Trauma
How it impacts our lives, brains, and bodies
Trauma happens to every single person. It can be big or small. It can be long-term or short-term. Trauma is a great equalizer: it plays no favorites, and it doesn’t discriminate - socioeconomic level, gender, race, ethnicity, disability, religious affiliation, sexual orientation, or any other categorization. Not all trauma is traumatic – meaning the brain is able to file it away appropriately with no issue. For traumatic experiences, the brain, body, and mind are changed at the cellular level.
“But traumatic experiences do leave traces […]. [It] leaves traces on our minds and emotions, on our capacity for joy and intimacy, and even on our biology and immune systems. Trauma affects not only those who are directly exposed to it, but also those around them.”
“It takes tremendous energy to keep functioning while carrying the memory of terror, and the shame of utter weakness and vulnerability.”
Trauma, by its very essence, is excruciating and impossible. Those who experience debilitating trauma and are able to continue living are incredibly strong.
Trauma and Our Brains
The brain is constantly undergoing shaping and pruning of nerves and neural pathways. “Fire together, wire together” is a concept that adequately describes how our brains connect, shape, and maintain their ability to remember information.
When a circuit fires repeatedly, it can become a default setting – the response mostly likely to occur.
If you feel safe and loved, your brain becomes specialized in exploration, play, and cooperation.
If you feel frightened and unwanted, your brain becomes specialized in managing feelings of fear and abandonment.
Trauma produces actual physiological changes: including a recalibration of the brain’s alarm system, an increase in stress hormone activity, and alterations in the system that filters relevant information from irrelevant. Specifically, trauma compromises the brain area that communicates the physical, embodied feelings of being alive.
Trauma also damages the imagination centers of the brain. Imagination allows us to shape and change our existence by giving us fantasy and escape. It helps us expand our creativity and see a world full of possibilities. Without imagination, our worlds become dark, stagnant, and closed. Without imagination, there is no hope, no chance to envision a better future, no place to go, and no goal to reach.
Trauma results in a system-wide reorganization of wiring which affects not only how our brains work, but how we think, what we think about, and even our ability to think at all. Another structure that undergoes transformation is the nervous system. This is the system by which all nerve signals are routed through the body. The ability to breathe, laugh, move your legs, hug, kiss, digest food, and sleep are functions of the nervous system.
Trauma and Our Bodies
Traumatized people chronically feel unsafe inside their bodies: the past is alive in the form of gnawing interior discomfort. Their bodies are constantly bombarded by visceral warning signs, and, in an attempt to control these processes, they often become expert at ignoring their gut feelings and in numbing awareness of what is playing out inside them.
The price for ignoring or distorting the body’s messages is being unable to detect what is truly dangerous or harmful for you, and just as bad, what is safe or nourishing. Self-regulation depends on a having a friendly relationship with your body. Without it you have to rely on external regulation – from medication, drugs and/or alcohol, constant reassurance, or compulsive compliance with the wishes of others.
Suppressing our inner cries for help does not stop our stress hormones from mobilizing the body.
Somatic (body/physical) symptoms for which no clear physical basis can be found are ubiquitous in traumatized children and adults. They can include chronic back and neck pain, fibromyalgia, migraines, digestive problems, spastic colon/irritable bowl syndrome, chronic fatigue, and some forms of asthma.
While human contact and attunement are the wellspring of physiological self-regulation, the promise of closeness often evokes fear of getting hurt, betrayed, and abandoned for those suffering from trauma. Shame plays an important role in this. Unresolved trauma can take a terrible toll on relationships.
The most natural way that we humans calm down our distress is by being touched, hugged, and rocked. This helps with excess arousal and makes us feel intact, safe, protected, and in charge. Those who have been physically or sexually violated face a dilemma: they desperately crave touch while simultaneously being terrified of body contact.
Just like you can thirst for water, you can thirst for touch. It is a comfort to be met confidently, deeply, firmly, gently, responsively. Mindful touch and movement grounds people and allows them to discover tensions that they may have held for so long that they are no longer even aware of them. When you are touched, you wake up to the part of your body that is being touched.
“The message that underlies healing is simple yet radical: we are already whole. Underneath our fears and worries, unaffected by the many layers of our conditioning and actions is a peaceful core. The work of healing is peeling away the barriers of fear that keep us unaware of our true nature of love, peace, and rich interconnection with the web of life. Healing is the rediscovery of who we are and who we have always been.”