Trauma
Why do I have trauma? How do I get rid of trauma? How does trauma work?
Trauma or PTSD is like an ancient brain technology. I know that sounds really weird. Trauma is not fun. But, yes, it works to think of it as a blunt but natural defense mechanism. Bad experiences that cause trauma have to be automatically recalled because they correlate to things that would threaten human survival. Nature baked in an automatic replay system that would give you echoing re-experiences to keep you alive by thinking about the threats. Nature’s harsh, however, so the replays are distressing and have bad timing. Nature doesn’t care if you’re happy or sad. Nature mostly cares about survival. Nature is not bad, it just doesn’t prioritize how we feel about things.
Shoot a deer in a field and all the other deer will run away. They startle at the crack of the rifle shot. They readily associate the bang with the smell and form of people, so they become skittish. Their brains are designed to respond to stimuli and make associations that relate to threat. But they don’t perseverate about Billy, the deer who was shot. They don’t stay up at night wondering about how Billy’s fate relates to their own. I’m saying this because deer will settle down and return to eating around Billy’s fresh corpse, if the negative stimuli stop. They don’t process things as we do. They have their processes, but theirs are not the same as ours.
You and me, we’re gifted with a prefrontal cortex that thinks, extrapolates, infers, figures, reworks, and problem solves. It’s our super power. Sometimes, it’s our curse. So, when trauma response does its thing (flashbacks, mood swings, aversion, avoidance, emotional overwhelm, etc.); the prefrontal cortex does its thing (what did I do to cause this, how is this my fault, how is it someone else’s fault, how do I stop this from happening, how do I get relief right now, why do bad things happen to me, why do bad things happen in this world, am I cursed, how can I be safe if I am cursed?). You can see how a prefrontal cortex that can’t fix the trauma can drift into substance abuse, unhealthy relationships, self-loathing, and deeper suffering. If it can’t figure out how to stop the suffering, it blames itself, first, and numbs itself, second.
We need an off-switch for the trauma response. The self-blame and numbing-out won’t do that. But we’ve found the switch through a few therapies. They’re a bit different than some might expect. They involve tracking movement with your eyes and even ears or sensation across your body. One’s called Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) and another one is called Brainspotting, and there are more than just these two. Essentially they help release the location of traumatic recall from a wild part of the brain to become remembered in a domesticated part of the brain where one has control. It’s like moving from a mountain top to the burbs, and you do it by staring at someone’s finger. That sounds so random, but the therapies create stimuli that allow your brain to rearrange its own furniture.
The psychologist who discovered EMDR realized it while walking through the park one day. Her name is Francine Shapiro. Her discovery has helped probably hundreds of thousands of people. Maybe more. And this natural off-switch has always been there. It has existed in other cultural practices and rituals throughout human history. It has lived in the flicker of firelight, in the rhythm of dance, in the rites of passage, in the traditions of storytelling, but it was lost to our strange modern world until found again in new ways.
Trauma lives in people as an uncontained echo. Nature wanted to make sure you wouldn’t be able to forget what harmed you. But you’re not bad, and you’re not broken. You’re surviving in an intensified state. In this culture we are discovering, or maybe rediscovering, how to quell that echo and let the trauma finally be over.
