When a traumatic event triggers our internal alarm system, the body goes into fight, flight, or freeze . . .
. . . but what happens in the brain during trauma?
According to Dan Siegel, MD, there are two key chemical reactions to trauma (and one can play a role in actually shrinking part of the brain).
Check out the video clip (below) for more – it’s just 4 minutes.
Knowing how trauma affects the brain can enhance our interventions for helping patients heal from a traumatic experience.
If you want to learn more about what happens to the brain during trauma, click here for our Rethinking Trauma series.
How have you used brain science in your work with traumatized clients? Please share your experience in the comments section below.
I have experienced multiple traumas of violence and my family characterized my ptsd as my being crazy/unstable. This ongoing emotional abuse is unrelenting. I have even been shunned. My family has abdicated all responsibility for my invalid sister and the stress of this and a dementia mother has me feeling overwhelmed. I have had therapy and in therapy now, but I detect a profound disconnect in memory and ongoing panic attacks. I feel the CONSTANT stress is killing my brain-permanently. I want to turn this around NOW. I am 56 and physically becoming more unable to get thru a whole week without physical ailments.i am unable to work. I have a wonderful husband who is becoming more of a nurse lately. I am not so depressed but starting to really worry about permanent brain damage. I was knocked unconscious by ex husband and received other battery to my head. I need help and answers. Thank you.
Some of our group members, including my own therapist, have bought the gold program. I am the lucky one who for the next few weeks can afford therapy because my church pays for it.
Most of us (120) cannot and must try to treat ourselves. We lost our income, career, ability to work, health, health insurance, homes and (even in some cases) retirement.
Hi All, I’m glad to hear many of these comments. My experience with young people and at times adult in my country is unbelievable. It tells me that there is more to be done. Here, people don’t pay for counseling/trauma healing services. Many time times I volunteer my services.
I would appreciate you helping me with guides of how to help someone who is DOING DRUGS.
Hi Ruth,
These are so terrific. I have not signed for a gold membership this year due to this being a period of financial difficulties for me. But I so appreciate that I can still watch the webinars on a science that is so exciting and effective in the work I do with clients.
Wishing you and your team well.
Kind regards,
Gene
Very helpful to see how these different hormones can have not only a normal and beneficial role in normal memory encoding but also how these same hormones can, at acute and sustained levels can significantly, negatively impact the structure and processing of memory. Not all memory is encoded the same and this has important implications for needing to work experientially not just cognitively.
Anna Maria, thank you so much for your client’s story. I appreciated knowing that your application of Dan Siegel’s model in the case of memory problems had a more positive outcome.
My question for the blog or the series is do researchers find that there is a difference between the effects of trauma vs. the effects of torture, especially in the developmental years? How they might define these terms would be helpful.
I am working with individuals who are “like” the clients being described by the researchers and their work and writings, but who, because of early ongoing trauma labelled by medical doctors as torture, have more acute symptoms. State of body health is very poor in many cases. They have developed personality fragmentation or alters. It is too simple to put a DID label on these people — the impact of what has happened has so broad an influence (understatement) on the body, the brain, the mind, and spirit.
If there could be comment on working with people with these issues, that would be appreciated.
I am now living in CA and had a private practice in CO for many years developing different ways for my clients to cope with trauma. I worked mostly with women and because of my own personal experience with childhood abuse plus a mild/traumatic brain injury, I was able to help my clients heal on a much deeper level. PTSD is a very broad term and probably most people experience this at least once in their life. But when trauma and abuse is repeated over and over again (and it doesn’t matter how long) that memory resides on such a deep cellular level in ones brain, mind, emotions and in the physical body.
I’m a keen follower of Dr. Siegel. He makes the understanding of complex neurological systems easy to understand and to remember. I share his explanations and insights with my clients. We use it as a basis to communicate about what is happening to us.
Yesterday my client (18 years) was very upset. She became aware of the fact that she had “glitches” in her short term memory. She would miss information that she knew she heard a second ago. She was afraid that her mind was deteriorating. In the past few months we have been working on awareness, handling stress and coping with anger. We examined her experiences with the model of Dr. Siegel and we came to the conclusion that she is now more aware of her own thought processes and therefore she is now able to catch the “glitches”. In short: she is now more aware and present in herself than she has ever been! This was a huge step forward for her.
Anna Maria, I think your story is wonderful and I’m glad to hear it, but perhaps we shouldn’t disclose such information through the net, for confidentiality purposes.
Some of our group members, including my own therapist, have bought the gold program.
Our group is totally free and grass roots. We do not charge a dime for anything. Out of our 120 members there are 3 therapists, including one psychologist, and one LMFT who got into it after her workplace bullying experience. She used to be a parole officer in my agency (Department of Corrections). Our website is on the comcast domain and is stopthebullies.home.comcast.net. We want anybody who is hurting due to workplace abuse to have somewhere to turn to.
Siegels work forms the basis for the approach taken by some of the therapists out there dealing with this kind of trauma, but there is little out there dealing with workplace abuse per se.