Trauma 101

“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside of you.” – Maya Angelou

Before we begin this journey, I am going to give my own lay definition of trauma and the next blog will be about the here and now.

 There are many types of trauma.  Some are single time events like a car crash.  Trauma varies greatly based on the individual and the type of trauma.   Some traumas are repeated over and over.

As a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, domestic violence and emotional abuse. I sustained trauma over many, many years.  One of the most devastating traumas to an individual is rape or sexual abuse.  It effects the mind, body and soul on a very profound level.

For me, my definition of trauma is a systemic injury to the mind, body and soul.   I prefer to use the word injury because someone injured my entire being.  During the trauma, the body and mind do what is necessary to protect the whole person at that moment in time.  The whole organism invokes survival techniques.  There is a lot of science behind this.   Bottom line, in the brain, the hippocampus is taken out of service and the amygdala takes over.  The sympathetic nervous system is activated and calming part of the nervous system (parasympathetic) is deactivated.

The hippocampus is responsible for recording memories in context.   During the trauma, this record of the event is not stored.  The event is fragmented.  These memories can be a single visualization, a smell, a color, a body sensation or pain or a sound.  How the memory is encoded truly varies from person to person.  These memories can be encoded and stored throughout the entire body.

For some, during the trauma, a person can mentally checkout or leave their body. This is called disassociation to survive the trauma, but the record of the memory can still be stored fragmented throughout the mind and the body.

So, the mind and body react this way to traumatic events for basic survival.  When you think about it, it is a brilliant design to survive the unimaginable.

However, the trauma is not resolved or processed. It is buried deep inside.  Common everyday events can cause reactions that seem odd or unexplainable.  For me, the smell of old spice can be problematic.  This smell could make me panicky and anxious.  I could even want to go and cry.  Most importantly, I may need to run away from that smell.

Imagine that a trauma occurred long ago in your past.  Your whole being did what it needed to do to survive.  You have survival skills that allow you to face each and every day knowing that there is a threat of being hurt at any time.

I somehow blocked what happened at home and went to school.  I threw myself into school as a child. That worked for me to survive the unimaginable at that time.

All of these survival skills may get or may not get you other places in life.  For me, it did.

However, the injury is still inside you festering away. Everything that you do is to avoid and bury the trauma.  The box that you put the trauma away in eventually leaks and you try to do things to keep that box at bay.  Those skills worked during the traumatic event(s), but they are not good coping skills for everyday life.

My coping skills were to be busy all of the time. I lived numb because I did not feel my feelings. I needed to be a high achiever. I was always very much on alert because my mind and body lived in the constant state that I could be hurt. Bottom line, my nervous system and whole being were injured and I lived in some state of anxiety and worry.  It was very difficult to bring the calming part of my nervous system online.

Eventually, your body and mind determine that it is time to heal and there is a reckoning.  Something can happen that is a key to that locked box of ick and it bursts that box wide open.  When it bursts open, the whole system becomes flooded with the unresolved past. Your whole being becomes unstable.  Imagine bottling up a bad infection in your body for years and the walls are coming down and you are flooded with a massive infection.  That is what this is like.  It is a ticking time bomb that can happen at any time.

To resolve the trauma, it takes a lot of different techniques and a lot of hard work. This process can be different for each person.

One of the biggest things that I have learned is that I need to do things every day that will calm my nervous system and my mind, body and soul because I have a nervous system that is more likely to be on alert naturally than in a calm state.