How Trauma Impacts You

If you’ve ever experienced a traumatic event, you know that it is a frightening thing. It shatters your beliefs about the world and how it works, leaving you to rethink deeply held beliefs. You may begin to be distrustful of others. You can even begin to lose hope that life will ever be good again.

Before we dive into what happens in trauma, I want to state up front that there is hope that life can be different. You don’t have to only survive; you can once again thrive.

Trauma and the Brain

Trauma, by definition, is going to leave a lasting imprint in your biology (see this article regarding feeling strong emotions). The thing that makes trauma so scary is that it overwhelms your brain’s ability to cope with the experience. Trauma impacts key structures in the brain underlying emotional regulation. More specifically, trauma causes the emotional brain, or limbic area, to constantly hijack the rational mind. When this happens, your prefrontal cortex (the thinking part of the brain) goes offline while your amygdala is constantly sounding the alarm of danger. If you’d like a quick overview of what happens in the brain, you can view Dr. Dan Siegel’s hand model of the brain here.

When your amygdala gets activated, there are a lot of things happening in the brain in regard to trauma. The thalamus (which is a part of the emotional brain) decides which incoming sensory information is and is not relevant and then it sends the information to different parts of the brain. But in trauma, the thalamus is overwhelmed, and sensory fragments don’t get organized correctly. The hippocampus (also a part of the emotional brain) shuts down which inhibits the coherent narrative (one that has a beginning, a middle, and an end) from being formed which causes problems with the accurate storage and retrieval of memories.

Why You Feel Activated

Instead, trauma gets stored as separate sensory details in the limbic part of the brain (the emotional brain). In trauma, precognitive circuits are activated, and because of the release of hormones, fragmented details get strongly imprinted. Therefore, sounds or smells can be highly activating. Trauma gets stored in the brain and makes it difficult for the survivor to describe because explicit memories rely on the hippocampus linking sensory components of a memory. It also relies on Broca’s area in the left frontal lobe which is needed to help us put words to our experience.

Flashbacks

When the brain is overwhelmed and the memory is not encoded properly, flashbacks can feel as if the trauma is happening all over again. It feels as if it is happening in the present moment and not something that happened in the past. Basically, your biology takes control as your brain decides if you will go into a fight, flight, freeze, or faint state. It’s not the thinking part of the brain that decides which state you enter because thinking time would take away from survival time. It all happens without conscious awareness as the brain attempts to keep you safe.

Calming the Body

So, to help you feel better, we have to calm the brain and get you connected to healthy resources. If you’ve ever tried to think your way to a feeling of safety, you know it doesn’t work because we have to actually feel the safety in our body. Therefore, we use body-based techniques like deep breathing, movement, and progressive muscle relaxation to help quiet the emotional brain and send signals of safety. These approaches help to shift the body out of a fight-or-flight state and activate the calming part of the nervous system.

Connection

Another important piece that trauma disrupts is our ability to connect. After trauma, we can become distrustful of others, ourselves, and our body as an attempt to stay safe and protect ourselves. The problem is that we are hard-wired for connection. Healing doesn’t happen in a vacuum; it happens when we are connected to ourselves, our body, God, and others. Therefore, healing involves reconnecting. This happens through knowing and understanding yourself, through building healthy relationships, and developing a rich emotional life that is tended to with compassion and care.

Hope is Here

I know it can feel scary to think about these things and that’s why counseling can be a great place to start. It’s a setting that is geared toward giving you what you need as you develop the tolerance to hold yourself with love, compassion, and respect. If you are someone who has not been able to process traumatic events from your past, feel free to reach out here for a free consultation. Your new life is waiting for you to engage it!