In continuing to understand trauma and how it affects someone who has undergone a traumatic event in his or her life, it’s important to consider the brain’s physiological response and how that can affect a person’s emotional state.
Time is not a Factor
Trauma, when it is left untreated, has no regard for the passage of time. Symptoms can strike at any given time, and the slightest trigger can cause a reaction or a physiological response in the brain even if years have passed since the event took place. This is a source of frustration for many trauma victims because they feel that because a particular event happened so long ago, surely that must mean that some healing should be taking place. However, that’s not usually the case.
To demonstrate this Dr. Van Der Kolk tested a number of subjects and he recorded their responses when they were played a recording of a script that had been prepared especially for them. The scripts were indicative of the trauma that many of them had faced in the past, so he was targeting their specific cases in the tests. He cited one woman in particular who had lost her daughter and her unborn child in a car accident thirteen years before. He noted that when the script was played, she demonstrated an increase in brain activity in her amygdala, which is the part of the brain that is responsible for activating the body’s stress response. Even though a great deal of time had passed since the traumatic event occurred, this woman’s brain responded in a dramatic way. Physiologically, she exhibited an increase in her blood pressure, heart rate and oxygen intake.
What Causes These Responses?
You might think that only certain things could trigger these reactions. However, that’s not the case. Triggers can happen out of nowhere, and the human mind is incredibly capable of drawing parallels between events that might not even seem connected to the original traumatic event. Images, thoughts or sounds or even smells can all quickly become triggers that can haunt an individual for the rest of his life.
Intervention with trauma therapy is an important part of finding healing. While it isn’t always easy to talk about a traumatic event, talking about it with someone safe is extremely helpful to aid in the healing process. Have you suffered a trauma either recently or in your past? Regardless of what type of trauma it was, the impact it had on you can have serious lifelong consequences unless you take the steps to find help.
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