Trauma as Pathology at the Cellular Level
When people talk about post-traumatic stress, most of them instinctively think of it as a "psychological problem" — something like a bad mood that you just need to endure or "pull yourself together" about. Dr. Saulitis insists on a fundamentally different view. For years in clinical practice he has shown how different organs suffer in different illnesses — how heart muscle changes after a heart attack, how lung tissue changes during inflammation, how the kidneys or liver react to damage. And in exactly the same way, he believes, we need to show what happens to the brain in trauma: this is not a metaphor, not "just personality" — it is pathology of a specific tissue, the tissue of neurons.
"post-traumatic stress syndrome is revealed as a pathology of neurons already. Because people don't understand this, they don't think about it, they think it's just a bad mood, or irritation."
The difference seems subtle, but it changes the whole way we relate to what's happening. If you consider irritability or apathy after trauma to be "weakness of character," you will demand willpower from the person (or from yourself) — "pull yourself together," "just don't think about it." But once you understand that we are talking about specific cells that have changed the way they function, demanding that someone "just pull themselves together" sounds as absurd as demanding that an inflamed lung "just breathe normally."
The mechanism here is simple to understand, even though the process itself is complex. Trauma is not some abstract "bad memory" sitting somewhere in consciousness. It is an event that hit the nervous system with such force that the system didn't have time to process it in the usual way. And unprocessed experience doesn't disappear — it leaves a physical trace in how neurons transmit signals to one another. The balance of chemical substances at the junctions between them — synapses — changes. The sensitivity of cells changes. Even the volume of certain brain structures responsible for memory and emotional regulation changes.
Imagine a person who, after a severe shock — an accident, the loss of a loved one, a prolonged conflict, violence — has become quick-tempered, has stopped enjoying things they used to enjoy, sleeps worse, and concentrates worse. From the outside it's easy to read this as "his character changed," "she got nervy," "he let himself go." In reality, behind these words there is often a concrete physiological picture: altered neurotransmitter function, overloaded brain structures, disrupted signal transmission at the synapses.
This does not absolve a person of responsibility for their life and their reactions. But it does remove the false guilt of "not being able to just stop." When you understand that irritability and apathy have a cellular basis, you stop fighting yourself over "weak will" and start working with the process of recovery — the same way you would work on rehabilitation after a physical injury.
Practical step: if you notice persistent irritability, apathy, or low mood in yourself or someone close to you after a shock, the first thing to do is to stop demanding that they "pull themselves together" and start treating the state as a process that requires time and gentle care — not as a character flaw.
How the Brain Defends Itself: From Shock to Freezing
Before talking about chemistry, it's important to understand the logic. The doctor explains: the reaction to trauma is not a malfunction but a protective program that the brain switches on so as not to "burn out" from excess load. The human brain has a particular feature that, in the doctor's words, explains a great deal about how we perceive reality in general.