“Some people’s lives seem to flow in a narrative; mine had many stops and starts. That’s what trauma does. It interrupts the plot…It just happens, and then life goes on. No one prepares you for it.” 

- Jessica Stern, Denial: A Memoir of Terror

In order to fully understand trauma and the effects it can have on the mind, body, and spirit, it is imperative to first understand the relationship between the body and the brain. The brain and the body are connected in constant dialogue. Take, for example, hunger. How does your brain know you are hungry? For most of us, we feel physical pain in our abdomen which communicates to our brain, “Feed me!” For many people, this dialogue has been interrupted. For example, most people who are in the thick of or are recovering from an eating disorder do not feel the physical sensations of hunger and fullness, and it is something they need to relearn. We’ll talk more about this disconnection later. 

A basic understanding of the nervous system is helpful in order to understand this mind-body connection. There are two main components to the nervous system: the central nervous system (the brain and spinal cord) and the peripheral nervous system (everything else). The autonomic nervous system (ANS) is a component of the peripheral nervous system, and is the unconscious operator that keeps us alive, regulating “involuntary physiologic processes including heart rate, blood pressure, respiration, digestion, and sexual arousal” (National Library of Medicine). The ANS is then broken down into the sympathetic nervous system and the parasympathetic nervous system (the ANS also contains the enteric nervous system, but for our purposes, we’ll stick with looking at the previous two which are most important in the understanding of trauma). Activation of the sympathetic nervous system leads to what is commonly referred to as the “fight, flight, freeze, or fawn” response (we’ll talk more about this in Part 3). The parasympathetic nervous system promotes the body processes involved in “resting and digesting.”

This brain-body system that is in constant dialogue is wired for two primary tasks: survival and connection; in fact, survival and connection are interdependent on one another. Hillary L. McBride, in her book The Wisdom of Your Body, writes that stress and trauma responses are “necessary adaptive responses to things that threaten our survival/relationship drive” and “If we stay in survival responses too long and without receiving help, our brains and bodies adapt, making it easier to remain in survival responses than to get out of them.” 

What does it mean to stay in survival responses too long? Let’s consider a popular example in understanding trauma and its long-term implications. Imagine you are walking on a trail and you see a poisonous snake cross your path. What is your immediate response? Most likely, you do one or a combination of the following: run away, beat the snake with a stick, freeze in your tracks, or scream for help. You don’t necessarily think about how to react; your body simply responds all on its own. This is the domain of the sympathetic nervous system, which communicates to the body to direct all of its energy toward surviving. This includes increasing your heart rate, decreasing the depth of your breathing, slowing your digestion, increasing hormones like adrenaline and cortisol, etc. Once you get to a safe place, you can start to come back to a more regulated place, where your heart rate slows, your breathing becomes deeper, and your body can send more energy into digestion and other functions that are not essential to in-the-moment survival. What happens when you never experience that sense of safety after a stressful or traumatic event? We’ll talk more about that in parts 2 and 3.

Now consider that you are out walking in the woods again, and you see a long, dark object lying across the path. Because of your previous experience with the snake, your body automatically assumes this is a snake, as well (remember, we are wired for survival); before you have a chance to process the fact that this is a stick, not a snake, your sympathetic nervous system (fight, flight, freeze, fawn) has kicked into a high gear. This stick triggered a trauma response, in which your body took over. Your autonomic nervous system was running the show, not the higher functions of your brains (like your ability to have rational thought). 

Next week, we’ll take a closer look at this trauma response, and identify the difference between trauma and everyday stress.

If you are interested in learning more about the impact trauma may have had on your life, and you are ready to understand what living a more full life could mean for you, please reach out to a trauma therapist, either myself (by scheduling a free consultation) or someone else.