In daily life, the brain passes messages between its basic parts communicating with our senses and emotions to our logic and thought. Our normal experiences are time-stamped, in sequential order, and stored in our long-term memory with a beginning, middle, and end. Basically, the brain works together as a whole to navigate the world in an organized way.
When we experience trauma, our brains react and respond. This response involves the emotional part of your brain (limbic system). The limbic system reacts on its own very quickly using survival instincts to protect you. This action slows down the logical part of the brain (cortex) and its ability to respond and make sense of the experience during the trauma and after it ends.
The limbic system stores the experience in the senses as bits and pieces without time and order. There is no time stamp to the traumatic experience. Basically, this means that the trauma lives in the limbic system in a loop for quick access when needed for survival. This response is instinctual. The brain is trying to help us and directs our mental and physical energy toward dealing with what it perceives as an immediate threat until it is gone.
This trauma response can persist and make daily life difficult. Trauma can alter the way we think, feel, and act. This explains why when someone is reminded of their trauma they react from their emotional brain. We call these reminders triggers. The response to triggers is immediate and unconscious. It can feel to someone experiencing this like the trauma is happening again when it isn’t. Other symptoms can be flashbacks or nightmares, becoming self-destructive, being on edge or on guard, intrusive thoughts and memories, and more. These troubling symptoms are often what bring us to seek treatment.
These symptoms are normal responses to trauma, however, when they do not go away on their own it becomes troubling and makes it difficult to live life the way we want to. These symptoms can be changed and trauma can be healed.
Our brains are very flexible, another way to say this is that they are neuroplastic. This is our brain’s ability to create new connections or pathways, this allows us to rewire our brain’s response to trauma. Trauma-focused treatment can change the way the brain works, adding pathways and decreasing the concerning symptoms. There is hope.
I use the Instinctual Trauma Response (ITR) method of treatment to create these new connections or pathways in the brain to treat trauma. First, the graphic narrative process (drawing out the trauma in stages, narrating it, and watching it, based in art and narrative therapy) stimulates the correct processing of events allowing the logical brain to access the information and creating a new neuropathway for symptom reduction. The Externalize Dialogue (based parts therapy) speeds up and strengthens this pathway in the brain. ITR helps the brain reboot, organize and communicate internally after trauma. The end result is that the brain understands the trauma in the logical brain where it can organize it, put a time stamp on it, and store it in long-term memory with empathy or compassion.
