Dr. Don Wood explains how chronic stress and trauma impair learning and memory. His wife, despite high intelligence, couldn't focus or retain information due to childhood trauma and hyper-vigilance, but recovered with proper intervention to become an excellent researcher. These deficits are reversible.
Chapters
I talk to a lot of people who will tell me that I wasn't a very good student in school. My wife is a perfect example. She said, I'm a b. C student. I never really did very well in school. She was actually brilliant. She's super intelligent. But she was living in a traumatic household. So because she lived in that traumatic household, her system was on constant stress mode. She was in hyper vigilance. And so when that happens, that affects your ability to learn. You can't focus on. She said to me, well, school was so easy for you. Well, of course it was easy for me. I had no stress in my home. I wasn't worried about what's going to happen when I get home or what happened to me last night where she had this constant fear that she was living with. I said, you had nowhere to rest. You were in constant flight. If your home isn't the safe place to come back and rest, you can't get that ability to learn and recharge. So let me give you a really good simple example to explain this. So say you're traveling or you're just in the mall and you're with your spouse or your partner and somebody comes up to you that you know, you can't remember their name. You know the face, you know the voice. And they walk up to you and you want to introduce them. But now how embarrassing this is that you can't come up with their name in that moment. You should be able to. Your mind is going to start racing trying to remember their name. Now what have you done? You put stress on the system and you can't remember their name no matter how hard you're trying. After they walk away, you go, george. It was George. How, how could I not remember George? Well, because you're under stress. The great news about this is this isn't permanent. So it's absolutely treatable. It's absolutely fixable. My wife being a great example, she used to say I could read a page in a book and then not remember what I just read. I'd have to reread it again. Now she's my best researcher. Everything is fixable.
