Understanding the Neurobiology of Trauma
Traumatic events impact brain chemistry and can significantly impact how you experience yourself and the world around you. It is important to understand these effects as insight allows you to make the first steps toward healing and change.
How Trauma Impacts Your Brain
Trauma can be a two-fold response that occurs when you undergo a threatening experience and that experience overwhelms your body’s capacity to cope. Physiological and emotional reactions occur in response to an intense danger, resulting in activation of the body’s survival systems.
Trauma disrupts the brain’s limbic system, which is associated with storing emotional responses. Trauma memories are processed through the amygdala, the brain region that is responsible for fear and overall emotional regulation. The amygdala and hippocampus work closely together to encode and respond to intense experiences. The hippocampus is located in the posterior portion of the limbic system and is associated with memory storage. This may explain why traumatic memories often feel hazy or fragmented.
The body’s vagus nerve is the longest part of the autonomic nervous system, and it contains numerous essential functions ranging from heat regulation to heart rate. Acute and chronic stress can activate the vagus nerve. Research has indicated that trauma heightens neuroception, which refers to how the nervous system assesses threat and safety. When this system is consistently activated, an individual may tend to feel hypervigilant and guarded in various settings.
Understanding Common Trauma Responses
Triggering situations can activate the fight-flight-freeze response for trauma survivors. These responses mirror the reactions your mind and body engaged in during the particular event (even if you can’t consciously remember all the details of what happened). This circuit is automatic and rooted in your survival.
Trauma responses vary in type and intensity, but they may include:
Dissociation
Dissociation refers to feeling detached from reality or yourself. This can coincide with gaps in memory or complete memory lapses. Some people also seek dissociative experiences (substance use, binge eating, cutting, excessive time watching TV) when their emotions feel too painful or overwhelming.
Intrusive Thoughts
Intrusive thoughts include distressing, unwanted thoughts associated with past traumas. Other intrusive thoughts correlate with suicidal ideation or desires to hurt someone else. These thoughts can be difficult to talk about and often come with high levels of shame.
Hypervigilance
Hypervigilance is one of the key symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and it refers to feeling heightened about your sense of safety around others. Someone who is hypervigilant may feel skeptical or paranoid about certain types of people or situations. They might also assume that people or the world in general are dangerous and cannot generally be trusted.
Relationship Problems
Relational trauma – particularly in the form of physical abuse, sexual abuse, emotional abuse, or neglect – can erode attachment. This is salient if the trauma occurred during early childhood, as feeling safe around others is an important part of healthy human development. Relationship problems may manifest as difficulty trusting others, pushing people away when they feel too close, jealousy or resentment toward others, and intimacy issues.
What Interventions Are Used to Treat Traumatic Events?
Effective trauma treatment tends to be multifaceted, and it must be paced according to each client’s individual needs. It’s important to establish an early mental health baseline. This helps you and your therapist understand how things are currently going in your life, and it sets the foundation for how treatment will commence.
Somatic and body-based interventions: Somatic work allows you to better connect your mind to your body. This can be useful when you feel overwhelmed, as grounding yourself physically moves you back into a more stable place.
Positive visualizations: Inner child work, grounding, and safe place exercises are all common experiential interventions intended to treat trauma. These exercises may help to build internal assets to utilize in moving forward in recovery vs staying stuck in early trauma.
EMDR: EMDR may be beneficial for supporting emotion regulation because it creates a desensitization effect to your trauma exposure. While this doesn’t mean you forget what happened to you, it means your central nervous system doesn’t become overwhelmed every time you’re triggered.
Parts work: Parts work, which coincides with internal family systems, allows you to understand some of the fragmentation often resulting from trauma. For example, part of you may want to numb out how you feel, whereas another part of you desperately seeks justice. Both parts are valid, but the goal is to improve how all parts of the system communicate with one another.
Stress management: It’s important to work on your stress response in trauma treatment. Otherwise, you may be prone to depression symptoms, anxiety disorders, and other physiological responses. Stress management can include tenants of mindfulness, positive affirmations, building up a positive support system, and potentially changing triggering environmental factors (such as leaving an abusive relationship or dysfunctional job).
Can Healing Trauma Change Your Brain?
Research shows that effective trauma treatment can affect activity within your brain regions. While it was once believed that brain activity was fairly static, the concept of neuroplasticity demonstrates how the brain consistently changes through reorganization and growth.
Trauma recovery can impact the brain by:
- supporting a more relaxed amygdala, allowing the hippocampus to resume memory consolidation more succinctly and effectively
- reducing cortisol by helping regulate stress levels
- restoring balance to the prefrontal cortex via blunted stress reactivity
Trauma Therapy in St. Louis, MO
Whether you experienced early-life trauma or recently experienced a distressing event, you may be suffering immensely. Trauma can cause both emotional and physical effects – some of these impacts are apparent, but others may be more insidious.
In trauma work, I support clients in understanding their triggers and learning new ways to manage their lives effectively. It’s not required to share every detail of your trauma. We will pace treatment at a timeline and cadence that feels safe for your needs. My approach to treatment is multifaceted, pulling from attachment-based care, exposure-response prevention, DBT, CBT, somatic therapy, and mindfulness. Please contact me today to schedule an initial consultation.
