Lisa Feldman Barrett

Her grades were okay in school.

She had friends.

She didn't have any signs of trauma at all.

Then she watched Oprah.

And she heard all of these women talk about having been the subject of physical abuse from their boyfriends or their fathers or, you know, their husbands.

And she recognized the similarity in that.

the physical circumstances of these women's descriptions and her physical circumstances.

And she also observed them experiencing symptoms of trauma.

And all of a sudden she started to have difficulty sleeping and her grades dropped and she had trouble concentrating and she became socially withdrawn.

Her way of making meaning, her way of, if you think about physical movements as actions, she made different meaning of those actions, and she experienced trauma where she didn't before.

Now, if you're somebody who believes that there is an objective world out there where, you know,

Yeah, that really there was some kind of latent trauma in her and she didn't experience it before, but then it was like triggered.

You could tell a whole story like that, and people do tell whole stories like that.

But that's not what the best scientific evidence suggests is happening.

What's happening is that the physical process

movements were the same, the psychological experience of those movements was different.

Because experience is a combination of the sensory present, the physical present, and the remembered past.

And you need both in order to have a particular kind of experience.

So the way to describe what happened to Maria's trajectory was that

She experienced something as an unfortunate aspect of like physical life that