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> "We know for a fact that mammals get PTSD after being in highly stressful experiences that they are unable to metabolize."

my otherwise wonderful dog, adopted from a rescue org when she was ~3 years old, plainly has PTSD from prior trauma. she spent the first 3 months with me going through frequent cycles of fear diarrhea, usually in the very early morning hours.

i can only guess that she was treated badly by a very overbearing/masculine person in tight quarters, based on her uncontrollable fear reactions, which almost always happen at home. outside, she's generally friendly toward women, mildly curious/cautious of kids, and fearful/cautious of men. we've largely worked through the diarrhea, though sometimes it triggers if she thinks i'm mad at her for any period of time, even if i get angry for reasons totally unrelated to her.

she still sometimes exhibits extended bouts of panting, scratching, and self-nibbling as she tries to regulate the autonomous fear reaction. distraction, petting, hugging, and other countermeasures sometimes but often don't work in calming her down. it still breaks my heart every time, even 2 years on.

We went to look at a rescue Chihuahua which I was not enthused by (they are difficult to read, which I think leads to their reputation of being erratic, moody).

This dog was a wreck. Profoundly terrified of men. Most chihuahuas bark when they're afraid, this one just sat, quaking, watching me the whole time.

I self-identify as an animal magnet so this became a matter of principle to me. It was obvious fifteen minutes in that this dog wasn't coming home with us, but the rescue person was invested in getting this dog exposed to more people so we just chatted while I sat on the floor cross legged, keeping my voice level, all of my gestures slow and exaggerated, and not making eye contact with the dog.

It took 90 minutes for that dog to interact with me, and he just came over and plopped down next to me, leaning against my thigh. After that, we were cool. I only hope that meant the next people didn't take an hour and a half to get that far.

poor little chihuahua. hopefully someone took a chance on it!

my dog also shook and was frozen scared when i first met her. she took a few minutes to take a single timid step forward. but she wasn't profoundly broken like a pair of similar-looking 6 month old siblings that were there at the same time (found in a separate hoarding situation). i saw each of them separately, and neither made any positive movements in the 20-30 minutes i spent with them. that was heartbreaking too.

luckily my dog is mostly well-adjusted now, outside of those occasional anxiety episodes.

A trick I've subsequently learned is that if you crouch down all the way, many small dogs like to hide in the 'cave' made by your shins.

In general shrinking yourself makes most dogs like you a lot more, but the little dogs will bee-line for your legs.

yes, crouching makes you smaller/less threatening. puppies/little dogs at the dog park (when that was open) use it as a little fort against the bigger dogs. much fun =)

>fearful/cautious of men

My ex neighbor rescued a wonderful dog that had been tied somewhere and left to die, in Spain. He brought her to Denmark and she has mostly recovered with the weird caveat that she is now racist. Southern-european looking people (black hair/beards) make her really angry or nervous.

glad she found a much better home! i worry about my dog being slightly racist too, as she tends to react more to black/brown folks relative to white/asian folks, but i may just be projecting my own implicit/latent racism there.

It’s very common. Growing up I had a dog that absolutely hated Mexicans because we had a Mexican gardener and the dog was very territorial. As you could imagine, it was difficult to get enough exposure to extinguish the reaction.

I had a dog just like this when I was a kid. She was terrified of my father and all other adult males since the day we brought her home. She only began to recover years later as my brother and I, who she trusted, grew to resemble him.

> >fearful/cautious of men

As a complete side note, I've always wondered how dogs tell human males from females.

Are we even sure they do?

pretty sure, and as others have noted, smell is probably the primary sense. i have a couple female neighbors she adores, and when they're nearby/coming home, she whimpers excitedly before i can hear anything. on the other hand, with a couple male neighbors she's slightly worried about, she'll do more of a grunt/growl.

but visual, and even auditory, cues are also used. size, posture, stance, and gait, are all pretty good (but not perfect) indications of human gender. she's alerted on ambigously dressed people over 100 ft away who were walking in a lumbering/macho way, but ignores or sometimes wags her tail for those who don't move that way.

edit: should note that sensing potential aggression/danger is probably a large component of this behavior too.

Almost certainly by smell.

I'm a trans woman, and when I started hormones, one of the first things my partner noticed was that my odor went from overpowering and musty to just kind of "stale". I can get away with wearing shirts 2 or 3 times between washings, or go without bathing for a day or two. That was definitely not possible before hormones (at least without offending the people around me).

So I'd say yeah, if even humans can tell the difference in most cases then a dog definitely would.

Same here, after transition I smell very noticeably different. It's awesome to wash my clothes less often

Probably scent, that's one of a dog's major senses. Not sure if it's the prevalence of perfumes or natural compounds.

Thank you for rescuing her and making the world a better place.

Stupid question here, but isn't it possible that experiencing violence and death isn't as highly stressful/traumatic if it's to you like water is to a fish, to borrow your phrase? Especially if you have some sort of belief in an afterlife to console you. Just a question from someone who knows very little about this.

It's not a stupid question at all.

Death nor violence does not have to be inherently traumatic. I would be very surprised if 100% of people back then had degrees of PTSD (and that's not what my comment was meant to imply).

A working definition of trauma: "trauma can be defined as any unresolved autonomic nervous system response. It’s about the nervous system’s response to an event, not necessarily the event itself. Events can affect each of us very differently."

The context in which these events happen plays a huge role in whether or not someone develops symptoms of PTSD afterwards.

Spiritual beliefs can play an important role in acceptance of death and therefore it not being a terrifying experience.

My (limited, so please correct me if I’m saying something dumb) understanding here too is some people are just wired different and can handle more traumatic situations than others.

My therapist had me read a book called The Highly Sensitive Person by Dr. Elaine Aron after I told him I was struggling with things I felt a “normal” person should be able to handle just fine. The book made a lot of interesting points about what it means to be sensitive (broad sense of the word) to the world around us.

> some people are just wired different and can handle more traumatic situations than others.

I've heard it hypothesized that ADHD is adaptive/selected for in some contexts, because people with it are more resilient to stress, i.e. it takes more to make them scared/shocked/traumatized, just like it takes more to excite/motivate them. And so such people can respond "normally" to stressful situations where the other people around them tend to freeze up, thus potentially saving the rest of the group.

This is definitely correct! Everybody is equipped differently to cope with life. The environments we grow up in make a huge difference in this. And they vary tremendously.

You might be interested in a book called Personality: What makes you the way you are by Newcastle professor Daniel Nettle. It's a very readable intro to the system of categorizing personality used by academic researchers and that probably has more resolution than thinking in terms of HSP.

I like that definition, but is the response "unresolved," or just "unhelpful?" Maybe "unresolved" has a different meaning in your specialty though.

I thought when someone experiences trauma, it makes their brain sensitize to preceding stimuli and unconsciously produce a strong response, in an attempt to avoid similar trauma. This would increase survival odds in life-threatening environments. The problem being that heightened sensitivity to similar stimuli and automatic strong responses are usually detrimental to living a safe, modern life.

My suspicion is that it's more about puncturing a worldview -- having your sense of natural order invalidated -- or a feeling of utter lack of agency or control, quite possibly both. Overwhelming sensory inputs quite possibly as well, especially painful or disturbing ones, though it may be a component of both the previous. The grief response seems mostly about an upset world-model. Loss of agency seems to be more strongly associated with PTSD.

It's possible that if you grew up in an environment in which death was commonplace, but you experienced, or even just believed in, a sense of agency, you'd experience fewer manifestations of grief or PTSD than we'd consider typical now.

Though perhaps not. I suspect many older psychological disturbances -- nervous exhaustion, mental breakdowns, melancholia and nostalgia (in their original senses) would map strongly to present notions of PTSD and depresion.

I disagree about being trauma naive as a society. Having a scientific understanding of trauma is separate from having phenomenological understanding of trauma, and I believe we have a large amount of knowledge and wisdom about the latter. I also believe there is a large repertoire of psychotechnologies that helped people to be trauma resistant or helped them if they had PTSD. We just lost contact with many of them and psychotherapy is perhaps the only dominant vessel for us in rediscovering those.

Peter Levine's most famous example is a polar bear that shakes a potentially traumatic stimulus off after being shot with tranquilizer. He argues even non-human mammals have the instinctive know-how to deal with trauma. Why humans would be lagging behind other than undue suppression of their instincts on how to deal with it? If anything, our modern society that puts so much stake at "being in control" is a hindrance to post-traumatic resolution than historical societies would be.

A crucial requirement for traumatic retention is a sense of loss of control that accompanies hyperarousal. No perceived lack of control = no trauma. In the context of combat PTSD, there is a large difference between modern warfare technologies and historical warfare in terms of the loss of control it induces (both for soldiers and civillians). At the very least, I would argue historic wars had more contextual meaning with them, fighting for one's land, nation, loved ones were more immediate and connected to the action, as opposed to being flown to a foreign country for less-than-well understood purposes.

Even for complex-PTSD, nuclear and even single parent households being a recent state of affairs, I would argue historically having multiple adult figures in one's childhood context prevented a problematic relationship with a single adult dominating the development experience of the child. Also those children had more access to natural world early on (unsupervised play time), developed competencies (e.g. working in the farm with parents) and afforded many other developmental freedoms, therefore likely to have developed trauma resilience. What was a rite-of-passage ritual supervised by the elders if not a training program for developing trauma resilience?

I would say it might as well be our current world that is more trauma-naive, trauma-generating and trauma-retaining than historical ones. We have the collective wisdom on how to deal with it, but insurance doesn't pay for it and you gotta show up at the office the next day.

Great points on being raised by more adults, rites of passage, and the context in which combat PTSD occurred. I don't disagree - these were definitely (sometimes powerfully) mediating factors.

And yes, it's an open question as to the degree of suppression of PTSD and natural traumatic resolution in pre-industrial societies.

I do also agree that there has been a deep phenomenological understanding of trauma for many, many generations of humanity. It most likely wasn't called "trauma" (until perhaps recently).

I also believe that our current understanding of this phenomenon has reached a level of sophistication that we've never had before, and this is bolstered by various advances in culture, science, and policy. For example, the legal use of entheogens as a medically prescribed treatment for PTSD (of course, these could be used to treat PTSD hundreds of years ago, and there were and are beautiful traditions around this -- the models were just different, though).

We may have been less trauma-naive and less trauma-generating at some point in our collective history; I wonder about the level of holism of the models of trauma at that time.

That’s a good point, we had the necessary pieces scattered across cultures and time but not all at one place. Looking forward to the integration modern psychology can afford us.

> At the very least, I would argue historic wars had more contextual meaning with them, fighting for one's land, nation, loved ones were more immediate and connected to the action,

War has been the same across millennia: rulers getting into fights and forcing the ruled to fight for these wars for them.

Not always. War was also a career, a way to provide to your (present, future) family by stealing resources from others (pillaging). Rulers often rewarded veterans with lands of the conquered etc.

That's precisely what war still is for many Americans too: a way to get cheap college, a guaranteed career, etc. Doesn't change the fact that it's still the poor being forced to take this option; the only difference is that it's the economy (controlled by the rulers) that's doing the coercion, instead of the rulers directly.

I don't think everything can be explained in such a top down way, as if there is a determined ruling class that subjugates a set of passive actors that don't have any role in the hole story.

Society is built by individuals that are ultimately driven by the same things, no matter what is your current place in the dominance hierarchy.

Thinking that the average peasant would not engage in aggressive behaviour if it were not for the "ruling class" to provide that incentive fails to explain how the ruling class emerged in the first place.

Humans compete. They compete for mates, for prestige, for resources.

Harmony and peace require effort to build and sustain, but they pay dividends. Prosperity benefits the rulers too.

Paradoxically, harmony and peace in ancient history was often the product of interests of the same ruling classes that engaged in the warring behaviour.

I took an exercise class a while back and the instructor came in one day shaking.

On his way to class there was a bad motorcycle accident. Guy didn't die but had life-altering injuries, and the instructor was first on the scene. It was bad.

He was vibrating when he came in. I finally convinced him to do some extra shake-out exercises like we already do which helped a bit. After class our timing didn't line up, I was trying to slip him some cash and 'prescribe' him an evening doing something he loves to wind down.

He was trying to be macho about it and I was trying to get him to acknowledge that some fucked up shit just happened. Haven't seen him since the COVID thing so I don't know how he's doing.

Sounds like you did your best to be of support. I’m curious about the particulars of the shaking exercise you recommended. I have heard of one called TRE (trauma release exercises), perhaps something similar?

There’s some static strength involved and so it’s not uncommon to “shake out” your limbs as part of a warm up or a transition between sections.

And I was trying not to lecture this young(er) instructor in front of a room of his regular students, so I didn’t feel I could do more than encourage him to dump some more adrenaline. He was trying to laugh it off, which parts of my extended family are notorious for. Nobody talks about anything.

> there is a large difference between modern warfare technologies and historical warfare in terms of the loss of control it induces

Certainly, in historical warfare, you faced off against an enemy. There were far fewer devices that could be highly lethal and completely unseen. Even stuff as simple as IEDs is awful, but airstrikes, artillery, etc. probably contribute to that sense of no control. And the counters to them are, generally, prolonged periods of hyper-awareness, continually scanning for threats.

Well said. Though as I was re-reading your comment I remembered the incidence of PTSD among drone operators. Even though they have the perfectly controlled physical environment, they seem to be negatively effected too. I doubt their triggers are similar (like fireworks reminding gunfire) though.

Does your username come from your interest in trauma? A palimpsest is a pretty elegant physical representation of human memory.

Hey palimpsest, I can’t see an email on your profile, is there a way to get in touch?