Dr. Paul Conti

We're getting ready to fight, right?

Or run, right?

And then we become aware of it.

So the aroused affect in us is also about survival and it has a very deep impact upon us.

And shame is an aroused affect.

So it can be raised in us without our choice and it's very powerful, which if you think about that is an extremely strong deterrent.

Imagine a tribe or a group of people that are sheltered together and someone eats half the food at night or something, right?

And there's a very negative response, right?

And that person feels shame because shame is so powerful to control behavior, right?

So the way that trauma can change our brains and stay with us in a way that says be more

Vigilant, look at the world in a different way, act more defensively, right?

And how that links to shame and to guilt.

And then guilt becomes what gets called feeling technically, where we relate the aroused affect to ourselves, right?

So shame, the aroused affect, and guilt, the next step, when the shame gets related to self, are such profound behavioral interventions and deterrents that you can see, I think, how evolutionarily kind of all makes sense.

If we're fighting for survival and we're an elder statesman, if we make it to 20, this makes sense, but it doesn't make sense in a world where we live much longer, we navigate in all sorts of different ways,

And there's so much coming at us that can be traumatizing.

Our brains are built to change from trauma, but not in the way we experience trauma and not in the way that we live life in terms of the nature of living life and the duration of life in the modern world where these traumas that happen to us are often so bad for us because they change how our brain is functioning and then our entire orientation to the world is different.

And that could be for...

We see that over and over.

It's not necessarily in everyone, but boy, it is in a lot of people who have suffered trauma.