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Benign social encounters and interactions may trigger older response-narrative scripting in trauma survivors.

These triggered trauma-altered responses may eclipse healthier narratives.

Slowing down, offering safety, and respecting agency can help survivors regain their voice.

Our existing narratives, created with wisdom, meaningful introspection, and reasoning, can change quickly if triggered by stressful contexts created by past trauma. The residue of a former trauma can shape the global nature of a survivor's response-narrative and their response-content during benign encounters (Crawford, 2023). In my experiences with this phenomenon, survivors may describe a typical encounter like a routine doctor's visit, renewing a license, talking with a friend, or something else, and suddenly an innocuous question triggers an old response-narrative script from long ago. Some survivors have described it as living an old plot in a new moment, finding themselves dialoging in a way that sounds starkly reminiscent of an older narrative. This triggered chronological time disruption may place a survivor back in a time shortly after a previously experienced trauma (Lutgen-Sandvik, 2007).

Old responses, new experiences

A survivor's current day responsive language, according to Anzaldua (1999), can be impacted under specific contexts where traumatic memory can seep into a communication borderland where there are no boundaries. In other words, sometimes the impact of a traumatic experience, although far relegated to the past, may inadvertently arise years later in ways not considered, aside from more common PTSD symptoms. Rebekah Perkins Crawford (2023), a researcher at Ohio University, believes there is insufficient understanding of how a former trauma can overwhelm one's present-day capacity to communicate. Lutgen-Sandvik (2007) views trauma-altered responses as those where memory and processing mechanisms relied upon for re-storying our experiences through more accurate, truthful, and meaningful introspection can become temporarily eclipsed by older, obfuscated, post-traumatic triggered narratives (Lutgen-Sandvik,........

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