Years ago I had a secretary -- I'll call her Eve here -- who went to the hospital to have a baby at the end of a healthy, happy first pregnancy. At the last minute there was a cord accident, and the baby died.
The first weeks after that are not for me to write, but when Eve finally came back to work, she shared some of what life had become for her. One detail surprised us both. Every morning, she felt terrified to see her husband leave the house for work. She was convinced an airplane would fall on him from the sky, and he wouldn't come home.
The broken shell
It made no sense, but it made perfect sense. Each of us lives in a protective shell -- a necessary, but ultimately mistaken, confidence that bad things probably won't happen to us today. Eve's shell had been ripped away. Her baby had died, and she couldn't see what would stop famine, flood, disease, and falling airplanes from coming next. It was many months before she regained the use of emotions beyond grief and fear.
Eve has two healthy kids now, a happy family. I've always been grateful that she shared her experience with me. It taught me not only a deep respect for her, but also a huge respect for the power of trauma in a healthy psyche. I saw how it moves in for a long stay, and how it causes changes that seem unrelated and strange until you finally see the connection.
This is your brain dealing with trauma
I think of Eve often, most recently when I read about a study announced yesterday, another neuroimaging study. I can't find the paper itself yet, but the press release, adapted in Science Daily, is detailed.
In the study, Cornell researchers led by Barbara Ganzel gathered emotionally healthy people, some who had been within a mile and a half of the World Trade Center when it fell on September 11, 2001, and others who had been hundreds of miles away. They asked all the subjects to look at pictures of people who looked fearful. (Other neuroimaging studies, the press release says, have shown that our amygdalae, the "fear centers" of the brain, respond to pictures of fearful faces.)
Brain scans showed that the subjects who had been near the twin towers -- even though three years had passed, and even though they and their family members were not themselves hurt -- were significantly more sensitive and reactive to the fearful pictures. From the press release:
- "The findings suggest that events that trigger shock, fear and horror that are within a normal range -- may cause similar changes in the brain that traumas do. Victims may experience lingering symptoms (bad dreams, jumpiness, thinking about the incident and avoiding the site of the trauma), but they are not severe."
"'These people appear to be doing okay, but they may, indeed, be having more sensitive responses to upsetting stimuli,' said Elise Temple, a co-author and assistant professor of human development at Cornell."
Later in the week, I'll post on working with jurors who have experienced trauma. The Cornell study is forthcoming in the journal Emotion.
(Image by Jon Haynes at http://www.flickr.com/photos/bluhousworker/113906853/; license details there.)
