Social support is not the same as merely being in the presence of others. The critical issue is reciprocity: being truly heard and seen by the people around us, feeling that we are held in someone else’s mind and heart. For our physiology to calm down, heal, and grow we need a visceral feeling of safety.

No doctor can write a prescription for friendship and love: These are complex and hard-earned capacities. You don’t need a history of trauma to feel self-conscious and even panicked at a party with strangers — but trauma can turn the whole world into a gathering of aliens.

Many traumatized people find themselves chronically out of sync with the people around them. Some find comfort in groups where they can replay their combat experiences, rape, or torture with others who have similar backgrounds or experiences.

Focusing on a shared history of trauma and victimization alleviates their searing sense of isolation, but usually at the price of having to deny their individual differences: Members can belong only if they conform to the common code.

Isolating oneself into a narrowly defined victim group promotes a view of others as irrelevant at best and dangerous at worst, which eventually leads to further isolation. Gangs, extremist political parties, and cults may provide solace, but they rarely foster the mental flexibility needed to be fully open to what life has to offer and as such cannot liberate their members from their traumas. Well-functioning people are able to accept individual differences and acknowledge the humanity of others.

from van der Kolk, B. A. (2015). The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Penguin Books.

The [human brain’s] hippocampus plays an important role in categorizing new information and integrating it with existing mental schemas. For explicit [conscious], declarative, or narrative memory to exist, incoming stimuli must be processed by the hippocampus, which takes weeks to months.

When the amygdala is highly stimulated, it interferes with proper functioning of the hippocampus. The intense stimulation of the amygdala will prevent a traumatic experience from being explicitly remembered.

In addition, explicit memory requires focal attention on incoming stimuli, resulting in reflection on the perceptual content. During traumatic events, the fight/flight response and accompanying hormonal stimulation produce high states of arousal, making focal attention impossible. Thus, the incoming stimuli cannot be categorized, digested, and stored as long-term memory. The information is remembered through a different system outside of cortical and hippocampal control.

The experience is registered as implicit [non-conscious] memory. It consists of perceptual, rather than reflective content. It is then remembered (relived) as body sensations, emotions, images, and motoric behavior.

This highly perceptual content, which is vividly experienced with little capacity for reflection [by the traumatized person], results in mistaken source monitoring. One tends to misinterpret external experience because of internal perceptual cues which are related to past, not present experience. Current experience is distorted and perceived as a potential threat.

from Eckberg, M. (2000). Victims of Cruelty: Somatic Psychotherapy in the Treatment of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder. North Atlantic Books.