Responding to local tragedy (part 2)
- Michael Remole MA, LCPC, NCC, I/ECHMHC
- Aug 10
- 9 min read
Updated: 7 days ago
How Our Stress Response Systems Help Us — and When They Become Vulnerable
In my last post, I wrote about why a tragedy like this one can affect so many people in a community — not just those on the bus, but parents, classmates, and neighbors who feel connected to what happened.
Today I want to go a layer deeper into what's actually happening in the brain and body during and after something like this — because the same systems that help us survive a crisis are the same systems that can become vulnerable and sensitized in the days and weeks that follow.
A Closer Look at How the Brain Works
Stay with me here while I dig a little deeper into how our brain functions.
We know that the brain is made up of over 86 billion neurons — information transmitters — and roughly ten times that number of glial cells, these help reinforce and streamline the pathways our neurons build based on previous experience. These units collaborate to orchestrate brain-mediated functions (Perry et al., 1995).
Neurons create networks through association and experience, responding to signals from other neurons and establishing systems that govern how we function. The more these associations occur, the more dominant and habitual they become — forming the templates that shape our development, memory, and learning.
This is important, because it means individuals experiencing severe, prolonged, and unpredictable stress may develop a hypersensitive stress response, leading to disorganized brain function. As a result, the "smarter," more complex regions of the brain struggle to override the reactive responses coming from the lower, more primitive regions. Those lower regions are our threat response mechanisms, and their primary job is: maintain safety and balance, whatever it takes.
The Brain Moves Along a Continuum
Bruce D. Perry, MD, PhD, principal of the Neurosequential Network, describes something called state-dependent functioning — the idea that our brain and body move along a continuum in response to threat, ranging from a state of calmness to heightened alertness, alarm, fear, and, in extreme cases, terror. This isn't something we choose or think about. It happens through rapid, unconscious signaling in the brain's core regulatory systems, which are constantly reading information from our bodies and the outside world. These core regulatory networks (dopaminergic, noradrenergic, and serotonergic) are located in the brain's lower regions, and their job is to help keep us safe by guiding our response to novelty, challenge, and threat (Perry, 2017). The level of activation is influenced by one's history and exposure to specific threats. Dr. Perry explains that stress that is extreme or prolonged, unpredictable and uncontrollable, creates a sensitized system. This means those systems that are designed to help keep "balance and safety" become overactive at baseline and overly (and inappropriately) reactive.
You'll notice the image also reflects some general patterns by sex and age — adult males trending toward hyperarousal, and children and females trending toward dissociation. These are tendencies observed across large groups, not rules for any individual. Any child, of any age or sex, can move along either continuum, and often moves along both.
Dr. Perry discusses two universal adaptive stress response continuums that a sensitized system can move rapidly along: hyperarousal (the act out "fight/flight" response) and dissociation (the checked out or a "freeze" response). The hyperarousal response is one we're probably all more familiar with than the dissociative response. The dissociative response is activated when an individual perceives a stressor as an inescapable, unavoidable, and painful situation (Perry, 2017). These response patterns — dissociation and hyperarousal — are always at work in some form, helping us move through everyday stress. Those same systems are what get called on, far more intensely, when we're faced with something as overwhelming as the tragedy our community experienced. Our brains and bodies are very complex, so I don't want to oversimplify this: while we're talking about these two responses separately, we also know that when we're faced with stress, we can use both at the same time.
After the threat has been eliminated, the core regulatory networks play a crucial role in determining the pace of returning to a baseline state. Our brain and body are influenced by factors such as the timing, intensity, and duration of exposure, and determine the rate at which we move toward a state of calm. If we have repeated exposure to evocative cues, it compromises our ability to return to a state of calm. If you think of the continuum calm, alert, alarm, fear, and terror, our stress response systems have determined it is not safe to move all the way down to "calm" and leave us slightly activated at all times.
Here's a really important part: as you move along that continuum toward alarm and fear, and terror, the brain's core regulatory systems begin to shut down the more reflective, "smarter" parts of your brain, and hand control over to more primitive, survival-focused regions. This is not a malfunction — it's your brain doing exactly what it is designed to do. In a moment of real danger, careful reasoning is slower and less useful than fast, automatic survival responses. So your brain prioritizes the response that is most useful in that given situation.
This is why, in the middle of a crisis, you might not be able to think clearly, find your words, or you might act in ways that surprise even you afterward. That's not a failure of character or intelligence — it's your brain prioritizing survival over reflection, exactly as it's built to do.
But losing access to the "smarter" part of the brain isn't the only thing that happens as you move up the continuum. Two other things shift as well, and both matter a great deal for understanding what you might experience in the days and weeks after something like this: your sense of time, and your ability to recall what happened.
Time perception changes. The higher up the continuum (moving towards a state of terror) someone moves, the less reliable their internal sense of time becomes. This is why survivors of the same event will often describe wildly different timelines for what happened. Someone might say, with complete sincerity, "we waited for hours for the ambulance to show up," when the actual time was two or three minutes. This isn't exaggeration and it isn't a lie — it's what an activated brain does with time when it's operating from survival mode rather than its normal reflective state.
Memory becomes harder to access and less reliable. The body often "knows" that something happened — through tension, a racing heart, a sense of dread — well before the mind can find words to explain it. And when you try to recall the details afterward, your memories can be fragmented, out of order, or simply missing pieces and parts. This is also normal. The parts of the brain that are activated during these stressful moments are not good at storing memory.
Understanding this matters for day-to-day life in the aftermath of something like this. If a child's account of what happened doesn't quite add up, or changes from one telling to the next, or a parent insists an event took far longer than it did, that's not that they are lying— it's part of how their brain and body coded the details of the event. It can also affect us in smaller ways day to day: struggling to remember a conversation from earlier, losing track of time during ordinary tasks, or feeling like time is moving strangely. These are signs that a system is still working through elevated activation, not signs that something is wrong with a person's honesty or memory in general.
The Pattern of Stress: Two Directions Our Systems Can Move
Dr. Perry's work includes a simple but powerful framework for understanding this, called the Pattern of Stress. It shows that the same stress response systems can move in one of two directions, depending on the nature of the stress itself.
Stress that is predictable, moderate, and controllable tends to move our systems toward resilience — it's resilience-building, the kind of manageable challenge that helps our systems grow and heal.
Stress that is unpredictable, extreme, and prolonged moves our systems in the opposite direction — toward vulnerability. Perry calls this sensitizing, or dysregulating.
Think about training for a marathon. If you want to run 26.2 miles, you don't start by attempting the full distance. You start with shorter, predictable runs — a couple of miles at a time — and your body adapts. Gradually, those runs get longer and faster, and your body handles them better, because you built that capacity in a predictable, moderate, and controllable way. Over time, what once would have wrecked you becomes manageable. That's resilience-building.
Now imagine deciding today, with no training at all, to run the full 26.2 miles. You might survive it. But what happens to your body? It becomes vulnerable — you're far more likely to get sick, get injured, or face a brutal recovery. The stress wasn't gradual, predictable, or something your body had built the capacity to handle. It was sudden, extreme, and demanded everything all at once. That's sensitizing.
Our stress response systems work the same way. A tragedy like this is the equivalent of that unplanned marathon — sudden, extreme, and completely outside anyone's control. None of us trained for this. So it makes sense that our systems are going to feel it, and it makes sense that recovery will take real time, just like a body recovering from a race it wasn't ready for.
A sudden community tragedy like this one sits squarely on the unpredictable, extreme side of that framework. None of us saw it coming, none of us could control it, and the shock of it doesn't resolve quickly. This is exactly the kind of stress that can push our systems toward sensitization — becoming overactive at baseline and overly, sometimes inappropriately, reactive. In practical terms, this means it takes less to trigger a reaction, and the reaction itself can be bigger than the moment seems to call for.
A student who was on the bus might feel flooded with anxiety at the sound of brakes screeching. A parent might feel a wave of panic when their phone rings unexpectedly, even for something unrelated. These aren't signs of weakness, overreaction, or trying to be manipulative — they're a nervous system doing exactly what it's built to do: staying alert to protect us from something that already hurt us once. The same system that helped someone survive the moment of crisis is now working overtime to prevent it from happening again.
I also want to make sure we recognize that this vulnerability isn't limited to those most directly involved, either. Younger siblings who sense their parents' distress, classmates who weren't on the bus but know the students who were, and adults in the community who feel connected to these families can all find their own stress systems activated. Proximity to the event matters, but so does relational closeness — how connected someone feels to the people affected.
Why This Will Affect Each of Us Differently
None of us walked into this tragedy from the same starting point or baseline (calm, alert, alarm, fear, & terror). The Pattern of Stress framework isn't just about this one event — it reflects the pattern of stress each of our systems has already been shaped by, over a lifetime, before this tragedy ever happened.
Remember that unplanned marathon. For some of us, this tragedy was the first hard mile we'd faced in a while — our systems had spent time in predictable, moderate, controllable stress, building strength and endurance, so we have more in reserve to handle this. But for others, this landed on a body still recovering from a different marathon entirely — one none of the rest of us knew was even happening. Past trauma, chronic stress, an already unpredictable or overwhelming season of life. Your system wasn't rested and ready. It was already tired, already sore, already running on limited reserves, when this new demand hit.
That's why the same event can hit two people so differently. It's not about who is stronger or weaker, more or less resilient as a person. It's about which marathon each of us was already running when this one showed up.
If your or your child's reaction to this feels bigger than you expected, or bigger than what you're seeing in the people around you, that doesn't mean something is wrong with you. It likely means your system was already carrying more before this happened. And if you notice you're moving through this with more steadiness than you expected, that's not a sign you don't care — it may reflect a stress response system that had more resilience already built in.
Understanding this can help us extend more grace to each other in the coming weeks — to the coworker who seems unusually rattled, the parent who can't stop checking on their kids, the student who seems "fine" days later but isn't. We're not all starting from the same place, and we won't all move through this at the same pace.
When to Reach Out for More Support
Most people, most of the time, will move through this with the support of routine, rest, and the people around them. But it's time to connect with a mental health professional trained in trauma if you notice:
Reactions that feel intense or overwhelming, in yourself or your child
Symptoms that persist beyond a few weeks without easing
Sleep, appetite, school performance, or relationships that are consistently disrupted
A child who seems "checked out" for extended periods, or who has stopped engaging in things they used to enjoy
Any signs of hopelessness or thoughts of self-harm — these should never wait
Reaching out for support isn't a sign that something has gone wrong. It's a way of making sure a normal response to an abnormal event doesn't become something a person has to carry alone.
This is Part 2 of a 4-part series. Read Part 1: Understanding the Impact, coming soon Part 3: What Helps Right Now, and Part 4: When the Caregiver Needs Care Too.
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