When you have childhood trauma – and you’ve experienced the total loss of a psychological self in the physiological urgency of the neurological survival response – you are always on the verge of fully re-entering survival emergency mode and losing the psychological sense of self that exists in states of basic physiological safety.
If the psychological self gets overwhelmed by a perceived threat to survival – be it real physical danger or stress of money worries, or resentful negative circular thinking that triggers a fight response – then the whole psychological structure of the personal self collapses and the simple reactive intelligence of an organism in distress takes over.
Then, the rational psychological self is just gone. There is just pure survival energy being released and assigned to execute to pre-coded survival response of the original trauma. Knowing better doesn’t help. There is no psychological self there and present to respond better. It’s too late once your particular trigger is triggered and the organism has gone into lockdown executing your particular trauma-reaction.
My particular pattern has to do with untrustworthy people within my social group. Both my step-dads masked their abuse and malicious intentions and personalities to the family/social group while lying about me to the group to cover up and scapegoat my reaction to their abuse on me.
This has made me hyper-vigilante and good at finding people with hidden motives and secret selfishness within a group. However, what perpetuates the reenactment of this social drama, is that my behavior towards them then becomes rather cold, withdrawn, even contemptful. This then triggers these sneaky people to start their sabotaging sneaky behaviors against me. I need to see them but not treat them differently. I need the compassion for them enough to overcome my own fear-response. They’re just people with selfish tendencies.