Are You F*cked Up or Just Traumatized?
en
January 30, 2025
TLDR: Discusses how trauma affects the brain and nervous system, responses to trauma like fight, flight, freeze, or dissociation, why some people struggle to heal, the role of therapy in healing, and triggers. Explores how trauma is not just in your mind but also physically stored in the body.

In this episode of the BBC - Benson Book Club, host Via Lieta delves into the complexities of trauma and its impact on the brain, drawing insights from the book The Body Keeps The Score by Bessel van der Kolk. The discussion emphasizes that trauma is not just psychological—it's a physiological experience affecting the brain and body.
Key Themes Covering Trauma:
1. How Trauma Affects Brain Function
- Rewiring the Brain: Trauma can drastically alter how our brains function, establishing survival mechanisms that keep us in a state of hyper-vigilance or numbness.
- Survival Responses: The brain utilizes fight, flight, freeze, and dissociation as automatic reactions to perceived threats. Understanding these responses is crucial for recognizing how trauma manifests.
2. Healing from Trauma
- Variation in Healing: The episode explores why some individuals seem to heal from trauma while others remain stuck. Factors such as emotional support, environment, and previous experiences play a vital role.
- Potential Pitfalls of Therapy: Interestingly, some therapeutic practices can inadvertently worsen trauma symptoms if not approached correctly. The conversation calls for conscious therapeutic environments that emphasize present stability before delving into past traumas.
3. The Role of the Body in Trauma
- The Connection Between Body and Mind: Lieta stresses that "your body keeps the score," referring to how our physical responses can be deeply tied to unresolved trauma. For instance, ongoing physical symptoms like fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue can stem from psychological trauma.
- Embodied Healing Techniques: Techniques such as mindfulness, breathwork, and physical movement can help recalibrate the nervous system and aid recovery.
4. Understanding Triggers and Responses
- Identifying Responses: The episode provides insights into identifying personal trauma responses and recognizing triggers that activate these responses.
- Flashbacks and Emotional Responses: Individuals suffering from PTSD often relive traumas through vivid flashbacks and emotional triggers, making day-to-day experiences challenging.
5. Community and Environment
- The Importance of Surroundings: Lieta highlights how important it is to surround oneself with positive influences when healing from trauma, as our brains naturally mirror the emotional states of those around us.
Practical Applications
- Self-Awareness in Healing: Developing awareness around one’s mental and emotional state is the first step toward understanding and processing trauma. Writing down feelings or practicing mindfulness can facilitate this awareness.
- Seeking Professional Help: Engaging with a trauma-informed therapist can provide invaluable support, ensuring that individuals can safely navigate their past experiences without being overwhelmed.
Conclusion
The episode closes with a powerful reminder: while trauma is a painful part of many people's lives, it’s crucial to learn how to live in the present and not let past events dictate future happiness. As Lieta summarizes, “You don’t want to live your life in fear. There’s just not a life to live.”
Through open discussion on these challenges, listeners are encouraged to engage with their experiences, recognize the signs of trauma, and seek out supportive paths to healing.
This summary offers a deep reflection on trauma, its physiological effects, and practical methods for healing, fitting for anyone seeking clarity on their mental health journey.
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Santa and his wife were trapped in a car number 13 of an 87 car pileup. An 18 wheeler went flying over the trunk of their car. People got out of their cars were hit as they ran for their lives. The air splitting crashes went on and on with each jolt from behind. They felt this would be the one that would kill them. Suddenly someone was pounding on their roof. A girl was screaming, get me out of here. I'm on fire. Helplessly, they saw her die as the car that she's been in was consumed by flames.
The next thing they knew, a truck driver was standing on the hood of their car with a fire extinguisher. He smashed the windshield to free them and stand climb through the opening, turning around to help his wife. He saw his wife sitting frozen in her seat.
Hi besties and welcome to a brand new, almost, adulting the largest self-apocasts and movement in a more than destination for some growth, mental health, dating, and everything in between. I'm your Russian, big sister, and your host, Via Lieta, and I would love to welcome you back to a brand new episode of BBC.
Benson book clubs. Since I'm writing a book that hopefully will come out the first quarter of next year, 2026. I've decided to dedicate an episode once a month to some of my favorite books and cover some of my favorite chapters from those books. If you are a brand new listener, thank you so much for joining today. You're going to love today's episode and don't
Don't forget to subscribe so you'll never miss an episode again, so click that subscribe button. Right now, if you are a returning listener, thank you so much and welcome back. Today, I've decided to focus on your brain on trauma. It's something we don't talk about as often as we should, and one book that has been recommended to me so often is a book called The Body Keeps The Score. We are going to cover chapter four, Running For Your Life, The Anatomy of Survival.
So sit back, sip on that overpriced coffee that's curling your hand, and let's learn what it's like your brain and your body going through trauma.
On September 11, 2001, five-year-old Naomi Sol witnessed the first passenger plane slam into the World Trade Center on the windows of his first-grade classroom, less than 1,500 feet away. He and his classmates ran with the teachers down the stairs to the lobby where most of them were reunited with their parents who had dropped them off at school just moments earlier.
Naomi, his older brother, and their dad were three of the 10,000 of people who ran for their lives through the rubble that ash the smoke of lower Manhattan that morning. Ten days later, I visited his family, who were actually friends of mine. In that evening, his parents and I went for a walk in the eerie darkness through the still-smoking pit where Tower 1 once stood. When we returned home, Noem was still awake, and he showed me a picture that he had drawn in 9 a.m. on September 12.
The drawing showed what he had seen that day before. An airplane slamming into the tower, a ball of fire, firefighters, and people jumping from the tower's window. But at the bottom of the picture, he had drawn something else. A black circle in the foot of the buildings.
I had no idea what it was, so I asked him. A trampoline, he replied. What was a trampoline doing there? He explained. So that next time when people have to jump, they're going to be safe. I was stunned. This five-year-old boy, a witness, to an unspeakable mayhem and a disaster just 24 hours before he made that drawing, had to use his imagination to process what he had seen and begin to go on with his life.
Noam was fortunate. His entire family was unharmed, he had grown up surrounded by love, and he was able to grasp the tragedy that they had witnessed had come to an end. During disasters, young children usually take their cues from their parents. As long as their caregivers remain calm and responsive to their needs, they often survive terrible incidents without serious psychological scars. But Noam's experience allows us to see and outline two critical aspects of the adaptive response to threat that is basic to human survival.
At the time, the disaster occurred, he was able to take an active role by running away from it, thus becoming an agent in his own rescue. And once he reached the safety of home with alarm bells in his brain and body, quieted, this freed his mind to make sense of what had happened, and even to imagine a creative alternative to what he had seen, a life-saving champoline.
In contrast to Noam, traumatized people become stuck, stopped in their growth because they can't integrate new experiences into their lives. I was very moved when the veterans of Patton's Army gave me a World War II Army issue watch for Christmas, but it was a sad memento of the year that their lives have effectively stopped. 1944.
Being traumatized means continuing to organize your life as if the trauma were still going on unchanged as every new encounter or event is contaminated by the past. After trauma, the world is experienced with a different nervous system. The survivor's energy now becomes a focus on suppressing inner chaos and the expense of spontaneous involvement in their life. These attempts to maintain control over unbearable psychological reactions
can result in a whole range of physical symptoms including fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, and other autoimmune diseases. This explains what is so critical for trauma treatment to engage the entire organism, body, mind, and brain.
When someone is going through trauma, their whole body responds to the threat. When the brain's alarm system is turned on, it automatically triggers pre-programmed physical escape plans in the oldest part of the brain. As in other animals, the nerves and the chemicals that make up our basic brain structure have a direct connection with our body. When the old brain takes over,
It partially shuts down the higher brain, our conscious mind, and it propels the body to run, to hide, to fight, or an occasion to freeze. By the time we are fully aware of our situation, our body may already be on the move. If the fight-flight-freeze response is successful and we escape the danger, we then recover our internal equilibrium and gradually regain our senses.
If for some reason normal response is blocked, for example, when people are held down, trapped, or otherwise prevented from taking effective action, be in a war zone, a car accident, a fire, domestic violence, rape, the brain keeps secreting stress chemicals, and the brain's electric circuits continue to fire in vain. Long after the actual event has passed, the brain may keep sending signals to the body to escape a threat that no longer exists.
Since the least, 1889, when the French psychologist Pierre Gené published the first scientific account of traumatic stress, it has been recognized that trauma survivors are prone to, quote unquote, continue the action, or rather, the futile attempt at action, which began when the thing happened. Being able to move and do something to protect themselves is a critical factor in determining whether or not a horrible experience will leave long-lasting scars.
So what we're going to be learning in the chapter as we're going to go deeper into the brain's response to trauma is basically the more neuroscience discovers about the brain, the more we realize that it is a vast network of interconnected parts organized to help us survive and flourish. Knowing how these parts work together is essential for us to understand then how trauma affects every single part of our human organism and can serve as an indispensable guide to resolving traumatic stress.
So hopefully that's what we're going to be learning by the end of the chapter as I go over the most important parts. So basically the difference between when you are kind of in a fight or flight or freeze type of interaction during a disaster, there's effective action versus immobilization. So effective action, which is the result of fight or flight, ends the threat while immobilization keeps the body in a state of an inescapable shock and learned helplessness.
Face for danger, people automatically secrete stress, hormones to fuel resistance and escape. I mean, you've seen people who become extremely strong, a mother who lifts up a car to save her baby. We get all this adrenaline in our body. It's one of those moments where we are not sucking, guessing ourselves, our body just is fight or flight. So brain and body are programmed to run for home, where safety can be restored and stress hormones can come to rest.
In these strapped down men who are being evacuated far from home, there was a picture in front of me who, after a hurricane Katrina, stress hormone levels remain elevated and are turned against the survivors, stimulating ongoing fear, depression, rage, and physical disease.
And this is because as they're running away from Hurricane Katrina, Hurricane Katrina continues to follow them. So they are unable to release their stress hormones. The reason I think this chapter is so amazing to cover is because a lot of times, even though we are past whatever trauma we experience, whether it was Los Angeles burning down or the pandemic and we think, okay, well, I'm safe now. Everything's fine. We don't realize that our body keeps the score.
And if we don't take care of it, of ourselves, it remains with us and we carry that trauma into other things in our life. The most important job of the brain is to ensure our survival even under the most miserable conditions. Everything else is secondary. In order to do that, the brain needs
To one, generate internal signals to register what our bodies need, like food, rest, protection, sex, shelter, and so on. Number two, create a map of the world to point us where to go to satisfy those needs. Three, generate the necessary energy and action to get us there. Four, warn us of dangers and opportunities along the way. And five, adjust our actions based on the requirement of the moment.
And since we humans are mammals, creatures that can only survive in thriving groups, all of these imperatives require coordination and collaboration. Psychological problems occur when our internal signals don't work, when our maps don't lead us where we need to go, when we are too paralyzed to move.
when our actions do not correspond to our needs or when our relationships break down. Every brain structure that I discuss has a role to play in the central functions as we will see because trauma can interfere with every single one of them. Our rationale cognitive brain is actually the youngest part of the brain and occupies only about 30% of the areas at our school. The rational brain is primarily concerned with the world outside of us.
Understanding how things and people work and figuring out how to accomplish our goals, manage our time and sequence our actions. Now beneath the rational brain lies two evolutionary older and to some degree separate brains, which are in charge of everything else.
The moment by moment registration and management of our body's sociology and the identification of comfort, safety, threat, hunger, fatigue, desire, longing, excitement, pleasure and pain, the brain is built from the bottom up. It develops level by level within every child in the womb just as it did in its course of evolution.
The most primitive part, the part that is already online when we are born, is the ancient animal brain, often called the reptilian brain. That's located in the brain stem, just above the place where our spinal cord enters the skull. The reptile brain is responsible for all the things that newborns can do, like eat, sleep, wake, cry, breathe, feel, temperature, hunger, wetness, pain, and rid the body of toxins by urinating and defecting.
The brain stem, and this part that sits above it, they basically control the energy levels of the body. They coordinate the functioning of the heart, the lungs, in a immune system. They ensure that these basic life-sustaining systems are maintained within the relatively stable internal balance known homostasis.
Basically, breathing, eating, sleeping, pooping, peeing, they are so fundamental that their significance is easily neglected when we're considering the complexities of our mind and behavior. However, if your sleep is disturbed or your bowels don't work like you're constipated or you always feel hungry, probably because you're stressed, at least that was me during the fires,
or if being touched makes you want to scream, which is often a case of traumatized children and adults, the entire organism is thrown into disequilibrium. It is amazing how many psychological problems involve difficulties with sleep, appetite, touch, digestion, and arousal.
Any effective treatment for trauma has to address these basic housekeeping functions of the body first. Now, right about the reptilian brain is the limb pick system. I'm not going to get too much into it. Basically, that system is shaped in response to experience and partnerships. Basically, if you feel safe and loved, then your brain becomes specialized in exploration, play and cooperation. But if you are frightened and unwanted as a child, then it specializes in managing feelings of fear and abandonment.
Taking together the reptilian brain and the limb-picked system, they make up what you can call, quote unquote, the emotional brain, which is what the doctor will be calling this throughout the book. The emotional brain is at the heart of the central nervous system, and its key task is to look out for your welfare. If you detect danger or a special opportunity such as a promising partner, it alerts you by releasing a squirt of hormones.
The resulting visceral sensation will then interfere with whatever your mind is currently focused on and get you moving physically and mentally in a different direction. These sensations have a huge influence on the small and large decisions that we make throughout our lives where we choose to eat, where we like to sleep and with whom, what music we prefer and whom we befriend and whom we detest.
Our frontal lobes can also stop us from doing things that will embarrass us, hurt us. We don't have to eat every time we're hungry. We don't have to kiss anybody who rooses our desires or blow up every time we're angry, but it is exactly on that edge between impulse and acceptable behavior where most of our troubles begin. The more intense the visceral sensory input from the emotional brain, the less capacity the rational brain has to put a damper on it.
Finally, now we're reaching the emotional brain's cellular organization is basically similar to our neocortex, which is our rational brain. It assesses incoming information in a more global way. So as a result, it's what makes you jump to conclusions based on rough similarities.
But in contrast with the rational brain, which is more organized to sort through a complex set of options, the emotional brain initiates pre-program escape plans, like the flight or flight responses. These reactions are automatic. They're set in motion without any thought or planning on our part, meaning when you get yourself in the situation, let's say you freeze and afterwards, you don't understand why you didn't react, like the way you imagined your brain that you would react.
It's because you had nothing to do with it. It was an automatic response based on whatever you went through in your childhood that automatically in your nervous system, that's what your body did to protect you. Because somehow for whatever reason, that's what protected you as a kid. That's what all of this means. Anyway, moving on, we finally reached the top layer of the brain, which is the neocortex.
We share this outer layer with other mammals, but it's much thicker in us humans. It helps you being able to use words rather than acting out, understanding abstract and symbolic ideas, planning for tomorrow, and being in tune with your teachers and classmates in school.
Now, the frontal lobes that we have in our brain, they're responsible for qualities that make us unique within the animal kingdom. They enable us to use language and abstract thought. They give us the ability to absorb and integrate vast amounts of information attached to meaning to it. They allow us to plan and reflect, to imagine and play out future scenarios to help us predict what's going to happen if we take one action like applying for a new job or if we neglect paying our rent. They make choice possible.
Now, one crucial thing that's so important to understand when it comes to trauma is the effect of us humans mirroring each other. So the frontal lobes are also a seat for empathy. Their ability to feel, quote unquote, into someone else, which again, empathy, everyone has it. And when people say, well, I'm an empath, it's actually silly because we are all empaths. For somebody to not feel empathy is actually that's the person who stands out, just FYI. Anyway,
So, one of the truly sensational discoveries of modern neuroscience that took place in 1994, when in a lucky accident, a group of Italian scientists identified specialized cells in the cortex that came to be known as mirror neurons. The researchers had attached electrodes to individual neurons in a monkey's premotor area and set up a computer to monitor precisely which neurons fired up when the monkey picked up a peanut.
At one point, an experimenter was putting food palettes into a box when he looked up at the computer. The monkey's brain cells were firing up at the exact location where the motor command neurons were located, but the monkey wasn't eating or moving. He was watching the researcher, and his brain was vicariously mirroring the researcher's actions.
After a few more experiments around the world, it soon became clear that mere neurons explained many previously unexplainable aspects of the mind such as empathy, imitation, being synchronized, and even the development of language. One writer compared mere neurons to neural Wi-Fi, where we pick up not only another person's movement, but their emotional state and intentions as well.
When people are in sync with each other, they tend to stand or sit still in similar ways, and their voices take on the same rhythm. But our mere neurons also make us vulnerable to others' negativity, so that we end up responding to their anger with fury or are dragged down by their depression. So treatment or trauma needs to reactivate the capacity to safely mirror and be mirrored by others, but also to resist being hijacked by others' negative emotions.
So this kind of in a way explains the importance of your environment. Literally what I spoke about last week with my how to be confident episode, which by the way, if you haven't listened to it, go listen to it because only do I put so much freaking effort into that episode and well, all my episodes, but into my how to episodes I put so much effort into. So make sure you listen to it if you haven't yet. But anyway, I literally discussed it.
on last week's episode that your environment is a big factor in your confidence because if everyone else around you are negative or keep bringing you down you will not be able to succeed in becoming confident and this little part right now explain something kind of similar.
Since our brains mirror those around us, if we want to heal from our trauma or some other painful pain that we're going through or experiencing, you will not be able to do this. If you surround yourself only around negative people, people who talk shit, if you only consume negative things on Twitter and so on, if you're around people who are stuck in life, who don't see the light, don't ever want to be happy, people who only bring you down.
It will not work out for you. You will mirror those actions and those emotions, and you will sink even lower. Just like they used to say, a happy person, no matter how hard they try, they will not be able to bring a negative person up if they do not want to go up. Unfortunately, the same does not apply the other way around. A negative person, if they're very negative, can in fact bring down a happy person to their level.
So if you're currently going through trauma and all of that stuff, make sure you pay attention to who you're surrounding yourself with. That is part of your journey to healing. Now, before we move on with the second half of today's episode, which is going to cover in more detail, the trauma triggers, this association, fight a flight trigger responses and so on. First, let's take a quick little break with some ads, which thinks of them as why I still currently have a podcast. So God bless my sponsors and let's take a little
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So now let's move on to how do we identify danger? Danger is a normal part of life and the brain is in charge of detecting it and organizing a response. Sensory information about the outside world arrives through our eyes, our nose, ears, skin, the sensation converge in the thalmos, an area that's inside the limbic system that acts as a cook within the brain. Steers all the input from our perception into a fully blended soup.
an integrated, coherent experience of this is what is happening to me. The sensations are then passed on in two directions down the amigdala and up to the frontal lobes where they reach our conscious awareness. So from the low road up to the high road.
So, this takes milliseconds longer in the midst of an overwhelmingly threatening experience. However, processing by the thalmoose can break down, like sights, sounds, smells, and touch. They're encoded as isolated disassociated fragments and normal memory processing disintegrates. This is where time freezes so that the present danger feels like it's going to last forever.
So that's what we experience in the moment of danger, like, Oh my God, am I about to die? Can I survive this and so on? So then the central function of the amygdala, which is he calls the brain smoke detectors to identify whether incoming input is actually relevant for survival. It does so quickly and automatically with the help of feedback from other parts in your brain.
So if that amygdala senses a threat like a potential collision with an oncoming vehicle, a person on the street who looks threatening, then it will send an instant message in your brain, recruiting the stress hormone system with your autonomic nervous system to orchestrate a whole body response. So because the amygdala processes this information, so quickly, it actually processes it faster than the frontal lobes do.
It decides whether incoming information is a threat to survival even before we are consciously aware of the danger. So by the time that we realize what is actually happening, our body has already made the move. Your body is already on the move. Get it? So that McDonald's danger signals trigger the release of powerful stress hormones, including cortisol, adrenaline. These are stress hormones I've even talked about on my love episodes and how to get them obsessed with you, where you need to release them, but not too many, obviously.
These increase your heart rate. Blood pressure and rate of breathing, preparing us to fight back or run away. Once the danger is passed, the body then returns to its normal state fairly quickly. But when recovery is blocked, the body is triggered to defend itself, which makes people feel agitated and aroused.
So while the central function of the amygdala aka the smoke detector is usually pretty good at picking up danger clues, trauma increases the risk of misinterpreting a particular situation is dangerous or safe. Like you can get along with other people only if you can accurately gauge whether their intentions are benign or dangerous.
Even a slight misreading can lead to a painful misunderstandings and relationships at home at work. So then, let's discuss controlling the stress response, the watchtower. If that smoke detector in your brain, think of the frontal lobes and specifically the medial prefrontal cortex located directly above our eyes as the watchtower.
Offering a view of the scene from on high is that smoke you smell the sign that your house is on fire and you need to get out fast or is it coming from the stake that you just accidentally put over to high flame. So the smoke detector in your brain, the amygdala is in the business to make a judgment of whether or not it's a stake or your house is on fire. Instead, it's just there to get you ready
to fight back or to escape. Even before, your frontal lobes finally get a chance to weigh down whether or not it's the stake or your house is on fire. So as long as you are not too upset, your frontal lobes can restore your balance by helping you realize that you are responding to a false alarm and then abort the stress response.
So, normally, the executive capacities of the prefrontal cortex enable people to observe what is going on, predict what's going to happen, if they take a certain action, and then make a conscious choice. Allows the executive brain to inhabit, organize, and modulate the hardwired, atomic reactions are pre-programmed into our emotional brain. This capacity is crucial for preserving our relationships with our fellow human beings.
So as long as our frontal lobes are working properly, we are unlikely to lose our temper every time a waiter is late, with our order or an insurance company agent puts us on hold. But when the system breaks down, we become like conditioned animals. The moment we detect danger, we automatically go into fight or flight mode.
In PTSD, the critical balance between the amygdala, our smoke detector and our brain, and our watchtower shifts radically, which makes it much harder to control emotions and impulses. So studies of human beings in highly emotional states reveal that
intense fear, sadness, anger, the all-increase activations of the subcortical brain regions involved in emotions and significantly reduced activity in various areas in our frontal lobe, like the MPFC, which was our watchtower. So when this occurs, the capacity of the frontal lobes
breaks down and then people take leave of their senses." So that means they may suddenly startle in response to any loud sound or they become enraged by the smallest frustrations or they freeze when somebody touches their body. So effectively dealing with stress depends upon achieving a balance between our smoke detector in our brain and the watchtower that's above our eyes.
So if you want to manage your emotions better, your brain gives you two options. You can learn to regulate them, your nervous system, from the top down or from the bottom up. So the top down regulation involves strengthening the capacity of the watchtower above your eyes to monitor your body's sensations, mindfulness meditation and yoga.
can help you with this. Now, if you are trying to regulate from the bottom up, that involves recalibrating the autonomic nervous system. We can access that through breath, movement, or touch. Breathing is one of the few body functions under both conscious and autonomic control. When I've done episodes before on our nervous system and how to regulate our nervous system,
I gave you guys a few call to action the end of the episode that had to do with breathing exercises, different types of breathing exercises that can help you with different types of reactions you may get. So our self experience is the product of the balance between our rational and our emotional brains. When these two systems are in balance, we feel like ourselves. However, when our survival is a stake, these systems can function relatively independently.
So like, if you're driving along with a friend and you guys are just having a conversation and a truck suddenly looms in the corner of your eye, you instantly stop talking, slam on the brakes, and you turn your steering wheel to get away from harm's way. If your instinctive actions saved you from a collision,
you may resume where you left off. Whether you are able to do so depends largely on how quickly your visceral reactions subside to the threat. So a neuroscientist Paul McLean, he decided to compare the relationship between the rational brain and the emotional brain. So as long as the weather is calm and the path is smooth, the writer can feel an excellent control.
but unexpected sounds or threats from other animals can make the horse bolt, forcing the rider to hold for his dear life. Likewise, when people feel that their survival is at stake, or they are seized by rage, longing, fear, sexual desires, they stop listening to the voice of reason. And it makes little sense to argue with them. Oh, that's interesting.
So although psychologists usually try to help people use insight and understanding to manage their behavior, they just assume maybe if they understand why they're acting a certain way they'll stop, neuroscience research shows the very few psychological problems are the result of these defects in understanding that most originate in pressure from deeper regions in our brain, the drive our perception and our attention. So when the alarm bell of our emotional brain keeps signaling that you are in danger,
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I want to share some core features of traumatic stress, where it's constantly reliving that moment, re-experiencing images, sounds, and emotions, and this association. So on a fine September morning in 1999, Stan and UTE Lawrence, a professional cop on their 40s, set out from their home in London, Ontario, to attend a business meeting in Detroit.
Halfway through the journey, they ran into a wall of dense fog that reduced visibility to zero in a split second. Stan immediately slammed on the brakes coming to a standstill. Sideways on the highway just missing a huge truck. An 18-wheeler went flying over the trunk of their car. Vans and cars slammed into them and into each other. People got out of their cars were hit as they ran for their lives. The air splitting crashes went on and on with each jolt from behind. They felt this would be the one that would kill them.
Stan and his wife were trapped in a car number 13 of an 87 car pileup, the worst road disaster in Canadian history. Then came the eerie silence. Stan struggled to open the doors and windows by the 18-wheeler that had crushed their trunk, was wedged under the car. Suddenly, someone was pounding on their roof, a girl was screaming, get me out of here, I'm on fire! Helplessly, they saw her die as the car that she's been in was consumed by flames.
The next thing they knew, a truck driver was standing on the hood of their car with a fire extinguisher. He smashed the windshield to free them and stand climb through the opening, turning around to help his wife. He saw his wife sitting frozen in her seat. Stan and the truck driver lifted her out and an ambulance took them to an emergency room.
Aside from a few cuts, they were found to be physically unscathed. At home that night another Stan, nor his wife, wanted to go to sleep. They felt that if they let go, they would die. They were irritable, jumpy, and on edge. That night, and for many to come, they drank copious quantities of wine to numb their fear. They could not stop the images that were haunting them or the questions that went on and on. What if we'd left earlier? What if we didn't stop for gas?
After three months of this, they sought help from Dr. Ruth, a psychiatrist at the University of Western Ontario. Dr. Ruth told Stan and his wife that she wanted to visualize their brains within an MRI scan before beginning the treatment. This scan basically measures the neural activity by tracking changes in the blood flow in the brain, and unlike the PET scan, it does not require exposure to radiation. So Stan went first and he mainly went into a flashback. He came out the scanner, sweating.
with his heart racing and his blood pressure sky high. This was just the way I felt during the accident he reported. I was sure that I was going to die and there was nothing I could do to save myself. Instead of remembering the accident to something that had happened three months earlier, Stan, during that scan, was reliving it.
Interesting, right? Now, this association is the essence of trauma. The overwhelming experience is split off and fragmented so that the emotion sounds, images, thoughts, and physical sensations related to trauma take on a life of their own. The sensory fragments of memory intrude into the present where they are literally relived as long as the trauma is not resolved. The stress hormones of the body you see creates to protect itself keep circulating.
However, many people may not be aware of the connection between their quote unquote crazy feelings and reactions in the traumatic events that have been replayed in their bodies. They have no idea why they respond to such a minor irritation. AKA, oh my god, this is triggering me, as if they are being annihilated. Flashbacks and reliving are in some way worse than the trauma itself.
A traumatic event has a beginning and an end, and at some point it's over, but for people with PTSD, a flashback can occur at any time whether they are awake or asleep. There's no way of knowing when it's going to occur again or how long it's going to last.
suffer from flashbacks often organize their life around trying to protect against them. They may compulsively go to the gym, or they're going to numb themselves with drugs, or these people suddenly start to bungee-jump motorcycle race, just things that constantly give you an adrenaline rush. Constantly fighting unseen dangers is exhausting, and it leaves them fatigued, depressed, and weary.
So if elements of the trauma were played again and again, accompanying stress hormones engrave those memories even more deeply in the mind. So ordinary day-to-day events become less and less compelling. Not being able to deeply take in what is going on around them makes it possible to feel fully alive. It becomes harder to feel the joys and aggravations of ordering life.
It becomes harder to concentrate on the task at hand. Not being fully alive in the present keeps them more firmly imprisoned in the past. So trigger responses manifest in many different ways. Veterans may react to the slightest cue like hitting a bump on the road or seeing a kid playing in the street as if they were in a warzone again.
They startle easily and become enraged or numb. Victims of childhood sexual abuse may become overly sexualized and then feel intensely ashamed if they become excited by sensations or images that recall their molestation even with those sensations or their natural pleasures associated with particular body parts.
These reactions are irrational and largely outside a person's control. Intense and barely controlled urges and emotions make people feel crazy, and it makes them feel like they don't belong to the human race. Feeling numb during birthday parties for kids in response to the death of a loved one makes people feel like monsters. As a result, shame becomes a dominant emotion, and hiding the truth is a central preoccupation.
They rarely are in touch with the fact that these sensations have their origins in traumatic experiences. So this is where therapy comes in. Therapists can then assist people to mindfully observe their emotions and sensations to help them get in touch with a context from which they emerge. However, the bottom line is that the threat perception system of the brain has changed and people's physical reactions are detected by the imprint of the past.
The challenge here is not so much learning to accept the terrible things that have happened but learning how to gain mastery over one's internal sensations and emotions. Sensing, naming, and identifying what is going on inside is actually the first step to recovery.
So, for example, when Stan went into that special MRI machine, his brain lit up in exactly the same areas that it would lit up had he actually been in the car crash in that moment. It triggered such powerful stress hormones and nervous system responses. That's why he began to sweat and tremble and have flashbacks.
His blood pressure became elevated, his heart started to race again. That is why it's so important to have an efficient smoke detector in our brains. You don't want to get caught in a raging fire, but you also don't want to go into a frenzy every time you smell smoke because it becomes intensely disruptive. Yes, you need to detect whether someone is getting upset with you, but if your smoke detector, aka your amygdala, goes into override, every time someone gives you a dirty look or
makes a weird face, you will then become chronically scared that people have to get you, that people hate you. When in reality, none of that is actually happening. Trauma is the ultimate experience of, quote unquote, this will last forever. So during the scan, both Stan and his wife became hypersensitive and irritable after the accident, suggesting that their prefrontal cortex were struggling to maintain control in the face of stress. Stan's flashbacks show a more extreme reaction.
And in his skin, it showed that some areas were deactivated. And when those areas are deactivated, people lose their sense of time. And they become trapped in the moment without a sense of past, present, or future. Now that it's been deactivated, the timekeeper in his brain has collapsed. That is why he is so hypersensitive, irritable, and struggling to maintain control in the face of stress. Because he's not in the present. His brain is not processing. He's in the present. He's still living in the experience of the accident.
So basically without using complicated words, the structure in your brain that are along the midline of the brain, they're devoted to your inner experience of yourself. But then those on the side that I just mentioned, they're more concerned with your relationship with your surroundings. So obviously when that's deactivated, that means you have no control of understanding what's happening of your surroundings. So that's why you're constantly walking in fear that something is about to happen and you're constantly still living in the accident.
So, the durosal prefrontal cortex that I said that was looking on the side of the front of the brain that determines your relationship with your surroundings and others, it tells us how our present experience relates to the past and how it may affect the future. You think of this as a timekeeper of the brain, knowing that whatever is happening is finite and will sooner or later come to an end, making most experiences tolerable.
The opposite is also true. Situations can become intolerable if they feel like you can't terminate them. Most of us know from sad personal experiences that terrible grief is typically accompanied by a sense that this wretched state will last forever and that we will never get over it or lost.
That is why trauma is the ultimate experience on quote-unquote, this will last forever, or at least that's how we feel. But Stan's scan reveals why people can actually recover from trauma only when the brain structure that we knocked out during the original experience, which is why the event registered in the brain is trauma in the first place, are fully quote-unquote online. And this part is important.
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This part is important. So a lot of people go to therapy for their trauma and a lot of them try to visit the past and try to heal it. But unfortunately, visiting the past in therapy should actually only be done while people are biologically speaking, firmly rooted in the present. That means that that side area that I mentioned in your brain is turned on.
Not deactivated, where you're fully now again, the timekeeper is on and you're aware of your surroundings, and you're aware they're in your present. That part is important. So, should only be done when you're firmly rooted in the present, you're feeling calm, safe, and grounded as possible. Being anchored in the present, while revisiting the trauma, then opens the possibility of deeply knowing that the terrible events belong to the past. It's not happening in this moment. You're aware of that.
So for that to happen, the brain's watchtower above your eyes, the cook in the middle of your brain, and the timekeeper, the things on the side of your brain, need it to be online, need to be activated. So therapy will not work as long as people keep being pulled back into the past.
So like I mentioned before, the thalamus in your brain, that helps you distinguish between sensory information that's relevant and information that you can safely ignore. Like listening to this podcast, well, maybe there's a gardener outside right now that's doing some gardening, but your brain is allowing you through that thalamus thing.
to then focus on my podcast instead of putting all your attention on the gardener so people ptsd have their floodgates completely wide open they lack of filter there are constant sensory overloads in order to cope they try to shut themselves down and they develop tunnel vision and hyper focus.
If they can't shut down naturally, that is why they may go to drugs, alcohol, to block out the world. The tragedy is that the price of closing down includes filtering out sources of pleasure and joys as well. Now, not everyone responds to trauma the same way. It's all based on our nervous system and during our childhood, but for example, Stan's wife experience was a little different to trauma.
Since she was sitting right next to Stan in the wrecked car, she responded to her trauma script by going numb. So, froze. That's happened to me before. Her mind went blank, and nearly every area of her brain showed markedly decreased activity. Her heart rate and blood pressure didn't elevate. When asked how she felt during the scan she replied, I felt just like I felt at the time of the accident. I felt nothing.
So what's happening to Stan's wife is she is disassociating, and that even shows on the skin on her brain. It's kind of blinking out in response to being reminded of past trauma. So in this case, almost every area of her brain decreased activation, unlike for Stan. It interfered with her thinking, with her focus and orientation. So the medical term for that type of response is called depersonalization.
Anyone who deals with traumatized men, women, or children is sooner or later confronted with blank stares and absent minds that are in manifestation of biological freeze reaction. De-personalization is one symptom of the massive disassociation created by trauma.
Stan Flashbacks came from his thwarted efforts to escape the crash. All his disassociated, fragmented, sensations and emotions roared back into the present. But instead of struggling to escape, his wife had completely disassociated her fear and felt nothing.
So for people like Stan's wife who experienced this type of freeze reaction to trauma, conventional talk therapy in that type of circumstance is virtually useless because they're part of the brain of thinking, feeling, remembering, making sense is completely shut down. The reason Stan's wife responded so differently from Stan is because she was utilizing survival strategy that her brain had learned in childhood to cope with her mother's harsh treatment.
When her father died when she was nine years old and her mother subsequently was often nasty and demeaning to her at some point, she discovered that she could just blank out her mind when her mother yelled at her. Thirty-five years later, when she was trapped in a demolished car, her brain automatically went into the same survival mode that she made herself disappear. Holy shit, is that why? So I've been, I've had a few accidents in my life before, but I've been in an accident where I was hit by a drunk driver and he totaled my car.
I was very lucky to survive it. But I remember when I got hit by the drunk driver, I completely froze and I couldn't speak and I wanted to speak and I could hear the people in front of me when the neighbors right now and they asked me if I was okay. And I thought I was answering. I thought I was saying, yes, I was trying to and I just couldn't speak. And I remember they were looking at me so confused and they looked at each other and they said, wait, do you think she can't speak? Do you think she can hear us? Do you think she understands us? And it was so shocking to me as well because I had no control over my body.
or anything in that moment and even surprised me because I thought there was no way if I was ever in a situation like this that is how I would react and that's what happened to my body and it was out of my control because my quote-unquote fire detector in my brain reacted faster than my frontal cortex parts were able to react. So the challenge for people like sand's wife is to become alert and engaged
a difficult but unavoidable test if they want to recapture their life which by the way she did find her way back she wrote a book of her experience so this is where bottom-up approach to therapy becomes essential. The aim is actually to change the patience sociology his or her relationship to bodily sensations so the trauma center.
They work with such measures as heart rate, breathing patterns. They help patients evoke and notice bodily sensations by tapping. Acupressure points, rhythmic interactions with other people are also effective, tossing a beach ball back and forth, bouncing on a Pilates ball, drumming or dancing to music. Numbing is the other side of the coin in PTSD.
Many untreated trauma survivors start out like Stan with explosive flashbacks, then numb out later in life. While reliving trauma is dramatic, frightening, and potentially self-destructive, over time, lack of presence can be even more damaging. This is a particular problem with traumatized children. The acting out kids tend to get attention. The blanked out ones don't bother anybody and are left to lose their future bit by bit. Wow, that just broke my heart.
The challenge of trauma treatment is not only dealing with the past, but even more it's enhancing the quality of day-to-day experience. One reason the traumatic memories become dominant in PTSD is that it's too difficult to feel truly alive right now. When you can't be fully here, you go to the places where you did feel alive.
Even if those places are filled with horror and misery, many treatment approaches for traumatic stress focuses on desensitizing patients to their past, with the expectation the re-exposure to their trauma will then reduce emotional outbursts and flashbacks. I believe that this is based on a misunderstanding of what happens in traumatic stress.
We must, most of all, help our patients and people around us to live fully and securely in the present. In order to do that, we need to help bring those brain structures to desert them when they were overwhelmed by trauma back. This association will make you less reactive, but if you cannot feel satisfaction in ordinary, everyday things like taking a walk, cooking a meal, or playing with your kids, then life will pass you by.
That was a really long chapter. I'm looking forward to editing it to cut it down a bit for you guys, but that was really helpful information. I feel like I got to learn a lot about what's happening in our brain where we act differently. And I think one thing that I took from it, aside from activating all these things in our brains, that can happen just by taking walks, jumping on a ball and doing things like that is that some people you have to take care of your brain.
first and learn how to live back in the present before you even go to that type of therapy when you revisit the past and that trauma and that what i thought it's times where i completely disassociate and have no reactions during moments where other people have fear where i thought was one of my strengths today i got to learn that that's actually part of my trauma response.
So as we keep learning of ourselves through these episodes, hopefully you can then find the proper information and research that can help you learn more about what you can do to heal yourself because you don't want to be stuck in the past. And you don't want to completely disassociate where you no longer feel trauma, but you also no longer feel happiness and joy and enjoy just a little moments in your life.
Trauma is horrible, but there's nothing we can do to go back and fix it. We cannot fix it. We can only live in the present and yes grief and everything else is like comes and waves, but eventually you have to learn have to say I survived it. It's done. All I can do now is learn from that experience and hope that I will be strong enough to take on whatever else that comes in my life. You don't want to live your life in fear. It's just there's just not a life to live.
So anyway, that is that. I hope you enjoyed today's episode. If you did, make sure to save it, share with your friends, leave me a five-star review on the podcast app if you have a time and give us a subdu, das vidanya.
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