Trauma Resonators

I maintain that the universe is just a big wave-function and that our brains are more or less resonators.

I haven't read too deeply into the signal processing literature, but entrainment, sympathetic resonance, and signal transmission are (though not all directly related to signal processing) incredibly useful when thinking about trauma.

In communication, we're constantly sending and receiving signals. We often talk about not being on the same wavelength with someone, and I think there's something real there.

When signals are transmitted via antennae, one of the ways they're able to transmit and receive the signal is more or less that they're the same shape  Antennae of the same material, size, shape, etc are the most able to clearly transmit signals between each other.

People's "antennae" are their body-minds. When the body-mind is regulated, communication is clear because there's a clear resonant match between the sender and receiver. With trauma present in the body-mind, subtle patterns of tension or "leaky" loops of neural activation lead to tense bodies , knotted brains, and communication breakdowns.

In more signally language: Trauma creates resonant structures in the brain that generate anti-noise when hit by a clear signal.

This looks like someone's past trauma causing them to react to an innocuous question in a less-than-graceful way. They're "triggered" (which is language that always makes me cringe a little) by words that aren't transmitting any of what they're "picking up on"- the negative reaction is coming entirely from them.

Being on the same wavelength is like being two coupled antennae. Both parties have similar enough resonant structures that information flows clearly. The signal is received more or less as it was sent.

If the receiver's mind and body aren't clear (if they have enough unprocessed trauma), they won't be able to pick up on the signal cleanly. They might even interpret the signal as a different signal.

Worse still, if their trauma is severe enough, it can generate anti-noise in response to a clear signal! This tends to be where "hurt people hurt people". The receiver perceives an attack and launches a counter attack!

This type of interaction can play out like this:

Sender: I like your shirt. (Neutral)
Receiver: You're such a dick! (Anger at perceived sarcasm)

The above reads as comical, but the feedback loop of wounding and acting from wounds creates a society that harms more than it heals. Letting your trauma resonators dump the equivalent of a car battery's worth of emotional charge into someone is generally bad form. Worse, it creates norms around doing so.

Paired with desensitization, the habit of releasing bursts of anti-noise at perceived slights bleeds out into the world and participates in amplifying a feedback loop of harm. It's an eye for an eye along the entire pecking order.

Aphoristically, an eye for an eye leads to a lack of vision. Thus, attenuating trauma resonators and starting to repair them seems in order.

We can more or less treat trauma resonators as if they're neural structures that trigger the creation of anti-noise (a negative/harmful reaction) via some biophysical process. I'm also partial to referring to these as mental "knots" that need to be "massaged out" or "untangled".

The knotted trauma resonators can be un-knotted by a process that's similar to chi gong, yoga, intuitive movement, and somatics (among other things.) Intuitively feeling and moving through patterns of tension in the body maps to undoing the mental knots that underlie trauma resonators. There are entire spiritual traditions and systems of practice here, so I'll leave it at that.

As trauma resonators are massaged and stretched and danced out of your body, you very much get "out of your own way". Untangling the knots of trauma resonators frees up a huge load of mental energy and stops the negative feedback loops from propagating. You do less emotional damage (no car battery shocks!) and lower the signal load on other people's antennae.

When there are less signals flying around, there's more space to really get a clear signal and act more easily.  Taken to its extreme, this creates a feedback loop in the opposite direction as the trauma resonator's. Instead, you can become an amplifier for a clear signal.