OMG, bear with me. About to geek out over a trauma training I just had and how it so relates to Kakashi!
So, am learning about Polyvagal Theory and the parasympathetic and the sympathetic nervous systems, blah blah blah a lot of mental health jargon. Yay! Okay, but in doing so, with case conceptualizations and all that fun stuff, applied it to Kakashi (heās MY coping skill and go-to training ādummyā).
After all was said and done, interestingly enough, learned that the Sharingan would actually make his trauma worse! Hear me outā¦Iām cookināā¦
The Sharingan constantly drains his chakra, leaving him with pretty low energy most of the time. He can never reach 100% capacity with his chakra, which is literally their life force, so he has access to maybe 1/2-2/3 of his max chakra, if that, on a good day, but still his body has to do 100% of the work. So, that would mean, all things being said, his body would not have the energy to regulate properly and he would be in a more or less survival mode at all times. Meaning his body would distribute chakra and energy to what would be necessary to survive because there's only so much chakra to go around and everything else is secondary. What is that everything else? That would be emotional processing, restfulness, future planning, pleasure, restfulness, social bonding, etcā¦you get the picture.
However, at the same time, since heās in a pseudo-survival mode due to his body reading as being on high alert, "something must have happened to you to cause you to lose so much chakra/be leaking chakra, danger!" it would turn up his threat detection, startle response, hypervigilance, pain reception, and panic response (aka sympathetic dominance or his trauma response). So, basically, heās living with a permanent trauma response because he can never return to his original baseline (fwiw, this actually happens when people experience trauma irl, as well). His brain never gets the āyou survived, itās overā message.
Then add the Sharingan on top of that with its increased perception and visual acuity and memories encoded in high res because of those and you have his trauma encoded more intensely and vividly than others (excluding the Uchiha). Now, picture him experiencing Obitoās death and especially Rinās death from that perspective. He remembers that death with full visual acuity, full emotional charge, and no ability to turn it off. Combine that with a nervous system that absolutely cannot shut off, and you will have PTSD on steroids (imagine his intrusive thoughts on that level and ask yourself why he couldnāt wash that blood off).
Trauma can only begin to heal when you feel safe (parasympathetic activation, aka sleep, calm, safety, and connection). He never felt safe. When you canāt fight, flight, or freeze, or faint, you detach; think of it as his emotional distancing, numbness, sarcasm, and flat affect. They were neurological self-defense, or his brainās way of protecting him or coping with stress that he couldnāt recover from. So, at the end of the day, his reading Icha Icha to cope and āfleeā makes sense because he physically cannot escape his stressors (unless he gets rid of the eye).
I could go on about how Team 7 actually activated his parasympathetic nervous system and blah blah blah, but this is super long as is, eek! But I geek out over stuff like this and some days really do love my job, hehe.
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