Dancing on the Edge

The amygdala is the part of your brain that processes emotion.  It also handles survival instincts and memory.  The case here shows what happened when the amygdala was damaged by trauma.

There are two such amygdala centers, one for each brain lobe.  They are small almond shaped clusters.  The white paper starts as follows:

The amygdala was damaged when a perfect storm of emotional and financial crisis hit, and fear responses were also triggered. To complete the storm a strong electrical attack, a brainwave storm crashed the amygdala.

The subject was left emotionally devastated and unable to process all that had happened.  The fight or flight response (survival instinct) kicked in and she fled her life and then completely deleted all memories related to the incident.  Thus we have emotion, fear, and memory all triggered and interacting through a damaged amygdala.  The shattered amygdala remained unable to process emotion or feel compassion for decades.

Upon finally healing and breaching the brain scars the subject began to recall the events and process the emotion. She found her own personality was unrecognizable to herself as were her life choices and goals.  She mourned the life she felt she lost when she lost herself.

She integrated her new personality with the injured self and began to process the grief.

She remembered the sense of failure from losing her husband’s love.  Her next relationship blew up in her face when the man she was falling in love with angrily rejected her.  He thought she had betrayed him and his reaction stunned and intimidated her.  That was when she found herself on the emotional edge, deflated and wounded, retreating to her home.  At that point she experienced utter shock when the final wave hit, the electrical storm.  She saw the angry emotional wave come at her and felt it pass through her being.  She was destroyed.

All humans are connected through the collective unconscious, and she saw the thought-waves that wished to sever ties.  Like knives, they severed every emotional tie and she was left bereft.

The ship of her psyche could not be repaired as it limped home, and it never found port but remained adrift and lost on the sea of consciousness for many decades.  Until the hull and decks could be repaired and the ship pumped free of its emotional overload, it could not sail home again.

She remembered dancing with him.  She remembered making up after their blowout.  She had forgotten that he wanted her back.  She left him waiting for her as she forgot to return home.

Sometimes this is called a fugue, when people just forget their lives and walk away from everyone they know.  They sometimes are found decades later with entirely new lives.  Since she was alone in a strange city, feeling abandoned by her family, husband and friends, no one knew she had done this.  Her amygdala surgically deleted all stressful memories of that place in time, everything that could trigger a memory of him was behind that door, the emotional door he had closed in her face.

And though he searched for her for years he could not find her.