Pandora’s box unopened: trauma

Life flows as if it were a narrative, but many plots are interrupted by events that become trauma. It just happens, and life goes on, and no one prepares you for it. TRUE?

In many cases, Remorse or feelings of guilt cause more suffering in people affected by trauma than the memory of the event itself. Many of the people who relive it every day despise themselves, are terrified, get angry, feel like they are losing control… They are sure that they could have done more, that they could have been more attentive, that they could have delayed or chosen another route. To come back home. They despise themselves for not having predicted the future, they judge themselves harshly once everything has happened, the rest of the more probable possibilities have evaporated and only one has remained. What really happened.

The reality of trauma

The trauma belongs to the past, but the traces it leaves are deep, in some cases permanent, conditioning the person in their emotions, thoughts and behaviors. For example, through the Rorschach technique it was discovered that traumatized people tend to superimpose the trauma on everything around them.

In other words, and as a complement to what we have already pointed out, it also affects the imagination, which is necessary to contemplate new possibilities. Paradoxically and as an example, It has been proven that many war soldiers only felt totally alive when they remembered their traumatic past again..

Mind, brain and body

Helping trauma victims tell the story is important, but helping them construct a story or encouraging them to do so, and achieve it, does not mean that traumatic memories disappear. For a change to occur, The body has to learn to live in the present reality, without fear of that danger that has already happened.

Research has shown that people abused during childhood often have feelings that have no physical cause. For example, they hear alarming voices or engage in self-destructive or violent behavior. The unprocessed fragments of trauma are recorded at the margins of history.

When traumatized people They are shown stimuli related to their traumatic experience, the amygdala (fear center) reacts, turning on the alarm signal. This activation triggers a cascade of nervous impulses that prepare the body to escape, fight or flee.

Denial of trauma

Some people deny what happened to them, but their body recorded everything they experienced, including the threats. So, We can learn to ignore the messages from the emotional brain, but the body’s alarm system does not stop.

Denial causes the physical effects of trauma on the body to end up expressing themselves as an illness that demands attention: fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, autoimmune diseases… Medication or drugs can turn off or cancel out unbearable sensations and feelings. That’s why It is so critical that trauma treatment be done at the mental, brain and body level.

A tragic adaptation

Different investigations have been carried out to answer a question, What happens to the brains of trauma survivors? Dr. Lanius posed the following question “What does our brain do when we are not thinking about anything specific?” It turns out that we pay attention to ourselves, aka “the crest of self-awareness.”

Thus, no activation was recorded in areas related to self-perception in patients with PTSD who experienced trauma in childhood. Only very low activity was recorded in the area responsible for basic spatial orientation.

Frewen and Ruth Lanius discovered that The more disconnected people are from their feelings, the less self-perceptual activation they had. These results are explained because, in response to trauma, they learned to disconnect the brain areas that transmit feelings and emotions that accompany and define terror.

The threat of the “I”

The elemental “I” system is divided between the brain stem and the limbic system, which is activated when people see their life threatened. The feeling of fear and terror is accompanied by intense physiological activation. When people relive the trauma, they encounter that threatening sensation again, which paralyzes or enrages them. After the trauma, mind and body are constantly activated, as if they were once again facing that imminent danger.

Traumatized people feel that the past is alive in their body, because visceral alarm signals continually bombard them. Many of them feel chronically insecure and respond to any sensory change by disconnecting, with panic attacks, external regulation (drugs, medication, compulsions…). Thus, the inability to connect with one’s body in a sustained manner over time explains the absence of self-protection, the difficulties in feeling pleasure and purpose, and the high rates of revictimization.

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