Simply put, when a person experiences something traumatic, adrenaline and other neurochemical rush to the brain and print a picture there. The traumatic memory Loops in the emotional side of the brain, disconnecting from the part of the brain that conducts reasoning and cognitive processing. The reasoning and cognitive processing part of the brain is unable to help the emotionally overloaded part of the brain get away from the trauma.

Understanding The Brain And Body In Trauma

Several parts of the brain are important in understanding how the brain and body function during trauma. They include the prefrontal cortex, the limbic system, and the brain stem.

When a person experiences a traumatic event, adrenaline rushes through the body and the memory is imprinted into the amygdala, which is part of the limbic system.

The amygdala holds the emotional significance of the event, including the intensity of emotion.

The amygdala stores the visual images of trauma as sensory fragments, which means the trauma memory is not stored like a story, rather by how our five senses experiencing the trauma at the time it was occurring. The memories are stored through fragments of visual images, smells, sounds, tastes or touch.

Consequently, after trauma, the brain can easily be triggered by sensory input, reading normal circumstances as life-threatening dangerous.

The sensory fragments are misinterpreted and the brain loses its ability to discriminate between what is threatening and what is normal.

The front front of our brain, known as the prefrontal cortex is the rational part where consciousness lives, processing in reasoning occurs and where we make meaning of language.

When a trauma occurs, people enter into a fight, flight, or freeze state, which can result in the prefrontal cortex shutting down.

The brain becomes somewhat disorganized and overwhelmed because of the trauma, while the body goes into a survival mode and shuts down higher reasoning and language structure of the brain. The result of the shutdown is a profound imprinted stress response.

The goal for intervention is to bring oxygen and blood flow back to the brain, so we can start, calming the body and accessing the higher regions of the brain.