The drone of flying engines -- is a song so wild and blue. It scrambles time and seasons— if it gets through to you. - from the song, Amelia
Linear time
We have all heard of the excellent book titled, “The Body Keeps the Score”–for my purposes here, I am thinking of another truth, such as,
“The Body Keeps the Time Clock”. We wish that all of our memories lined up in a logical and sequential order. Our brains a hard wired to have memories that fit in mental folders with labels of PAST, PRESENT and FUTURE. When you go through trauma that sequence and ordering is broken. It feels like a disjointed story.
During Trauma – a Different way to perceive TIMEE
When an event causes the body to go into shock this is we now understand to be a dorsal vagal freeze. This is similar to a scramble that occurs with a plane is in a spiral flight pattern. Up and down are not differentiated by a clear understanding of the horizon. In flying this phenomenon is knows as the false horizon illusion because the visual cues are scattered. When going through trauma it is your orientation to time that is fractured.
Time can twist, plots can reverse – the stable reality that you once counted on is pulled out from underneath you.
Often people going through shock describe this experience as time standing still. Every week, I hear someone say that they have very few childhood memories. This is not their fault. Their mind was off line and their energies were devoted to fighting other life or death battles.
So our job as a listener is to not judge or show fear of someone describing a scattershot sense of time.
IT TAKES A WHILE TO REMEMBER and sometimes it is a great benefit to ask other family members to fill in the blank spaces in the timeline of your life events.
Why is this? Why are there blank spots in the stores of memory?
The primal brain doesn’t believe (or act) because it is stuck in a pattern of survival. It sincerely believes that isn’t efficient or life-saving to help its human host to concentrate or remember details.The trauma brain only wants to activate the limbs of the body to survive through freezing, running or -fighting.
As you listen to someone my guidance would be to respect how hard it is for the person you care for to get a sequential story about their life events. Your friend also might desperately want the past to stay in the past. The past can feel more real than any current experience.
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- Claudia Rankine describes it this way: - "The world is wrong. You can't put the past behind you. It's buried in you; it's turned into flesh. It's your own cupboard."