Trauma is a term often misunderstood and misinterpreted. People mistake it for victimhood or an unwillingness to let go of a painful experience. Yet a traumatic experience goes beyond feelings, thoughts, or behavior. The root cause of this change is the brain. Trauma leaves indentations in various parts of the brain, altering how you process, react, and handle anything associated with an adverse experience. In case you are wondering about the extensive nature of trauma. Here is a deep dive into the science behind trauma and post- traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
What is Trauma?
Before delving into the topic, let us first define trauma. According to the American Psychological Association (APA), trauma is an emotional response to a distressing event. This could be a long sickness, a gruesome accident, experiencing all forms of abuse, witnessing a loved one’s death or suffering, and so much more.
Trauma manifests as intrusive thoughts concerning the ordeal, hypervigilance, flashbacks, nightmares, memory and concentration interference, and startled responses. The symptoms are severe enough to interfere with daily living.
From the definition, a couple of questions arise. What causes the emotional response? Why do some people get too affected while others bounce back quickly? What role does the brain have in all this?
The Brain and Trauma
Trauma affects three parts of the brain – the amygdala, hippocampus, and the prefrontal cortex. These brain regions are responsible for the mental, physiological, and physical symptoms a person exhibits when they have PTSD.
The Amygdala’s Role in Trauma
The amygdala is the stress response center, a role that is pivotal in emotion regulation. It mediates the famous fight-or-flight mechanism, commonly known as anxiety. The amygdala activates the fight-or-flight response involuntarily when it senses danger. It is the body’s first line of defense against internal and external threats.
Once the amygdala picks up sensations through internal and external senses, it activates the stress response by sending distress signals to the hypothalamus. The hypothalamus is the brain’s command center, linking the brain to the body.
The hypothalamus sends signals to the sympathetic nervous system through the autonomic nerves. The autonomic nerves stimulate the adrenal glands in the kidney to release adrenaline, the primary stress hormone. Adrenaline’s action brings about physiological changes to prepare the body for fight or flight.
Adrenaline:
● Increases your breathing rate to raise your oxygen intake needed to burn fuel and release energy for fight or flight
● Raises your blood flow and heart beat rate to boost oxygen transfer to your brain and muscles
● Boosts muscular contraction to expend the energy created in fight or flight, enabling you to acquire superhuman strength when anxious.
● Increases alertness on the threat to help you fight or escape danger.
This ‘adrenaline rush’ occurs in microseconds, enabling you to maneuver on coming traffic or a burning flame. The hypothalamus also triggers the release of cortisol from the pituitary gland in the brain, a stress hormone that sustains the stress response. Cortisol works to mobilize glucose required to produce energy.
Cortisol also suppresses activity in the gut, immune system, and other body organs to redirect the energy for fight or flight. Its impact includes:.
● Nausea or sudden bouts of diarrhea to clear your digestive tract
● Appetite suppression
● Immune suppression
● An uncomfortable feeling of impending danger in the gut
How Trauma Affects the Amygdala
While the stress response is meant to keep you safe, during a traumatic experience, the amygdala becomes hyperstimulated by the stress signals. Studies show it reduces in size after exposure to trauma, interfering with its function.
The amygdala becomes hypervigilant, picking up phantom stress signals and activating the stress response when there is no impending danger. This distortion leaves you anxious perpetually. Triggers of this premature activation include intrusive thoughts and memories, nightmares, vivid flashbacks, and sight and sound triggers.
The Hippocampus Role in Trauma
The amygdala also collaborates with the hippocampus during a trauma-activated stress response. The hippocampus is the brain’s contextual memory center. It links and adds context to emotional memories, a process known as encoding emotional memory. The details include sights, sounds, touch, and so forth.
The hippocampus regulates your response to stimuli by adding context to memories. Simply put, the hippocampus receives stress signals from the amygdala, adds context to the information, and stores it as a memory. It retrieves this memory every time the amygdala signals the same stimulus.
However, the amygdala sends a distorted stimulus with faulty cues to the hippocampus during a traumatic event. Furthermore, the hippocampus gets disrupted, juggling the contextual cues relevant to the emotionally charged memory. Suppose, hypothetically, you got attacked at a park by a person wearing a red shirt. The hypothalamus should ideally pick cues like trees, grass, red shirt, and the attacker and add context to that memory. However, the distortion in the amygdala provides a faulty emotional memory.
Similarly, mishaps in the hippocampus interfere with the encoding process, disrupting its ability to gather all crucial cues about the memory. If the hippocampus picked the color red in isolation, every time you see red, it will retrieve the traumatic memory and trigger a dread synonymous with the initial attack.
The warped memory also distorts your sense of time, making it seem as though the attack was happening all over again. Distortions in the hippocampus manifest as intrusive thoughts and memories, flashbacks, and nightmares.+
How Trauma Affects The Prefrontal Cortex
A traumatic event also affects the prefrontal cortex, part of the brain responsible for decision-making, rationalization, and emotional regulation. The prefrontal cortex tags emotions as pleasant or unpleasant through a process known as toning. It also contributes to how you understand and interpret emotions, adding a layer of logic and reasoning through a process known as emotional framing.
The prefrontal cortex works with the hippocampus in memory retrieval and priming the emotional context of the memory. However, traumatic events interfere with the prefrontal cortex’s ability to tone and frame emotional memories. Trauma also interrupts the prefrontal cortex’s ability to regulate emotions through logic and reason and makes it hyperreactive. Each time the hippocampus retrieves the traumatic memory the prefrontal cortex evokes an intense
emotional reaction.
You Can Rewire The Brain and Heal from Trauma
Trauma-induced brain distortions evoke unbearable physical, emotional, and physiological responses. The good news is the brain is neuroplastic. You can rewire it and restore its previously healthy functioning. However, it is nearly impossible to regulate the resulting symptoms without therapy due to trauma’s complex nature. Seek help today from a certified counseling psychologist to find relief.
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