02/06/2022
Understanding Trauma and its Treatment
Long-lasting responses to trauma result not simply from the experience of fear and helplessness but from how our bodies interpret those experiences.
Rachel Yehuda
We don’t survive trauma as a result of conscious decision-making. At the moment of life threat, humans automatically rely upon survival instincts. Our five senses pick up the signs of imminent danger, causing the brain to turn on the adrenaline stress response system. As we prepare to fight or flee, heart rate and respiration speed oxygen to muscle tissue, and the thinking brain, our frontal cortex, is inhibited to increase response time. We are in survival mode, in our animal brains. Later, we may pay a price for these instinctive responses: we have made it without bearing witness to our own experience.
Afterward, we are left with an inadequate record of what happened, no felt sense of its being over and little awareness of how we endured it. If we have immediate support and safety afterward, we may be left shaken, but the events will feel behind us. If the events have been recurrent or we are young and vulnerable or have inadequate support, we can be left with a host of intense responses and symptoms that tell the story without words and without the knowledge that we are remembering events and feelings from long ago. Worse yet, the survival response system may become chronically activated, resulting in long-term feelings of alarm and danger, tendencies to flee or fight under stress, debilitating feelings of vulnerability and exhaustion, or an inability to assert and protect ourselves. To make the challenge even greater, therapeutic approaches that emphasize talking about the events often result in more, not less, activation of trauma responses and symptoms.-
Janina Fisher
