What Happened to You?: Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing

So many phenomena of everyday life are directly linked to this process of the brain making sense of the world by creating associations and making memories. This is why asking “What happened to you?” is so important in understanding what’s going on with you now.

As we make our way through the world, countless sounds, smells, and images can tap into memories we created earlier in life. These memories may be full-blown recollections of a specific event, or they may be fragments—a feeling, a sense of déjà vu, an impression.

A child exposed to unpredictable or extreme stress will become what we call dysregulated.

For most people, the unknown is one of the major causes of feeling anxious or overwhelmed.

And there are motor-vestibular memories—curling up in the fetal position is essentially an act of remembering—stored in even lower networks in the brain. But traumatic experience can create complex memory traces that involve all regions of the brain.

every environment has a tone. If you were to walk into any home as a stranger, not speaking the language, you could absolutely feel whether this is a place where people are loved. Just as you can sense when something’s off. You may not know what it is, but something feels off.

seemingly senseless behavior makes sense once you look at what is behind it.