Trauma

Trauma is personally defined by the individual who has experienced an event that has shaped or altered the original perspective of their life. It is a life-altering event that has become interfering with previous lifestyle choices that may be occurring with intrusive thoughts, disturbances with daily activities, noted fears, or concerns for safety, interpersonal distresses, and potentially many other symptomology. An individual who has experienced trauma is noted to have different trauma responses, both when activated and in the event of the onset trauma.

Our control center, also known as our brains, experiences trauma in various ways causes different responses. To better understand this let’s break down different areas of what the brain is responsible for.

The right hemisphere is the linguistic and analytic, music of experience communicated through experience body language. Studies have shown that the Right hemisphere is first developed in the womb and carries our first attachment with mother and baby. This begins our Communication for children their worlds. The book, The Body Keeps Score, by Dr. Bessel Van Der Kolk, helps define that, one can see the right hemisphere is the side that can touch onto our emotions, producing and evoking responses to voices, places, and experiences of the past intuitive truth (the way things are) how a face recalls an aunt we loved at age 4.

Let’s navigate to the other side of the brain known as the left brain brain. Left brains are known to be the logical side of ourselves. This will include logic sequencing linear thinking mathematics facts •thinking in word facts, stats, vocab of events, structure, and order. On the left side of her brain additionally, we have our speech area also located known as our Broacha.

If any event that somebody is experiencing a traumatic event, one may go into their primal response. This is what we always hear about, fight flight freeze, or fawn response. These are all responses geared to keep yourself safe chemically from your stress response. The fight is as it sounds if you can the danger presented, flight is to run from it, freeze one feels unable to make a decision, stuck in mobile, cannot move, and last fawn is somebody who is overly agreeable, trying to be helpful and putting people before themselves. Fawn also may be perceived as going along with the event. this is a newly discovered response and is noted to be a stress response due to potentially their upbringing with narcissistic parents and traumatic households.

As trauma has been observed, our brain's hemispheres have a loss of communication with one side, shutting down or disabling. If our left which is responsible for our logic and communication shuts down, ultimately we have an individual who is going to be stuck in their emotions, and if the right side is hindered, then they are going to be regulated in their emotions.

In trauma, the hemisphere of our brain is affected, causing the left and right to not communicate. Our right becomes activated which can lead to anxiety attacks, flashbacks, and storing memories in the right side of the brain.

Additionally, we look at having our left side disabled. We note that our speech area is located on our left, and also our executive functioning.

This is why at times you’ll see individuals who are in a traumatic event, lose the ability to speak, unable to move due to the left side of our hemisphere being deactivated.

Right brain being reactivated in triggers can re-create present feelings of the traumatic event, causing one to experience physiological responses, similar to the events, and when they originally transpired.

It is important to engage in understanding your healing and nurturing of the next steps in your life through healthy coping skills as trauma can lead to distressing life habits, such as aversion towards the trauma, as a whole, physiological symptoms, such as not limited to sleep disorders health issues, substance use disorders, and many more concerning life events. If you have been an individual affected by trauma, don't hesitate to get in touch with our office to speak to one of our clinicians so we can begin your healing journey.