HOW TRAUMA AFFECTS THE BRAIN
Have you ever wondered how trauma affects your brain? Are you curious about how to mitigate the impact after you have experienced a traumatic event? This post reveals the science behind the impact of trauma as well as some tangible skills you can utilize to reduce the impact of trauma on your brain and body. By the end of this article, you will have a clear sense of what is happening in your brain, how you can help yourself, as well as where to get help if you need additional support.
The Science Behind Trauma
Let’s start by defining trauma. Trauma, simply put, is a deeply distressing or disturbing experience that creates lasting physical or emotional responses due to a prolonged state of fear. Trauma is essentially a threat to your safety. What does the brain do with that fear, you may ask?
Perhaps you have heard of the notion of fight or flight. The idea is that when under actual or perceived threat the body goes into a state of fight, combatting the threat, or flight, running away from the threat. There are actually two other responses as well, freeze and fawn. Freeze is a state where you become paralyzed by overwhelming sensations brought on by the threat and feel unable to respond in any way, similar to playing dead. Fawn is illustrated by people pleasing or doing everything in your power to appease the threat in order to make it less threatening and therefore less of a risk to your safety. These are all normal responses to threats, including trauma.
These four responses are all part of our nervous system responses. When the nervous system is at ease, we exist in a state of parasympathetic rest, otherwise known as ventral vagal state. When we are activated beyond the capacity of our internal coping mechanisms, we move to either a sympathetic state or a dorsal vagal state. This is referred to in Polyvagal theory. I will more deeply explore polyvagal theory in another post but if you want to learn more, you can do so here. For now, know that the sympathetic state is a highly activated or charged state that engages your fight or flight responses while the dorsal vagal state engages your freeze and fawn responses. One is overactive, the other underactive. Below is a visual for your reference.
When you have experienced a traumatic event and your body is consistently living outside of your safe parasympathetic state, your brain begins to adapt to the fear that is dominating your responses. It does this by shrinking your hippocampus, the part of the brain responsible for memory and spatial navigation. It impacts the strength of your amygdala, the function of the brain that helps you with emotion processing, which may make it difficult for you to know what you are feeling and how to communicate it. Trauma also affects your cortex, the part of your limbic system that is responsible for behavior and personality presentation. This can show up through behaviors that range from self-destructive to isolating. This may sound daunting or hopeless if you have experienced significant trauma but there is actually quite a lot you can do to recover healthy function of all of your brain systems. Let’s explore some skills now.
Skills To Mitigate The Impact of Trauma
PLAY - Play is imperative to our brain health and yet many of us see a sharp decrease in play with the rise in the demands of adulthood. Play is also important in keeping your social engagement muscle strong. The less we play, the more likely we are to develop social anxiety. It can feel really hard to play when you are experiencing trauma and your motivation to activate the playful part of yourself will likely feel low. As with anything, starting small will grow into something big enough to make a significant impact. Some ideas for small playful actions include starting a puzzle, coloring, playing fetch with your dog, grabbing a friend to go for a walk, or putting some upbeat music on. This list could expand. Start engaging play in these small ways and without noticing it, you will be working on healing the part of your brain that is impacted by trauma.
BREATHWORK – Breathing is obviously critical to our existence but many people find breathwork anxiety producing as opposed to calming. A lot of us are actually over-breathing, otherwise known as hyperventilating, and therefore we are getting far too many short breaths and too few deep breaths. When you go to take a deep breath, your lungs are over filled with oxygen and there isn’t room for a full inhale that would help to regulate your nervous system and provide a burst of oxygen to the brain. This causes anxiety. A good place to start is to sit down in a comfortable position and inhale for 7 seconds and then exhale for 11 seconds. Repeat this inhale and exhale as deeply as you can. After several rounds, you should feel your nervous system beginning to settle and your brain getting more oxygen, aiding in the process of healing.
COLD WATER – When you are in distress or are hyperactivated, it can be extremely hard to access the part of your brain that communicates safety and calm. One way to reduce the impact of traumatic memories or intrusions is to run your hands under very cold water for several seconds. You can also splash your face with cold water. The temperature shift provides a sort of shock to your system to reset and brings you to a more regulated place where you can access other calming strategies.
MEDITATION – Often, people find guided meditations to be helpful in grounding them when they are outside of their parasympathetic state of rest. A guided meditation provides an external voice to help soothe your anxious brain to a more comfortable and functional place. There are a couple of meditation suggestions on my resource page here if you want to check them out.
VOCALIZATIONS – Another term for your parasympathetic nervous system is your vagus nerve. By toning our vagus nerve, you are able to reach a state of rest and digest…aka chill out! One way to do this is through singing or humming. Stimulating the nerve through repetitive vocal expressions helps your central nervous system communicate to your brain that you are safe and it’s ok to rest.
MOVEMENT PRACTICES – The final skill you can use from the comfort of your own home is a movement practice. It is well researched that trauma is stored in our bodies and therefore it is critical that we access our bodies in releasing that storage. Mindful movement practices like yoga, stretching, Tai chi, and even massage have powerful qualities that help you connect with your body in a gentle way and release stored emotions and trauma.
External Supports for Trauma Recovery
The skills provided above are a great place to start in recovering from traumatic events. However, if you have been through a more significant trauma such as a car accident, assault, death of a loved one, relational harm, or other major events, you may need more extensive support. Reaching out to a professional who is trauma trained (different than trauma informed) is a critical next step in your healing process. There are many ways to treat trauma. A couple of excellent directories for body-based trauma therapists that work in person to discharge the impact of trauma from the body are Somatic Experiencing and Sensorimotor Psychotherapy. If you are looking for a talk-based telehealth therapy option that integrates some of these modalities without the in-person component, I would be happy to consult with you about potentially working together. You can contact me via the contact form here.
In closing, please know that there is hope for healing from the physical and emotional impacts of trauma. Just as your brain changes in response to trauma, it can also change in response to healing. It is generously malleable, no matter your age. What excellent news, right? Reach out if I can be of support to you in your process of healing from the effects of trauma on your brain and body.