A three-pound organ, the most complex part of the human body, the brain. The brain works in confusing ways. It is the organ that is responsible for emotions, memory, motor skills, and other functions needed for survival. The brain drives our everyday actions, decisions, and desires. It’s the organ that handles the trauma that we have experienced and keeps it stored. The decision we make, how we act with our family, friends, and strangers, and how we handle certain situations is the brain and body’s response to trauma. How people behave in different situations is a defense mechanism to protect themselves, such as being observant. I believe it is a trauma response because the brain is looking for anything that might pose a threat. Being observant lets one observe the situation, and read a person’s expression, and body language, after analyzing the brain, one can decide how to proceed. 

A person’s trauma helps people understand others. It plays a huge role not only in daily life but for serious situations. It helps law enforcement find a killer by analyzing their behaviors; how they kill, if the victim is a male or female, how they dispose of the body, and in some cases what they do to the body. They then processed to profile them into a category and begin to describe their characteristics and determine whether the killer is a male or female. All this information is gathered because of a person who has inflicted trauma upon them. 

Trauma can make or break us, the experiences people endure can cause them to either become determined to continue living life with the motion of wanting to make progress or it can cause a person to become stuck in the past, in their mind and in no way motivate people, to continue living a life that they think they cannot change nor make better. When one goes through a traumatic event it tends to have a severe effect on a person’s mental health, causing it to decrease eventually leading to different mental health issues. For example depression, this distinguishes if people let the traumatic event define them or not. If they let the depression consume them, their mind absorbs all the negative memories and emotions and they do not know how to let them go. It is proven that depression affects the brain, it can cause certain parts of the brain to get smaller, while this is happening people become trapped in a mental block that they may never recover from. 

Trauma that you have not experienced can have as much of an impact on you as if you did experience it; one example of this is generational trauma. Generational trauma starts with the parents. If it continues, that depends on the parents and if they have a strong enough mentality, to break a cycle that’s been passed down for many generations. In some cases, parents will put an end to the cycle and provide their child with a different lifestyle. If a parent continues the cycle, I think it is because they still have not moved on nor healed from the trauma that’s been afflicted, they don’t know how to change the pattern that many generations taught and enforced. The trauma that a loved one experiences changes how you act around them and shifts the way you view them. If you pay close attention they can notice how that trauma affects them in their daily routine. 

Conscious and subconscious play a role in how trauma is handled, the conscious mind may have forgiven and forgotten the trauma but the subconscious mind will always act accordingly to the trauma even if the mind has ‘moved on’ from it, it will always be in the back of the mind whether we make the outcome of the trauma good or bad. It will serve as a reminder so we can learn from those mistakes and not repeat them. We don’t mature through the years but through the damage that we’ve experienced.

The obstacles that people encounter they can’t control, but the outcome of the situation and how they proceed with their life afterward is up to them, it’s controllable. People possess the power to get back up after they have experienced trauma. You have to maintain a strong mentality to continue to want to move on and overcome the trauma. Don’t let it define you but let it shape you into the best version of yourself.