prolonged and extended exposure to stress overwhelms your system, which then has to compensate and overwork (i.e., “toxic stress”), which shortens your lifespan.2

Consequently, children who experience toxic stress have trouble concentrating, controlling impulsive behavior, and following directions.

Toxic shame is the belief that one is inherently bad, defective, different, or unlovable. Toxic shame is not just a belief that one does bad things, it is a deeply held core belief that one is bad.

Impatience combines all three ingredients of toxic stress: unpleasant experiences, pressure or urgency, and lack of control.

Toxic shock was ominous because they never really said how you got it, or why, or what happened when you did get it. It just struck you dead in the cunt.

Rape and war, she explained are among the most common causes of post-traumatic stress disorder, and survivors of sexual assault frequently exhibit many of the same symptoms and behaviors as survivors of combat: flashbacks, insomnia, nightmares, hypervigilance, depression, isolation, suicidal thoughts, outbursts of anger, unrelenting anxiety, and an inability to shake the feeling that the world is spinning out of control.

We need to understand that victims of trauma are more prone to all forms of addiction because their baseline of stress is different.

The salient stressors in the lives of most human beings today — at least in the industrialized world — are emotional. Just like laboratory animals unable to escape, people find themselves trapped in lifestyles and emotional patterns inimical to their health. The higher the level of economic development, it seems, the more anaesthetized we have become to our emotional realities. We no longer sense what is happening in our bodies and cannot therefore act in self-preserving ways. The physiology of stress eats away at our bodies not because it has outlived its usefulness but because we may no longer have the competence to recognize its signals.

But the larger point is that we can now see that depriving systems of stressors, vital stressors, is not necessarily a good thing, and can be downright harmful.

A traumatic experience is a seismic event that shakes our belief in a just world, robbing us of the sense that life is controllable, predictable, and meaningful.

When shame has been pumping through a heart, over time the heart itself grows toxic. When we are wounded, we leak toxic waste, and that waste poisons us and the people around us — even when we are completely unaware of it — just like I did with Joanna. The reality is: • Hurt people hurt people. • Broken people break people. • Shattered people shatter people. • Damaged people damage people. • Wounded people wound people. • Bound people bind people.

Traumatizing agents include the rise of mass culture and the subsequent diminishing of the individual soul, the spread of rampant materialism, and the rise of “connective” technologies that contribute to deep disconnections while “linking” people at surface levels of life.

People generally don’t suffer high rates of PTSD after natural disasters. Instead, people suffer from PTSD after moral atrocities. Soldiers who’ve endured the depraved world of combat experience their own symptoms. Trauma is an expulsive cataclysm of the soul.

The Moral Injury, New York Times. Feb 17, 2015

Trauma makes us thin-skinned, overly sensitive, hypervigilant, and prone to pain. And it’s often all-encompassing, too, so our attention is focused on the pain and on desperately trying to avoid more of it.