Ukraine: That’s what war pictures do with traumatized people

What does the current news do to traumatized people who, for example, have already experienced a war themselves?
The new stirs up the old, tearing the old open again. And those who experience it don’t remember past events, they experience them as if it were now, as if they were on the run again or in need or powerless. Trauma memory has a special feature. It works with similarities. Something doesn’t have to be exactly the same here, but something similar. And then there’s a summer thunderstorm or spring thunderstorm outside and it sounds like bombs or artillery fire. It’s something like that. And the old people panic and want to hide or go into the bunker or the basement. And the other. The other peculiarity of trauma memory is that we don’t remember dates, facts, sequences like you might remember your last vacation or any other situation, but the trauma memory acts as if it is here now and now there. That which is threatening, people feel like they are at war and it doesn’t help to appeal to their intellect and say, Your experiences are so far away, or was it so long ago, but it is there now . Of course, this evokes everything associated with terror. Fear, helplessness, loneliness, paralysis. So we humans have a special part of our brain in the amygdala, the amygdala, an organ as small as a small almond. That takes care of every piece of information, whether it can be existentially threatening or not. And if something is existentially threatening, then we might fight or want to fight, we get upset. This runs completely automatically. I can’t consciously control that with my will, but adrenaline is poured out.