By Anna Fischer. Published in Issue 18 of Paper Chained in June 2025.
There are things that humans will do in order to survive that are inexcusable, unjustifiable, and totally explainable.
When I was young, I was friends with a boy named Micah. Micah was intellectually gifted, so when his family moved to a new state when he was thirteen, his parents put him into an elite private school. Micah kept up with the academics easily, but because he was different from everyone else there, he got bullied – very badly – until he finally graduated about four years later. The abuse was overwhelming and inescapable, especially when it came from the teachers as well as his classmates. Micah ended up developing something called Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, which can show up when a person has many different traumatising experiences (or one trauma repeated over and over) throughout a certain time period. Micah’s parents didn’t catch onto this until one night, after about an hour of arguing with his little sister, she teased him about how skinny he was, and he tried to kill her. Now luckily, Micah’s parents were in the next room and rushed in before he did irreparable harm, but those familiar with the science of trauma know that if they hadn’t, Micah likely would’ve ended up in custody.
What Micah did was terrible. It damaged his relationship with his sister for life. At the same time, his actions were completely explainable and even predictable to anyone who understands how trauma affects the brain. The human brain has a built-in protocol for dealing with danger. It’s called the threat response, and it’s what triggers those fight, flight, freeze, faint, and fawn instincts. When your brain perceives a serious threat, it floods your system with hormones that help you hit harder, run faster, react more quickly, etc. Once that happens, the parts of your brain motivating you to act through feelings like panic, fear, or rage can actually override the parts that handle rationality, planning, morality, communication, and more. Why? Because we’re hardwired to survive, and sometimes our brains help us do that by sidelining non-essential functions so that all our energy can go to those most likely to keep us alive, like running and fighting.
When that process works properly, it will (ideally) save your life and then shut back off, returning you to a regulated state of calmness, clear thinking, and intentional, planned behaviour. Sometimes, though, a threat can feel so overwhelming that even after the immediate danger goes away your brain will keep that threat response active, keeping you in a state of perpetual survival mode, watching and waiting for the next danger. This is what unresolved trauma often does to us. Whether we were abused, neglected, or left alone when we needed someone to stay, our brains can end up frequently reminding us – normally through symptoms like flashbacks, nightmares, “random” pains, or bursts of overwhelming emotion – that dangers like the one from long ago could reappear and hurt us again.
When our brains get locked in like that, even a small threat that’s just a bit similar to the old, big one will often be enough to send us back into full-blown fight-or-flight mode. When that happens, humans will often do all kinds of things to regain their sense of control over the danger – the same danger that they had no control over when it overwhelmed them before. For instance, a boy who endured years of cruel bullying might instinctively react to his little sister’s teasing with extreme violence, looking to control the situation by eliminating the threat. The teasing wasn’t actually a big danger, but it felt familiar, and because his brain was still hyper-aware of anything resembling the old abuse, it immediately jump-started his threat response to help him survive it better this time by fighting back.
I want to say two things here. First, the threat response is completely physiologically normal. The trouble comes when it hangs around because the event or events that first triggered it are unresolved in the brain, stored as trauma. Second, if you have ever been incarcerated, there’s a high likelihood that you have experienced trauma. The process surrounding incarceration has been shown to be potentially traumatic in and of itself, but also, those in the criminal justice system report very high rates of unresolved trauma from their earlier lives.
Now, it’s very difficult to heal from unresolved trauma without the help of a trained professional. Unfortunately, access to therapeutic care is extremely limited during a custodial sentence, so what can be done before we regain our access to that care? Well, we work to notice the threat response when it shows up, we work to develop different coping skills to keep us from acting out of rage or fear or pain, and we do our best to stay regulated as often as possible, reminding ourselves that even though this process is a normal part of our physiology, it doesn’t have to rule our lives forever.
Anna’s work as a speaker, trainer, and professional consultant centers on increasing the legal field’s awareness of how mental health, trauma sensitivity, and ethical client care influence all aspects of the legal process.
