In 2025, we know that it’s essential to survival that our brains hotwire to what happened.
We’re just lucky to be in safer times. If we stayed/lived in the warzone, or if we lived where perpetrators had the power to repetitively assault us, hypervigilance wouldn’t be a disorder. Watching everyone and everything around us would keep us alive. We would have respect for the skills of self-protection, including that heightened sensory awareness that now we say dysregulates our nervous system.
For instance… we don’t have wonder why something violent snapped our survival response network. As if something in me made this happen. As if I’m defective. That’s what we thought in the 1900s and blamed the survivor for being altered after surviving something life threatening or horrifying.
Or… It’s not rocket science. It’s neuroscience.
Our brains hotwire to the sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and feels of what happened to keep us safer from it happening again. That’s trauma memory. That’s a moment in time vividly frozen in time. That’s 2025.In the 1900s, we thought that something was wrong with us that made us not able to let things go. We thought that we should forgive and forget, as if forgiving would detox that trauma memory. As if a grudge was the operative hurdle.
In the 1900s, we thought that boys will be boys and girls had to be tolerant of assault. So we called it abuse or physical discipline or a mistake. Women were told not to report assault because it would ruin a perpetrator’s reputation.
In 2025, we call that intimate partner violence or sexual harassment in the workplace or child endangerment. We have zero tolerance for one human to put their hands on another human without consent.
So, let’s get out of the stigmas from the 1900’s. Let’s understand PTSD for what it is.
Life threatening events don’t happen to everyone, all the time, but when they do, PTS symptoms are evidence that we survived one of the worse days of our lives. PTS recovery is detoxing the vivid memory of what happened so that we can get out of the loop of survivalist reactivity.