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Comment by _wovb | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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