New research has found a specific change in brain chemistry due to trauma. An article on Medscape.com says:
“Lower serotonin 1B levels were also strongly associated with age at first trauma. The earlier the trauma exposure, the greater the brain alterations and the greater the severity of PTSD symptoms, and the greater the risk of developing comorbidities,” senior author Alexander Neumeister, MD, associate professor of psychiatry at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City, told Medscape Medical News.
“These findings establish that trauma at a young age causes long-lasting neurobiological and psychological effects in survivors with PTSD. In other words, early-life trauma can interfere with normal brain development,” he said.
The article is somewhat technical, but lay readers like us can pretty much follow what is being discussed. To read the story, you need to register for Medscape.com, which is free.
Read Potential new drug target for PTSD on Medscape.com.
Link supplied by a Lovefraud reader.
I wonder if it was PTSD that ruined my memory. I used to shake pretty constantly, and especially around other people. Some days now, I forget what I’m doing and where I’m going. Usually, I figure it all out, and everything is fine, but no longer/rarely am I ahead of others… and I’m not 30 yet.
I always joke at my job with the elderly ladies (who complain about their memory loss) that I’m on the same page. This usually gets them laughing.
P.S. I used to blame it on thyroid issues, but since going gluten-free, I don’t have thyroid issues anymore, and my bloodwork has been normal for 3+ years.
I even forget sometimes that you can GOOGLE ANYTHING! LOL
Haha, that’s bad, Ox!
I worked for a jerk once who wanted me to memorize all my performance metrics (a lot of them – i ran a very large business unit) every week, and to be able to spit them out verbally on command.
i spent hours staring at a piece of paper every monday morning trying to memorize my numbers.
He was a total N, and it was a total waste of my time.
This guy added no value to my ability to do my job. A waste of a paycheck.
Purewater, right after the aircraft crash that killed my husband and burned my son (he was also in the plane) we could NOT READ. It was the strangest thing. We both realized we couldn’t read, we couldn’t remember the first part of the sentence by the time we got to the end of the sentence. We are both big readers and used to read a book a day at least. We also realized we could watch the same movie 2 days in a row and not remember that we had watched it the day before. It was almost a year before we could read, and I still read much slower than I did prior to the crash. My retention of DETAIL is very poor, though I can still seem to “get it” about the over all ideas of what I am reading.
My spelling is off, and I frequently use the wrong word, like “hear” for “here” and that sort of thing.
Technical writing, like chemistry, etc is much more difficult for me to acquire new learning now, though I have a minor in chemistry. Even refreshing my old learning is quite difficult now.
That “damage” to my thinking, my ability to learn and even to do things I used to do used to bother me very much, made me feel like I was “retarded” but I’ve finally come to the emotional “grips” with the changes in my thinking since the plane crash, and I realize I am still OK, and would still be OK even if I couldn’t tie my shoes any more or remember my own name.
Sky – trust but verify? Anyway, yeah, I’m with you.
Ox,
🙁 I have similar problems, but keep hoping it will improve. Otherwise, I’m resigned to where I am right now… things are peaceful, even if they’re not as good as they used to be, or could have been. It’s a little scary, because IF I get worse off, and I could live a long while from now, I may be one of those people that go to the assisted living, early. No joke, My memory and just logical connection to stuff can be really bad.
I think the emotion play a big deal in how we remember things. Even how we see and remember ourselves. When my grandmother died, I felt like… blank. I used to sometimes have a panicked feeling, surreal feeling, like I didn’t exist and didn’t belong anywhere. But, the emotional bond I had with her was so profound, that I think I might’ve literally died with her.
Emotions and memory probably go hand in hand… and when we break from certain people in our lives, it literally fractures our minds. There’s just no going back to it… the light is gone.
If I didn’t believe in a higher power, this would all be very devastating.
Purewater,
My faith has become stronger through all of this believe it or not, because I no longer look at God through the lenses of my egg donor’s twisted “glass.”
I no longer see God as some avenging old man, just looking for a reason to ZAP me to hell fire and brimstone for not being “perfect”—that is my egg donor’s idea of “perfect”—in other words letting the psychopaths get a pass for their bad behavior and “pretending it didn’t happen.”
I now read the Bible with “new eyes” and see the messages not as one of condemnation but of love and caring. Sure if someone chooses to follow the evil path, they can do that, but if we work at following the better path, then we don’t have to BE perfect in order to BE OKAY.
Sky
Sorry for my perverse density but I am still not on the same page. Trust, or should I say, not trusting, is a huge blind spot for me.
In your example, I don’t trust others to drive on the road with the same rules. I expect mutual cooperation based on the rule of law, that they’d rather at least aim to stick close to the law in order to avoid losing their priviledge. I think those who BREAK the traffic laws Trust that the rest of us are respecting the LAW or else they won’t be able to get away with reckless driving-or maybe they don’t trust the rest of us and enjoy the thrill of beating the odds.
If you see where my logic is eroneous, please correct me. I won’t have hard feelings. It seems others understand social contracts that are a fog to me. Fact is, I don’t TRUST hardly anyone. That is the consequence of my husband revealing the true nature of people to me, esp the behaviors of those under the BIG part of the bell curve. But I do rely on people following rules b/c to break them is to suffer unpleasant consequences. Very few care if they lose another’s trust.
Ox,
Yes. I hear you. Perfection is a narcissitic goal, anyways. And, like you just said, pretending to be perfect, and seeing behind the curtains of those people, puts things into proper perspective.
Just gotta trust in the process, and that not everything is in our control.