amandalouise,
Yes, I can see your point, good post.
And Yes sugahorse, there are times when you can understand the whys. It all depends of the situation of abuse or even the way one is raised that may cause perception problems that we may not realize.

For example, sometimes children are raised by a person who is very self absorbed and has personal issues. So, the child can be constantly re-inforced with the fact that they are more of a bother and should not express their issues or concerns or even questions. So what can result from this is the child may become trained to be self absorbed. The problem with this is the young brain has not learned problem solving and the process of proper interaction. There fore that part of the brain is not cultivatied. And because of this the now grown up person has developed into someone that has problems dealing not only with others but they often feel guilty as they are self absorbed and lack certain skills.

Now as far as children that grow up in abusive situations, well, they often never achieve not only the love and affection of a parent, including the feeling of safety, but they also are not rewarded and my often not know how to attain happiness. Perhaps they may even have been denied happiness so their perception of it is very off. Happiness is then something that is hard to accept and can feel very uncomfortable to an individual.

When we have troubles and sit with a therapist we look back to see possible areas where we did not get the proper guidance as our brains grew and developed. Once we can recognise these areas than we can begin by learning how to accomplish these lost aspects. It can take a lot of time to learn how to accept happiness and even comfort as, well, we never learned it.

So it is not just about back tracking to an event necessarily. It is also backtracking in how an event affected us. It can be very involved.

Suga, a trainer came out and helped me work with a horse. She stated that if a certain process did not take place in the training of the horse then there was no foward process. Inevitably one eventually has to go back and address the missing part of the training process. It made a lot of sense to me as I watched a horse learn something that had been previously left out. I have to say it was very interesting to see. And I couldn't help but think about how that transfers to humans as well.

When someone does not have the right envoirnent for thier brain to grow and understand all the different ways of slowly understanding how to proceed thru life, well, they have difficulty and they really don't realize why.

I hope that makes sense as I have been inturputed three times while writing this.

Ok, if you look at Lava's response. He is a perfect example of leaving things out and reaching back to a boy that had no way of dealing with an abusive situation. And that boy had no way of even discussing it for may years until he went there with a therapist. So what Lava has been doing is really learning how to work on this area with a new way of perception that he was never given as a child. Well, the fact that he is triggered now, by someone getting upset around him, that is further evidence of what he was never allowed to learn growning up. It was missing in the development of his brain. Very sad to see this. But the fact that he is now learning it, figured out the whys here, well, now he has something to learn, ways of coping that he never had before. Before he just hid it all, not knowing what to do about it.

Open Eyes