YOU and how Trauma affects the Brain
Trauma disrupts the stress-hormone system. It plays havoc with
the entire nervous system, which prevents people from processing
and integrating traumatic memories into conscious mental
frameworks.
Rachel’s Vineyard.org has a lot of information on trauma and how
it affects YOUR brain.
On the website, it gives very detailed information about the brain
and how it works in trauma
Trauma creates chaos in our brain:
The amygdala is a small, almond-shaped portion of the brain
It is the emotional part. It is the primitive part of the brain
It interprets messages that there is a danger.
It knows nothing about reasoning originative functions. It deals
with feelings and emotions
It controls emotional reactions such as fear and anger
It is the alarm portion of the brain
It becomes high active during and while remembering a traumatic
incident
It controls our behavior. When you have been in trauma it is
hypersensitive-overreacts to normal stimuli
Trauma freezes thinking.
It is as though the left side(cognitive) and the right side(emotional)
are disconnected from one another.
Usually, our body and emotions and thoughts are all connected.
Trauma separates these from one another
I remember when I went through trauma- loss of mother, brother,
and sister in little over 2 years, and then I was having hips
problems at the same time. Listed below are some things that
may help you overcome trauma:
- Learn about causes and risk factors of trauma
- move frequently in ways that exercise your arms and legs
- make the face-to-face connection with others a priority
- learn about and practice things that soothe your nervous system
- make choices that will boost your physical health
- learn more by reading related articles.
Healthyplace.com talks about that:
During trauma, your amygdala is responsible for emotions and
actions motivated by survival needs. In threatening situations:
Increases your arousal and autonomic response associated with
fear
Activates the release of stress hormones
Engages your emotional response
Decides what memories are stored and where they should be
placed around the cortex
Applies feeling, tone and emotional charge to memory
Adjacent to the amygdala the hippocampus is responsible for the
formation, organization, storage and retrieval of memories.
Technical, it converts them from short-term to long-term, sending
them to the appropriate parts of your outer brain for storage
Trauma, however, hijacks this process; the hippocampus is
prevented from transforming the memories and so those
memories remain in an activated, short-term status. This stops
the memories of being properly integrated so that their effects
diminish. In some cases, when the hippocampus’ function is
suppressed it has been shown to shrink.
The blood flow to the brain is affected and trauma that is strictly
mental or emotional rather than the result of a physical injury can
manifest in our bodies in a variety of ways including chronically
restricted tissue, the shrinking or bracing of the overall structure, a
tight diaphragm and shallow breathing, cold hands, and feet—
which is the body summoning energy from the extremities to the
central nervous system and core), and strong tensions at the
base of the skull and at the bottom of the spine.
There is lots more to trauma than just the trauma itself. Having to
get past the trauma and the effects on your WHOLE being.
