Trauma and the Mind-Body Connection

Written By Becky Makous

By Julia Manasek

What is Trauma?

When we think of trauma, images of intense emotional pain from natural disasters or war often come to mind. However, dysfunctional families and relationships can also have a profound impact on our mental health, leading to long-lasting trauma. Trauma can deeply affect an individual's mental and physical well-being, disrupting their ability to feel safe and connected to themselves and others. The American Psychological Association describes trauma as follows:

“Trauma is an emotional response to a terrible event like an accident, crime, natural disaster, physical or emotional abuse, neglect, experiencing or witnessing violence, death of a loved one, war, and more. Immediately after the event, shock and denial are typical. Longer term reactions include unpredictable emotions, flashbacks, strained relationships, and even physical symptoms like headaches or nausea.”

Whether resulting from a single catastrophic event or prolonged exposure to adverse environments, trauma's impact is pervasive, and understanding its long-lasting effects is therefore crucial to enable healing and recovery. 

Trauma Responses in the Brain and Body

In the book “The Body Keeps the Score” by Bessel van der Kolk, the author further underlines that the terror experienced during traumatic events reshape both the body and the brain. To further understand this connection between body and mind let’s look at what happens when people experience a traumatic event. 

When we perceive a threat, the brain’s alarm system - the amygdala, which is responsible for our fear response - gets triggered, which activates our fight or flight mode. We can notice this by our heart rate going up, we start sweating, our breathing becomes shallow and we are unable to think clearly. Our main mission becomes survival. On the other hand, there is the frontal lobe, the part of our brain that is also known as the “watch tower”. The frontal lobe helps us recognize false alarms and helps us to calm down again. However, in people who experience trauma, the frontal lobe is more difficult to activate, which causes the brain to stay hyper alert to threat. 

Let’s imagine a little child at home and one parent starts hitting the child. The child is too little to fight back and or run away from home and provide for themself. So, what can the child do? They freeze; and maybe close their eyes and hope that it will all be over soon. 

When fight or flight is not an option, some people experience a freeze response, leading to chronic shutdown. Although their brain remains hyperalert, their body is using a learnt coping/survival mechanism to not be detected by threat and to detach emotionally. While this response might have been adaptive in the past, it often is accompanied by feelings of overwhelm, helplessness, and powerlessness.

As a result, traumatized individuals can become stuck in fight, flight, or freeze mode, leading them to either be hypervigilant to threats or to shut down completely. The thalamus, which normally filters sensory information, may become overwhelmed and fail to regulate this input effectively. Consequently, the brain is flooded with excessive sensory data, causing heightened awareness of the environment and persistent scanning for potential threats. While the brain is flooded with sensory input, trauma can simultaneously lead to decreased activity in brain areas responsible for processing emotions and bodily sensations, such as the medial prefrontal cortex and the insula. While the sensory input may be heightened, the ability to process and integrate these sensations emotionally can be impaired. This mismatch can contribute to feelings of alienation and depersonalization, where individuals are overwhelmed by external stimuli yet feel disconnected internally. In essence, the brain is in overdrive, trying to manage sensory input, but the emotional centers are not functioning optimally to help make sense of these experiences. While you rationally know the traumatic event is over, your body still responds as if it is ongoing - making it difficult to stay in the here and now. 

Shame 

Many traumatized people are ashamed about what they did or did not do under the circumstances of a traumatic event. They despise themselves for how terrified, dependent or enraged they felt. When people feel helplessness and are unable to move it keeps them from using their stress hormones to defend themselves. As a result these hormones are still continuously pumped out and the body responds in constant fight/flight/freeze response instead of completing the stress cycle. In order to function normally again, the body needs to come back to a place of safety and relaxation, so it appropriately responds by mobilizing the body to action in fear of danger. If you know someone who has experienced trauma, it is not necessary for you to know everything that happened but rather it is crucial for the affected person to learn to tolerate the feeling knowing what they know. 

Relational Trauma & Attachment 

Sometimes when we see disrupted families or other dysfunctional relationships, we wonder why a person keeps going back to someone who has hurt them over and over again. The answer lies within attachment and our biological need for human connection. Children are programmed to be fundamentally loyal to their parents even when they experience abuse. Because children with abusive parents have not learnt what it means to have a healthy relationship, they often seek partners with similar patterns. The relationship feels familiar and these individuals often struggle to believe they deserve anything better. 

The brain is a cultural and social organ - shaped by experience. Social behavior is created when a baby is stimulated by social interaction accompanied by sense of safety and pleasure. You learn to attune to other people and they attune to you - resulting in a positive interaction. However, when parents don’t attune to their children’s needs - and therefore the child is not given consistent care and affection - the child does not learn to self-regulate and this can later lead to dissociation. On the other hand when caregivers respond to their needs and stay calm in the face of a stressful event, children often survive trauma. Healing from relational trauma is often more complex than recovering from trauma caused by external events like natural disasters.

Social Support & Reconnecting Within Relationships

Human contact and attunement are essential to physical and emotional self-regulation. Traumatized human beings can recover in the context of relationships that provide physical and emotional safety without judgment. Whether that is with family, other loved ones, in group settings such as veteran meetings or with the help of a professional therapist. The most important protection against trauma is being protected by the people who love you. However, regaining trust towards other people can be especially difficult for people who have experienced trauma within relationships. Child abuse, molestation and domestic violence are all inflicted by people who are supposed to love you. Closeness and vulnerability within a relationship can evoke a fear of getting hurt, betrayed or abandoned. If the people you naturally care for terrify or reject you, you learn to shut down and ignore your feelings, this in turn can lead to dissociation, addictions, chronic pain and disconnection. In order to relieve these symptoms, traumatic memories need to be addressed. 

Treatments - Healing from trauma 

There is no quick fix to deal with trauma. Most people need a lot of guidance and trust in someone who is not afraid of your terror and can hold a safe container for you to process these painful memories. 

  • EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing): EMDR is one of the most successful treating options for individuals who have experienced trauma. This therapy uses guided eye movements to help patients process traumatic memories and reduce their emotional impact. EMDR opens up and stimulates the memory association process. As people with trauma are stuck in old associations related to their trauma, EMDR helps reintegrate the traumatic memory in the right place so the body understands it is in the past and that the individual is safe now. 

  • IFS (Internal Family Systems Therapy): IFS is a therapy approach that helps patients understand and reintegrate different parts of their personality, addressing internal conflicts resulting from trauma in a self compassionate way in order to increase the capacity to tolerate and process traumatic material. 

  • Neurofeedback therapy: Neurofeedback involves monitoring brain wave activity and providing real-time feedback to the individual. By using sensors placed on the scalp, neurofeedback helps train the brain to regulate its activity more effectively, promoting healthier brain patterns. This process can improve self-regulation, reduce symptoms associated with trauma, and enhance overall mental well-being. Research has been showing promising results, however treatment is still fairly expensive. 

  • Movement, art therapy & yoga: To reverse feelings of detachment and depersonalization, movement and art therapy have shown to be effective in helping individuals to reconnect with their senses and emotion. Activities that allow you to engage in physical attunement with other people, signal your brain a sense of safety allowing you to be able to experience connection and pleasure again. That is why movement therapy, music, art and yoga are so effective.  

  • Somatic Approach & Mindfulness: A somatic therapy approach focuses on the body and how emotions appear in the body. Similarly, mindfulness helps bring your awareness to what you are sensing and feeling in the present moment. These approaches have scientifically shown to be effective in calming down the sympathetic nervous system, so you are less likely to be in constant fight or flight mode. A first step is to pay attention to physical sensations and to label them. For example “I feel anxious; and when I feel anxious I feel a lot of pressure on my chest and it feels more difficult to breathe”. Learning to tolerate difficult emotions is crucial to be able to revisit painful memories from the past. 

  • What about medication? While medication might be useful for some people to help contain their symptoms it is important to remember that they only dampen the physiological stress response rather than addressing the underlying issue. Medication cannot cure trauma and they also cannot teach long-lasting effects of self-regulation. 

Further resources

Healing from trauma requires comprehensive approaches that address both the emotional and physical impacts, focusing on self-regulation and reconnection. While therapies like EMDR, neurofeedback, and somatic approaches offer effective treatments, support from safe, nurturing relationships are also essential for recovery. If you have experienced trauma or know someone who might need support, feel free to reach out or use one of these resources: 

References

van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. Viking.

American Psychological Association. Trauma. https://www.apa.org/topics/trauma

Becky Makous
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