Dr. Andrey Laugman

30/11/2025

Mechanics: Why Psychosomatic Symptoms Choose You

Your chronic pain has no medical explanation, yet it's devastatingly real and disabling every day. Migraines, digestive chaos, skin conditions specialists can't diagnose - your body speaks trauma's language whilst doctors find nothing wrong.

Psychosomatic manifestations don't appear randomly in bodies; they emerge through precise interaction of multiple predisposing factors operating simultaneously together. These elements create the conditions under which emotional distress translates into physical symptoms your medical tests cannot capture or explain adequately. Think of them as stage settings in life's theatre - each factor a prop that makes the ground fertile for suffering to root. Your hereditary blueprint, nervous system integrity, personality architecture, trauma characteristics, state during impact, and environmental context all contribute to vulnerability patterns. The body becomes the canvas where consciousness paints what it cannot process through words, thoughts, or conventional emotional expression alone. This isn't weakness or imagination - it's sophisticated biological communication happening when the mind's standard processing channels became overwhelmed and shut down completely. Understanding these factors reveals not fate but mechanics, not destiny but architecture that can be read, understood, and ultimately dismantled structurally.

These six factors interact to create the precise conditions under which your consciousness translates distress into somatic language your body speaks. The body doesn't store trauma - it expresses what consciousness holds but cannot process through standard emotional or cognitive channels available to it. Your mind leads this process; the body follows, manifesting in flesh what exists as unresolved architecture in consciousness and nervous system coding. The root lives in how your system encoded overwhelm, not in tissues themselves - they're messengers, not authors of the problem. Psychosomatic symptoms are consciousness speaking through the only language that worked when all other expression routes became blocked or too dangerous. Understanding mechanics reveals entry points - these aren't random afflictions but structured responses following precise logic your system created under specific conditions then.

When you work with consciousness at the level where encoding occurred, somatic expression dissolves because the need for body-language disappears entirely. The route exists from symptom to source, from body's testimony to mind's resolution, through work addressing architecture rather than manifestation alone.

30/11/2025

30/11/2025

29/11/2025

Decision paralysis: When Every Choice Feels Impossible

You stand in the supermarket unable to choose cereal. Simple decisions become insurmountable walls. Your executive function has shut down, and what looks like indecisiveness is actually your traumatised nervous system protecting you from making the "wrong" choice that once carried catastrophic consequences.

Decision paralysis in PTSD operates through the prefrontal cortex - the brain region responsible for executive function and choice-making. Research demonstrates that chronic stress and trauma significantly impair this area's capacity to weigh options and initiate action (Bremner, 2006). Your hippocampus, which normally provides context for decisions, becomes dysregulated. The amygdala, your threat detector, treats every choice as potential danger. The result? Your brain freezes rather than processes. Small decisions feel enormous because your system learned that choosing wrong meant survival threat. You're not indecisive.

Your nervous system is running threat assessment on mundane choices, applying war-zone logic to peacetime decisions. The paralysis compounds - inability to decide generates shame, shame increases stress, stress further impairs decision-making capacity. You're trapped in a loop where the mechanism meant to protect you now prevents you from functioning in the very life you're trying to live.

Trauma-focused work addresses this at the root level. Mental Engineering works with the moment your system coded decision-making as dangerous, where choosing became associated with catastrophic outcomes you couldn't control. The work doesn't teach decision-making skills or cognitive strategies. It changes the architecture that interprets choice as threat. When the mechanism shifts, decisions become accessible again because your nervous system stops treating them as survival calculations requiring perfect accuracy.

The paralysis operates through specific coding in your threat assessment system. That coding is accessible when you work at the level where it was built. Your executive function isn't broken - it's being overridden by protection programmes running on outdated threat data. Update the data, and choice returns. The route exists. The mechanism is known. When you're ready to explore why your system treats decisions as danger rather than endlessly struggling with the paralysis it produces, the conversation is available.

28/11/2025

5 Defence Mechanisms That Became Your Prison
Trauma often teaches you to survive in ways that later make it hard to live.

Hypervigilance, dissociation, people-pleasing, emotional numbing and avoidance are not random flaws; they are survival strategies built under threat. They helped you read danger faster, minimise conflict and keep functioning when your nervous system was overloaded.

In war-zone conditions, whether literal or emotional, those adjustments can mean the difference between harm and survival. The difficulty appears when your surroundings change but your internal settings remain locked in emergency mode.
What once spared you from the worst can now limit your choices, relationships and sense of safety. Noticing these patterns is already a form of movement; you are stepping back far enough to see the structure, not just the symptoms.

You do not have to blame yourself for strategies that formed under pressure you did not choose. At the same time, you are allowed to question whether they still serve the life you want. Many people feel a shift when they realise survival mode is optional in their current life.

From there, the work is creating conditions where your system can safely try out different responses. How these mechanisms soften, and what takes their place, can remain a question you explore over time.

28/11/2025

Emotional numbing as survival, and cost

You do what it takes to get through. When overwhelm lasts, the system learns to turn feelings down so life is bearable.

It is not about weakness, but rather about a protective manoeuvre that kept you functioning when exit was impossible. In clinical terms, dissociation and emotional numbing are short-term adaptations to excessive threat: the brain prioritises survival over processing, sensory and emotional traces outrun the story, and contact with self thins (Lanius et al., 2010; Brewin et al., 2010). Peritraumatic dissociation is also linked with later PTSD, which explains why the blankness can linger long after danger has passed (Marmar et al., 1994).

Over time, this shield charges a price. Numbing mutes pain, but it also flattens joy, intimacy and motivation. Decisions feel distant because the inner compass is quiet. Grief stalls and returns as jolts; ordinary closeness can read as risk. Many people describe moving through days as if behind glass, present enough to manage tasks yet not fully available to themselves or others. The body often speaks for what the mind cannot represent clearly: sleep becomes shallow, energy fragmented, and attention defaults to scanning. In this state, strong inputs can feel like proof of being alive, so the system can drift towards heavy content or high drama just to register sensation.

Change is possible when the work targets causes rather than only manifestations. In trauma-focused therapy the task is to restore usable contact with self and context while updating what the system predicts about time, place and safety. We are not pushing intensity. We rebuild the thread so fragments gain a frame, the nervous system trusts steadier states, and feeling stops being equated with danger. Progress is visible in ordinary days: fewer and shorter blanks, quicker return to baseline, wider range of safe contexts, steadier sleep.

Emotional numbing started as protection. It does not have to be the operating system of your life. When the drivers shift, feeling becomes information again, not a threat.

27/11/2025

Reading About It Won't Heal It

You've saved 47 articles about trauma. Your browser holds 12 open tabs on nervous system regulation. And yet, the flashbacks still come.

This is content therapy. The quiet belief that enough information will eventually unlock the door. That one more podcast, one more book, one more post will finally make it click.

Here's what happens instead. Knowledge accumulates. Understanding grows. But the trauma stays exactly where it was. Tucked into your nervous system, running the same patterns. Reading about fire doesn't put it out.
Three signals you're caught in this loop. Your saved folder keeps expanding while your symptoms stay stable. You can explain your trauma brilliantly to others but still get triggered by the same old things. You feel productive, yet nothing shifts.

The model is straightforward. Intellectual understanding lives in the cortex. Trauma lives in the neuro system, in the amygdala, in patterns formed before words existed. They speak different languages. One cannot translate for the other without a bridge.
That bridge is structured therapeutic work. Not more reading. Not a deeper analysis. Actual intervention that reaches where the wound lives.

This pattern protects something. As long as you're "still learning," you avoid the vulnerability of real change. The stack of articles becomes a shield. A sophisticated one, but a shield nonetheless.
Context matters. I'm not dismissing knowledge. But context without protocol is just a very informed prison.

If your bookmarks folder overflows and your nervous system remains hijacked, something needs to shift. Not more information. A different approach entirely.

Transformation isn't found in articles. It's built in the space where someone knows how to reach beneath understanding and work with what's actually stuck. That work exists. It resolves rather than manages.

When you're ready to move from reading to rewiring, we can discuss what that looks like for your situation.