Choosing Emotions Research Notes — No. 1: Trauma
By D. Earl (“Doug”) Johnston
Prepared August 14, 2026 — starting point: Johnston’s own experience, query, and research regarding the trauma/”tilt” hypothesis for Choosing Emotions (2025)
Purpose of This Paper
D. Earl (“Doug”) Johnston has proposed, in his original query and framing reproduced below, a synthesis and working model about trauma developed originally for Choosing Emotions. This paper restates that synthesis precisely as offered, sets it in the context of the author’s own lived research, and then examines it against the clinical and academic literature — noting where it is well supported, where it should be qualified, and where genuine scholarly disagreement exists. Every claim below is either general scientific consensus or is anchored to a well-regarded named researcher and publication so that it can be independently verified before any language is adapted. This is the first in a series of research notes prepared for the Choosing Emotions Media Room.
Author’s Note: Genesis of This Synthesis
This synthesis and model did not begin in a library or on-line. It began with hundreds of hours of the author’s own therapy, spent learning — slowly, and often the hard way with dedicated effort — to attach words to scenes of overwhelm that had, until then, been carried a lifetime without articulation. The working hypothesis below was formed from that lived, first-person process, long before its author encountered and pursued the clinical and research literature that follows.
Only afterward, in the course of researching Choosing Emotions, did it become clear that clinicians and researchers — starting with Pierre Janet in 1889, and continuing through Bessel van der Kolk, Judith Herman, Stephen Porges, Elizabeth Stanley, James Pennebaker, Jill Bolte Taylor, and others — had been independently mapping much of the same territory for well over a century. That convergence, arrived at from two entirely different directions — one clinical and personal, one academic and empirical — is the reason this synthesis is offered here: not as a claim to have discovered something new, but as documentation that a body of hard-won personal experience holds up against, and is illuminated by, more than a century of independent scientific research.
Johnston’s Original Query and Model — Verbatim, in Full
The following is reproduced as written, word for word, as the starting point for this entire paper:
“From my book Choosing Emotions I have made and developed some observations and aphorisms – one of the key areas has been about trauma. It feels supportable to me that trauma is a condition of overwhelm where our emotional system effectively ’tilts’ and shuts down either wholly (unconsciousness) or partially (in and out, and often without full awareness). I note that Bessel van der Kolk and others have commented on all trauma being ‘preverbal’ and that the solution can be, after the fact, to attach at last the descriptive, narrative words to the ‘speechless’ trauma event. In my view, the human nervous system/emotional system, which has a priority of protecting us, has effectively ‘failed’ or been temporarily overcome in a traumatic episode, and so it prioritizes repetitive fixations on ‘what really happened.’ (See Kahneman (?) or Haidt (?)about how our nervous system prioritizes negative information.) When those words are carefully recovered or assigned to more adequately explain the blanks in the victim’s memory, the fixations and fear often fade, and the ‘terrifying’ event is replaced by a calmer ‘bad memory’ which the person comes to regard as having overcome. And so life moves forward more freely without crippling fixations and debilitating gaps in memories and words.”
Johnston’s query (verbatim in substance): “Please review and examine the observation and synthesis, citing clinical and/or MD/PhD works which are either supporting or challenging.”