How can psychological trauma cause latent inflammation?
In disaster movies, when a woman screams, “Oh my God, what an earthquake!” If you hear her scream and feel annoyed with her, I suspect that you may have a psychological scar.
Because the scene of fear of a terrible earthquake is a terrifying situation that puts you in a stressful state, like facing death. In such a situation, stress hormones rise and people prepare to “run or fight”.
In a sense, the woman who runs away screaming, “Oh my God!” is reacting appropriately, like a healthy animal, with a normal rise in stress hormones in a fearful situation.
What is important is that in such a fearful situation, stress hormones are elevated and “fear” is felt on the spot, and the fearful situation is properly organized as a memory in the memory drawer.
Fear is properly stored in the fear drawer, so that later we can talk about it in the past as “I was scared that time, wasn’t I? The memory becomes more and more beautiful and turns into a boastful story like, “How did I escape that time!”
The fearful scene may cause a momentary inflammation due to elevated stress hormones, but the inflammation will heal over time, so it is less likely to remain as a psychological scar.
People who are irritated by a woman screaming in a scary scene in a movie do not have their stress hormones elevated by the scary scene, but by their irritation at the fact that the woman’s screaming causes others to panic. Stress hormones are not raised by the fact that you are in a fearful situation, but stress hormones are raised by imagining the stress that others around you must be feeling.
Then the memory is not organized in the fear drawer of the brain because you are not properly feeling “scared” in the fearful scene (as written in the narrative).
Memory is organized by a combination of situational memory and emotional memory of being “scared” if you are in a fearful situation. If you think about the feelings of the people around you in the “scary” situation, the memory is not organized, and the “fear” you originally felt remains unorganized and untouched.
Then, as time goes by, stress hormones spike again, and you become angry, saying, “That woman who screamed pissed me off!” and anger will rise, which causes stress-induced inflammation.
The memory of the stressful scene is no longer properly organized, and the stress hormone rises again, just as it did when the fearful scene was encountered. Each rise causes inflammation, activation of peripheral immune cells and cognitive decline.
When we conducted a stress stimulus test using an air horn, which is the same volume as a car horn, the participants said, “Crikey! It’s too loud!” and those who were able to react at the moment they heard the blast, their stress hormones dropped after 20 minutes, 30 minutes, and then 40 minutes.
But for those who said, “Isn’t this bothering the neighbors?” at the moment they heard the explosion had a normal increase in stress hormones at that time, but the stress hormones, once thought to have dropped, returned 30 minutes later at the same level, and so on.
By thinking about the feelings of others around them, the memory of the stressful scene is not properly organized in the brain. Then, the emotional memory of the stressful scene remains fresh, so that the fearful scene repeatedly strikes in the brain, even though the fearful scene has passed away.
And when stress hormones are repeatedly elevated, they create a cycle of chronic inflammation, which causes cognitive dysfunction, resulting in various malfunctions, which in turn cause stress and inflammation (all written in narrative).
The latent inflammation of psychological scars is also involved in the inability to react appropriately in stressful situations because we think about how others are feeling, so we just need to realize that our autoimmunity is out of control.
When you think about the feelings of those around you, if you realize that your autoimmunity is out of control due to latent inflammation, your autoimmunity will be calmed down and you will be able to react appropriately to stress. Then, your self-esteem will naturally increase because the memory of the stressful situation, properly organized, will be beautified over time.
You did well, didn’t you? At that time! and the story turns into a saga.