Trauma and the Brain and Body

Trauma impacts many areas of our lives, but did you know it also can encode in our bodies and brains? Let’s start with a video about how our brains operate to keep us safe and help us to reach our goals.

When we have an experience that puts our body into a flight, fight, or freeze mode, that experience is encoded or stored in our brain and body at multiple levels. Many times we may not remember the event, but the body stores a memory of it.  

Animals in the wild will ‘shake off and release’ any excess energy in its body by running, shaking, or roaring. Through this natural reaction to a traumatic event the animal releases all the arousal and tension in the body that was mobilized during the threat as soon as the threat is over. Thereby a balance in the nervous system is restored and the animal becomes present and is able to respond fully to its environment (1).   

We are not designed to carry chronic stress in our bodies. 

Unlike animals in the wild we aren’t always able to “shake it off” and return to a calm nervous system after shifting into fight or flight. Or we can experience chronic trauma or toxic stress that can create a prolonged activation of stress response systems in the body and brain (2).

We can carry unresolved traumas that can be triggered by seemingly unimportant actions or even perceptions. We may be triggered without understanding the source of the trigger - even a smell could trigger a biological response. 

Triggers

  • A trigger may be a person, place, thing, smell, sound, expression

  • A trigger represents a piece of information your body stored as a marker of a time negative or positive

Developing awareness of potential triggers can help a person anticipate a triggering situation and possibly avoid it or recognize it when it’s happening.  

 

Sources:

  1. Levine, Peter A. (2005). Healing trauma: a pioneering program for restoring the wisdom of your body. Boulder, CO. Sounds True.

  2. “Toxic Stress.” Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University, 17 Aug. 2020, https://developingchild.harvard.edu/science/key-concepts/toxic-stress/.