Does trauma cause brain damage? Yes. Can the brain heal? Yes.
Trauma alters the very platelets in our bloodstream. It affects the configuration of neurons in the brain, the quantity and proportion of neurotransmitters, and the development or shrinkage of brain matter.
Fortunately, we can do things that reverse the damage done to the brain. Unfortunately, we can’t undo the configuration of addiction. Those branches in the brain are permanent—which is why, if you reexpose yourself to your addiction, it settles right back in as though it never had a vacation. Any addict can tell you that it’s difficult to work against your own brain.
However, you can get your brain on your side. Through conscious practices, you can bring new growth to the brain that makes it easier, over time, to consistently make healthy choices. As your brain heals, the brain itself will help you stay on the healthier path.
You need to feed your brain well. This may seem really obvious. Yet people inside an addiction will not consider inadequate nutrition as something that contributes to their distorted thinking.
An addiction distorts thinking because of direct chemical action on the brain. However, thinking also gets distorted because of what you aren’t eating as a result of the addiction’s influence on your appetite or food preferences.
If you had a sick baby, you would want to be very careful about his nutrition and his exposure to harmful influences. While your own brain is healing, you need to be just as careful.
Here are some tips on how to feed your brain well:
A person on psychotropic medications (such as antidepressants) will suffer more from side effects if she is low in protein. Anorexics, people malnourished from addiction, and binge eaters who have neglected their protein intake are at more risk for these side effects. The answer: eat more protein.
Being thoughtful about feeding your brain helps your thinking improve.
Certain common foods can harm you and your recovery. Dr. Blaylock blew the whistle on a major category of such foods with his book Excitotoxins.
Aspartame (the important ingredient in NutraSweet), hydrolyzed vegetable protein, and monosodium glutamate (MSG) are excitotoxins, which are being associated more and more with degenerative brain diseases, brain cell death, nervous system disorders, strokes, brain damage, seizures, hypoglycemic brain damage, and migraine headaches.2
Food manufacturers like MSG because it can make ordinary food taste scrumptious, removes the tinny flavor of canned foods, and suppresses undesirable flavors. Since the late 1940s, the amount of MSG added to prepared foods has doubled every decade.3
MSG is disguised with innocent sounding labels like vegetable protein, hydrolyzed vegetable protein, and natural flavorings. Hydrolyzed vegetable protein and MSG are added to many foods, including beef broth, chips, frozen foods, fast foods, and toddler foods. Blaylock’s book states, “The amount of MSG in a single bowl of commercially available soup is probably enough to cause blood glutamate levels to rise higher in a human child than levels that predictably cause brain damage in immature animals.”4
Glutamate is a naturally occurring brain amino acid. The problem comes from flooding the brain with unnatural amounts of that chemical beyond the brain’s capacity to siphon it out or in areas unprotected by the brain’s natural barrier, such as the hypothalamus and locus coeruleus5 (areas already implicated in several addictions). Excessive amounts of glutamate can cause serious problems including nerve cell destruction. In animals MSG caused destruction of hypothalamic cells causing obesity, reproductive problems, and early onset of puberty.6
If you value your brain, stop eating any food containing MSG, aspartame (NutraSweet), or hydrolyzed vegetable protein.
Research shows that psychotherapy helps the brain. This is not exactly a big surprise to those of us in the business.
The very best timing for psychotherapy is immediately following trauma. We’ve seen this in action in recent years when communities or schools are flooded with crisis counselors following a tragedy.
Immediate therapy prevents trauma from settling into the tissues of the body, especially the brain. (We therapists call this process consolidation.) Consolidation can start within a week after the trauma and can continue for more than twenty years past the event.
Of course, starting therapy at any time, even years or decades after trauma, is better than continued waiting.
The most important component of therapy is talking out the experience with immediacy and presence. Immediacy means that as you talk, it’s as if you were there. The present surroundings fade, and you see the event in your mind’s eye. Presence means you are present to the experience, fully inside it, instead of talking about it as if it happened to somebody else.
The second most important component of therapy is the quality of the therapist’s listening. Nonjudgmental, empathic, receptive listening is more important—and does much more good—than advice, pep talks, or commands to buck up, which only cut off internal processing and healing.
Mild exercise improves protein balance in the body by increasing muscle tone. Exercise also increases blood flow and oxygen intake and lifts your mood.
Twenty percent of blood flow and 20 percent of oxygen intake go into the brain. When you improve circulation and oxygen intake, the brain gets a big benefit. So does the rest of your body.
An injured body part needs rest. The brain is no exception. It needs plenty of downtime to get itself in order.
Between the hours of 9 P.M. and midnight, most people’s brains manufacture body-healing hormones. Stress and excessive late-day activity can interfere with the body’s appointment to heal itself.
Because your brain is healing, stop doing anything that pressures you after 9 P.M. Be in bed by 10:00 as much as possible.
You can help yourself sleep with a daily dose of serotonin by eating a few ounces of turkey each day or drinking a cup of warm milk before bedtime.
The brain is the body’s computer, and it is susceptible to reprogramming. You can counteract a childhood of negative messages by giving your brain positive messages. Affirmations, visualization, and preenactment are all ways to soak your mind in new thought.
An affirmation is a positive “I” statement in the present tense:
Visualization is mentally picturing the good you want. The classic reference on this subject is Shakti Gawain’s book Creative Visualization. You can use your imagination, drawing, collage, or clay to create a detailed picture of the way you want your life to be. Picture the kind of people you want in it. Feel how you want to feel. See yourself doing what you want to do.
Preenactment is acting out your visualization with your body. If you want to be good at fishing, imitate the actions of fishing with a smile on your face and positive energy in your heart. Become increasingly precise with your enactment, adding as many details as you can think of that involve that activity.
Many of us have discovered the effectiveness of a spiritual principle called attraction. We have found that we can attract good into our lives by using the three practices just described, along with prayer and meditation.
Like the body, the brain likes to be exercised. A bored brain turns off part of itself. Learning, new experiences, puzzles, reading, and sensory exposure (such as concerts and art museums) give the brain something to do.
Childhood trauma can isolate the brain halves. A major highway connecting the right and left hemispheres is called the corpus callosum. Trauma can decrease commerce between these two.
Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards is specifically aimed at healing this bridge. Although one’s drawing skills improve through the exercises in her book, the main benefit is strengthened access to the right brain and improved transmission between the brain halves.
Another good book, Keep Your Brain Alive by Lawrence Katz et al. offers other exercises to give your brain a workout.
Go home a different way, learn a new language, stop to smell the lilacs, study the different patterns on the wings of finches, do puzzles, sing, watch bubbles; all sorts of simple activities open the windows of the mind.
The medications available at present, such as antidepressants or antipsychotics, do not, so far as I know, heal the brain. They do, however, bring the brain up to speed, allowing it to function close to a normal range. The advantage of this in terms of healing is that a malfunctioning part puts strain on the other healthy parts.
A brain that is underutilizing serotonin receptors, for example, is a brain too agitated and not getting enough rest, which would seem to overuse other neurons and use up other neurotransmitters.
We do our brains a service, if we need medication, to take the appropriate kind and dose.
Here’s a very important principle: after you’ve taken yourself through a Healthy Feeling Process (see chapter 26) and have experienced a shift or insight, or after you’ve received enough comfort to be able to let an issue go, stay on the new side of the divide you’ve crossed.
We can feel so good about a discovery or new feeling of liberation that we want to tell people how we got there. So we cross back over the bridge and rehash the details of the event that upset us, providing the background so our listener can appreciate the grandeur of our new vantage.
CAUTION: By reawakening those feelings, you can pull yourself back to your old place of misery. You can even lose your revelation.
I remember the first time I was flooded with revelation. I thought, I’ll never forget this. This is the most incredible discovery of my life. It was like a golden door had opened on a distant vista. And then, in trying to describe the entire process to somebody, I lost it and couldn’t get it back.
So stay in your joy. Rest in your revelation. Write it down so that you can remember the details. Talk about the shift all you like, but avoid going back over the ground that brought you there.
Remember the information about trauma settling into body tissues if it is not processed? This is the opposite situation. You want this to settle in. You want the revelation, the rise in energy, the joy to settle into your body. You want it to be recorded.
So keep yourself on the positive side. Once you’ve crossed over, don’t go back over the old divide for at least a month. If you start to talk about the old place and you feel a dip in energy or rising dread, quit talking about it. Switch immediately to talking about the joy and the discovery.
This next piece of advice is crucial: do not tell joyous discoveries to people who have hurt you. Protect your tender tendrils. Reveal your discoveries only to those who can celebrate with you. If you start to share joyous information with someone who begins messing with it, stop. That person will try to turn it against you and put you right back into your old misery. Don’t allow that. Preserve your joy.