The Evil Hours by David J. Morris Page A

exceedingly hard to duplicate. The episode does, however, highlight the myriad factors, both personal and cultural, that dictate who suffers post-traumatic stress and who does not, as well as the special role that reacculturation plays in the process. In most post-traumatic situations, survivors are viewed by “normals” with confusion, suspicion, and in some cases outright hostility. For a psychologically wounded person returning to the regular world, it is only natural to return this suspicion and hostility, virtually guaranteeing their own social isolation. One group of VA investigators, summarizing twenty-five years of research, wrote that “the major posttraumatic factor is whether the traumatized person received social support. Indeed, receipt of social support, which appears to be the most important factor of all, can protect trauma-exposed individuals from developing PTSD.”
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    Therapists like to talk about “small-t” traumas and “Big-T” traumas.Small-t traumas are not really traumatic in the formal sense of the word, but they are enough of a stressor to alter your perception of time and shake you up for a few days, like being woken by a bear rummaging through your campsite in the middle of the night. After your bear encounter, you may have trouble sleeping in your campsite, and the smallest sound, like a branch snapping, will send your heart racing. Small-t traumas, or danger for that matter, trip the guard-dog part of your brain known as the amygdala, a tiny almond-shaped piece of gray matter that deals with immediate threats (the Greek word for almond is
amygdale
). * Whenever you encounter a similar set of circumstances—a similar-looking or similar-smelling campsite—your amygdala will remember that first bear. These little details, many of which go unnoticed at the time, become what clinicians call a trigger, and you will probably not sleep well that night.Small-t traumas set up shop in the brain, altering your response to anything that reminds you of the bear, creating an emotional bookmark. Create enough bookmarks and you can begin to have a problem. During a small-t trigger, the amygdala initiates an incredibly complex series of chemical events that causes your heart rate to spike, your blood vessels to constrict, and your adrenal glands to secrete epinephrine and cortisol, two very powerful stress hormones.Outwardly, this process is often described by psychologists as one of “fight, flight or freeze.”During a small-t trauma, and the triggers that follow, your IQ is reduced to that of an ape and your body chooses one of those three outcomes before your conscious brain even has a chance to notice what’s going on. Time dilates, things happen on autopilot, and you notice things that were invisible before. You react, you don’t think.
    Erich Maria Remarque, author of
All Quiet on the Western Front
, has written about this effect with amazing clarity, especially since, at the time of its publication, knowledge of the amygdala was limited to only a handful of scientists:
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At the sound of the first droning of the shells we rush back in one part of our being, a thousand years. By the animal instinct that is awakened in us we are led and protected. It is not conscious; it is far quicker, much more sure, less fallible, than consciousness. One cannot explain it. A man is walking along without thought or heed—suddenly he throws himself down on the ground and a storm of fragments flies harmlessly over him—yet he cannot remember either to have heard the shell coming or to have thought of flinging himself down. But had he not abandoned himself to the impulse he would now be a heap of mangled flesh. It is this other, this second sight in us, that has thrown us to the ground and saved us, without our knowing how.
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    Of course, Remarque wasn’t exactly describing a “small-t” trauma in this instance. What he was describing was a