The Faces of Trauma: Who Becomes Traumatized?
If you are struggling with trauma it is because there is unresolved and compressed energy stored in your body. The symptoms indicate incomplete physiological responses that have been frozen by fear.
Trauma is not as much about the details of what happened, but the symptoms that appear afterwards.
Most understand trauma as a stressful occurrence that is outside the range of usual human experiences. Rape, assault, loss, violence, natural disasters, war, life threat. However, accidents, illnesses, and surgeries most certainly can be traumatic too.
Trauma is a part of modern life and everyone to some degree has experienced trauma.
A particular experience will leave only some people traumatized, while others will walk away much less affected. It’s about energy, more than the event itself.
At the heart of trauma is the immobility response. The physiology responsible for this response resides in our nervous system and the primitive instinctual parts of the brain.
When we experience a threatening situation, there may be a conflict between flight and fight, as we as a species play the role of both predator and prey. Our rational brains can even override our instincts, contributing to feeling of being held hostage by the freeze response. If you cannot negotiate the threat, immobility and symptoms of trauma will ensue.
The freeze response is responsible for the traumatic symptoms. Within the freeze response is an immobilization of forceful energy that is meant to be used for mobilization away from the threat, creating an opportunity for energetic discharge. If this energy isn’t discharged, anxiety, psychosomatic, and behavioral symptoms will arise. These symptoms are the body’s way of navigating unresolved energy.
Trauma is really then defined as the residue from frozen energy that’s trapped within the nervous system, and not by external events.
Completing the Cycle of Trauma
If you are struggling with trauma it is because there is unresolved and compressed energy stored in your body. The symptoms indicate incomplete physiological responses that have been frozen by fear. A survival response to a life threat remains sympathetic in arousal and energy, but becomes trapped when the body becomes immobilized. Even when you are frozen, the survival response still remains sympathetic, until the physiological response is completed.
The symptoms don’t disappear until the responses are discharged.
We often attempt to release the built-up energy by recreating similar situations as the original traumatizing event, but unfortunately this only creates a trap that reinforces the symptoms.
We also block the natural healing process by suppressive drugs, over control, or denial and invalidation of feelings and sensations.
To begin to understand the process of completing physiological responses to life threatening situations, it’s important to recognize that trauma represents primitive instincts gone awry. It is the fear coupled with immobility that literally imprisons people from their own vitality and “escape”.
Being physiologically stuck in immobility feels like resignation. It feels hopeless and it feels frightening.
To move through immobility, we need to arouse deep physiological resources and consciously utilize them. We have to free your nervous system from being overburdened by undischarged energy and fear.
The same energies that create the symptoms of trauma, when they are engaged and mobilized in safety, can transform the trauma. Instincts can be harnessed by the conscious mind to create transformation.
You must move through the primitive immobility response and become mobile and functional again through feeling, responding, and reflecting to heal from trauma.
When we aren’t navigating trauma and our responses to trauma, or focusing on anything in particular, there is a space where we can focus on self. The brain is free to explore the self.
The midline structures of the brain are involved in the formation of our sense of self. Our internal gps is firing and the areas contributing to consciousness are turned on.
Those who have experienced trauma have little to no activation in the self-sensing areas of the brain outside of a small portion of the brain responsible for orientation in space.
To cope with trauma, we turn these areas off in the brain because they not only are responsible for a wide range of emotions, but they transmit visceral emotional experiences of terror.
We sacrifice self-awareness and sense of self so that we don’t have to feel terrifying sensations. This adaptation deadens the experience of vitality and being fully human.
This adaptation explains the loss of purpose people feel after trauma. Without being able to have a sense of who you are and what you want, it’s challenging at best to pursue and implement a plan of action, as well as notice and interpret sensations in the body.
There is a relationship between survival, emotions, and body states. The center of who we are depends on the awareness to physical sensations that tell us about the inner states of the body. We have to act on this information to keep our bodies safe.
The Memory After Trauma
Lawrence Langer said,
“We unearth a mosaic of evidence that constantly vanishes into bottomless layers of incompletion. We wrestle with the beginnings of a permanently unfinished tale, full of incomplete intervals, faced by the spectacle of a faltering witness often reduced to a distressed silence by the overwhelming solicitations of deep memory.”
There’s a difference between memories of positive events and memories of trauma. The difference is distinguished by the organization of the memories in the mind, and the visceral reactions to the memories.
With trauma, memory loss is a distinguishing factor.
Traumatic memories are disorganized. They are not remembered by a sequence of events or logistical details. Rather, details such as images, smells, feelings, become hyper clear and triggering.
Immediately after a traumatic event it is nearly impossible to tell another person what exactly happened. Instead we experience overwhelm, and an increase in sensory experience as time went by. The more time that passes people start to put the pieces together as to what happened to them, and to make sense of the symptoms they are experiencing. There is a knowing that opens, giving the presence a sense of safety, although existing stride by stride with a past that is devoid of it.
They find the words, they create a cohesive timeline, but then come to realize that the words don’t deconstruct the symptoms.
Also, the earlier the traumatic experience, the more likely the memory will be repressed.
We don’t need to regain the totality of the conscious memory in order to understand what happened, or to heal. We allow the symptoms to lead and to be the portal of where the untangling of past and present begin.
Who Becomes Traumatized After Trauma?
Our ability to respond in the face of danger is dependent on multiple variables.
The event itself has a lot to do with if we become traumatized. The length, frequency, and intensity play a huge role in our survival resources or lack thereof.
What is going on in a person’s life at the time of the event is a variable. If the person is isolated, ill, already experiencing a high level of stress, they are more prone to the negative consequences afterwards.
Becoming traumatized is more likely if someone is lacking in strength, speed, agility, and overall physical fitness. Physiological factors and age can be predictors of someone’s resilience. And sometimes the opposite is true. When we build up so much strength, we don’t ask for the help that is needed.
Another factor that determines the effects of trauma on an individual is their belief in themselves and overall confidence. Believing and experiencing yourself as being capable to defend and protect yourself against danger can be a buffer to the after effects of trauma.
And lastly, if we have a history of success from navigating threats in the past, we are more able to enact our instinctual action plan to move away from or through a traumatic incident.
Traumatizing events may be loss of a parent, illness, injuries and accidents, abuse and abandonment, being a witness to violence, natural disasters, surgery, medical procedures, and going under anesthesia.
While this list isn’t inclusive of all possibilities, the likelihood of these being catalysts for becoming traumatized depends on the variables we discussed.
Trauma changes people. People are never the same after being traumatized. However, it is absolutely possible to heal and to resolve the trauma energy that is stored within the body.