HOW TRAUMA AND FEAR EMOTIONS ARE INTERTWINED?
Any traumatizing event can implant horror frozen memory in your brain’s amygdala; a fire, earthquake, harassment, being raped or mugged. life cruelties stamp their victim’s memories with a dreadful fear. This is how fear affects the brain and controls us: Children who were attacked by a psychopath in 1989 at Cleveland Elementary school, California, or 2019 in Peshawar school, Pakistan – just can’t get the memory out of their mind. Those massacre images came flooding back in vivid details to innocent kids.
These imprints of fear in the brain can last a lifetime not only in kids but also in adults, as one of the holocaust survivors said in his interview that
“50 years after the horrendous incident of Holocaust the haunting memories of their loved ones dying
in Nazi camp is still alive in my head”
Can fear cause anxiety? According to American Psychiatric Association, these memories lived long with them, victims are having severe anxiety with disturbing dreams about someone will kill them, they will die soon, etc. All of these reactions are well known to the psychiatric doctor as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Till now we know why fear comes to mind? Let us dig more about how to forget fearful memories.
Did you know you can kill any pernicious disease with this single emotion, read our blog THE EMOTION THAT EVEN KILLS PERNICIOUS DISEASE?
How to forget or remove memories of fear & trauma?
Fear conditioning is the word used by phycologists; it is a process where something very normal becomes dangerously frightening in someone’s mind. For example, the girl who acquires a fear of cats because of being scratched by a street cat once will lose that fear if her best bud owns a friendly cat and she spends time playing with it.
In people with PTSD spontaneous relearning just fails because the fear pathway is really strong. This real fear in the amygdala does not go away but can be suppressed by the prefrontal cortex. The main question comes here is that? How quickly can you let go of your fears? Hence you can recover as fast as you want to let go of holdings of fear
How to get rid of your fears?
There are few steps of recovery, Dr. Judith Lewis Herman is a Harvard psychiatrist giving groundbreaking recovery solutions from trauma. Firstly, regain the sense of safety. This begins with someone (friend/psychiatrist) telling the victim that their anxiety and nightmares, hyper, and panics are due to PTSD. The understanding of attacks makes the victim calmer and less frightening.
