Living on Our Emotional Edges:
The Mind/Body Impact
of Trauma
I became what I am today at the age of twelve, on a frigid overcast day in the winter of 1975. I remember the precise moment, crouching behind a crumbling mud wall, peeking into the alley near the frozen creek. That was a long time ago, but it’s wrong what they say about the past, I’ve learned, about how you can bury it. Because the past claws its way out. Looking back now, I realize I have been peeking into that deserted alley for the last twenty-six years.
—Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner
Imagine that you’re walking through the woods on a sunny, crisp, spring day. The pleasant songs of birds are floating through the morning air. Your head is filled with the intoxicating scents of spring and you feel bathed by warm, caressing breezes. You’re relaxed, at ease, and wandering through your day. Then around the bend, in the middle of the path, you suddenly come upon a coiled-up snake ready to strike at you. A deep chill of fear shoots through your body. Before you think a thought, your heart starts pumping rapidly, your palms sweat, and your muscles fill with the extra blood supply you need to sprint to safety. No thought goes through your mind; you become entirely part of the moment. For a split-second you freeze, then immediately see a path out, and you are ready to bolt.
But just as you’re taking off, the sun comes out. Gradually, through the placid movement of clouds overhead, light replaces shadow, and blades of grass become clear and distinct. The path is there beside you again, all laid out just as before. Then it dawns on you that the snake you thought you were looking at was not a snake at all but simply an old piece of coiled-up rope. You stare, amazed and relieved at this now-altered apparition. You take a breath. Your thinking brain—your prefrontal cortex—that had shut down comes back online and tells your feeling/sensing brain and body—your limbic system—that the snake it thought it saw is not a snake after all, just an inanimate object.
You can relax, breathe again, and let go of your tension. Your body can settle down. The thinking part of your brain helps you put the whole situation into perspective and moderates your fear through observation, understanding, and insight. Your body slowly returns to normal as you tell yourself that you have nothing to be scared of. You take more deep breaths, shake your arms and legs a bit, or jog a few yards to get rid of the excess adrenaline your body just built up, and your muscles start to regain their supple, natural state.
Nature evolved this fear response so that if we sense danger or feel threatened, our feeling of fear will signal our fight/flight/freeze mechanisms to go into self-defense mode. This fight/flight/freeze response is part of our limbic system. Our limbic system operates hundreds of times faster than our thinking mind because nature does not want us to think about whether or not we should run from a saber-toothed tiger or an oncoming truck. She wants us just to run, stand and fight, or freeze in our tracks till peril, hopefully, passes us by.
The Limbic System:
Our Emotional Processing Center
We process emotions like fear and love, key to our human and animal experience, through our limbic system. Scientists sometimes refer to the limbic brain/body system as the “reptilian” or “animal” brain or the “feeling/sensing” part of the brain, and the prefrontal cortex as the “thinking/reasoning brain.” The limbic system developed long before the prefrontal cortex ever made its appearance on the evolutionary stage. Feelings, so necessary to our survival, came first. Thinking came thousands of years later.
The limbic system is the part of our brain and body that processes our emotions and the information picked up by our senses: what we see, hear, smell, taste, and touch. It “holds,” records, and categorizes our emotional memories and the sensory data that goes along with them. We’re not necessarily aware of the limbic system as it gathers, records, and indexes these sights, sounds, and smells, and the emotions we’re experiencing until our thinking mind elevates these imprints to a conscious level and makes sense of them. But these emotional and sensory “files” are there nonetheless.
Mind/Body Connection
The limbic system has a huge job: it has to do something with all of the sights, sounds, tastes, smells, and touch sensations that it is constantly gathering from the world around us. And it also has to process the feelings that are attached to that sensory information. The various jobs of the limbic system are far-reaching and crucial. It governs and regulates our mood, appetite, libido, sleep cycles, motivation, and bonding, to name just a few of its wide-ranging functions. If our limbic system gets thrown out of balance, through, for example, repeated experiences of fear, abuse, or neglect, we can have difficulty regulating our basic emotions and our emotional connection with others. Lack of limbic regulation can manifest as depression, anxiety, or sleep disturbances. Limbic disregulation can also cause difficulty in regulating mood, appetite, sexual responses, bonding, and motivation. Those affected by trauma (and a disregulated limbic system) can thus have trouble living moderately. Instead, they vacillate between life’s emotional extremes.
Trauma and Our Loss of Self Regulation
We all have an “emotional set point,” a default setting that represents our personal “norm.” It’s a set point that we can continually return to as our point of emotional balance and equilibrium out of which our thinking, feeling, and behavior grows. Trauma disturbs that delicate balance. It upsets the equilibrium and can cause us to lose our ability to return easily to our emotional set point because it has been disrupted too deeply and too often. We have become overwhelmed too frequently with too much feeling and slammed our foot on the emotional brakes too often. Our emotional gearshift gets eroded. We have trouble finding neutral.
When I see people who cannot find their way back to their emotional set points or a normal range of functioning, I look for fear, stress, or relationship trauma of some kind because these extremes tend to be a direct result of the cumulative effect of trauma. We overreact or under react but we have trouble with “normal”. Overreactions and underreactions send up a signal to me as a therapist that further investigation is merited. I ask myself, Why does this person fear going near to this feeling? Why is she hiding from the feeling either by acting it out, medicating it, or shutting it down? Why is she staying away from that emotional middle ground where she can feel and think about feeling at the same time? What doesn’t she want to feel and why doesn’t she want to feel it?
Experience Becomes Biology
While it’s our limbic system that processes our emotions and collects and categorizes information gathered by our senses, it is our thinking brain that elevates that data to a conscious level and converts it into language or pictures that have meaning attached to them. Through this rational thinking of the prefrontal cortex, we integrate the disparate fragments of our experience into a coherent whole—a “picture” or “story”—that we can record, remember, and recall. It’s through this rational thinking that we make sense of ourselves and ourselves in relation to others. The limbic system provides content. The prefrontal cortex categorizes that content, gives it a framework, and integrates it into a working model of ourselves and our lives.
But what happens when that thinking doesn’t take place because the prefrontal cortex was temporarily frozen with fear? Trauma causes the prefrontal cortex to temporarily shut down while still allowing the limbic system to keep going. This means that we continue to record content but we are not making sense of that content. Where do all our feelings go if the thinking brain doesn’t help us to understand them? And what about the images, sounds, smells, tastes, and textures that are part of an experience? Did these things happen? Did they disappear? Where are they? Without the help of the prefrontal cortex, all of that emotional and sensory information gets recorded by the limbic brain/body but remains unprocessed and unconscious. Because the prefrontal cortex was not doing its job of elevating the information to a conscious level and making sense of it, those emotions and sense impressions were stored within us but remain unconscious. In cases such as this, the body remembers but the mind “forgets.” The trauma-related “memories” become part of the vast web of what researchers call a dissociated neural net or the dissociative capsule (Badenbock 2008; Scaer 2005). The feelings and fragments of sensory experience and emotion are in us, but we don’t know just where and how they fit into the total picture.
Triggers
But out of sight is not out of mind/body. These limbic memories can be triggered without our awareness. As these memories are unconsciously triggered and replayed, their grooves deepen. Unless we make our unconscious limbic memories conscious so that we can feel, think, and talk about them, so that we can process and become aware of what is inside of us, we can become locked in a recycled memory that does not seem to have a beginning, middle, or an end and deepen its imprint in our mind/body. In his book The Trauma Spectrum: Hidden Wounds and Human Resiliency, Dr. Robert Scaer writes:
When people develop PTSD, the replaying of the trauma (in the mind) leads to [neurological] sensitization. With every replay of the trauma there is increasing distress. In those individuals, the traumatic event, which started out as a social, interpersonal process, develops secondary biological consequences that are hard to reverse once they become entrenched. Because these patients have intolerable sensations and feelings, their tendency is to avoid them. Mentally they “split off” or “dissociate these feelings,” physically their bodies tighten and brace against them. They seem to live under the assumption that if they feel these sensations and feelings those feelings will overwhelm them forever. These are patients who rely on medications, drugs and alcohol to make these feelings go away because they have lost the confidence that they can tolerate them on their own . . . The fear of being consumed by these terrible feelings makes them feel that only not feeling them will make them go away (2005).
Other common ways that people try to get rid of these unconscious, unwanted feelings are by acting them out through behaviors that are destructive to the self, other people, or relationships (picking fights, becoming passive aggressive, constant complaining, self-sabotaging behaviors), or by projecting them onto others and disowning them within the self (making them about something that someone else did or a situation or circumstance outside the self), or engaging in process addictions (over- or undereating, risky, or overly frequent sexual liaisons).
These fragmented memories that contain valuable information about our experience and ourselves become hidden from view. And until we make them conscious, parts of our inner world, parts of who we are and why we do what we do, can remain a mystery to us.