TWO CONCEPTS YOU CANNOT FAIL TO UNDERSTAND: PUTTING IT TOGETHER

Scott Musgrave, creator of Associative Awareness Techniques, explains that understanding how our brains react to trauma is the key to understanding how trauma impacts the body and our psychology. In particular, by understanding that what defines trauma is how evolutionary responses are activated, allow us to unload the unfair weight of social stigmas and personal auto-critiques we all at some level carry around. 

The social cultural insistence on “getting over things” and “not be too sensitive about things”, as well as the medical culture of damping the natural physiological signals of our autonomic nervous system through drugs, go against a person's natural capacity to perceive the different kind of cues and intervene appropriately to moderate their intensity. 

Trauma symptoms remain for the most part beyond our conscious control, and paradoxically healing from them is for the most part dependent on accepting this as fact.

Most people think that trauma is what happens to you, so trauma is your mother's depression, your father's alcoholism, a divorce, your parents fighting, physical or sexual abuse, but those are not the trauma, those are traumatic. Trauma is not what happens to you but how your system integrates that traumatic experience by changing your whole physiology into something more adapted to the traumatic experience. So it happens in you, and then it is a you-to-you relationship that develops... So the essence of trauma is loss of self, not a giving to self. (Gabor Matte)

So if you had an experience that left you trauma ridden, the implication, and it is a very important one to recognise, is that you were helpless, that is, unable to either fight or flee. And when our ANS is unable to carry out its Fight-Flight program, it goes into Freezing-Dissociation or Freezing-Shut-Down. This "opinion" of the world is stored in a new body-state, a mutation of all your physiological systems and the experience of the world you end up having is one not like you would have had without having been traumatized. Trauma research champion Dr. Bessel Van Der Kolk explains some of the resulting consequences:

One of the determining factors of our psychological lives is to understand what things tend to attract our attention, what sounds, or images, or situations and unfortunately people with trauma tend to be attracted to situations of trauma, particularly to situations where potential victim persecutor relationships are present. Because of this bias, traumatized individuals are more vulnerable to falling into behaviour that upsets others, or make others make harsh judgments, thus further reinforcing the sense of isolation, shame, embarrassment, frightened states and trauma

As we seen, this new "me to me" or "me & me" relationship that ensues after traumatic experiences, is most often out of our conscious sight and control. Dr. Porges himself is witness to this common pattern:

I'm ever more surprised, when analysing individual dysfunction statistics, of the number of people that show to have lived a very good portion of their lives in a state of dissociation.

Finally Dr. Ronald Siegel, Assistant Clinical Professor of Psychology at Harvard Medical School, exposes the risks involved in not recognising one's ANS trauma related symptoms

With people for whom trauma happens, they do tend to get immobilized unconsciously – they tend to have a lot of “deer in the headlights” experiences. If they’re with another person who acts in ways that are perceived as threatening, they will freeze. They might observe and say, “Why does it always happen to me? It’s like I’m a magnet for abusive people; I’m a magnet for dominating and sadistic people.” Because of the “deer in the headlights” phenomenon, the immobilization that happens makes her seem like an easy mark. ... people get immobilized because of this part of the vagal nerve response and become easy prey. Sometimes we think, “Why does this person keep choosing abusive relationships?” But it’s not their fault – it is a hardwired reaction in which they tend not to fight back. They tend to become immobilized – whether to the point of fainting or just to the point of getting stuck and paralyzed.

We have seen that this state of vocal and physical paralyzes is also accompanied by a partial or complete shut-down of our Thinking-Brain, something non-traumatized individuals experience only in traumatizing situations, and traumatized individuals experience in most situations:

If you talk to clients who have been traumatized and they are extraordinarily defensive about creating relationships – they don’t trust people – and you say to them, “You should trust people. You should go to places with other people,” how effective is that? But if you tell them: "Your nervous system is functionally like a TSA agent at the airport and every person who comes close to you is literally going through one of these scans. Every person, to your nervous system, is a potential terrorist. The way to get all potential terrorists off the plane is not to accept them in." This is really the neuroception of people who have been traumatized – they don’t want people to come close to them because their nervous system is making that evaluation. Now, when you ask them on a cognitive level, they will probably say, “Look, I’d love to have good relationships. I’d love to be loved. I’d love to be able to hug, but my body is reacting this way.” A lot of people think that their nervous system is no longer social after trauma, that they’re bad – something is wrong with them – as opposed to clearly understanding the adaptive strategies, the miraculous adaptive strategies, that their body has implemented. If we inform people about the features of their body’s response, which is literally these neuroception subcortical areas in our body reacting, then the higher cortical areas can interpret that and start inhibiting them at a natural level

Pat Odgens, an internationally renowned pioneer in somatic psychology, has focused much of her life on this subject theme and built a framework she calls Window of Tolerance, a framework to keep the person she is working with at a level where their social engagement functions, their cognitive as well as facial and auditory higher functions work just as they should and where the ANS defense system is just barely engaged. She recounts her own aha moment:

As I sat nervously on the passenger seat, with my friend in my father's car at the driving seat, and my life on the line, I realised that before anything else I wanted to know that they could find the break. I wanted to know that they could always stop the car quickly, automatically, no matter what. And only when they got really good at it, and found the break and not hit the others, did I let them turn on the ignition, ease out the clutch, roll forward a little bit, and hit the break again. And this is how I see working with trauma. I do not want my clients to go any further into a process before I and they, know that they can pull themselves out of it. This gives them eventually more courage to go to difficult places because they have built the confidence to come out again.As I sat nervously on the passenger seat, with my friend in my father's car at the driving seat, and my life on the line, I realised that before anything else I wanted to know that they could find the break. I wanted to know that they could always stop the car quickly, automatically, no matter what. And only when they got really good at it, and found the break and not hit the others, did I let them turn on the ignition, ease out the clutch, roll forward a little bit, and hit the break again. And this is how I see working with trauma. I do not want my clients to go any further into a process before I and they, know that they can pull themselves out of it. This gives them eventually more courage to go to difficult places because they have built the confidence to come out again.

The bottom line is that we are hardwired for how we responded to difficult internal or external experiences and those with trauma, having their ANS in hyper vigilance, have it harder than most. Understanding how our behaviour builds on our nerve brain connections, should hopefully give us ways to deal, if not with precipitating feelings of threat, at least with precipitating judgments about our perceptions of threat. So the next time you see yourself asking "Why are my legs suddenly walking faster?", or "Why is my gut suddenly clenching?" "Or why am I suddenly so deeply sad I can't move?", remember that although the triggering event may be hidden from your consciousness, you can now safely and rationally assume that your unexpected behavioural responses is there because something deep in your neurology is working hard to keep you safe. 

Wishing you Well,

Your Shrink in Bansko