One of the most useful metaphors and concepts the book introduces is the idea of chronic and unpredictable stress in the chapter titled “the Rattled Cage”. This chapter describes experiments with rodents that conclude that ongoing low-level but unpredictable stress is more harmful than ongoing high-level stress that is predictable. This metaphor reveals that childhood trauma isn’t just a single violent event impacting an otherwise fine daily existence: trauma as a single collision between a psyche and an event. But that trauma can also be a slow, enduring friction that slowly burns your psyche as it drags your life and emotional health down. This reinforces the importance of stability, rules, and a sense of consistency during childhood.
Chronic and unpredictable stress can “prune away neurons in a child”. A child that is exposed to toxic stress may remain resilient, happy, and functional as a child as a critical mass of neurons has not yet been pruned away. However, when a child with prior stress-induced neuronal pruning hits puberty – and the brain goes through a normal phase of developmental neuronal pruning – that child may have insufficient neurons left to be fully functional when they reach adulthood. This explains to me why so much mental illness really hits in the teenage years, and perhaps why I found myself in a mental hospital from 15-18. This is backed up by scans showing smaller and less dense brains with less activity and connectivity in people who were traumatized as children.
Chronic and unpredictable stress also resets our stress response to high for the rest of our lives: causing long-term inflammation that manifests as physiological disease. The author really explains this is the reason behind the correlations between high Adverse Childhood Experience (ACEs) scores and low expectancy and higher risk of chronic diseases especially immunological diseases. For me, scoring 10 out of 10 on the ACE survey, this explains a lot of my own immune issues.
One of the most powerful chapters for me was “The Neurobiology of Love”. Here the author describes the work of Ruth Lanius, MD, Ph.D. who “spent her academic career looking at how neurological changes to a young brain from trauma and adversity affect the ability to interrelate with others over a lifetime”.
This 4-and-a-half-page chapter was a revelation as to why, after over a decade, psychotherapy stopped really working for me even though my personality seems to remain at least socially dysfunctional – even if I can (sometimes) pull off a good enough professional persona to keep a job for 9 months (my record).
Psychologically, I am officially over my past. There is nothing left to talk about after over a decade. I’m no longer personally identified or emotionally caught up in stories, persons, or events. I have enough compassion and awareness to take care of my inner children and my subconscious. I can feel most feelings without compulsively disassociating, and can process them without resistance or identification for the most part. I am mostly aware of my projections and patterns of re-enactment and am working on bad cognitive and behavior habits. And bit by bit I am deconstructing my “fake”, pretend-to-be-normal personality and opening myself up. All my current emotional issues now are about my dysfunctional personality in the present as it manifests through failed social interactions and relationships… as well as processing a backlog of resurfacing feelings from my decades of being disassociated.
Even so, I still feel hemmed in by an invisible fence: unable to participate in the world of higher social functioning and interaction that I can witness and feel between others. I can observe healthy normal people meet each other in a space of feeling and reciprocity – and I can cognitively understand there is a mesh of meaning and feeling that choreographs these “real” human interactions, but apart from low-level mimicking, I can’t really participate in it. Like learning the steps but not the feeling of a dance.
Relating this to my psychiatrist, and speculating that I might have a type of autism or a personality disorder, my psychiatrist refused to give me a diagnosis. He argued that though there may be some kind of epigenetic autism at play, in his experience, personality disorders are transitory symptoms of whatever the actual core issue is.
My psychiatrist’s speculative assessment of epigenetic autism marries up with “Lanius’s fMRI study that shows people who suffered trauma have very little connectivity in areas of the brain responsible for memory, constructing thought, recognizing others have thoughts, and integrating our thoughts… resulting in a lack of what we may call a sense of self… emerging out of childhood very unaware of feeling states.”
“Lanius’s fMRI study also shows that early trauma decreases activity in an area of the brain that affects our ability to regulate and modulate emotions… leading to a complete inability to experience positive feelings, and when they do feel something positive, they’re immediately flooded with negative emotions… fewer positive moods in general…”
“…they don’t know how to improve interactions in their most meaningful life relationships… with a decreased ability to dampen down intense feelings… they go between two mind states: overmodulation and shutting down feelings, and under modulation and getting caught up in intense feelings… they may be entirely clueless about the own behavior and how it affects others and may not even know that they’re caught going back and forth between these two mind states.”
For me, these 4 and a half pages finally put into words all that I have been finding in life, in my attempts to socialize, and in my inner emotional instability. I used to lean to thinking I was bipolar, but with my psychiatrist saying I didn’t meet the criteria for the diagnosis, I now relate going back and forth “between two mind states” to the mechanical shortcomings of my post-trauma brain.
These pages also explain why talk therapy is no longer effective at relieving my personality issues. At this point in my healing journey, I’ve gone beyond the need for emotional catharsis, rather, my next step in healing is about regrowing parts of my brain and healing the mechanical and operative nature of my thought and feeling processes rather than addressing my personal relationship with the content.
The author makes a list of concrete steps to help regrowing activity in areas of my brain dampened by childhood trauma. I will definitely be following up on this list as my own personal next steps. I’ve posted it here: https://blisspoems.com/neurogenesis-synaptogenesis-how-to-bring-under-connected-areas-of-the-brain-back-online/