The Trauamtized Brain
How psychological trauma affects our brain, body and soul. nd how we can cure ourselves.
The Bear
I was 5 years old when my father noticed me writing with my left hand, it was after my kindergarten, a chubby child who was eager to learn his first alphabet ‘A’, I remember setting in the middle of our hall, in my cute little desk, it was white with little brown bears painted all around it, I was a big fan of bears, I had panties with bears on them, on my pajamas and my blanket too. I just loved those furry creatures. My father came across the hall and saw me there, writing with my bloody left hand, he was agitated and furious in such a perplexing way. My father, like any strict Sudanese religious father, he believed using your left hand in any activity is a crime, shame and just utterly wrong! you can only, and only use your holy right hand. So, he screamed at me, went outside and after 5 minutes he came with a rope, he took my left arm, then tied it to my chair, leaving only my right arm free so I can just write with it. I was in utter fear, shocked and boggled. I cried from the pain of being tied to the chair, I also cried because I didn’t understand what I was being punished for, but I was being shushed and told to keep writing. Everyday, after kindergarten was like this. It was like was attacked and injured by a bear, the creature the I love, and now I have to go back home everyday with an angry bear waiting for me. This is t how I became ambidextrous (double-handed) it’s also, a story of a psychological trauma. I grew up fine, my father is a great person, he raised me well. Vut sometimes a trauma could be so severe to the extent that it may modifies your whole life, shapes your thoughts and changes the way your brain thinks, it could jeopardize any single aspect of your life. Let’s learn more about trauma, a universal phenomenon that we all encounter in our existence, and how we can heal from it.
Trauma = Doomsday
Interestingly enough Psychological Trauma has a deep level of complexity and multidimensional effectiveness, that makes it really hard to distinctively define it, because in order to define something, you need to be able to understand it fully, and there’re still a few stretches of vagueness within the scientific realm of understanding psychological trauma. We humbly and roughly though, can define it conceptually as the exposure and confrontation with heavily stress inducing, overwhelming and disturbing events as an adult, such as war, violence, disasters, serious illness, death, threatened death, actual or threatened serious injury, or actual or threatened sexual violence, or as child such as physical, emotional and sexual abuse, physical or emotional neglect, parental mental illness, parental separation, divorce and domestic violence. We can also define psychological trauma phenomenologically as a sense of incapability, subjection, feebleness, hopelessness and defenselessness at the utmost level. The person is painfully witnessing an absolute shatter and disruption of his beliefs and expectations, leaving him falling in fear and panic, and sometimes in blankness and frozenness.
In The Flesh And Mind Of The Traumatized
“Don’t you dare to remember”: One of the important methods in cognitive behavioral therapy is what we call ‘free dissociation’, which is basically talking about your past experiences so you and your psychologist try to understand and make sense of them. Mere understanding has an unbelievable power in resolving a troubling past experience. The thing is, with an individual who went into traumatic episode, he refuses and utterly rejects to remember his previous trauma, now why is that? Well, because as humans and as part of our nature find it really hard and irritating to witness an application of pain, torment and brutality on others. Because these things cause stress, agitation and other deeply negative emotions. We even trick ourselves and actually believe that most of the pain happens in faraway few areas that are not anywhere near us (like Darfur or Palestine). So you can imagine, a person who has been put into brutality and pain in the most horrible way, find it really dreadful and daunting to rememorize and witness their trauma again, that’s why the brain of a person with trauma, tries its best to push away and bury these memories, deeply into its untouched and unvisited basement.
“Beware from danger”: The most noted and most general characteristic of traumatized people, is that they’re in constant and never ending state of alertness and watchfulness, they pay an over-extensive and anxious attention to their surroundings, leaving their body in a continuous flight or fight mode, and their mind in an agitating fear and defensiveness, they are over-sensitive to any small and potential mark of threat.
“Shame one me!”: We think that traumatized people are unbearably suffering from the act of brutality, pain and exploit that have been inflected by others at the traumatic episode, but more shockingly, those poor people are equally if not more, are suffering from the feeling of self-resentment and loath caused by their shame of their act of rage, anger and cruelty that they did during the episode (as self-defense for survival or taking revenge) or their submission, easiness and not doing what was supposed to be done (frozenness caused by the shock or in sexual abuse for example, when sometimes they might still want to be in contact with the abuser, since in some cases he is someone close to them).
“I’m nothing, and I live for nothing”: People with trauma become emotionally frozen and numb. Dull emptiness is filled into their hearts, extends and metastasizes like a horrid cancer into the rest of their bodies and souls, leaving them floating in void with no sense of purpose or direction. Although a person might be a successful writer, lawyer or a doctor, but it just rips away from them that sense of self-love and self-worth, they despise themselves and care about how much of success did they accomplish.
“Trauma, trauma my little friend! Trauma, trauma I See you everywhere”: A huge critical point that encapsulates the experience of a traumatized person is his loss of the gift of imagination and mental flexibility. A traumatized person is viscously and constantly dragged back into his past, into the timeframe of that dreadful event, his mind is stuck there. Therefore, in the present, they superimpose and corelate anything that happens around them with the trauma. Imagination is the most beautiful gift given to human beings, it’s the most essential element for forecasting the future, envisioning opportunities and the strongest tool to predict outcomes of our behaviors or others’. It helps us to envision the possible reactions and predict the outcome of every single one of them. Imagination enlightens and amuses our souls, picking it up from the mud of boredom, it helps us in crafting and excelling our skills, it enhances our experiences and helps us to create meaning and story out of everything we encounter. It’s basically what keeps us beautifully alive and functioning. Unfortunately, and painfully enough, a person with a trauma loses all of that.
“Trauma is all who I am”: Another aspect that in certain cases or maybe in most cases, when the traumatized person is encouraged to talk about his trauma (like in group therapy for example) it starts to become an essential part of his identity, he becomes fixated with it and creates some sort of meaning. The same thing that causes pain to them is the same exact thing that they extract meaning of life from, to the extent that the world is sharply divided into people who know about the trauma and people who don’t, and the people who do, are trustworthy but people who don’t, are suspectable source of threat.
“New job for the brain: Don’t get hurt again”: The trauma causes a tremendous and strong impact on the structural network of the brain. The brain is physically and physiologically reorganized and changed in a manner that should serve one purpose, and only one single purpose, which is not to get hurt again! Never. Therefore, a person becomes hypersensitive, enclosed within himself, suspicious and alert. The body is practically stuck in the past! It doesn’t know that the trauma has past, and in order to heal, it needs to be told: “you went through some tough and immensely loathsome situations that destroyed your sense of being, but it’s all gone now, we’re in the present now, its’s all safe and sound, there may be a minimal threats of danger here and there, but that’s life and it’s manageable”.
“My body aches, my heart trembles”: People who went into severe traumas are triple the time have the risk of heart diseases. That’s caused by the continuous activation of stress response system of the brain, which is caused by the continuous exposure of a stressor (continuous current trauma or the memories of old trauma) this continuous activation, turns this system from being the guardian angel of the person (support and survival) to a monstrous devil (health damaging). The prefrontal cortex is also affected, which lowers the person’s ability to make reasonable judgments and other problems solving functions. Trauma affects the amygdala too, leaving the person unable to regulate his emotions effectively and rightfully. The immune system is lowered and jeopardized also and this is just a mere glimpse of how the body is dangerously affected.
The Grand Avenues of Healing
I can present you with three avenues of therapy techniques and methods that will drastically help in dealing with trauma: 1) top down, by talking, reconnecting with others, and allowing ourselves to know and understand what is going on with us, while processing the memories of the trauma; 2) by taking medicines that shut down inappropriate alarm reactions, or by utilizing other technologies that change the way the brain organizes information, and 3) bottom up, by allowing the body to have experiences that deeply and viscerally contradict the helplessness, rage, or collapse that result from trauma (van der Kolk 2014).
The first avenue is incredibly beneficial, connecting with your social identity, involving within your community and letting them to share with you the heavy lift of your trauma is really therapeutic, the mere fact that “you’re not alone” is just magnificently helpful. We’re social creatures, standing up for each other and communicating with each other is what helped us to survive more than 50000 years. The strive to connect is deeply written in our genes, it has a really magical and physiological ability to heal you. If you’re someone who went into trauma, connect with your peers, let them engage deeply with you, with your experience and emotions. Join group therapy or any kind of valuable and authentic ways to connect you with people.
The second avenue is really valuable and important to highly severe cases of trauma. A family of drugs like of SSRIs and SNRIs, proved some effectiveness in dealing with trauma. However, keep in mind that they should be the last option and only be prescribed after deep and utter thought and consideration of multiple psychiatrists and psychotherapists. A person should be meticulous when taking these kinds of drugs, since they have some serious and annoying side effects.
The third avenue is my personal favorite, the mind and body are deeply connected in all sorts of levels. personality is like a light; it reflects itself on anything. The way you think of yourself could be reflected in the way you pose. The way you walk tells a lot about you too, if you’re a fast walker and you look forward with an upright posture, then most likely you’re high in conscientiousness (hard worker) and openness (you strive for new experiences) and low in neuroticism (you don’t let stress to withdraw you). In contrast, if you’re a slow walker, you look down and you drag your feet while walking with a defeated posture, then mostly likely you’re a person who’s cautious about his surroundings, shy, anxious, depressed and afraid of stressful situations.
In this avenue, we treat the traumatized person by teaching him to pose and walk in a way that opposes his mental state, allowing it to be converted in a manner that aligns with his body. Indulging the person in various physical activities that allow him to gain confidence of his body, have more control of it, will also be reflected on his mind, making him confident of himself and in control of his emotions. The combination of this avenue with the first and a little bit of the second (only if necessary) is the best way to deal with trauma, it would work like magic.
The Soft Season
I think it would be wonderful not to type any letter further, and just end this article with a poem of Nayyirah Waheed that I read couple of days ago, and it intensely captured me. It perfectly, warmly and in a heartening way resembles the wistful and beautiful human experience of existence:
the hard season
Will
Split you through.
Do not worry.
You will bleed water.
Do not worry.
This is grief.
your face will fall out and down your skin
and
There will be scorching.
But do not worry.
Keep speaking the years from their hiding places.
Keep coughing up smoke from all the deaths you
Have died.
Keep the rage tender.
Because the soft season will come.
It will come.
Loud.
Ready.
Gulping.
Both hands in your chest.
Up all night.
Up all of the nights.
To drink all damage into love.
References:
The Book of The body keeps the score - Bessel van der Kolk (2014)
Trauma and Public Health: A Focused Review - Rolf J. Kelber (2019)
The Social Psychology Responses to Trauma - Orla T. Muldoon, S. Alexander Haslam, Catherine Haslam, Tegan Cruwys, Michelle Kearns & Jolanda Jetten (2020)
Thank you so much for this
I finally found explanations to my unjustifiable feelings/actions.
Thank you for enriching us with such an amazing article 💕💕