Why PTSD Arises: The Brain's Defense Program and Stockholm Syndrome

Many people live without ever suspecting that "life has wounded them": they run from five in the morning, drown anxiety in busyness, and don't understand why they feel bad, where the flashbacks and unclear symptoms come from. Dr. Saulitis's method invites us to look not at the label but at the mechanism: under what conditions our own brain switches on this defense program — and why it later becomes fixed.

A Defense That Becomes a Trap

At its core this is a protective reaction: so the human brain "isn't knocked out, doesn't burn out," it produces a special program — a filter that begins to interpret information in its own way. An important feature: the brain has no built-in function to recognize facts and actions that don't match reality. If you keep telling someone for a long time that "trees grow with their roots upward," the brain begins to treat it as fact — and builds all its further logical chains on it.

Concussion of Perception: How It Begins

To launch this last defense, perception and the cognitive sphere must be struck by a stimulus so powerful that it causes a total concussion — shock. The person is "grabbed by the throat," and everything flies out: memory starts glitching, focus is lost, the picture becomes blurred. Even delusional understandings may appear, spinning round in the head.

What Happens in Body and Emotions

A stimulus of such force shuts perception down, and on the emotional level there comes either emptiness or a dreadful fear — when the brain seems paralyzed, the legs go weak, there is complete helplessness, emptiness in the head. There can be a flare of irritable aggression; a reactive depression develops, along with guilt. On the physical level — high blood pressure, heart rhythm disturbances, shortness of breath, digestive problems (constipation or diarrhea). Poor sleep joins in: with sleep deprivation, by the second or third day a stunned, giddy "euphoria" sets in — a disturbance of the psyche following loss of sleep.

Fixation: Stockholm Syndrome

The nervous system's thresholds then drop: the smallest stimuli trigger tears and reactions, a general anxiety appears, a constant "on guard" vigilance. And the culmination comes: the brain adjusts to the one who attacks. While an induced delusion can be knocked out, this becomes fixed. The person fully adopts the attacker's views, goes over to his side, begins to love him — and is ready to give his life for him. That's the catch: the person perceives this as reality, as his most cherished truth.

Where This Occurs

The principle is the same across very different settings: political and terrorist acts, military and punitive operations, captivity, prison where cellmates abuse. It is also Stalinism as a phenomenon — the more fear and aggression were stoked, the more strongly people "loved." And it is the same in authoritarian relations within groups: religious, political, in school under a strict teacher and, above all, in the family. Here is the key: why a child who is abused perceives it as being for his own good and can never shake it off for life, not understanding what is happening to him. When a person is broken — he adopts the views, the "truth," and the methods of the one who breaks him.

Practice: Recognize the Mechanism

1. Notice the mode itself: the endless running, when anxiety and fear are "drowned" in tasks and there's no time to understand yourself.
2. Trace the triggering stimulus: what event or prolonged stay in a toxic environment "wounded your life."
3. Check in with body and emotions: dreadful fear, helplessness, emptiness, blood pressure spikes, heart irregularities, poor sleep, tearfulness over trifles.
4. Test the "fact": what was repeated to you for a long time as truth — and whether your logical chains are built upon it.
5. Ask yourself: whose "side" have you ended up on — do you love or justify the one who causes you pain.