For close to ten years, a small white flash on the side of the road could return me to the instant before a deer died.
I was in college. My friend Benjamin was driving me to Steamboat to visit my girlfriend, who later became my wife. We were in his Land Cruiser, a tough vehicle, and it was snowing as we traveled through the steep rises and gullies near Kremmling. That stretch of road has always had a lot of wildlife crossings. It is different now – this was almost thirty years ago.
We dipped into one of those gullies, came back over the rise, and there was a deer. There was nothing to be done. We hit the animal, it staggered to the side of the road, and it died almost immediately.
The front of the Land Cruiser was damaged, but not badly enough to stop us. I took the hair tie out of my hair and used it to rig one of the lights back onto the vehicle. Then we kept going. He was doing me a favor, and we still had somewhere to be.
I do not remember experiencing the event as an enormous trauma while it was happening. It was intense and sad, and it was also over. What I did not know was that my nervous system had recorded the small white reflection in the deer’s eye.
Anyone who has driven at night knows the flash I mean. We see it in the eyes of deer, cats, and other animals when light catches them at a particular angle. The same flash appears everywhere on the side of a road. Reflectors on signposts produce it. Curve markers produce it. Pieces of metal and glass produce it. For years, each of those ordinary reflections produced a full embodiment of the moment before impact, even though I had not registered the deer’s eye as important on the day it happened.
By the diagnostic manual’s standard, hitting a deer did not give me PTSD. That standard is binary, and I do not think in binaries. The manual draws its line where an insurer needs one drawn, at the point where a response becomes debilitating, and below that line we are said not to have the thing. The same is true of depression, addiction, and attention. In lived experience, none of these are switches. They are degrees. The question is never whether we have it. It is how much of it we have, and in what context.
I begin with the deer because it is the low end of the spectrum, and because the association is unusually clean. The narrative mind filed the event as sad and finished. The body preserved a small piece of light and went on treating it as a warning. At the low end, a trauma response is an exaggerated reaction to a stimulus. There was a real question of danger on that road, and a driver should pay attention to a flash in the dark. My body did more than pay attention. It reacted as though we had already hit the deer.
The spectrum runs from there to the far end, where the person is not reacting to the present at all. They have been carried back into the time of the trauma, and they are living in it. Between those ends is most of what we see: the person who grew up with an alcoholic parent and has a panic attack at a trace of alcohol on a partner’s breath. Naming this as a spectrum does not shrink the far end. It locates it. The severe versions of a traumatic response are not created by making the deer story darker. PTSD changes the degree, the context, and the organization of what returns. A present cue may retrieve far more than a brief alarm. It can retrieve the sensory field, the defensive posture, the relational meaning, and the lived certainty that the original danger is happening again.
Remembering becomes too small a word.
Four stages of a traumatic reaction
I use a four-stage model to organize this process. The first stage is the physiological spike. The second is the interpretation, most of which occurs before conscious awareness. The third is behavior, which includes the visible things we do and the private cognitive actions that follow. The fourth is re-regulation, the return toward physiological baseline and present time. The structure is mine. It is not a named scientific model, though the processes it organizes are established across trauma research and clinical work.
The stages are not four boxes that open and close in order. An interpretation can intensify the spike. A behavior can create another trigger. The presence or absence of a regulated person can alter what we perceive, what we do, and how quickly the body returns. PTSD makes those interactions more consequential because the past is not arriving as neutral information. It is arriving as current threat.
Stage One: The body receives more than the present
The first stage is the body’s immediate response. Heart rate changes. Muscles organize. Breathing shifts. Attention narrows. The reaction arrives before deliberate choice.
I think of the mind and body collectively as a measuring tool. Something happens in the environment, the tool registers it, and there is a result. Put us on a bench with the right equipment and the biometrics would show it. In PTSD, the present cue may match material stored from an earlier threat. A latch, a smell, the pressure of a hand, a building outside an airplane window, or a particular vibration may retrieve more than a memory in words. It can retrieve the sights, sounds, sensations, and defensive organization that belonged to the original event.
The tool is still responding to something in the present. The reflector really flashed. The airplane really shook. The door really closed. What changes is the amount of information the cue opens and whether the body can locate that information in time.
A trauma trigger carries an old danger into the sensory authority of the present. This is why a person can know where they are while being unable to make that knowledge physiologically convincing. They may know they are sitting in a therapist’s office, driving a familiar road, or lying beside someone they love. At the same time, their body may be organized around another room, another person, and another time.
The present has not disappeared intellectually. It has lost its authority.
The landing that did not happen
Years after the deer, I was flying from Denver to John Wayne Airport in Orange County. The flights had been radically delayed by weather. Denver was disrupted, California was disrupted, and everyone had been sitting inside the delay for a long time. I was exhausted. The flight attendants appeared exhausted. The pilots may have been exhausted too. I do not know.
John Wayne operates under nighttime curfew restrictions. A late flight may have to divert to another airport. We were told that we needed to circle before landing because of the traffic ahead of us, and I could see other planes in the air.
We began the approach. I had landed at John Wayne many times, and the angle felt wrong. We seemed lower and faster than we should have been. I could see the lights of buildings outside my window, and I had the feeling that we could hit them. Then the plane began shaking, and we tilted hard enough to the left that I could no longer trust that we would land flat across the two wings. We were coming in hot.
The flight attendants did not provide much information. Their voices sounded exhausted and irritated. At the last possible moment, when it felt as though we were about to land hard, fast, and at the wrong angle, the engines went to full power. The plane pulled sharply upward. I sat in my body. Then we circled for about fifteen minutes without an explanation.
When we finally approached a second time, it also felt too fast. We landed safely. Nobody explained what had happened.
That is the spike as the airplane delivered it: vibration, angle, weight, the buildings, the acceleration, and the emotional state of the people in charge. My tool registered all of it, and it has kept the recording. On later flights, a similar vibration produces something close to an anxiety attack. On a recent flight from Spain to the United States, my interoception fixated on the feeling that the plane was too heavy to remain in the air. The plane was not too heavy to fly. My tool was reading John Wayne.
The room where I read everyone
The largest one had two triggers, and the first was the obvious one.
My wife was pregnant with our son, Benjamin, and she was two weeks past her due date. Being the burly mountain woman she is, she endured an extraordinary labor. She pushed for hours. The midwives were wonderful. The nurse was next-level wonderful. Everyone had worked hard for a long time, and neither of us had slept in what felt like forever.
Then the measurements began to change. The concern in the room shifted. The baby needed to come out. A larger medical team entered, doctors and nurses we had not seen before, and the room filled with alarms and voices and speed. My wife was doing something close to physically impossible after that many hours. Nobody needs a sensitive tool to spike in a room like that. It was an emergency, and my body registered it as one.
The second trigger was the one my tool added. This is one of the burdens of being a therapist who is already predisposed toward empathic attunement: I read everyone in the room for information without deciding to. The doctors and nurses had more information than I did, and their faces were telling me what it was.
What I read was fear.
That reading was a second spike laid on top of the first. It gave me access to information the emergency itself had not delivered, that the people who understood what was happening were afraid, and it ran through all four stages on its own. The umbilical cord was wrapped around Benjamin’s neck. No amount of pushing could have completed the delivery. My wife received an emergency episiotomy, and he was delivered gray and initially unresponsive.
Collapse and protection
Traumatic activation takes very different forms. Some people move toward collapse. Breathing becomes difficult. Speech slows or disappears. The body trembles, contracts, or becomes unavailable for movement. At greater intensity, the person may lose much of their contact with the room, and their face, posture, or voice may take on qualities that belong to the age at which the trauma occurred.
Other people become more forceful and more distant from feeling. Their posture changes. Their language sharpens. They become watchful, skeptical, or prepared to fight. Some approaches describe this as a protector, a defensive part that developed when the person needed access to power without access to vulnerability.
These responses look opposite while serving the same function. Collapse reduces exposure when fighting or leaving is impossible. A protector creates strength when softness is unsafe. Neither one tells us that something is fundamentally wrong with the person. Each tells us something about what the environment once required.
This matters when we encounter freezing during abuse or assault. The absence of a successful fight does not imply consent, passivity, or a failure of character. It may reflect the body’s most available survival response under conditions in which resistance carried additional danger or had already proven ineffective.
Before we call it the past, we have to ask whether it is over
During my years in community mental health, I worked with children carrying severe and sometimes ongoing trauma. Some would regress so substantially that an already young child seemed to become younger. Underneath the regression was a need that fit the age they had returned to: protection from an adult who could make the danger stop.
The terrible complication was that the danger had not always stopped. Their nervous systems were not confusing a completed threat with the present. The threat remained part of the present.
The same distinction applies to adults. An abusive partner may still have access. A family member may continue to threaten, manipulate, or violate boundaries. Housing, money, immigration status, disability, race, gender, custody, and social isolation may constrain a person’s ability to leave. Regulation still matters in those conditions, but it serves a different purpose. It may create enough access to choice for advocacy, safety planning, material support, legal protection, and the gradual recovery of power. We cannot regulate someone into tolerating what remains unsafe.
A great deal of trauma recovery involves helping the body experience that the suffering was instead of the suffering is. That work cannot begin by pretending the danger is over when it is not.
Stage Two: The interpretation arrives before awareness
The second stage is the meaning assigned to the spike. In ordinary language, interpretation sounds deliberate. We imagine a sentence passing through consciousness after the body reacts. Much of interpretation does not happen that way.
The body registers a cue and an old appraisal arrives with it. A tightening throat may carry the conclusion that speaking is dangerous. Sudden numbness may contain the rule that visibility creates exposure. Care may feel like debt. Dependence may feel like entrapment. A person who wants to help may become dangerous precisely because they matter.
The interpretation feels like perception because it arrives at the same speed and with the same authority. The child who hears an excavator after watching a frightening dinosaur movie does not hear a sound that might be a dinosaur. For a moment, there is a dinosaur behind them. Trauma gives that process a much larger library.
The deer shows the interpretation at its simplest. I never made a story about the flash. The story would have been absurd, and I knew it was absurd every time. But the meaning was there anyway, and it was not a sentence. It was a warning, delivered as a body already braced for impact. The flinch was the evidence that an interpretation had been made.
Confabulation and the flight
When an experience contains missing information, the mind does not remain empty. It builds the most probable account it can from prior experience, current sensation, and whatever facts are available. This is confabulation, and in the airplane it ran at two speeds.
The first was instantaneous. The angle, the buildings, the tilt, the attendants’ voices: we are going to die. That arrived whole, before any thinking, and the body treated it as fact. The second speed was slower, and it ran for years afterward. The crew must have been rushing to beat the curfew. The plane was too low. The landing gear may not have come down. I do not know most of that. I know we were delayed. I know we circled. I know the airport has a curfew. The rest is what I told myself, and it belongs to the third stage more than the second, because I built it in response to a feeling I could not otherwise explain.
These stories were not random. They were the mind’s attempt to create coherence around intense interoceptive information. The more frightening the body felt, the more catastrophic the available explanation became. The explanation then produced more activation, which gave the mind more evidence that something was wrong. The interpretation and the spike became a loop.
Telling myself that airplanes are statistically safe does not reach that loop. At high levels of activation, reassurance arrives in the wrong language. The body is receiving vibration, movement, angle, weight, and the emotional state of the people in charge. A sentence about probability cannot restore present time on its own. This does not make the sentence useless. It means the sentence has to arrive within enough regulation, sensory orientation, and relational safety to become receivable.
The buildings were not new
Something happened years later, while I was telling the airplane story out loud. I said the word buildings and stopped.
The buildings outside the window at John Wayne were not a new image. They were connected to an earlier flight I had never consciously linked to this one.
That flight occurred about ten years after September 11. I grew up in Connecticut, so New York was not abstract to me. The images of airplanes entering buildings belonged to a collective trauma, and they were also geographically and emotionally close to the world in which I had grown up. I was flying to a friend’s wedding. We were coming in for a landing when I looked out and saw another airplane beneath us.
There was no turbulence. This was visual. I could see the other aircraft below us while our plane continued descending, and I began bracing. Fuck. We are going to die.
Our pilot pulled up. The pilot offered an explanation that sounded strangely artificial, something like, “It is not our turn yet.” Then we flew directly over downtown Manhattan. I had heard that passenger flights were no longer routed over the city after September 11. I did not know whether that was true then, and I am not claiming it as fact now. My nervous system did not need it to be true.
The later flight into John Wayne did not create its meaning from nothing. Its angle and its buildings found an earlier landing, and that landing was already connected to a much larger catalog of images. This is what the second stage does in trauma. It does not interpret the present event. It interprets the present event through every event that resembles it, and the resemblance is decided before we are consulted.
That connection became visible only in the telling. It had been there the whole time.
The schema in the delivery room
In the hospital, the interpretation was not we are going to die. It was older than that, and it did not concern me.
My wife was still on the hospital bed, and labor is not over until the placenta is delivered. She was not done. She looked at me and said, “Stay with him.” I put my hand on a baby who, in that moment, felt lifeless. I remember saying, “Come on, buddy.” It felt as if his spirit was in a transitional space between two worlds and I was asking him to enter this one.
I was terrified. And underneath the terror, the second trigger had already produced its own interpretation, and the interpretation was already organizing me: when everyone else is afraid, you must be grounded. Nobody asked me to regulate the medical team. I did not believe I could control what they were doing. My system read a frightened room, took responsibility for the fear it had empathically received, found no one in the room who was regulating me, and concluded, as it has concluded since I was young, that the balance had to come from me.
That is a schema, and it can be reverse deconstructed. We work backward from the feeling to the rule. The feeling was responsibility, arriving faster than fear. The rule underneath it is that if no one is holding the room, I am. And the rule has a cost that does not show up until later: the fear I was reading did not go anywhere. It went into me, and I kept going.
When the safe person becomes the trigger
For many people, the interpretation is more complicated than mine, because the person who caused the trauma was also supposed to provide safety. A parent, caretaker, partner, teacher, clergy member, or another trusted adult occupied both roles. The person depended on the same relationship that created fear.
Under those conditions, the nervous system learns more than one person’s dangerousness. It learns that care is the beginning of control, that dependence leads to humiliation, or that trust creates the conditions for betrayal. For some people, safe attachment becomes part of the PTSD trigger.
Imagine someone sitting with a therapist after months of careful work. Years earlier, they lived with a partner whose arrival home required immediate assessment. The sound of the front door meant they had seconds to determine which version of the evening was coming. Irritation. Intoxication. An interrogation. A blow.
In the office, the therapist says, “You do not have to do this alone.”
A door closes in the hallway. The latch clicks.
The person’s chest locks. Their hearing sharpens. The room flattens. They can still see the therapist and the light through the window, but their body is waiting at the old door.
The sound matters, and so does the care. If dependence once preceded danger, being offered support can increase exposure. The present contains two cues at once: the click of a latch and the possibility of trusting another person. In relational language, some of what follows is transference. More plainly, the therapist has begun to occupy a symbolic position once held by someone who could not be trusted.
The therapist can become both a trigger and part of the way out.
Stage Three: Behavior is what the system does next
The third stage is behavior. Most of us hear that word and imagine something visible: getting out of the car, yelling, withdrawing from a conversation, reaching for a partner, or leaving a room. Behavior also occurs inside the mind. Catastrophizing is something we do. Replaying the event is something we do. Intellectualizing, minimizing, blaming, constructing an argument, proving the interpretation, and gathering evidence for the schema are all actions. They may happen privately, but they change the physiology and everything that becomes available next.
The distinction is not between thinking and acting. It is between the meaning that arrived and what the system did with it.
This is the stage that separates my three stories from one another, more than the severity of what happened. The deer resolved, over years, on its own. The airplane has not resolved. The hospital room has not resolved and has a sophisticated way of appearing to. The difference between them lives here.
Fifteen minutes of silence
After the pull-up at John Wayne, nobody spoke for fifteen minutes. My body had the shaking, the tilt, the buildings, the acceleration, and the aborted landing. My mind had an informational vacuum. Had the landing gear failed? Had the crew seen something on the runway? Had we almost hit a building? Were we going to try the same thing again?
Those questions were behavior. My mind was trying to close a gap, and every hypothesis it generated rehearsed the danger one more time. Every rehearsal was a new event for the tool to register. The attendants’ silence was not neutral either. It was received as evidence that the people who understood airplanes did not have anything reassuring to say.
By the time we landed, the interpretation had been proven. Not by the plane, which had landed, but by fifteen minutes of catastrophizing that the plane’s safe landing could not undo.
On the long flight from Spain, the behavior ran the other way. I listened to binaural beats for most of twelve hours. I breathed four seconds in and six seconds out, more or less continuously. Those were behaviors too, and they did not remove the fear. What they did was keep the fear from recruiting every available thought and sensation into a twelve-hour escalation. One set of behaviors intensified the alarm. The other set contained it. Neither one touched the spike.
The deer, by contrast
Nothing about the deer required a behavior. I flinched, the flash passed, and the road went on being a road. There was no vacuum to fill, no story worth building, no one to explain myself to. Because the third stage was empty, the fourth stage was available every single time, and the return happened at the pace of a normal drive. It took years for the tool to stop reading reflectors as eyes. But nothing I did fed the association, and so it starved.
That was not a method. I had no choice about any of it. It is a demonstration of how much of what we call the trauma is actually the third stage.
The room where I became the rock
The most revealing behavior in my own trauma history does not look dysregulated from the outside.
In the delivery room, with my hand on Benjamin, I became calm. Not performed calm. From the inside it felt sincere, and some of it was. The immediate crisis ended well. Benjamin lived. But the mortality did not end there. As a child, he experienced severe croup, and there were later moments of respiratory shutdown, including the need to be intubated. Without medical intervention, he would have died on at least two occasions.
Years later, I walked into intensive care and saw my mother intubated and completely unconscious with pneumonia, acute respiratory failure, and sepsis. The physicians were honest. What she was surviving had a good chance of killing someone decades younger. And this is my mom.
The same response returned. I read the room. I felt the fear in it. And I became grounded.
From the outside, that looks like health. Some of it is health. Some of it is a dissociative adaptation that allows me to remain functional in the presence of overwhelming mortality. My third-stage behavior is to be the rock rather than allow the emotion. The word for it is compartmentalization, and mine is high. I have said more than once that I would make a good EMT or firefighter. The fear gets put somewhere, the hands keep working, and the people who need me get what they need.
That behavior protected my wife, my son, my mother, and me. It gave me access to what each moment required. It also interrupted my full return to baseline, every time, because the emotion that would have carried me through the fourth stage was the emotion the behavior was built to hold off. Compartmentalizing is not the same as metabolizing. What gets put away stays where it was put, and it still needs a mechanism of release.
I can still feel the mortality energy living in my body. I have not satisfactorily gone through three.
Fault, responsibility, and the transmission of trauma
Stage three is also where the difference between resilience and a victim identity lives, and it is where the transgenerational transmission of trauma happens when it happens.
Trauma does not produce one inevitable behavioral outcome. Many people who were harmed become exceptionally careful not to harm others. They use the memory of what happened as information and build a different family around it.
And unresolved activation can still cross a relationship through behavior. A parent who was hit may strike a child when the child’s distress activates helplessness, shame, or rage that the parent cannot metabolize. A person who learned that intimacy and danger belong together may experience familiar danger as legible and unfamiliar safety as untrustworthy. They may remain in, return to, or feel drawn toward relational structures that resemble the original one. Our father was abusive, and we marry an abusive man.
None of this means the person chose the abuse or caused what another person did. Familiarity is not consent. Repetition is not preference.
There is also a difference between acknowledging that we were victimized and allowing victimhood to become the only identity through which action remains available. We need the first truth. Something was done to us. We did not cause it. We may have been young, overpowered, dependent, isolated, or physically unable to stop it. The second truth is harder: what happens through us afterward becomes our responsibility even when what happened to us was not our fault.
I did not cause the trauma, and I am responsible for interrupting what it continues to do through me.
That responsibility should never become a disguised form of blame. Blame asks why we failed to prevent the injury. Responsibility asks where choice is available now. It may appear in the moment before we hit a child, in the decision to leave more space while merging, in the ability to say out loud that we are catastrophizing on an airplane, or in allowing ourselves to stop being the rock long enough for grief to enter.
This is where resilience becomes concrete. It is not the absence of a trauma response. It is the growing capacity to keep the response from deciding what happens to the next person.
Behavior can also become repair
The third stage is where trauma can repeat. It is also where something different can happen.
We can soften during an argument. We can reach for a partner instead of accusing them. We can notice the impulse to prove that we are being abandoned and say, “I love you, and I am making up a story about losing you. Can I have a hug?” We can leave more space between our car and the one ahead in a difficult merge. We can move the body, change the room, take a run, play music, step into cold water, or ask another person to sit beside us.
These actions do not erase the interpretation. They change the ecology around it. Instead of spreading the trigger, the behavior makes physiology, relationship, and environment available to help metabolize what happened.
The gap between the spike and the interpretation may be too small to feel. The gap between interpretation and behavior is often where choice first becomes legible. Repair lives there.
Stage Four: Returning to baseline means recovering the present
The fourth stage is re-regulation. Heart rate slows. Breathing changes. Muscles release. Attention widens. The body begins to recover the range of responses that disappeared during the spike.
With PTSD, the return may remain incomplete because the system has not fully registered that the threat ended. Hypervigilance can become close to a resting state. Sleep becomes less restorative, unresolved activation accumulates, and the next cue arrives in a body that is still carrying the last one.
Sleep, exercise, movement, medication when appropriate, and trauma-focused treatment all influence the return. Relationship carries the most immediate weight, because human nervous systems develop and regulate in relationship.
Regulators and dysregulators
The airplane made this visible in a way I have used with clients ever since. During severe turbulence, a calm flight attendant can change the emotional field of a cabin. When the plane begins moving violently and an attendant says, almost casually, “Oops, hitting a little bump here,” we hear more than the sentence. We hear whether the person who understands airplanes is afraid. The words are ordinary, and the voice tells us whether someone with more information believes the structure is holding.
On the flight into John Wayne, the people whose job it was to regulate the cabin were the dysregulators. Their exhaustion and irritation did not prove the plane was unsafe. My nervous system received it as evidence anyway. And after the pull-up, what my body needed for the fourth stage was exactly what did not arrive: someone with more information saying what had happened and that we were all right. In the absence of that, my mind supplied its own account, and the account was not regulating.
The same process occurs in therapy. Through inter-regulation, a person borrows enough stability from someone else to recover access to their own. The therapist’s breathing, face, voice, pacing, and lack of alarm become part of the present evidence. This is use of self at its most physiological. The therapist’s presence helps the room feel current before language can do the same.
Relationship reaches backward through the whole sequence. It can soften how threat is received, make a more flexible interpretation available, change the behavior we choose, and shorten the return. This is why the tool can seem to measure in grams rather than milligrams when we are holding the hand of someone we love. The tool is not operating alone; it is inside a different ecology.
The relationship does not replace trauma-focused treatment. The methods with the strongest evidence ask the person to work directly with traumatic memory, avoidance, meaning, or some combination of them. And every method still enters through a relationship in which pacing, consent, predictability, and the freedom to stop affect whether the work becomes usable.
Pacing becomes corrective information
I worked for a long time with someone who did exceptional trauma work. There were sessions in which she knew that she had reached her limit before I could have known it for her. She would say, “I need to do something else. Let’s talk about something else.”
So we did.
We shared an irreverent sense of humor and an appetite for philosophical questions. Sometimes we spent the final twenty minutes of a session there. On the surface, we had changed the subject. Relationally, something central was happening. When she became too flooded and needed safety again, I respected her authority over the pacing of the work.
She could say stop without having to submit, disappear, escalate, or abandon the relationship. I could care about the work without claiming ownership of it. Her boundary changed what happened between us.
A stop is not automatically avoidance. Avoidance can maintain PTSD, and treatment often requires approaching memories, feelings, and situations the person has learned to avoid. Pacing can protect the work, and it can become the place where the work repeatedly ends. The therapist has to remain curious about that distinction without overriding the client and recreating the powerlessness the therapy is meant to address.
The therapist does not correct the old symbol by declaring themselves safe. Manipulative and exploitative people make that declaration too. The correction has to be embodied repeatedly. The therapist remains regulated without becoming distant, caring without becoming possessive, and consistent without using consistency as leverage. They respect the client’s no. Over time, the relationship creates new information. A caring person can remain caring when we disagree. A boundary can exist without ending attachment. Closeness does not have to eliminate choice.
Helping the past acquire an ending
The work of re-regulation is not always a movement away from the memory. Sometimes the person has to approach the memory while remaining connected to the present.
The senses help because they communicate in the same register through which the past has returned. We notice the current light, the actual floor, the temperature of the room, the therapist’s face, the person’s present age, and the fact that the door has a handle on this side. The present does not win an argument with the trauma. It becomes available alongside it.
Language may then become usable. That happened. It ended. I am here. I have choices now that I did not have then.
Some trauma work brings the person’s current capacities into contact with the earlier scene. In imagery rescripting, the adult self may enter the memory and protect the younger self. They can speak, intervene, create an exit, or bring in another protective figure. The imagery can become intentionally impossible. The person gives the child armor. They become large enough to stop the abuser. They shrink the abuser to the size of an ant or move them out of the scene with the kind of force available in a Marvel story. We are not pretending that history occurred differently. The memory is coming into contact with strength, language, protection, and choice that did not exist within the original event.
Some somatic approaches also work with a defensive movement that was interrupted. The person may imagine or physically enact a push, a kick, a turn away, or a word that could not be spoken. The evidence for specific completion mechanisms is more limited, so the theory should be held with humility. Clinically, the intervention can still allow the person to experience action where helplessness once dominated, provided it is collaborative, paced, and part of coherent trauma treatment.
The goal is not to eliminate the protector or judge the freeze. It is to expand the system’s available responses. The adult self now has size, language, mobility, relationships, and forms of protection that the earlier self may not have had.
As the event acquires an ending, grief becomes more available. Fear is present tense. Grief is past tense. The arrival of grief is evidence that the event has acquired an ending. The person can feel sorrow for the child who had no protection, the adolescent whom no adult believed, or the adult who survived by listening for the door. Compassion can replace some of the shame attached to the survival response.
Something can be over and still matter. The point is not that the past becomes irrelevant. The point is that it becomes past.
Understanding is not the same as completion
I understand the four stages well enough to teach them. I can identify the white flash, the vibration of the airplane, the fear in a medical team, and the moment my own system begins preparing to become the rock.
That understanding helps. It does not mean I have finished the process.
The airplane response remains close to the surface. The mortality around my son and my mother still lives in my body. When those experiences become active, I can move toward the fourth stage. My wife can help me return. I can let another nervous system help mine come back into the present.
And I can still stop at stage three. I can become calm, capable, observant, and partly absent from my own fear. The adaptation is sophisticated enough to look like health. Sometimes it is health. Sometimes it is the old requirement that I hold the room together because nobody is available to hold me. Some of my own interpretations are in the way here, about stoicism, about being a father, probably about masculinity, and they may not leave enough room for what the fourth stage requires, which is decompartmentalizing in the presence of another regulated person. I do not want to turn that recognition into a heroic story about how I worked through my trauma. The unresolved part is part of the truth.
PTSD recovery cannot be measured only by whether the first spike disappears. Progress may appear in how quickly we recognize where we are, how much choice remains while the body is activated, whether our behavior spreads the injury or protects someone from it, and whether we can receive help without surrendering ourselves.
Each return adds to the catalog. A reflector flashed and no deer appeared. The airplane shook and remained in the sky. A stop was respected. A caring person stayed caring. The body activated, and the present remained.
My son is alive. My mother survived. The events ended. My body does not always know that at the same speed that I do.
That is where the work remains.
