When we experience something traumatic, the natural instinct and response is to avoid the things that remind us of the traumatic event. While this is a survival mechanism our brain has developed to literally keep us alive and safe, often times this gets generalized to situations, places, and things that are not actually putting our life in danger at that moment. Our brain is doing its job perfectly – it is telling us to avoid things that remind it of something that could have harmed you. The part that keeps us alive just doesn’t have access to the portion of our brain that controls higher thinking and logic – it’s all emotion and all feelings. When this overgeneralization occurs, we often are left with things known as trauma triggers, which can include flashbacks, triggers, nightmares, and any reaction of our fight flight or freeze system in response to something that is connected in our brain to the traumatic event.
Say you were in a car accident while making a left turn in the dark. You did nothing wrong, the person who hit you ran their light and turned into your car. Your brain may imprint with the ideas that left turns, driving in the dark, the song that was on the radio when you were hit, ANYTHING related at all to the memory can be a signal you are in danger. Then you might get triggered whenever you have to drive at night, make a left turn, come to the same intersection, etc. Your brain is working in overdrive to protect you, and is being hypervigilant to any and all signs that something bad could be coming, which can result in things like panic attacks, fear of driving, not being able to turn left, and all sorts of other things. This can take control of your life and make it harder and harder to function.
There are a number of ways to treat this trauma response, and not every way or modality will work for every person in every situation. THERE IS NOTHING WRONG WITH YOU IF ONE, OR EVEN ALL DON’T HELP.
Prolonged Exposure Therapy
https://www.apa.org/ptsd-guideline/treatments/prolonged-exposure
Prolonged Exposure Therapy is an evidence based type of therapy to help the brain reprocess and restore traumatic memories.
Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR)