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Decoding The Mind
Psychology in Everyday Life: From Stories and Research to Self-Discovery and Personal Growth
Psychology Hits explores psychology in everyday life through stories, research, insights and articles on trauma, relationships, emotional well-being and human behaviour. Decode the mind and browse real-life psychology explained through everyday experiences.
See psychology topics below. The full stories are available on Medium.
This brings together psychology blog articles, stories and topics in one place.
Trauma bonds can make harmful relationships feel impossible to leave. Emotional dependency, intermittent reinforcement, gaslighting, and the nervous system’s need for safety and connection strengthen trauma bonds. Why trauma bonds keep you stuck in relationships can seem a mystery.
This trauma bond story explores why trauma bonds can make it so difficult to get unstuck and leave. It explores how trauma bonds affect both the mind and body, including fight, flight, freeze and shutdown responses. It also examines the seven stages of trauma bonding, the role of the polyvagal nervous system, and why breaking free often requires more than simply recognising that a relationship is unhealthy. Recovery also involves restoring emotional regulation, boundaries and inner trust.
When trauma bonds keep you stuck, gaslighting, intermittent reinforcement and nervous-system dysregulation can make leaving feel almost impossible. If you want to explore the subject further, I have also brought together five related stories that look at trauma bonding from different psychological perspectives and dynamics.
A newer study suggests trauma may not be stored in the body tissues like a hidden object. Recent neuroscience studies suggest the brain predicts trauma. Instead, the brain may continue to predict danger based on past experience, causing the body to react as though the threat is still present.This neuroscience and trauma story on Medium explores predictive coding, frozen inference and metastability, and how these ideas add a new layer to Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score. These new neuroscience studies explain why the nervous system remains trapped in old patterns. It further suggests how healing can update these predictions. It’s important to understand that the new findings do not dismiss embodied trauma or the strength of Bessel van der Kolk’s work.
The new findings advance existing information on trauma and are primarily opinion, but exciting developments in further research are currently being undertaken to develop these hypotheses. The view of trauma residing in the body is still extremely relevant. The recent neuroscience studies are opinions. But they are also advancements on the original findings that the body keeps the score. Further information needs to be proven, however. In this trauma flashbacks and PTSD story on Medium, I explained why trauma flashbacks and PTSD are not weaknesses. They are crucial pieces of information relayed by the body, which might otherwise go undetected.
Trauma flashbacks are not ordinary memories. They can make the past feel as though it is happening again in the present, with the body reacting before the mind can understand what is wrong. Trauma Flashbacks and PTSD are not weaknesses
This story explores how trauma affects speech, memory, emotion and the nervous system, and why people may freeze, panic or become unable to explain themselves during a trigger.
Trauma responses are not weakness or victimhood. They are signs that the brain and body are responding to danger they once learned was real.
Coercive control is not simply about someone being difficult or controlling. It is much more than that. Coercive control is about taking away someone else’s freedom. It involves manipulation, control and other methods, such as intermittent reinforcement, which I wrote about here.
It begins when one person interferes with another person’s freedom to choose, decide and live according to their own needs and values.
This story explores the difference between ordinary control and coercion, and how manipulation, gaslighting and pressure can slowly replace free will.
It also examines why coercive control can appear in relationships, families, workplaces and institutions, often becoming normalised before the person affected fully recognises what is happening.
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