My Body Keeps the Score: Reliving Traumatic Experiences
- davikath8
- Oct 10
- 2 min read
“I cannot forget the follies and vices of others so soon as I ought, nor their offences against myself...My good opinion once lost is lost forever.” Fitzwilliam Darcy
― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, Chapter 11
I would like to tear certain traumatic memories out of my brain, like old garments on fire, and stamp on them until the burning and the sensation and the repetition of burning is extinguished.
But trauma doesn’t work that way. The offences I can’t forgive or forget are nestled like baby reptiles in my blood, my nerves, my bones, my flesh.
If these offences were purely cognitive, perhaps I could reason them away, recontextualize them. With logic and imagination, I could defang, declaw, and disempower them.
But recent research suggests why defeating traumatic memories is so difficult.
According to a study conducted in 2023 by Yale University and the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, MRI scans of the brains of traumatized people show that traumatic memories are not processed in the hippocampus, the part of the brain devoted to memories, but in the posterior cingulate cortex or PCC, which is responsible for internally directed thought, like introspection, daydreaming, and the processing of present experience.
With the PCC rather than the hippocampus activated, people with PTSD do not recall their traumatic experiences; they relive them.
The extreme threat response, seemingly incomprehensible to outside observers, makes sense neurologically. It involves the entire body, a body overwhelmed by shock and helplessness, despite an environment or a situation others perceive as “safe.”
Safety, like everything else, is in the eye of the beholder.
Science has always been a comfort to me.
It is also ammunition, fortress, and defense. When I’ve experienced PTSD episodes I have witnessed the people around me, even medical professionals, stare at me like I was a freak, and treat me like some horrible, repulsive monster (or worse, a hysterical woman!).
While I may be close to a heart attack or hyperventilation, I see very clearly the failings of others, their own incapacity to recognize a person, even a patient, in distress and to find ways to connect, to comfort, to acknowledge and alleviate our common frailty and fragility.
Like Mr. Darcy, my good opinion, once lost, is lost forever.
Mind and manners, be damned. My body keeps the score.
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