habit of bracing for the worst. In some situations the worst really is what's coming. Small children are fragile, and they take a threat at face value. When there seems to be nowhere to turn for love or comfort, a child learns to stay silent about things out of fear of being pushed away. If the family itself does the rejecting, what options does a small child have left?

Treat a young child's fears as real. Children don't sort through things the way grown-ups can. The fear and the feeling are genuine to them, and the job of the adult is to take that seriously and help the child find a way to cope.

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