Your mind is your biggest ally. It gives you the capacity to choose where to focus your attention.

Trauma is a sensory memory.

Trauma is a sensory/implicit memory – this means that the information is stored in the limbic/non-verbal part of the brain. Trauma is often referred to as body memory. Trauma is not a conscious/explicit memory.

Trauma is not in the event-it’s in our bodies.

Trauma is in our nervous system and in our stress chemistry. Trauma is nervous system dysregulation.

The nervous system is responsible for our survival and our biological functions.

How is brain and body being hijacked by the trauma? Simply put, when a person experiences something traumatic, adrenalin and other neurochemicals 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 reasonable part of the brain is unable to help the emotionally loaded part of the brain get away from the trauma.

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

The front part of our brain, known as the prefrontal cortex, is the rational part where consciousness lives, processing and reasoning occurs, and 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 the higher reasoning and language structures of the brain. The result of the metabolic shutdown is a profound imprinted stress response.

In order to rewire your brain, the first thing you should do is learn how the brain works.

Your brain works in response to and in relation tothe world around you.

When your brain detects a threat, the amygdala initiates a quick automatic defense (fight or flight) response involving the release of adrenaline, norepinephrine, and glucose to rev up your brain and body.
If the threat continues, the amygdala communicates with the hypothalamus and pituitary gland to release cortisol. Meanwhile, the medial part of the prefrontal cortex consciously assesses the threat and either accentuates or calms the fight or flight response.

It’s a question of being present to your emotional experience by developing your capacity to sit with and explore difficult emotions.

1. To sit with and feel unpleasent triggered emotions so they can get unstuck and be released from the nervous-system. 2. To assign triggered emotions to the event from the past where they originated.

A type of cognitive or thought-process change that can occur in response to traumatic stress. Cognitive errors: Misinterpreting a current situation as dangerous.

Triggers

A trigger is a stimulus that sets off a memory of a trauma or a specific portion of a traumatic experience.  Some triggers can be identified and anticipated easily, but many are subtle and inconspicuous, often surprising the individual or catching him or her off guard. A trigger is any sensory reminder of the traumatic event: a noise, smell, temperature, other physical sensation, or visual scene. Triggers can generalize to any characteristic, no matter how remote, that resembles or represents a previous trauma.

It is important to note that any therapy model cannot change the existence of the distressing event and the fact that it happened. What is does is give you the ability to reprocess and feel as though you are not operating from a point of distress all the times and that your environment does not remain a scary place to be.

Trauma changes the way in which you see and navigate the world.

Awareness of – not avoidance of feelings.

Feelings are not bad or negative-they are unpleasant and uncomfortable.

What we feel emotionaly is experienced and felt in the body first as a bodily or physical sensaation. It doesn’t feel good-but feelings are temporary. Feelings come up and always subside.

Feelings can com up so tumultously and unexpectedly or spontaneously-and they will always subside. Stay present to the uncomfortable feelings of past experience and just let them ride out their course. Insights will follow. With consistent practice you will be able to un-hook from old life stories.

With consistent practice you will be able to un-hook from old life stories.

Embrace the unpleasant feelings.

Unpleasnt feelings are the path back to you being more fully you.

Bringing attention/awareness to the feelings that accompany difficult experiences offers the possibility of learning to relate differently to such experiences in each moment. In time, this practice of working through the body and how they feel may allow people to realize, through their own experiential practice, that they can allow the feeling associated with unpleasant experiences and still be okay.

Remain in contact the anxiety long enough to disconfirm the fear structure.
Fear structures are cognitive networks of maladaptive thinking activated through fear or anxiety and triggers.

EMBRACING PAINFUL EMOTIONS AND FEELINGS WILL UN-HOOK YOU FROM OLD STORIES

Emotions and feelings, then, are neuro-chemical memories of past events.

Limiting beliefs and subconscious programs are usually unknown. However, you can examine potential areas, beliefs, and patterns that could be the result of subconscious programs.

When you identify and reprogram a core issue it can automatically address other issues. For example, it’s like updating the software on your computer. After the main software has a “system update,” the other programs that operate within that software will update automatically. That’s also how your subconscious mind works.

The subconscious mind doesn’t understand language. The subconscious does understand images, emotions, and feelings.

During a threatening event, the brain focuses on what is central to survival so it does not focus on insignificant and peripheral details, so it does not encode them.

The amygdala is the stress evaluator. It continuously monitors all situations for danger and decides when to react. The sights, sounds and smells of frightening and dangerous memories are stored here. When the brain recognizes similar situations, the amygdala sends out danger signals and gets the body ready for a flight or fight response.

The hippocampus stores and retrieves memories, everything from where you attended second grade to where you parked your car three hours ago. If your brain is a computer, the hippocampus is the hard drive.

The prefrontal cortex is the large part of the brain sitting right behind your forehead. This is the executive-functioning area responsible for rational thought and decision making. In the computer analogy this is the central processing unit running the programs.

In the moment of a traumatic experience the hippocampus frantically tries to cope and calm the amygdala alarm circuit. In some cases the hippocampus is not able to calm the amygdala, resulting in damage to the hippocampus region of the brain, which lessens the ability of the amygdala to produce calming thoughts.

With CPTSD, the nerve circuits connecting the amygdala, hippocampus and prefrontal cortex aren’t working correctly. The hippocampus can’t store the memory and the prefrontal cortex can’t override the hippocampus to tell the amygdala to calm down when there is no danger. So, do not get frustrated take the time to practice and learn and reassure yourself there is no danger.