Hi! Can you expand on the "trauma is a learning disorder" thing you touched on on the crow post?
*cracks knuckles* all right, let's go. for reference, here is the post.
as we navigate the world, we are constantly taking in information, working out what kind of place we are in, and adjusting our behavior accordingly. this does not only happen when we are consciously trying to learn and pay attention; we are always absorbing information, filtering it, and using it to guide actions.
because the world is constantly changing to some extent, some of the things we learn day to day is that things we previously learned to be true are now false. We have to keep adjusting our responses and predicting the future based on current data, and sometimes the situation changes. Often that means un-learning habits and information we previously knew to be true. So while taking in new information, skills, and ways of thinking is constantly happening, we are also constantly losing information/skills/etc. when they stop being useful in the environment that we're currently in.
There are two ways for learning to fuck up and cause problems. When we talk about learning disorders, we're often talking about disorders that impair the process of learning new things: things like dyslexia, dyscalculia, sensory processing disorders, sometimes alexeithymia or other aspects of autism. The kinds of things that make it very hard to learn something that would be useful in helping you adapt to your environment.
But there are also ways that learning can fuck you up when you form a connection between two things and can't seem to break that connection. Trauma (as distinct from stress) happens when you survive a stressful experience and have a hard time un-learning associations between the stressful experience and other things in your largely non-threatening daily life. It's hard to decouple those emotions for you, and it's hard for your brain to sand them away. Phobias similarly exist as a failure to un-learn connections between subjects of phobias and feelings of intense fear. And addiction can be conceptualized as deep difficulty un-learning that addictive substances bring at least temporary comfort and pleasure, which is especially difficult to resist when comfort and pleasure are relatively scarce in a person's life.
