You might simply be driving home from work, on your way to the grocery store, or tucking your child into bed when it happens, your thoughts jump to things you’d rather not think about, things that make you feel sad, ashamed, hurt, or afraid. Maybe you realize it right away and try to fight it, but it persists and gets stronger, or maybe, you manage to kick it out of your mind, only to have it reappear at a later date or time, or even in your sleep. These intrusive thoughts and memories can sometimes be symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), but not always. Yet, they are always trying to alert you to areas of your life which long for healing.
Intrusive thoughts are often related to memories of painful past events or unwelcome projections of things you’d never choose to think about, if you had your way. Either way, the one thing that they are definitely related to is anxiety, and quite possibly past trauma.
Anxiety, Trauma, and The Brain
When anxiety or painful reminders of traumatic events course through our body’s systems, powerful chemicals are released in the hopes of preparing us to take action. These chemicals are our brains’ way of wanting to help us escape or fight back against something that feels unsafe or threatening to our well-being or survival. This is known as the “Fight or Flight” response. The tricky part of this miraculous, self-protective mechanism is that it sometimes reacts when there is no current danger, when we are innocently going about our lives, and when everything is relatively safe.
If you wonder why your body and mind respond this way, you can thank a part of your brain called the amygdala. The amygdala is like a submarine’s sonar signal. It acts as a scout which sends out feelers to scan for the threats that are out there in our environments. If we’ve had significant threatening events in the past, it becomes extra heightened in a super-vigilant attempt to keep us safe so as to never let that past threat harm us again. The problem is that this hyper-sensitivity can cause stress and pain to us when there is nothing currently or actually threatening happening.
It doesn’t have to be a real, present threat for intrusive thoughts or memories to be recalled and produce those unpleasant situations in our heads and bodies; it just needs to seem related to a past incident to our amygdala. Even a slight, subconscious reminder of a past traumatic threat will get the amygdala’s chemical juices flowing.
For instance, if you hear a word in casual conversation that just happened to be a favorite of your emotionally abusive parent, your body might tense before you even realize what’s running through your mind. If a stranger accidentally rubs up against you at a concert, you might be reminded of a sexually abusive relationship from your past and feel like running out of the stadium, or you might catch a whiff of the same cologne that your dad wore when your mother died and feel suddenly transported in your memory to the cemetery and saying “goodbye” to her all over again.
It doesn’t matter if you consciously are aware of what sets off your internal alarm system, or if the threat is somewhere underneath the surface of your awareness, your amygdala is ready to scan your world and prepare you for protective action.