Trauma isn't the event itself, it's your body's biological response to overwhelming stress. Without enough buffering—safe people and environments—that stress response stays on high alert, causing anxiety, depression, headaches, asthma, autoimmune disorders, and heart disease.
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Trauma is the biological response to overwhelming stress.
Okay.
So a lot of us think of it as the stressor, the thing that happened to us.
Yeah.
But it's actually the body's reaction to that stress.
Oh, I think I had this wrong for a long time. I always thought trauma was the thing that happened. You're saying trauma is your body's response to the thing that happened. That's right. And not only in the moment that it happened, but that it continues to respond in similar ways.
Exactly right. When we experience something stressful or traumatic, it activates our biological stress response. And that— it actually involves a lot of our body system, like the brain, the immune system, our hormonal systems, even the way our DNA is read and transcribed. In absence of adequate buffering caregiving systems, what can happen is that our stress response can actually stay on high alert. And then that increases the risk for not only some of the stuff we typically associate with trauma, right? Maybe anxiety or depression, mental health or behavioral health challenges. But it, it turns out that it also increases the risk for things like headache, asthma, autoimmune disease, heart disease, cancer, right? And that is because of these changes that we see to our biological systems when we don't have enough buffering. Your brain and body become wired to respond to stress. So you need way, way more buffering on the other side. And that's a big part of the reason why if some of your listeners are like, sure, I experienced some adversity, but that was way back when. Right, right. And now I'm fine. And I don't know why this should even still be bothering me. Right. I got a good job. I'm— my life seems like it's great, but I notice that I'm still like triggered sometimes, right? It's because our buffering, right, isn't— the adversity that we experience needs to be balanced out by a lot more buffering in order for us to—
