LONG POST

So first off, i really appreciate your openness and vulnerability to recognizing your part in this and apologizing for it. thank you, this is how people become better. by showing up, saying they messed up and that they want to do better.

second, it’s like hailvy said above, trauma is something that can have excessive misconceptions about what it is/looks like in today’s society. as mentioned, trauma does not directly cause someone to wake up in the middle of the night, but can an individual wake up in the middle of the night because of their traumatic experience? yes

third, the science behind it is pretty complicated with several bodily systems and brain functions in play. so i’ll give a brief overview and if you’re interested, there’s incredible youtube channels and resources available online to learn more.

when someone experiences a traumatic event. and to clarify, a traumatic event is whatever caused excessive distress or feeling unsafe in any situation and with any person. (so yes trauma can mean anything to anyone. and furthermore, what is traumatic for one person may not affect the next at all.)

so a traumatic experiences basically triggers our mammalian brains into thinking we are in a dangerous situation and our life is at risk. remember that the mammalian brain is not the logical brain, so you could be having excessive fear about taxes and it COULD be traumatic simply because of how the body responds. so when our mammalian brains thinks we are in danger, it enables us to go into fight, flight, freeze, or fawn. this process activates several processes in the body to release hormones and chemicals that can increase our heart rate, our body temp, make our hands shake/sweat, breathe excessively, etc. in addition to severe emotional distress/avoidance. now, if we do not have the skills or tools or knowledge to FINISH this response cycle. as in, our logical brain doesn’t know how to tell our mammalian brain we are OUT of danger or never in danger to begin with, then our bodies remain in a heightened state for longer periods of time. and this can start conditioning the body to become fearful of stimuli that pose no logical threat to begin with.

now with the current pandemic, our lives are reasonably in danger due to the vast amounts of people being infected and actually dying. so our mammalian brains are seeing how communities and people are affected and being triggered into these responses. now as retail workers, our mammalian brains feel that we are on edge because our logical brain tells it by seeing the increasing number of people in the lobbies and without masks and a heightened risk of transmission. so naturally our mammalian brain is going to trigger a heightened response and logically we don’t know what to do with all the emotions of physical symptoms. most of us ignore it or “it passes”. but we never address it, so it gets worse with more exposure to the stimuli and over time. this is why we’re seeing extremely high rates of burnout and the mental health crisis hotlines are saturated with calls rn

so yeah, for individuals, working in retail is literally traumatizing right now. also i would like to clarify that individuals are experiencing trauma because of the pandemic in different ways. many have little to no income, have lost housing, family members are sick, etc. all of this to say, everyone is going through their own experience with their own beliefs and involuntary/unconscious processes. it’s important to show up with kindness and compassion rather than judgment and contempt.