Trauma and the Nervous System
Trauma and the Nervous System. Whats the connection?
Everyone’s been telling me to breathe but nobody is telling me why. Unfortunately, there has not been much conversation around the connection between trauma and the nervous system anywhere. Including counseling masters programs, the general education system or even the medical care system so of course we don’t know / how would we know. Later problem, for now let’s catch up.
Our nervous system starts programming itself way before we are born, in fact when we are in the womb of our mothers. Crazy right? What does that mean? Well first, pregnant mothers should really manage their stress levels as much as they can. But also - it means we learn how to react or relax/aka how to regulate when a threat to our safety arises. We learn what stress looks like, what it means, and what we should do with it to stay safe. Of course when we are children, we can’t know all this - our parents or caregivers are really the ones responding to, modeling and shaping our nervous system by their own regulation and their reactions to our inability to regulate just yet for example, babies cry when left alone, aren’t fed, emotionally neglected, etc.. Hopefully parents, teachers, adults near by are making sure we feel safe. seen. heard. loved. all of that jazz. Since this might not have been the case for many of us, our nervous system just had some rigid programming and ultimately stayed that way because we may have learned the world isn’t safe and to get our needs met we need to get creative. All of these ‘behavior patterns’ are essentially normal instinctual human reactions that serve a purpose. Let’s talk about a few of them -
Fight - This is a state where we might feel the need to move towards or take action in the fact of the threat. A healthy fight response could be simply standing up for yourself where as an unhealthy fight response could be explosive anger.
Flight - This is a state in which we want to move away from the threat. A healthy flight response could be simply removing yourself from a dangerous situation where as an unhealthy flight response could be distracting which progresses to an addiction to numbing.
Freeze - Freeze state can look like a shutdown response or when we start to zone out of life. A healthy freeze response could be a meditative state where you are using dissociation in an adaptive way where as an unhealthy freeze response could be feeling unable to move in the face of a threat.
Fawn - Fawning which is addressed less often is when we are trying to create a false sense of safety, which might look like abandoning our needs for the needs of others. On its best day this could be a ton of compassion, but on its worst day it could be people pleasing because we are afraid to be left behind.
To put it simply, we can start to notice in our day to day when we may be engaging in any of the above in response to low, medium or high levels of stress. To avoid uncomfortable feelings or past threats mistaken as the present there are a variety of ways we sooth ourselves. Ideally, we can all self-parent ourselves back to safety by first connecting with our bodies, these experiences and then learning how to regulate our nervous system as well as working through any blockages or limiting beliefs for a more healthy life.
