Trauma Introduction How Trauma Affects Physiology & More

Trauma Defined

Trauma is an experience of having no choice. Whether you are a soldier being attacked in battle, a child in an abusive home, or a woman walking alone who is assaulted, your choice about what happened to you did not matter. – David Emerson & Elizabeth Hopper PhD 

What is Trauma?

• Trauma is an experience that is deeply distressing or disturbing, causing psychological overwhelm. (Stephen Joseph PhD)
• Trauma is “an overwhelm of our natural defensive responses that creates something like an injury in our autonomic nervous system, which affects its ability to self-regulate.” (Peter Levine PhD)
• Trauma overwhelms the individual’s ability to cope or integrate the ideas and emotions involved in the experience. It “disconnects us from all sense of resourcefulness or safety or coping or love.” (Trauma Recovery and Tara Brach)

TRAUMA CHANGES PEOPLE SO THAT THEY ARE NO LONGER THEMSELVES

Trauma radically changes people… in fact they no longer are “themselves.” It’s excruciatingly difficult to put that feeling of no longer being yourself into words. – Bessel van der Kolk, MD

IN TRAUMA, WE STAY STUCK IN FREEZE

When we feel threatened, our bodies naturally charge up for fight or flight. If neither of those two options are available, we fall back to the third option, to freeze — to trick a predator into thinking we’re dead, and giving us a potential opportunity for escape later… Once it is safe, an animal will eventually shake and tremble, discharging all of that fight or flight energy. However, in trauma, we stay stuck in freeze…. [We aren’t] able to process, discharge and integrate the experience. – Peter Levine PhD