Dr. Burke Harris explains how childhood trauma rewires your stress response, making you hyper-reactive in relationships. When reminded of past threats, your body floods with stress hormones, triggering conflict and emotional volatility even in safe situations.
What are some surprising ways, Dr. Burke Harris, that traumatic or adverse experiences can show up in your adult life? But on the surface, particularly if you're one of these people, you're like, I'm, I'm going to work, I'm doing my thing, like I'm not going to— like that show up that could be tied to something deeper.
One of the most common ways is how it shows up in our relationships. When we have an overactive stress response, a couple of things can happen. One, it can get triggered when there's a reminder or of something, or if we somehow in some way don't feel safe. And so that means that the stress hormones that are designed to save our lives from a mortal threat can go from 0 to 100.
Okay.
That can show up with You know, your partner says something and you snap at them, right? Or your child does something, right, that triggers or activates you. We maybe respond in a way that we're not proud of. It can show up as us saying something to someone else, or it can be really internalized. For some folks, they don't say anything to anybody else, but they get headaches, they get neck pain and neck tension, they have gastrointestinal challenges, they get autoimmune disease because that stress response is activating over and over again. And when it activates, it also activates our immune system. When we talk about this, one of the things that's most critical is that doing evidence-based interventions to regulate ourselves, and then also connecting to those supportive relationships, being able to feel safe being vulnerable with someone. And what does that even mean? You're not hiding, you're not sugarcoating. You can really honestly talk about what really happened. And there's someone to be able to say, no, Number one, you're not crazy. Number two, you're okay. Someone who's not gonna amp it up, but who will just be a regulated presence and make it okay for you to feel what you're feeling, think what you're thinking, whatever, without necessarily trying to fix you, but just being present for that. That's critical.
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