Lost Time – Losing Our Sense Of Time Passing When Trauma Is Involved
How Trauma Affects Our Sense of Time
Primary Category: Scam Victim Recovery Psychology
Authors:
• Vianey Gonzalez B.Sc(Psych) – Psychologist, Certified Deception Professional, Psychology Advisory Panel & Director of the Society of Citizens Against Relationship Scams Inc.
• Tim McGuinness, Ph.D. – Anthropologist, Scientist, Director of the Society of Citizens Against Relationship Scams Inc.
About This Article
Disrupted time perception is a significant issue for individuals who have experienced profound psychological trauma, such as victims of relationship scams. This phenomenon occurs when the brain’s ability to perceive and process the passage of time is altered, often making past traumatic events feel as though they happened more recently than they actually did.
Several processes in the brain contribute to this distortion. The hippocampus, which is crucial for memory formation and organizing events chronologically, can be affected by trauma, leading to disorganized or fragmented memories. The amygdala, responsible for processing emotions, can heighten the emotional intensity of these memories, making them more vivid and seemingly recent.
This effect is compounded by cognitive biases, such as the recency effect, where the brain prioritizes and frequently recalls emotionally charged events, further skewing the sense of time. Strategies to address disrupted time perception include trauma-focused therapies like Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) and Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), mindfulness practices, grounding techniques, and support from mental health professionals.
By engaging in these interventions, victims can begin to restore a more accurate sense of time, process their trauma, and move forward in their recovery. Understanding and addressing this aspect of trauma is crucial for helping individuals reclaim their lives and mental well-being.
Losing Our Sense of Time After Trauma – How Time Seems to Disappear for Scam Victims
When we lose our sense of time, particularly in situations where a significant stressful event occurs like a scam, things can feel like they happened more recently than they did. When this happens several processes in the brain are involved. This phenomenon is often linked to how the brain processes memory, emotions, and trauma.
Time Sense – Our Perception of Time
Time Sense: Memory Encoding and Retrieval
Hippocampus and Memory Consolidation: The hippocampus, a critical region for memory formation, plays a role in encoding and consolidating memories. When an event is emotionally charged or traumatic, the brain might encode these memories more vividly. However, the way these memories are stored and retrieved can affect our perception of time. The brain doesn’t always store memories in a linear fashion, and during retrieval, these memories can feel fresher or more recent, particularly if they are frequently revisited or associated with strong emotions.
Re-experiencing and Memory: Traumatic events can cause the brain to repeatedly re-experience or recall the memory, which can distort the sense of time. The brain’s repeated engagement with the memory can create the illusion that the event happened more recently than it did.
Time Sense: Emotional Impact
Amygdala and Emotional Intensity: The amygdala, which processes emotions, especially those related to fear and anxiety, is highly active during traumatic events. The strong emotional impact of a scam can lead to a heightened state of awareness, making the memory of the event more prominent in your mind. This heightened emotional state can blur the passage of time because the brain is repeatedly engaged with the emotional aspects of the memory.
Emotional Numbing and Time Perception: Conversely, after trauma, individuals might experience emotional numbing or dissociation, where the passage of time feels distorted. This can result in large chunks of time passing without the usual markers of memory, making the event seem closer in time when recalled.
Time Sense: Trauma and Temporal Distortion
Trauma and Disrupted Time Perception: Trauma can disrupt the brain’s normal time perception mechanisms. The brain may struggle to integrate the traumatic event into the chronological flow of life, causing a sense of temporal disorientation. This can make it feel as though the event happened more recently than it actually did because the brain hasn’t fully processed or contextualized the event within the broader timeline of one’s life.
Flashbacks and Time-Freezing: Trauma can also lead to flashbacks or intrusive memories, where the individual feels as though they are re-living the event. This can make the event feel immediate and ongoing, rather than something that occurred in the past. The intensity of these experiences can distort the sense of time passing.
Time Sense:: Cognitive Biases and Memory Reconstruction
Recency Effect: Cognitive biases, such as the recency effect (where more recent events are remembered more vividly), can make the brain prioritize recent memories over older ones. If a traumatic event is continually revisited in thought or triggers strong emotions, the brain might treat it as if it were recent, even if it occurred a while ago.
Memory Gaps and Time Compression: Trauma can cause gaps in memory, where the brain doesn’t fully process or encode details of time passing. This can lead to a compression of time, where months or even years seem to shrink, making the event seem more recent.
The brain’s perception of time is complex and can be significantly affected by trauma and emotional experiences. When a person loses their sense of time, particularly in relation to a traumatic event like a scam, it often involves disruptions in memory processing, emotional intensity, and cognitive biases. Understanding these processes can provide insight into why certain events may feel more recent than they are and highlight the importance of addressing trauma in a way that helps the brain process and contextualizes these experiences properly.
Disrupted Time Perception: An Overview
Disrupted Time Perception refers to a phenomenon where an individual’s ability to accurately perceive the passage of time is altered, often due to psychological factors such as trauma, stress, or intense emotional experiences. This disruption can manifest in various ways, such as feeling that time is moving faster or slower than usual, or perceiving events as more recent or distant than they actually are.
How Disrupted Time Perception Works in the Mind
Neurological Basis of Time Perception
Temporal Processing in the Brain: Time perception is believed to be managed by multiple brain regions, including the basal ganglia, prefrontal cortex, and parietal cortex. These areas are responsible for integrating sensory information, memories, and emotional states to create a coherent sense of time.
Role of the Hippocampus and Amygdala: The hippocampus is crucial for memory formation and retrieval, helping to organize events chronologically. The amygdala, which processes emotions, can influence how memories are encoded and retrieved, particularly under stress or trauma. When these systems are dysregulated—such as after a traumatic event—the perception of time can be distorted.
Impact of Trauma on Time Perception
Trauma and Time Dilation/Compression: Trauma can cause significant alterations in time perception. During a traumatic event, the brain often enters a heightened state of arousal, driven by the sympathetic nervous system. This arousal can cause time to feel like it’s slowing down (time dilation), as the brain processes more information per unit of time, leading to a more detailed encoding of the event.
Post-Traumatic Effects: After the trauma, individuals may experience time compression, where large periods may seem to have passed quickly. This is particularly common in those with PTSD, where the brain’s normal processing of time can be disrupted by intrusive memories or flashbacks, making recent events feel distant or vice versa.
Cognitive and Psychological Factors
Dissociation: During traumatic or highly stressful events, some people experience dissociation, a mental process where they feel detached from their body or surroundings. This can create a sense of timelessness or confusion about the sequence of events, contributing to disrupted time perception.
Memory Reprocessing: The way memories are reprocessed and integrated into the self-concept can also affect time perception. Traumatic memories are often re-experienced with intense emotion, which can lead to a distortion in how recently the event seems to have occurred. The brain’s default mode network (DMN), which is active during self-referential thought, can be heavily involved in re-experiencing and reshaping these memories, further distorting time perception.
Emotional and Physiological Influence
Stress and Cortisol: Chronic stress and elevated levels of cortisol can impair the hippocampus, affecting memory formation and time perception. When under stress, the brain prioritizes immediate survival, which can distort the perception of how much time is passing.
Emotional Intensity: Emotions can significantly skew time perception. Intense emotions—whether fear, sadness, or happiness—can cause time to seem to drag on or speed up. Emotional experiences are often more vividly remembered, which can make events associated with strong emotions feel more recent or significant than they are.
Real-World Examples and Implications
PTSD and Time Perception: Individuals with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) often report feeling as though the traumatic event is still occurring or happened very recently, even if it was years ago. This can be due to flashbacks or intrusive memories that vividly bring the past into the present, disrupting the normal flow of time in the mind.
Stressful Life Events: People who experience significant life stressors (e.g., divorce, job loss, or natural disasters) may find that their sense of time is altered during and after the event. The intensity of the emotional experience can lead to a perception that time has either stood still or flown by.
Disrupted time perception is a complex interplay between the brain’s neural mechanisms, emotional state, and psychological processes. Trauma, stress, and strong emotions can all profoundly affect how we perceive the passage of time, leading to experiences where past events feel unnervingly close or distant. Understanding these mechanisms helps in recognizing the effects of trauma on our mental state and can guide therapeutic approaches to help individuals regain a more balanced perception of time.
A Related Function: Déjà Vu
Déjà vu, the sensation that an event currently being experienced has already been experienced in the past, is not typically considered an artifact of disrupted time perception. However, there are overlapping elements between the two phenomena that might suggest some connection in how the brain processes time, memory, and experience.
Understanding Déjà Vu
Memory System Anomalies: Déjà vu is generally thought to result from anomalies in the brain’s memory systems. One prominent theory suggests that déjà vu occurs when there is a slight delay in processing sensory information between different parts of the brain, leading to the false impression that the current experience has already been stored in memory.
Temporal Lobe Involvement: Research indicates that the temporal lobe, particularly the hippocampus, which is involved in memory formation, plays a key role in déjà vu. The sensation might be related to the brain’s attempt to reconcile a mismatch between the sensory input and the retrieval of similar past experiences.
Dual-Processing Theories: Another explanation for déjà vu involves dual-processing theories, where the brain processes the same information along two different pathways. If these pathways get out of sync, it can create the illusion of familiarity, as if the experience had occurred before.
Connection to Disrupted Time Perception
While déjà vu and disrupted time perception are distinct phenomena, they both involve complex interactions between memory, perception, and brain processing. Here’s how they might be related:
Temporal Distortions: Disrupted time perception, especially in the context of trauma or stress, can alter how the brain encodes and retrieves memories. In situations where time perception is distorted, the brain might misinterpret the timing of events, contributing to a feeling of déjà vu.
Memory Fragmentation: In cases of disrupted time perception, particularly under stress or trauma, memories can become fragmented or disjointed. This might lead to a situation where the brain mistakenly perceives a new experience as familiar, possibly due to a fragmented memory from a similar situation, leading to a déjà vu experience.
Cognitive Processing Anomalies: Both déjà vu and disrupted time perception involve anomalies in how the brain processes and interprets experiences. While disrupted time perception usually involves a broader distortion of time awareness, déjà vu might represent a more specific misfire in the brain’s processing of time and memory.
While déjà vu is not directly caused by disrupted time perception, the two phenomena share underlying cognitive processes related to memory and perception. Both involve the brain’s interpretation of time and experiences, and disruptions in these processes can lead to altered perceptions of time and reality. Further research is needed to fully understand the connections between these experiences, but the overlap in cognitive and neurological mechanisms suggests that they are related aspects of how the brain processes the flow of time and memory.
Disrupted Time Perception in Relationship Scam Victims
Disrupted Time Perception is a common experience for individuals who have undergone profound psychological trauma, such as victims of relationship scams. This phenomenon involves a distortion in the way time is perceived, where past events, particularly traumatic ones, may feel as if they occurred much more recently than they actually did. This distortion is often linked to the brain’s processing of trauma and its impact on memory, emotion, and cognition.
Overview
Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and significant trauma can disrupt time perception in several ways, including:
Slowing down: Traumatic events can slow down time perception, which can intensify negative feelings. For example, a person may feel like every day is a week.
Distorting: Trauma can cause a distorted sense of time, making it feel like a traumatic event is happening again, even though it has already passed. This is because trauma affects how the brain processes and stores memories.
Overestimating: People with PTSD may overestimate time, especially when processing non-emotional stimuli. This may be linked to impairments in working memory and attention.
Blackouts: People with PTSD may experience blackouts, which can include losing track of time. Other signs of a blackout include making or sending calls that they don’t remember, and feeling an unexpected adrenaline rush afterward.
How Disrupted Time Perception Functions in Trauma
Impact of Trauma on the Brain
Memory Encoding and Retrieval: During traumatic events, the brain’s usual processes for encoding and retrieving memories can be significantly altered. The hippocampus, which plays a crucial role in organizing memories chronologically, may be affected by the intense emotional responses mediated by the amygdala. As a result, memories of the traumatic event may not be properly integrated into the brain’s normal timeline, leading to the sensation that the event happened recently, even if considerable time has passed.
Emotional Intensity and Re-experiencing: Trauma can cause certain memories to be re-experienced with the same emotional intensity as when the event first occurred. This re-experiencing can make the trauma feel as though it is still present, disrupting the perception of time and making it difficult for the individual to process the event as something in the past.
Cognitive and Psychological Effects
Cognitive Dissonance: Victims of relationship scams often struggle with cognitive dissonance, where the reality of being deceived conflicts with their self-concept and beliefs about the relationship. This dissonance can lead to rumination, where the brain repeatedly revisits the trauma, preventing the individual from moving forward and creating the illusion that the scam occurred more recently than it did.
Trauma-Related Dissociation: In some cases, the brain may respond to trauma by dissociating, a defense mechanism that can involve a sense of detachment from time and reality. This dissociation can result in significant gaps in memory or an altered sense of time, further complicating the individual’s ability to process the trauma.
Strategies to Minimize Disrupted Time Perception and Aid Recovery
Trauma-Focused Therapy
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT): CBT, particularly trauma-focused CBT, helps individuals reframe their thoughts and reduce the power of traumatic memories. By addressing the distorted thoughts and feelings related to the trauma, CBT can help re-establish a more accurate perception of time and promote healing.
Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR): EMDR is another effective therapy that helps reprocess traumatic memories, reducing their emotional impact and allowing the brain to integrate them more effectively into the broader timeline of life events. This can diminish the sensation of time distortion.
Mindfulness and Grounding Techniques
Mindfulness Practices: Mindfulness exercises help individuals focus on the present moment, which can counteract the brain’s tendency to ruminate on past trauma. By anchoring oneself in the present, individuals can begin to reclaim their sense of time and reduce the feeling that past events are still occurring.
Grounding Techniques: Grounding techniques, such as focusing on sensory experiences or practicing deep breathing, can help reconnect the individual with the present and create a clearer distinction between past and present events.
Support Networks and Psychoeducation
Support Groups: Engaging with support groups, either in-person or online, can provide victims with a sense of community and understanding. Sharing experiences with others who have faced similar trauma can normalize the healing process and help reframe the perception of time.
Psychoeducation: Learning about how trauma affects the brain and time perception can empower individuals to recognize and challenge their distorted perceptions. Understanding that these experiences are a common response to trauma can reduce feelings of isolation and help in recovery.
Medication and Professional Support
Antidepressants and Anxiolytics: In some cases, medication may be prescribed to help manage symptoms of anxiety, depression, or PTSD, which can exacerbate disrupted time perception. These medications can stabilize mood and reduce the intensity of trauma-related symptoms, making it easier for the brain to process and move beyond the traumatic event.
Professional Support: Regular sessions with a therapist, psychiatrist, or counselor who specializes in trauma can provide ongoing support and strategies to cope with disrupted time perception and other trauma-related challenges.
Disrupted time perception is a significant challenge for victims of relationship scams, rooted in the brain’s response to trauma. Addressing this issue requires a combination of therapeutic interventions, mindfulness practices, support networks, and, in some cases, medication. By engaging in these strategies, individuals can begin to restore a more accurate sense of time, process their trauma, and move forward in their recovery. Recognizing the impact of trauma on time perception is an important step in helping victims reclaim their lives and mental well-being.
References
Here are some key research that explore the concept of disrupted time perception, particularly in the context of trauma and psychological processes:
- https://www.sciencenews.org/article/trauma-distorts-time-self-new-therapy
- https://www.fermatapsychotherapy.com/blog/2023/4/14/how-trauma-affects-our-sense-of-time
- https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38032630/
- https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/feeling-relating-existing/201510/trauma-destroys-time
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9898469/
- https://www.psypost.org/trauma-induced-temporal-disintegration-plays-a-role-in-shaping-how-people-anticipate-the-future/
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Note about Mindfulness: Mindfulness practices have the potential to create psychological distress for some individuals. Please consult a mental health professional or experienced meditation instructor for guidance should you encounter difficulties.
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