Trauma rewires the brain by shutting down the frontal lobes and triggering the amygdala to flood you with alarm. Repeated trauma can shrink the hippocampus, leaving you hypervigilant. The nervous system has more responses than fight-or-flight: fawn, flop, and submit. The brain can form new pathways throughout life, so recovery is possible through therapy, somatic work, yoga, and other approaches.
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Okay. Okay. Um, so Harvey said trauma survivors have symptoms instead of memories. And here are just some of the symptoms that you might find in a client or a person or you may have experienced yourself as a result of trauma. One of my mentors, Dr. Phyllis Solon, said, and I agree with her, there is no mental illness, there's just trauma. So we're going to talk about types of trauma. There's acute trauma, which is something like after an earthquake happens, so it's a one-time event. There's chronic trauma, which results from repeated and prolonged exposure to highly stressful events. That might be something like abuse, bullying, racism. Those are some examples. Complex trauma is— results from exposure to multiple traumatic events. So that might be if you deal with racism, abuse, poverty, and domestic violence. There's also secondary or vicarious trauma, and in that situation, someone is exposed to, uh, somebody else who's traumatized. And interestingly, the, uh, reactions or the effects of that are similar to someone who has actually experienced the trauma themselves. And briefly, we have a nervous system that helps us defend against, uh, danger, and that's the nervous system, which we have the sympathetic and parasympathetic. I'm sure you've heard of fight, flight, freeze, but there's also fawn, flop, and submit. So fawn is when you try to appease a person by saying yes or being people-pleasing. Flop is when you become completely physically and mentally unresponsive. So sometimes people will faint. Uh, and then submit is when you are filled with shame and you're passive and self-sacrificing. And of course, the parasympathetic nervous system is the opposite, which is when we come into relaxation, rest and digest, and conserving energy, heart rate slows down. People that have repeated exposure to trauma are much more likely to go into the sympathetic nervous system easily. They tend to be at a heightened level of arousal. And now to get into the brain, uh, if you want to make a little model of your brain, take your hand, tuck your thumb in, and then take your fingers and cover up your, your thumb. So these— your fingers can be the frontal lobe, and your thumb is the amygdala, and then the back of the hand is the brainstem. So they can see— they say there's one mind but three brains, and we'll get into that a little bit more. So the frontal lobes right here, your fingers, are the thinking— is the thinking brain. Reasoning, planning, the higher-level activities in the brain. The limbic system, which again is your thumb, is the fight, flight, freeze. It has the emotional center, feelings, intuition, and some memory. And the brainstem is where our consciousness, the breathing and heartbeat, are automatic things happen that our body does. So the impact of trauma is different on the different levels of the brain. So in the frontal lobes, the memory centers shut down, and it's less active because there's more activity in the emotional center. The frontal lobes can, can shut down. Which impairs our ability to reason or regulate emotions. The limbic system here will respond with increased activity. So you talk about being amygdala hijacked, that means that you're triggered by something and this kicks in giving you signs of which is the sympathetic nervous system, that you're in danger. So your heart rate will kick in faster. You release corticotropin releasing factor, and that increases your alertness and hypervigilance. And you get tunnel vision because that is— evolutionary-wise, that helped you see, focus on one way to escape. Actually, you have a smaller hippocampal volume when you're exposed to repeated trauma. Those are some of the effects there. That's not supposed to be there. On the brainstem, it reacts instinctively to the amygdala alarm. Your heart rate increases, like I said. You can stop breathing or hyperventilate. Your muscles tense so that you can fight or flight. And you either speed up or shut down. So to treat traumatic memories, we have to wake up the frontal lobe— lobes— or thinking brain. So when the frontal lobes are online, we are aware of our trigger instead of believing, even subconsciously, that we're unsafe. And we are aware that the uncomfortable feelings and body sensations are just a result of flashback. And so when the frontal lobes notice and can label it as an emotional reaction, then the amygdala can be turned off and the parasympathetic nervous system can kick in, which then of course calms the brainstem. Heart rate remains steady and the breathing returns to normal, which adds increased or decreased anxiety. And just briefly, another reaction or result of trauma is dissociation. There's a range of types of dissociation, so here is just some general symptoms and then some more severe symptoms. And there's also PTSD, and there's also complex PTSD, but in general, PTSD is when you have intrusive memories, avoidance, negative changes in thinking and mood, and changes in physical and emotional reactions. Oh, we will skip that. And another encouraging thing is neuroplasticity, which basically means that we used to think that our brain stopped developing after teenager age. But now we know that we can create new neural networks into, you know, indefinitely. So this is the exciting thing about getting treatment and help, that we can create new neural pathways and undo some of the damage from trauma. So these are some types of treatment. There's therapy, somatic work, yoga, and mindfulness. One thing we know is that traditional cognitive behavioral therapy isn't effective in itself. There needs to be more, especially because trauma is stored in the body tissues. And some more examples of treatments: medication, biofeedback, and increasingly psychedelics are found to be extremely helpful. With trauma. So I could go on and on. One more thing about resilience. It's very important to note that there are a lot of different resilience factors that keep people who experience trauma able to function and go through life, sometimes with relatively little impact. Other times, people develop resiliency as a result of trauma. So that's just an important thing to remember. Rather than necessarily feeling sorry for people who experience trauma, you can look at it as a strength and, uh, something that built resiliency and character. So that's all I have, and thank you for listening today. I am available if you have any other questions or want to talk further about this. My information is right there. Thank you. Have a beautiful day.
