Understanding how my body is keeping the score
Reflections and Preparations for brain mapping
Last week I began reading The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind and Body in the Healing of Trauma by Bessel Van Der Kolk, M.D. Right off the rip, I connected with the book, specifically with one of the Vietnam Veterans named Tom. I recognized some of his story as my own: going through the motions of life, hoping to learn to become our old self again, drinking into oblivion, riding his Harley-Davidson at dangerously high speeds to help calm him down, having flashbacks, feeling disconnected from loved ones, sometimes finding it hard to recognize oneself in the mirror or from a distance, feeling like floating in space without any real purpose or direction, unable to find real pleasure in life, his loyalty to the dead keeping him from living his life.
I found it intriguing how the only time Tom felt alive is when he could find something to immerse himself in, becoming totally absorbed into it, only to find a loss of that energy after the project was completed. Also feeling Tom’s sentiment about not wanting to take medications because of feeling like by doing so it felt like he would be abandoning his friends, making their deaths in vain.
Feeling emotionally distant from everybody, as though his heart were frozen, and he were living behind a glass wall. *
Before reading this book, I did not realize that I suffered from PTSD. I had no idea that my symptoms would track along with Vietnam Veterans like Tom. So many people suffer from PTSD without knowing it. Our brains are very adaptable to our circumstances. Traumatized people look at the world in a fundamentally different way from other people. They also have a tendency to superimpose their trauma on everything around them.
When we experience trauma, our bodies literally go through changes on a physical level. It was discovered that when people are reliving these traumatic events in their mind, their bodies were placed in a panic and they began seeing the same images, smelling the same smells and feeling the same physical sensations as if it were the original traumatizing event.
When we experience something that is threatening or dangerous, or even witness something happening to someone else, our natural defense mechanism is for our brain to activate our amygdala, triggering our fright, fight or freeze response (survival mode in our reptilian brain). To keep us safe, the amygdala (like a smoke alarm) is constantly scanning for threats and connecting them to memories and emotions. Anything that it deems as a threat, causes the body to send out a red alert. It shuts down thinking and releases surges of hormones, like cortisol and adrenaline, and sends blood to the big muscles, preparing us to take physical action to escape from the perceived danger. With the repeated triggers and flashbacks for people experiencing PTSD, their amygdala becomes more sensitive to alert for danger. Their bodies are tense and on high alert, causing them to stay stuck in this survival mode, trapped in a trauma response.
Our hippocampus, which is responsible for processing emotions and memories after a trauma, shrinks. The constant high levels of stress hormones (like cortisol, adrenaline) make the hippocampus less effective at processing emotions, also proving it difficult to distinguish between the past and the present. The amygdala and the hippocampus begin talking to each other more, maintaining the fear response. No matter how long ago the event was, the body perceives it as a present threat.
Additionally, the prefrontal cortex shrinks, which is responsible for handling higher thinking, language and planning of rational thoughts. Without the ability to rationalize our thoughts, it is harder to overcome the red alert responses our bodies receive from our amygdala. It makes it harder to think or speak clearly or to process through the memories, trapping the individual in a loop of trauma. The old reels keep being replaying in our minds. With the constant flowing of the stress hormones, it keeps our nervous system on hyper arousal.
When people are compulsively and constantly pulled back into the past, to the last time they felt intense involvement and deep emotions, they suffer from a failure of imagination, a loss of mental flexibility. Without imagination there is no hope, no chance to envision a better future, no place to go, no goal to reach. *
The good news is that with understanding the trauma and how it affects us, the symptoms can be reversed, and we can learn to heal. We can teach our amygdala to be less sensitive and our hippocampus to relearn to process emotions. Our nervous system can strengthen its ability to revert back. I have been learning a lot through this process already. I look forward to seeing what the brain mapping will help show.
I am thankful to be able to make this invisible injury visible.
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*The Body Keeps the Score