When you suffer from trauma, it’s often helpful for you when you can understand why you respond to certain stimuli in certain ways. For many trauma victims, their brains interpret dangerous situations, or what they perceive to be dangerous situations in entirely different ways than others do. The questions are:
- What exactly happens within the brain that causes these different reactions?
- What is the pathway that these perceptions of reality take?
- Can the end result ever be changed?
Let’s take a few minutes and go over the pathway of perception.
Pathway of Perception
One of the most important jobs your brain has is to perceive danger and dictate your response to it. When your brain senses danger, the thalamus “cooks” the information it receives into data it can interpret and understand. As a result you have a sense of what is occurring at that particular moment. From the thalamus, the information is sent to the amygdala and to the frontal lobes.
During the “cooking” stage, trauma victims will often experience a breakdown in the accuracy of the information their brains were presented with. Data becomes fragmented and memory processing becomes faulty. It can actually feel as though time freezes, which causes the individual to feel as though he is trapped in a situation that seems like it will last forever.
As information enters the amygdala, the brain determines whether or not it is a threat to survival. If it is, the amygdala will enlist the help of the hypothalamus and the brain stem, alerting them to the need for the release of stress hormones and eliciting a response from the body.
Because the amygdala is the emotional response center in the brain, and because it’s a little bit quicker than the frontal lobes, it’s very common for the body to respond to danger before it’s even apparent to the individual that there is a reason to be cautious and respond.
The Trauma Victim’s Response
As you can see, trauma victims often have a difficult time distinguishing which types of situations require a true emergency response. Reality is often misinterpreted, which leads to overreactions or in some cases, under-reactions. Every person is different because trauma affects the brain in different ways. For many trauma victims, they aren’t able to recover right away after they have been in these situations, which has long-lasting effects on the way they feel, and it can make their trauma even worse as time goes on.
Perhaps you can think of times in your own life when you responded too quickly or when you completely shut down in the face of an event you deemed to be dangerous. You may have realized much later that it wasn’t, but it was too late. Your body responded before you were able to seize control of it and correctly assess the situation.
Trauma therapy can help you work toward healing. While the issues and the situations you faced in your past will always be there, it’s easier when you have the proper coping mechanisms to help you manage your day-to-day interactions with the world.
If you would like to work with a trauma therapist who can help you, please contact me for an appointment.
