"People who grew up in chaotic environments - volatile parents, financial instability, emotional unpredictability - spent their formative years in a permanent state of low-grade emergency. Their nervous systems were trained on crisis the way a pilot is trained on turbulence simulators. Except the simulator was their childhood. And nobody debriefed them afterward."
"Psychologist Bessel van der Kolk's research on trauma and the body shows that individuals exposed to chronic stress in childhood develop fundamentally different stress-response patterns. Their amygdala - the brain's alarm system - doesn't overreact to new threats in the same way. Not because it's healthier. Because it's exhausted. It's been ringing since age six."
"What looks like calm is often a deeply wired dissociative competence. The body learned long ago: panicking doesn't help. Reading the room does. Controlling what you can does. Going still - while everything around you falls apart - does."
People perceived as calm under pressure typically developed this trait through childhood exposure to chaotic, unstable environments rather than inherent personality traits. Their nervous systems were conditioned by chronic stress, training their amygdala to become desensitized to emergencies. Research by psychologist Bessel van der Kolk demonstrates that individuals exposed to childhood trauma develop different stress-response patterns, where workplace crises register as familiar rather than novel threats. This apparent composure represents dissociative competence—a learned survival mechanism where the body prioritizes controlled responses over panic. However, this outward calm carries hidden psychological costs that emerge during quieter moments following crises, creating a disconnect between professional performance and internal wellbeing.
#trauma-and-stress-response #workplace-psychology #crisis-management #childhood-development #mental-health
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