Neuroscience of Trauma, Part 2
Let's celebrate the holiday season with TWO EXTRA episodes to round out Season 2 of The Brain Blown Podcast!
Following Part 1, this last shorter episode dives back into the neuroscience of trauma and specifically examines the body's role in storing trauma.
Laine also highlights some brilliant takeaways we can all use to try and manage the stress in our lives and be prepared to take on everything life throws at us.
This will be the final episode of the season, and we look forward to bringing you more brain-blowing info in the new year!
Much Love,
Cherys & Laine
REFERENCES
What Happened To You Bruce Perry and Oprah Windfrey
Trauma-Informed Care in Behavioral Health Services. Rockville (MD)
PTSD History and Overview Matthew J. Friedman, MD, PhD
Traumatic Stress Center of Wales
How does your body remember trauma? Dr. Matthew Boland and Hilary L. Lebow
Response Variation following Trauma: A Translational Neuroscience Approach to Understanding PTSD Rachel Yehuda, * and Joseph LeDoux
Thirty-Year Study Links Neuroscience, Specific Trauma, PTSD, Image Conversion, and Language Translation Dee Spring PhD, ATR-BC, MFT
Relational Trauma and the Developing Right Brain An Interface of Psychoanalytic Self Psychology and Neuroscience Allan N. Schore
General Outline of Episode
The body is so important here because trauma is often in our body. Because the brain’s rewiring to keep us safe is so important that when we experience trauma it changes our breath, our digestion, our muscle tension, our heart rate, etc our body is majorly impacted by this.
And it can make our body feel unsafe to be in. It can make us floating heads. A lot of what we experience feels like harm to the body or at risk of harm to the body, and as a coping mechanism, we detach from the body. We are not present in it, it is just this thing carting around our brains. That is why body techniques for trauma care have such a huge impact.
And we need to talk about it because of the impacts on long-term health. The ACE study found that experiencing four or more adverse experiences in early childhood significantly increases the risk for 7 out of 10 leaded adult causes of death including heart disease, stroke, cancer, COPD, diabetes, Alzheimer's, and suicide.
And we’ve known this in medicine for a while, about as long as we’ve known that smoking increases cancer risk. But doctors ask about smoking, they don’t ask about childhood adverse experiences. In fact, many doctors completely detach from anything that is ‘behavioral health’.
Perry states “Most people including doctors make a biological versus psychological distinction when they think about health. And it's very common for instance for the medical community to dismiss trauma-related physical symptoms such as headaches or abdominal pain that often afflict people with sensitive dissociative responses.” He cites material distributed only three years ago that helps teach doctors about children that if there is not an organic cause for stomach ache then it is ‘all in your head’. Medically called psychosomatic.
That is a doctor's way of dismissing symptoms. You are making it up.
When we understand neuroscience and use that to guide medicine not only can we learn so much more about mental health but we can understand how stress and the body translate to major illness. Perry states “You began to see that person's worldview can change their immune system…That interconnection becomes clear. Everything matters. And most important you come to understand that belonging is biology and disconnection destroys our health. Trauma is disconnecting and that impacts every system.” Example insulin
We want to learn WHY we do what we do as humans, and we’ve looked to the brain for explanations…
**BREAK**
PART 4: TAKEAWAYS (10-15 minutes)
What we need to think about is what we need to develop properly. Perry states that it's important to remember that for us to develop we need a variety of right experiences. If we don’t have those they don’t develop. And a key thing for our brain to develop is to learn that the world can be safe and there can be people to protect us. Not that there are not hard experiences, not that all life should be without stress. But having those in a predictable controlled manner makes all the difference.
It’s not that there are not people who are ‘resilient’ it’s not that humans don’t have the capability to experience hard things and then continue to be successful - but a key factor is, did the brain develop the ability to handle this? “Our core regulatory networks comprise a set of very important neural networks that collectively reach each part of your body and brain. We know that these systems are well organized flexible and strong we have the capacity to cope with all manner of stressors. We know that controlled predictable and moderate challenges can make our core regulatory networks even stronger. Our stress response capacities expand when they get to practice. So if a child has had the opportunity to have predictable moderate challenges as they grow up they will be more capable of demonstrating resilience in the face of challenge. The very start of this process is when a newborn is hungry thirsty or cold and the attentive attuned caregiver meets their needs. Later they will crawl away from the safety of their parent and start exploring the world because it is novel it will activate their stress response but only moderately when it becomes too much they call back to the safe base. This process leaves it safe to explore the new and return to the safe and will continue thousands of times for a toddler or young child. And all of these challenges they build capacity to demonstrate resilience in the face of unexpected stress.”
Other things that really matter - rhythm, body movement, and community.
Rhythm is regulating. Think about rocking a crying baby. Think about humans’ love for swings and hammocks. All things in life have a rhythm and connecting with this is regulating.
Body movement - remember your body is hugely impacted by trauma. Doing things, especially as a child with your body in a regulating consistent matter (dance, sports, even walking) will help reconnect the body to the brain and help with regulation.
Community - this was all of season 1. Humans need each other. More than we are comfortable talking about. A core part of the human condition is the need to feel seen and loved and like you matter. We search for it all the time. And we are more starved of one another than we have been at any other time in history. We don’t grow up in villages, or multigenerational households. Through the pandemic, some of us didn’t see or touch another person for over a year. Perry says your community, your network of people is a bigger factor in determining how much you can weather stress, harm, trauma, and health concerns than anything else he has found. And yet as clinicians in any field - we never really ask about that.
As medical professionals, as a community, and as parents or potential parents, we need to rethink all we know about trauma. We are talking about something that dramatically changed the way we have made sense of mental health since mental health became a thing.
Why not what DX? - I can't tell you how many people feel incredibly relieved when they get an explanation of how their brain is working and why. We don't give them a psychiatric label. We are just saying this is the way you're organized and it's absolutely predictable based on what happened to you. Then we help them understand that the brain is malleable plastic and changeable. And together we come up with a plan that helps change some of the systems that appear to be causing them problems.
Regulation - Self-care is huge. Unfortunately, many people feel some guilt in taking care of themselves they view self-care as selfish. It's not selfish it's essential. Remember the major tool you have helping others change is whether you're a parent, teacher, coach, therapist, or friend. Relationships are the currency of change.
What do we need? - until you heal the wounds of your past you will continue to bleed. The wounds will bleed through and stay in your life through alcohol, drugs, sex, and overworking. You have to have the courage to pull out the wound and begin to heal yourself. This is the lesson I hope everyone carries with them from our conversation we must understand and heal the wounds of the past before we can move forward. I can't help thinking the same is true for society not just individuals. How can our society move towards a more humane socially just creative and productive sure without confronting our collective historical trauma? Both trauma experience and trauma inflicted. If we want to understand ourselves we need to understand our history our true history. Because the emotional residue of our past follows us.
What we need - poet Mark Nepo says that pain is necessary in order to know the truth. But you don't have to keep the pain alive to keep the truth alive.
Take Aways
WHY _ Your past is not an excuse. But it is an explanation offering insight into the questions so many of us ask ourselves why do I behave the way I behave? Why do I feel the way I do? For me, there is no doubt that our strengths, vulnerabilities, and unique responses are an expression of what happened to us. Very often what happened takes years to reveal itself. It takes courage to confront our actions peel back the layers of trauma in our lives and expose the raw truth of our past period but this is where the healing begins.
Dr. Perry “What is trauma? - Many people when they begin to think about trauma as it applies to their life have trouble recognizing the relationship between their early experiences and adult decision patterns. They rationalize their behaviors that's just the way it is. Or in an effort to move quickly past any discomfort they encounter, they make light of it and find ways both healthy and unhealthy to soothe or simply bury it. Trauma is difficult to reconcile. In its essence trauma is the lasting effect of emotional shock. If left unexamined it can have long-term physical emotional and social consequences.”
