How Trauma Changes Your Brain
What is trauma?
Several ideas might come to your mind when you think of the word “trauma”. You might think of a physical injury, like blunt force trauma or a head injury. You might think of survivors of war, natural disasters, and other major conflicts. Perhaps you know someone who has experienced post-traumatic stress disorder. Trauma can affect people in many different ways, and there are several types of trauma. Psychological trauma is an emotional response to a severely distressing event. In this post, we will discuss how psychological trauma occurs, what kinds of symptoms result from it, and things that can be done to treat it.
How does trauma change your brain?
Traumatic experiences trigger a reaction in your body commonly known as a “fight or flight response”. During an intense situation, your brain will make changes to where its blood is flowing to give extra power to parts of the brain that are most important for survival. Understanding where the blood goes - and where less blood is flowing as a result - can help you better understand why people who have experienced trauma have the symptoms that they do.
The front part of your brain, called the frontal lobe, is the area responsible for your thoughts, logic, and making rational decisions. Your personality, judgements, and muscle control live here. Importantly, this part of your brain connects to your memory center to provide information about your memories, especially with regards to remembering the context of your memories and how events relate to one another in your memory.
Around the center of your brain is where you will find the amygdala. The amygdala is responsible for several strong emotions, including fear, anger, and sadness. Similarly to how the frontal lobe provides your memories with contextual information, your amygdala provides memories with information on the strong emotions it is responsible for.
Near the amygdala is the hippocampus, which is responsible for storing and retrieving memories. It connects to many other areas of the brain, such as the frontal lobe and the amygdala, to get information on the memories it is creating, and also connects to these parts of the brain when retrieving a memory, which can lead to you experiencing certain emotions or drawing certain conclusions when remembering past events.
Finally, near the back of the brain, you will find your brainstem and your cerebellum. These parts of the brain handle basic survival functions, such as breathing, keeping your heart beating, helping you to keep your balance, and allowing you to make coordinated movements. These regions of the brain are essential for keeping you alive.
While you don’t need to remember the names of all of these parts of the brain, it is important to remember that the parts of the brain linked to basic survival functions are located more toward the back, while the parts of the brain that let you make decisions and remember the context of events are more toward the front. When you find yourself in a high-intensity situation, your brain will direct extra blood flow to the back of the brain, to make sure you have enough power in that part of the brain to keep yourself alive and have the coordination to either fight or run away successfully.
Unfortunately, this is where the problems begin. Because blood is flowing to the back of the brain, the front regions of the brain are getting less power, meaning your ability to think logically is seriously hindered. On top of that, this affects how your memories are stored! Your hippocampus is getting enough power to create a memory, but it’s not getting enough information from the front of your brain to know the context of how and why the event took place. Meanwhile, the amygdala is still getting enough power for your memory of the emotions and sensations you felt - especially those of fear and anger - to be stored as a memory.
The end result of this response is that, when experiencing a traumatic event, you will likely not be able to make good choices, or remember why you made them afterward. You might not remember what happened at all, but still have memories of the strong emotions you felt during the trauma. Certain people, places, and things might trigger your memories of the event, but without the context of what happened, you might only feel the fear of the moment, making you suddenly feel stressed out for seemingly no reason. These are common symptoms of trauma, and without this understanding of why they happen, they can make you feel like you’re going crazy.
What does that mean for you?
If you have experienced a traumatic event - especially if it was prolonged, rather than just one time - you might have noticed some symptoms that can be explained by how trauma affects your brain, even if you didn’t realize they were connected at first. Here are a few examples of things you might experience as a result of how your brain responds to trauma:
Lapses of memory, especially around the traumatic event.
Feelings of fear or anxiety with no cause, or a trigger that doesn’t make sense to you.
Thinking about or experiencing memories of the event over and over again.
Reliving memories of things you don’t remember happening.
Difficulty experiencing positive emotions, or feeling negative emotions more often.
If you are experiencing these symptoms seemingly out of the blue, you might feel very alone, confused, and afraid of what is going on. You might not know what you need to do next to deal with these symptoms, or feel like people will think you are crazy if you ask around trying to find help. If you think some of the things listed here describe your experiences, there are resources you can access to help you with them.
How does therapy help?
Therapy has been shown to be very effective for dealing with trauma symptoms, and while there are different types of therapy intended to help with different forms of psychological trauma, many trauma-focused therapies take similar approaches and teach similar skills to help you overcome the effects of your trauma.
When you begin trauma treatment, your therapist will likely begin by assessing your situation and determining which phase of treatment is most appropriate for you. Trauma therapy starts by taking your immediate safety concerns into account, both in terms of physical safety and in terms of distressing or dangerous behaviors or symptoms you may be experiencing. Your therapist will work with you to identify your most relevant safety concerns, and will explore potential solutions for these concerns together with you. Your therapist might teach you relaxation skills, help you identify the impact of your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, and provide you with basic tools to make changes to how you think about your trauma.
Once your immediate concerns have been addressed, your therapist will likely move on to focusing on symptom regulation, creating a trauma narrative, and processing the things you experienced. This stage of treatment builds on what you learned during the first stage, and focuses on acknowledging your trauma, contextualizing how it affected you, and learning to deal with your symptoms in a way that is effective for you.
After learning skills and processing your experiences, the final step your therapist will likely take with you is integrating the lessons learned from therapy into your daily life, improving your mental well-being and helping you recognize ways to apply trauma-informed principles in future scenarios. Your therapist might help you apply tools you learned early on in therapy in new ways. They might help you create a safety plan for how you want to react if a similar situation happens in the future.
By the end of your time with a therapist, you should have an understanding of your trauma experience, how to deal with the symptoms of trauma, and feel prepared to deal with future symptoms should they arise. We hope that this brief introduction to trauma-informed therapy helped you contextualize any trauma symptoms you may be experiencing, and helped to clarify how therapy can help.
We provide counseling sessions both in person and online with video conferencing. We also offer a free 15-minute consultation if you have any questions, or just want to see if you mesh well with one of our therapists in conversation.
Alternatively, you can seek out a clinician through a trusted referral service, such as psychologytoday.com, to find a therapist that fits your needs and preferences.
