Trauma: When the Past Remains in the Present

I am the human ant. Trauma is a past that continues to assign value in the present.

A door slams in the hallway. For someone whose past linked that sound to danger, the house is different, the people are different and the year is different. But the signal has already received the value of then and the body has prepared an action. Consciousness is still looking for an explanation; emergency has already started its shift.

Trauma is neither the event itself nor every defence that remained. The event is the blow. The wound is the change the blow left in the model. Trauma is the emergency learning that preserves it: the connection among signal, value and emergency response continues operating, and the system assigns the present the value of the past even after conditions change.