When the Brain Pulls a Muscle

This post might get me in some trouble. We’ll see.

So, sometimes traumatic stress happens. I am not a licensed expert on this or what have you, but I have had to deal with it during the more colorful parts of my career and I’ve been able to talk about it at length with people who are licensed experts. Traumatic stress happens when a person is in a situation in which they have little to no control of events and in which they understand themselves to be in great physical peril. I don’t want to be too formal with the definition; we’re talking about things like automobile accidents, firefights, a house fire, a particularly harrowing mugging, and other deeply terrifying incidents.

Such incidents are unusual. That might seem obvious, but understanding it is deceptively important. These event are not normal. After conditions return to normal, the brain expends a lot of energy processing what happened. Much of that intense mental activity is subconscious, but it has consciously perceptible outputs, such as nightmares, flashbacks, difficulty breathing, and all those other well-known symptoms.

I liken it to the brain puling a muscle. Try to lift a weight that is well outside the normal bounds, and a muscle will get injured. A pulled muscle is usually not very serious; the muscle will come back to normal, and we avoid pulls by keeping muscles warm and strong. While a pulled muscle heals,though, there will be some soreness. So too the brain. Apply intense emotional stress, and the brain will need some time to come back to normal. While it heals, the person my experience nightmares, flashbacks, difficulty breathing, etc. But also like a muscle, a brain can come back to normal.

Generally speaking, after a traumatic incident, the sooner a person can get back to regular activity, the better. Regular activity signals to the subconscious that we are back to normal. The nightmares and things may still occur (in fact, they probably will), but the best thing to do is to work around those symptoms and stay active. The symptoms then disappear over time. A muscle can suffer a pull but return to full strength and full health. The brain can suffer a traumatic event but also return to full strength and full health. This is why, as they say, when you fall off a horse, you should immediately get back on the horse.