The Hallmarks of Trauma: Rage, Terror and Helplessness
All other symptoms of trauma originate from these four reactions. The symptoms were created as a quick fix short term solution to energy that hadn’t been discharged. When hyperarousal, constriction, dissociation, and helplessness are chronic, this leads to complex symptoms that exponentially grow and shape shift. The symptoms will affect every aspect of a person’s mind, body, and soul, if not addressed.
Peter Levine said,
“Just as terror and rage figured into the onset of the freezing response, they will now contribute greatly to its maintenance.”
In response to a threat the defense system is summoned and a sense of terror activated. When fleeing and fighting have been thwarted, we constrict as we move into freeze. The energy that would have been discharged by fleeing or fighting is magnified and contained simultaneously within the nervous system.
In this state, the blocked fight response turns into rage, while the frustrated flee response collapses into helplessness. From this place, there is still a chance to shift the helplessness into an abrupt escape or a raging comeback fight. This would resolve the constricted energy.
If this opportunity doesn’t occur, the rage, fear, and helplessness will continue to compound until it overwhelms the nervous system. Immobility will take over and the emotional states of terror, rage, and helplessness will be frozen and trapped within the nervous system.
The bound-up energy is essentially trapped by terror and the person is traumatized. The fear extends immobility and makes mobilization of the energy terrifying as well. Just as terror and rage figured into the onset of the freezing response, they will now contribute greatly to its maintenance, regardless of there be no present threat.
The intensity of the rage is internalized because of fear of expressing it and the consequences of doing so. Imploded anger looks like the anxiety depression cycle.
While the anger needs to be mobilized, the traumatized person is so frightened by their potential to cause harm, they withhold and implode and remain in a vicious cycle of terror, rage, and helplessness.
The immobility response mirrors death and as humans we fear death and avoid it at all costs. We cannot stay with the felt sense of this experience long enough to resolve it. We do not have a tolerance to go into or come out of the freeze response. This lack of tolerance then leads to symptoms that are constantly growing and persisting.
If we can experience the felt sense of immobility while uncoupling the fear from it, we would be able to move through this experience.
But instead, when we experience the freezing response, we feel terror, rage, or a death experience, and we respond as if the threat is still present. Symptoms compile to try to desperately contain this compressed energy.
Symptoms of Trauma
When energy of a traumatic event is frozen within the body and nervous system, the nervous system by itself isn’t capable of discharging the energy. This sadly keeps the body, mind, and nervous system trapped in a repetitive cycle that will eventually overload the person.
But the body is so smart and will always find a way to adapt and to relieve the tension from the compressed energy, in an effort to create a sense of homeostasis. The body finds this relief by the manifestation of symptoms.
The response to create symptoms is a way for the nervous system to manage and contain the compressed energy, by binding them to something.
First responses to develop are hyperarousal, constriction, dissociation, and a felt sense of helplessness.
Symptoms that shortly follow these responses are often mood swings, poor sleep, nightmares, hyper-vigilance, flashbacks, sensitivity, and prolonged stress.
If the energy has not been discharged the symptoms keep intensifying.
At this stage people may experience PANIC attacks, crying spells, heightened emotional and startle responses, a drastic change in sexual activity, isolation, avoidance behaviors, decrease in memory, and increased trouble sleeping.
And even more severely, these symptoms may show up much further down the road: lack of commitments, becoming extremely quiet and unemotional, low energy and chronic fatigue, gastrointestinal problems, immune system dysfunctions, chronic psychosomatic pain, the fear of impending doom, death, or losing one’s mind, lack of community and connection, depression, insomnia, and a general sense of helplessness.
The symptoms listed aren’t all inclusive of what someone could experience after trauma and these symptoms rarely appear in isolation. Symptoms can shape shift, come and go, or simply not show up for many years.
Even if the current symptoms seem so unrelated to the original trauma, they are, and they are deeply connected to the frozen stress response cycle. But no matter the complexity of your symptoms or the length of time you’ve experienced the same cycle of symptoms, the original trauma energy can be released.
The Trauma Response
Trauma reactions, regardless of what the event was, share similarities that are always present in some degree in people who have been traumatized.
Hyperarousal
The body is gathering its resources to respond to a threat
Constriction
The nervous system constricts to focus all out attention on a threat.
Without a discharge of energy, constriction + arousal leads to hypervigilance. To maintain constriction, symptoms such as panic attacks appear.
Dissociation
Protection against escalating arousal and threat of death and a way for people to endure the unimaginable
Helplessness
Immobility leading to a sense of helplessness
The experience of the gas and brake being pressed down simultaneously and going into paralysis. The nervous system only recognizes a threat has passed when the energy is released. The body notices when there is too much energy is the system. The flooding of continued stress hormones, met against the need to contain, produce the experience of immobilized helplessness.
All other symptoms of trauma originate from these four reactions. The symptoms were created as a quick fix short term solution to energy that hadn’t been discharged. When hyperarousal, constriction, dissociation, and helplessness are chronic, this leads to complex symptoms that exponentially grow and shape shift. The symptoms will affect every aspect of a person’s mind, body, and soul, if not addressed.
This pervasive level of a trauma reaction, is what leads to traumatic anxiety, an experience that takes over a person in their daytime hours and in their nightmares.
Identifying how these components manifest in your experience can not only be illuminating, but transformative. Know that these responses were intended to protect you and are NORMAL reactions to an abnormal experience(s). You can heal. You can release.
Hypervigilance
Hyperarousal, as a trauma symptom, is funneled through hypervigilance. Hypervigilance as a trauma response, originates from the disruption of the orienting response. When the over charged arousal energy is paired with the initial reaction to danger, hypervigilance is born and creates a compulsive all-encompassing expression of the orienting response.
This means you will feel obligated and uncomfortable in any moment if you cannot identify the source of threat, even if the very threat is internal, and you are not in any physical danger.
Because the hyperarousal is present, you will compulsively seek to source where the threat is located, and what the threat is made of. The problem is, often there is no threat, and the continued seeking out of a threat becomes the foundation of hypervigilance.
Hypervigilance is a way to move compressed energy into the head, neck, and eyes and compensate for an unsuccessful defense against the original threat we experienced. This becomes an obsessive search in the present for a phantom of the past.
Hypervigilance grows in repetition and compulsion and hyper-focuses on micro changes in the external and internal environment. These micro shifts are perceived as danger.
The deeper into the body the immobility response sets, hypervigilance grows in its intensity. We may mistake arousal of excitement or sexual desire as a threat unconsciously because the energy feels the same, arousal is arousal. We may lose our sense of wonder, our trust in pleasure, and capacity at curiosity because of our alertness.
At the heart of hypervigilance, we do not feel safe. And sadly, and ironically, hypervigilance does not keep us safe. Danger could be standing right in front of us and we could miss it because we are so hyper aroused.
The orienting response does have purpose though. It is how we make the unknown, known. But not everything in our human world can be explained and this can be cognitively distressing for us. We want to figure it out, to remember what happened, to name it. Our rational brain than separates us further from the experience with this need to know.
If we are unable to locate the source or threat, instead of escaping, we freeze. We freeze because we need an explanation and suspend action.
But, if we are able to let go of the NEED to understand and know, we can get out of the way and let our experience, and our instincts drive us to safety and release the compressed energy behind hypervigilance.
Helplessness
We get stuck in helplessness when we chronically, unconsciously, and repetitively follow dysfunctional pathways.
Hypervigilance blocks the integration of new information coming in through our orienting response.
The freeze response is our dominant defensive strategy time and time again. If this is true, then it becomes particularly difficult to escape or create any forward movement.
This is where the victim mentality and physiology presents itself. Instead of self-confidence and assertion, we become victims to our own thoughts and beliefs about ourselves.
When we become aroused, we cannot move into a healthy orienting response and defend ourselves, but instead, we fall right back into immobility and a sense of helplessness consumes us.
The fact that we move right into immobility, strips us of other defensive strategies and experiencing our emotions.
Helplessness is in the trenches with becoming re-victimized.
When arousal is colluding with immobility we don’t have choices. Any time we experience arousal, it leads to collapse. Arousal is then linked to terror, rage, and helplessness, the hallmarks of trauma.
When we can’t experience arousal without immobility, we are cut off from the enjoyment of successful defensive executions and meeting challenges, and instead we are left with anxiety, shame, numbness, depression, and helplessness.
Every person who has been traumatized experiences helplessness to some degree.
Dissociation
Dissociation is at the core of trauma. The traumatic experience becomes split off and the emotions, sensations, thoughts, smells, sounds of the trauma create a life of their own. These fragments intrude on the present moment as symptoms that become more debilitating the longer the trauma is unresolved.
It’s common for these symptoms to not make sense and seem unrelated to traumatic events, when in fact they are. The trauma response continues to be replayed with the continued release of the stress hormones, engraving the traumatic memories deeper into the mind and body.
When there seems like there’s no way to make sense of the trauma responses, and we don’t know when or what is going to activate them, we create a life around protecting ourselves. The constant battle against invisible threats leave people exhausted and imprisoned. The past is more alive than the present. The intense emotional responses to trivial affairs, matched by the numbness to events in life that seem to bring others joy, makes people feel less alive and crazy by default.
Toxic shame arises and prevents people from sharing the truth of their reality. Unfortunately, what they cannot see is the connection between what happened in their past and what is going on inside their bodies right now in the present.
Dissociation is at the core of trauma. Trauma opens the door to constant sensory overload. While some experience symptoms they actively try to escape, others will feel nothing and go numb.
Numbness is a survival mode where someone has learned to disappear. Every part of the brain tunes out. This is the outward manifestation of freeze. When someone can’t be fully present, they will go to places where they felt alive, like memories of the past, even if they are horrific and trigger intense responses.
They feel like strangers to themselves. They cannot experience pain or pleasure. The self is detached from the body.
Feeling like this state of dissociation will last forever is a trauma response. Coming home to the self begins the awareness of physical sensations, followed by befriending the sensations in their body. Fear is a signal that the body is in a constant survival state and needs to find safety.
To visit the trauma of the past and begin to work with the dissociation response, the person needs to be grounded in the present and feeling as safe as possible. Grounding into the present while working through trauma of the past opens the door to eliminating trauma symptoms, discharging unresolved energy, and relegating the trauma to where it belongs; in the past.
Dissociation can look like a disconnection between self and body, a part of the body, or an experience in part or totality.
The hallmarks of trauma involve a degree of helplessness, terror, and rage that manifest in a multitude of ways. No matter the severity, trauma responses can be healed. There is hope after trauma.