What is trauma?
Trauma is a word we throw around a lot, but often struggle to understand. It is a very real experience that, if unexamined, can lead to ever-increasing pain and confusion as we attempt navigate our stories. If you remember nothing else from this article, remember that trauma not as much about what happened to you, as it’s about how an experience landed with you.
Through examples, and a quick look at nuero-science, we will unpack the concept of trauma so and deepen our understanding of it. By digging deeper, we will cultivate the capacity to recognize the impact of trauma by identifying its those experiences and their resultant patterns in our lives. Engaging the trauma’s in our story will help us understand our stories and the deeper meaning behind them.
Understanding trauma
Trauma comes from a Greek word that literally means “wound.” In the mental health context, we understand trauma as an event (or series of events) that results in emotional or psychological wounding. Because it’s inherently painful, our tendency is to manage the pain and move away from it as quickly as possible. Often, in our scramble to dull the pain from a traumatic experience, we move on from that experience without taking the time to figure out why it was painful or what it means for our story. But doing this leaves us raw and exposed, making the wound vulnerable to unintentional irritation through otherwise perfectly normal actions.
For example, if a soldier is wounded on the battlefield, there often isn’t space to properly dress and treat the injury. A tourniquet, a compression bandage, and vitals verification is often all there is time for in the heat of a battle, and rightfully so. But in the wake of the battle, if the wound isn’t properly treated, it can lead to a faux restoration. As a result, a friendly pat on the effected shoulder can result in blinding pain, placing the wounded individual back in the traumatic experience.
In the same way, untended traumas can leave us vulnerable to people who don’t mean to harm, but who may inadvertently ‘bump’ up against an unhealed wound. When this happens we can find ourselves ‘triggered’, or having an unexpected or disproportionate reaction to an otherwise innocuous event; but one that relates to a trauma in our story.
This is why it is so important to address trauma in our lives. It is not enough to quickly dress the wound and try to move on or forget the wounding experience ever happened; instead, we must summon the courage required to face our trauma and work towards healing.
Responding to Trauma
Our response to trauma takes us out of our normal, everyday functional cognitive capacities, making us respond in one or more different ‘triggered’ modes: fight, flight, freeze, submit or tend-and-befriend. In our triggered state, our brain registers that we are in distress and immediately responds by slowing or stopping certain autonomic processes normally associated with rest and restoration. Simultaneously, the mind and body reallocate resources to muscles (so we can either fight or run), and to more primal parts of the brain that are responsible for threat mitigation (like the amygdala, hippocampus, and medial-prefrontal cortex). This means that other lower priority signals and processes aren’t tended to in the moment. When this state of hyper-arousal is persistently maintained it can result in chronic fatigue, high blood pressure, and a host of other significant health concerns.
The freeze response is similarly taxing. It’s an autonomically-initiated dissociative state of varying intensity designed to preserve and protect a person’s core identity from the wounds that are being inflicted on the body or self. This hypo-active response is typically initiated when the fight or flight responses are judged to be ineffective. A remaining option in this event is to posture in such a way as to freeze and endure the travail as opposed to combating or escaping it.
The submit response is an effort to move with, rather than against, whatever is perpetrating the trauma. This can often look like appeasement. The victim attempts to mitigate the damage by going along with the harmful components of a person, system, or community.
According to Teresa B. Pasquale, in her book Sacred Wounds (2012), a more recently identified defense mechanism is to tend-and-befriend. In this case, in an effort to mitigate victimization, a person will experience a powerful bonding dynamic with the perpetrator(s) creating an unhealthy alliance. The “restoration” that happens in this space is generally shallow and duplicitous, leaving the victim vulnerable to repeated perpetration in the future. This response is empowered by the natural bonding system that keeps people together in difficult times. In its more severe iterations it can present as something like Stockholm Syndrome, where a hostage identifies and aligns with their captors.
Brain Response
This is a SPECT scan of an individual’s brain recalling a traumatic event. Blood flow (depicted in red) is substantial to multiple areas of the brain. When the trauma has been addressed and resolved the same memory results in a substantially more peaceful neurological picture.
As we think about how our body naturally responds to trauma, let’s consider the brain as something akin to a distribution center, and our senses are the trucks that deliver the data to the appropriate docking bays (or cortices of the brain). Our senses like sight, smell, touch, etc., bring information about every single life experience for our brain to process. High-level cognitive processes get slowed and stopped so that the docking bay in your brain has to hold all of the information instead of processing it and moving it somewhere else for storage. That docking bay is suspended in time, but a memory, when mal-adaptively encoded, will be temporally bracketed. When you go to the “docking bay” to look at a memory that’s stored there, it feels like it’s happening in the present moment because it was never processed and stored. As a result, even if the memory is decades old, the experience of recall can make the event feel as if it is happening again.
When we recall an unprocessed traumatic memory, multiple areas of the brain are inundated with blood flow and the subject is typically overwhelmed and triggered. However, if treated effective trauma interventions, the memory is adaptively encoded and the subject can recall the traumatic event without significant distress. Understanding how the brain responds to trauma reveals another important aspect of trauma: because it has to do with how your brain stores the memory, it’s a primarily subjective experience issue, not an objective experience issue.
That’s why two people can experience the same event but only one registers it as trauma. Children can grow up in the same home and be part of the same events, but one may register negative experiences as trauma and the other won’t. One isn’t right and the other wrong, that’s just the nature of trauma. It’s all about how we as individuals receive and then process the experiences in question.
Recognizing Trauma in your Story
So how do we approach trauma in our lives? If the initial trauma is subjective to each person’s experience, how can we begin to recognize when we’ve experienced trauma and learn to recognize when that trauma is impacting us down the road?
We can begin by identifying triggers. Triggers are anything that induce some variation of the aforementioned trauma responses. They can be related to feelings, fear, or energy you experienced at the initial time of the trauma.
Perhaps, for example, your last relationship ended badly after a subtle energy shift which resulted in your fiancé leaving you. You may not have connected it at the time, but that little shift stayed with you.
Now, in your current relationship, this old trauma may play out as you noticing a similarly subtle shift in the energy of your partner. As a result of your trauma, you may find yourself hyper-aware of this shift, but may struggle to give it language. The presence of the shift increases your anxiety (triggers you) and you become hyper-vigilant to notice any relational nuance. As a result, you pull away, or hover in an effort to avoid or address the conflict. What’s really happening is you’re being triggered and probably don’t realize that it’s related to a past trauma. If left untended, this dynamic often decays into a self-fulfilling prophecy; in our effort to avoid our worst fear, we actually re-enact it.
Trauma and triggers can be very nuanced, and if you aren’t attentive to them you can find yourself in these maladaptive patterns that not only hurt you, but the people you love as well.
Many people look at their story and think that nothing traumatic has ever happened because our understanding of trauma is often so extreme. We think if we haven’t experienced sexual abuse, combat zones, or physical injury, then we haven’t experienced any significant amount of trauma. But this unfortunate understanding keeps us from recognizing and dealing with the trauma in our own lives. Remember that trauma means “wound”, so any kind of wounding we experience carries with it the possibility of resultant trauma.
When we experience trauma as children, our natural response - because we don’t have the maturity to know how to address it - is to normalize it. That is, we assume that this is typical life; that everyone experiences something like this in their upbringing. This response serves us well as children because it allows us to live with innocence and minimize pain when we aren’t equipped to handle it. But in our adult world this avoidant tactic is neither helpful nor productive. It serves to stunt our emotional growth and our ability to live in healthy and integrated relationship with others by undermining and devaluing our emotional and relational experiences.
To respond to trauma as adults requires courage and curiosity. Allow yourself to be curious about your triggers without jumping to the “why” question. “Why?” is often a question laced with contempt and accusation resulting in a defensiveness that shuts down further exploration. Instead of asking why, be willing to step back into your story where a trauma may have occurred and see what really happened. Ask how it impacted you and how you experienced it. Explore what you felt and what was going on, and notice how you feel as you enter into the memory.
These types of questions - “What happened?” “How did it make me feel?” “What did I believe about myself in that moment?” “What triggers that trauma today?” will help provide context for your current story allowing you to move forward in health … for yourself, and those that matter most.