“The New Feminine Brain” by Mona Lisa Schulz, M.D., Ph.D.
Posttraumatic Relationship Disorder;
Childhood sexual abuse, incest, or adolescent rape can rewire the brain circuits for love, bonding, trust, and intimacy, so that women tend to love, bond to, trust, and be intimate with people they should in fact fear, people who resemble the perpetrator of their trauma. And they tend to FEAR those they could LOVE, those whom they could actually have a trusting, secure, healing relationship. In effect, with PTRD, the fear and the love circuits get crossed.
The same can happen with monkeys that have had both amygdalas removed, a key temporal lobe area that is important for encoding and detecting fear, anxiety and intuition. When monkeys have had a bilateral amygdalectomy, they lose the capacity to feel fear in frightening situations. The monkeys run and hug laboratory workers in white coats – people they should be frightened of. They also try to have sex with inappropriate partners. These monkeys, called Kluver-Bucy monkeys, are said to have psychic blindness, a numbness. Their fear and love emotional circuits have switched. They lose the capacity to make correct choices even though all the indicators are clearly in front of them, right before their very eyes.
Posttraumatic relationship disorder alters the amygdalas and the other brain areas so that women tend to have ‘psychic blindness’ to dangerous situations, especially relationships.
Prostitutes are more likely to have survived childhood sexual abuse. Rape victims are more likely to be raped again. Women who have experienced physical abuse as a child are more likely to be in a physically abusive relationship as adults. Pain and stress are more likely to be recorded in body memory by the temporal lobe’s amygdala, where it evokes physical health reactions, like digestive complaints and heart palpitations. The hippocampus, the memory system that puts fear into words and creates conscious though, is less apt to lay down traumatic memories. When a woman has had a life-defining, emotionally traumatizing experience, the frontal lobe-hippocampal circuits are disconnected in a way so she is less likely to talk about it. She will however, reenact the trauma – not in art or play therapy as a child would – on the biggest playing field: relationships.
Previous traumatic experience is very likely to shape your unconscious behavior, and your personal choice in mates, jobs, and social contacts. You are less likely to understand why you feel the attraction that you feel, because during traumatic stress, stress neuropeptides norepinephrine and cortisol disconnect the left-brain “talk” memory systems, but simultaneously turn up the volume on the right-brain “action” memory system. Your brain and body are primed emotionally to return to the relationship “scene of the crime” and react and reenact that past traumatic relationship over and over.
Baby mice who are raised in a locked box where they are repeatedly shocked tend to return to that box when set free as adults. Despite the genetic differences between a woman and a mouse, unfortunately, we do tend to act similarly when it comes to trauma.
Previous traumatic experience preheats and warms up the brain pathways, increasing your chances of having the same type of relationship again and again. Even if you think it through, and say to yourself, “I am never going to fall into that trap again,” you may be pulled back toward it like a moth to a flame. Your frontal-lobe reasoning circuits murmur, “think this through. You don’t want to go through all that pain, do you?” But your temporal-lobe amygdala, body memory circuits scream louder. What would you more likely hear?
“He’s so exciting.”
“She really just understands me.”
“Being in his arms feels like I’ve come home again.”
“I feel like we’ve known each other for years and years, even though we just met.”
The greater the trauma, the more inescapably stressful it seems, the longer it lasts, and the greater its intensity, the more likely the feminine brain-body circuits will be shaped into creating a chain of relationships that mimic the trauma. Unlike the male combat veteran who has flashbacks, visual memories of the trauma, a woman will replay the memory over and over again in the cinema of her life until she gets the proper help to stop the pattern. Alone, she can’t prevent herself from being attracted to reenacting the trauma anymore than an alcoholic can stop drinking by himself without proper treatment.
Each time she chooses the “loser,” the “creep,” that “bum,” whatever “prototype” can play the part of the perpetrator, the deeper the pattern gets engraved in the memory network of her brain and body.
In fact, the brain’s visual and attentional pathways that could actually direct her to healthier mates fall into disuse. Abused women are attracted to the same people who mistreat them because their brains become molded in such a way that’s the only kind of person they tend to notice. The nicer, normal men and women don’t seem ever to make it on the screen of relationship radar.
Posttraumatic Relationship Disorder is a long name for what I believe I had or have.
Just knowing there is an actual word or words to describe me is an awesome thing.
What I recall saying is that it was like changing the DNA of who I was, to undo and step away from habits that seemed were there for generations.
The psychic blindness is my mother to a Tee, and me of course.
I am half way through this book, which has a subtitle, “How Women Can Develop Their Inner Strengths, Genius and Intuition.”
I would highly recommend this book for any woman who is not totally balanced in mind and body. It may be interesting for you to see why!
