The mind and the body are profoundly connected. This is something that is often seen in and experienced by trauma victims. At times, people who have lived through traumatic experiences even have a difficult time feeling entire areas of their bodies. They just feel numb to them.
It should come as no surprise that trauma victims often struggle with:
- Cutting behaviors
- Drug addictions
- Alcohol addictions
- Sexual addictions
- Binge eating behaviors
In a desperate attempt to feel something, trauma victims may turn to ways to harm themselves. It helps them feel more alive.
The question is, why is this disconnection there in the first place?
A Brain Study of Trauma Patients
In his book, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma, Dr. Bessel Van der Kolk discusses a study that a colleague of his completed.
The study focused on what happens in the brains of trauma survivors when they’re not thinking about past events. She asked people without a trauma history to lie in a scanner and not think about anything in particular at all. She then repeated this with trauma victims, and gave them the same instructions.
What she found was that when the brain is not focused in any one place, it focuses on the person. In the subjects without a traumatic past, she found that the midline structures of the brain were engaged. In the subjects with traumatic histories, these parts of the brain were not engaged at all.
This only led to one conclusion. In the second group of subjects, they had learned to shut down the parts of the brain that deal with feelings and emotions, which includes fear.
The Brain/Body Disconnection Explained
For trauma victims, shutting off these areas of the brain is something that’s done as a way to cope and survive. In the process, they have also taken away their ability to feel alive.
One of the areas that trauma victims shut down is the medial prefrontal cortex. No activation in this area explains why these individuals feel as though they have no purpose or direction.
It was even discovered that trauma victims:
- Have difficulty recognizing themselves in the mirror
- Aren’t able to make even the simplest of decisions at times
- Have a hard time following through when they’re given advice
When self-experience and self-recognition are gone, it’s very difficult to cope. Even so, these issues are not so far gone that they can’t be helped.
Trauma therapy is available for anyone who needs to recover from a traumatic event. You may be facing a situation right now that you can’t quite understand. It’s possible that you aren’t even able to remember the traumatic event that you’ve gone through.
Either way, trauma therapy can help you in more ways than you realize.
If you would like to make an appointment with me to discuss your personal situation, please contact me.
