To Heal Trauma, Work with the Body

When something traumatic happens, the brain functions differently. Under normal circumstances, the brain encodes whatever it needs to encode, sends it down the pathway, it is processed, stored or disposed of, and life goes on, memories intact. This is a completely different process under chronic stress.

Our bodies communicate consistently all day long with all kinds of electrical and chemical impulses. These impulses tell our brain and body what to do. “Process this, dump that, pay attention here, this doesn’t need your attention …” Under normal circumstances, the only messages are the ones that need attention—you are fully present, encoding the information, and it’s not a big deal. Under stress, all of this goes haywire.

Anytime that we process information, we form explicit memories and implicit memories. Explicit memories are the factual information, general knowledge, and autobiographical information. Implicit memories are the emotional responses and body sensations—this part doesn’t have to do with fact, but feeling. These two types of memories travel in different pathways in the brain and have to be integrated later to form one unified memory.

In a traumatic situation, your “fight or flight” response gets triggered. Your body senses danger and sends out red alert signals in the form of hormones. Your bloodstream is swimming with chemical messengers that tell you to “get out now!” The primary goal under these circumstances isn’t encoding the memory, but getting you to safety. This is the reason that so many trauma victims have gaps in memory: the attention was focused on getting the body to safety. The symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress, and often anxiety itself, are the same signals that the body sends when you are in danger: your heart beats fast and your breathing races to get oxygen to the muscles to run, your body shuts down extra impulses like hunger and needing to use the restroom, your palms sweat, adrenaline fuels your energy so that you can get out- sound familiar? These are normal responses to stress in the short term. The problem is when you get stuck.

When you get stuck, your amygdala—the primary culprit in the fight or flight response—gets really really sensitive. This part of your brain screams “get out” when It feels that you are in danger.

Your brain stops processing and focuses all of its energy on getting you away from danger. The memory doesn’t get fully processed and is fragmented in the brain in chunks of implicit and explicit memories. This is why sometimes a sound, or even tone of voice can trigger a trauma victim.

Here’s the problem (and this is important): your body cannot tell the difference between physical and emotional danger.

This is the reason that you have this fight or flight response to stimuli, whether it is emotional or physical.

Your brain, the very primal part of your brain involved here, thinks that you are in physical danger, which is why you have the physical symptoms.

We need to address the physical in order to solve the problem.

So the issue is twofold: we need to bring the body’s response down, calm down the hormonal messengers who are telling you that you are in danger and then we can work on the mental and emotional aspects.

So, the next time that you are experiencing a trigger, remind yourself that your body is doing exactly what it is supposed to do. It is protecting you. You just need a little work on recalibrating the alarm system. 

The term we use for being present in our bodies is “mindfulness.”