These attentional biases are made all the more distressing because the original trauma—and subsequent reminders—can sufficiently overwhelm neurological synapses and systems, resulting in malfunction of the hippocampus. Without hippocampus involvement in encoding a memory, information regarding when and where the distressing event occurred may be missing from the memory. Thus, reminders of the original event may not only receive more attention, they also may be experienced as having a “here-and-now” quality eliciting as strong—if not stronger—SNS mediated distress responses as the original event. Also overwhelmed in processing a traumatic event or its reminders are important language centers of the brain, suggesting the possibility of less conscious (less language) processing of the event and its meaning and also suggesting greater negative emotion is associated with the memories that are encoded. Consequently, it is quite understandable that memories undercontextualized for mitigating factors and overladen with negative emotion may elicit shame when publicly recounted—or when encountering unanticipated adverse reactions when publicly recounted. Shame, especially if perceived as a threat, is liable to make a person who does not have PTSD defensive and to make a person with PTSD vulnerable to a renewal of PTSD re-experiencing and arousal symptoms, including dissociation.

Asking students to assume positions of such physiological and psychological vulnerability is not warranted in the first-year composition classroom.