Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) represents an error in the ongoing processes of learning useful things in one’s life.  A traumatic experience can actually contain much more information than a person can actually use as one single individual.  The potential of what a traumatic experience can teach about survival needs to be applied (learned) in order to improve adaptation within the environment just in case a similar event happens again in the future.

Particularly in today’s world where we no longer exist in a tribal culture that would allow a whole group to learn from a dangerous experience, there can be “no room in the inn” on a personal level for the whole amount of new information that might be gained about survival from an event one person has had to experience alone.  Learning is thus interfered with on the individual level, and the wholeness of that person is interfered with, as well.  The result can be that their ongoing experience of being in their life is interrupted, and we then have a post-trauma circumstance.

If the information about what is needed to survive an overwhelming trauma cannot be shared ‘in a group’, the information out-matches the needs of a single person’s waking day and sleeping night.  Unprocessed information about trauma survival just sits in line, in the cue of ongoing information processing, and can ‘jump the line’ at every possible trigger that stimulates it – like it is impatient to be completed and finished.  It WANTS to used, and be useful.  That’s the nature of ongoing life.  Traumas are supposed to teach us something important about how to get along in a world that is not always safe.

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When an infant suffers traumas that create breaks in its ongoing experiencing of life, the interruptions will most often be built into its growing brain as dissociational patterns.  Its learning and adaptation will be interfered with just as it would be for an overwhelmed adult, only much more so.  Once these ‘crisis’ response patterns are built into the brain, they will be lying in wait to be used should any future overwhelming trauma occur.

Survival through evolution has required humans to have the widest possible range of responses to traumas.  If what is known cannot prevent a trauma from occurring, or does not allow for adaptation to a trauma, new responses must be learned.

Within a safe and secure range the best of all possible genetic phenotypes will be able to manifest.  Phenotypes are what we actually SEE on the ‘surface’ of who we are based on our genetic material as our genetic expression machinery has told our genes what to do on an ongoing basis.  If too much trauma exists during the early developmental stages of our lives through abuse, neglect, deprivation, etc., the actual phenotypes we end up with can be far different than they would have been if development had happened in a safe and secure, non traumatic environment.

Most mental illnesses, for example, are ‘visible’ phenotypes that might not have needed to develop if early trauma had not been present.  As soon as an early environment overwhelms an infant or young child with too much trauma, the body will interpret this as a threat-to-life situation, and use the most extreme adaptive phenotypes it can in order to cope with disaster.

The developing brain and body operates on a simple rule basis.  A safe world is run by safe rules and will bring out safe responses.  A dangerous world is run by dangerous rules and will bring out the most extreme adaptations possible – as needed.  Our phenotypes reflect how these rules are applied within our bodies.

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Too much or too little of anything can kill an organism.  Extremes push the body into an emergency, crisis response.  Trauma that reaches PTSD proportions for an individual represents a condition of too much information.  Information is only useful if it can be integrated and applied BY USING IT.  I believe it is because we so often are left without a ‘group’ or ‘tribe’ that would help us learn from the traumas that we are so at risk as individuals for becoming overwhelmed.  This appears obvious when we realize that strong safe and secure attachment relationships mediate the effects of traumas at every single age along the human lifespan continuum.

Making good use of the information that traumas present to us has to be in the direction of promoting and advancing life – for the individual, for the species.  Being a connected part of the ‘social group’ allows for a wider range of possibilities for learning from traumas while being isolated and alone narrows that range.

I think about it in terms of 30,000 eggs.  An ordinary family sized cake might require the input of 3 eggs, not 30,000.  Too many eggs would obviously ruin the cake!  Trauma eliminates the choice of deciding we don’t want so much overwhelming information.  Too bad.  Here it is.   What are we going to learn from it and how are we going to use this information for a better future?   We can’t decide NOT to try to proceed with our cake-bake-of-life with ONLY 3 eggs.  When life hands us 30,000 eggs, we better be ready and able to deal with it.

Trauma is an out-of-the-ordinary experience:  It is extra-ordinary, supra-ordinary.  So if we have to deal with 30,000 eggs, we better be a part of a very large family so that we can effectively bake a super-sized cake large enough to use the 10,000 times more information than what we could ordinarily make good use of by ourselves.  This is what community is truly all about.

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I suspect that in a perfect world no individual (family, group, etc.) would ever be given more traumatic information to deal with than what they could ordinarily use.  The more divided and isolated we are the ‘fewer eggs’ we can handle.  While being connected and safely and securely attached to others is not the only factor that leads to resilience, it is probably the most important one because we are a social species.  We did not evolve as separate beings cut-off from a whole, and our evolutionarily developed abilities to respond to trauma and to process it by learning new things when we need to, is NOT meant to happen separately, either.

Any time we try to go against the patterns that nature has given us, we are far more likely to suffer difficulties.  Healing from trauma is no different.  When the group – our family of origin – hurt us and did not protect us, and was also not there for us when we had our greatest need to depend on safe and secure attachment with dependable, available others,  we are much, much more likely to suffer from ‘too much information’, or information overload that results in a post-traumatic reaction.

Traumas happen.  Not being able to process the information contained in traumatic experience so that future responses will be better adapted responses leaves us baking the 30,000 egg cake when we can only, by ourselves, handle a 3 egg cake.  We need help.  We are made that way.

The more fragmented and insecure our connections are to others, the more at risk we are for being overwhelmed as ‘an army (or victim) of one’.  The more overwhelmed we are, the more likely we are to be fragmented (and dissociated) ourselves.  No single person was ever designed to ‘go it alone’, and certainly not infants and young children.

I say this because we cannot heal alone, either.

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