Another thing I find fascinating is how those who have experienced trauma would progressively make more general and further reaching associations with regards to what would trigger the emotional memory of the traumatic event.
Like the boy who was taught to fear white rabbits, who would eventually fear white things, then Santa etc. That is the blind and crude instinctual mechanism, it readily forms associations which will fire at anything remotely resembling that original event.
This is something that I can observe well in myself, sometimes the trigger is something more ’
sophisticated, like ‘I’ have this whole story for why ‘I’ got triggered. But the more I chip away the more crude it all becomes, eventually the mechanism is like a cornered animal, lashing out at anything.
The reason I wanted to write about this is slightly different though, relating to what we discussed in the equity thread - Equity.
I have a cleaner in the house at the moment doing her thing, a few minutes ago I had to pop into the kitchen to do some stuff so I apologised for getting in her way etc. What I noticed though was that on some level I was being extra nice, I was overcompensating for the whole master/servant structure which I do not want to play into. Yet underneath this well meant niceness there was an air of awkwardness, and it clicked what it is all about.
Just like in seeing the Santa’s white beard the boy triggers an entire mechanism of associated fear, in the same way my ‘good’ behaviour is triggering the entire mechanism of feeling and belief that it is trying to fight against, the hierarchy lives another day! It is just not good enough to be ‘good’, this is why the whole thing has to go, because it is all a big interconnected system, once any aspect is activated then all of the other ones automatically begin firing.