Aha! November SAD ++

 

Process

• Combination of innocuous factors like time of year, fatigue, and anxiety cues can trigger a cascade of traumatic emotional recall (end of November pattern match to first semester of college)
• Rather than visually reliving specific trauma incidents, it’s the painful mental states / somatic sensations and predictions from a PAST PERIOD of difficulty that replay
• It’s like being transported back into the physical/emotional EXPERIENCE of past helplessness and pending doom
• The threat is feeling the same loss of power and overwhelming sensations - not original abuse event details which may stay repressed
• In the “time travel” emotional flashback, adult logic fades away and everything gets filtered as danger like in childhood survival mode
• A “suffering time machine” in the nervous system replays decades-old trauma energy in present body

Explanation

You bring up an important point about trauma triggers and the lack of memory elaboration. Let me try to paraphrase the key dynamics:

• Traumatic memories are often encoded in an emotional, fragmented state as the rational brain goes "offline"
• This means key details were not fully processed for coherent storage or conscious recall
• Therefore traumatic memories lack rich elaboration and contextualization into stories
• This makes them more prone to triggering just by matching sensory cues or survival emotions
• With no wider storyline holding space for those memories, there is less inhibitory effect keeping them dormant
• Any matching sounds, images, scents, bodily feelings can instantly activate the unelaborated trauma memory and associated survival responses

Essentially, because traumatic memories get laid down in the activated limbic system rather than frontal lobes, they take on an intense sensory/physical quality without integrated narratives holding space for them.

Therefore, directly matching cues - whether sensations, emotions, phrases - tend to trigger these unprocessed memories easily without the proper mental framing or inhibition keeping them dormant. They exist as “raw” and easily reactive fragments until we gradually elaborate their meaning and context. Excellent point about this memory elaboration piece!