The Body & Brain Keep Score

How a Traumatized Person Responds Differently to Events

Trauma “re-sets” the brain.  People who have experienced chronic trauma and/or neglect in childhood often experience a heightened sense of arousal.  This is because the part of the brain that generates the “Fight, Flight, or Freeze” response (the limbic system) is very active, and the part of the brain that translates this to language and memory (The Frontal Cortex) is diminished.  Therefore, the person is left with experiencing terror or uncomfortable emotions without the ability to make meaning of it.  They repeatedly experience bodily sensations that they have no words for.   The brain’s job is to determine if certain things are dangerous, and to activate the “Fight, Flight, or Freeze” response when faced with overwhelming danger to oneself or someone else important to them.  During a traumatic experience, the brain is trying to understand what things to “be on the lookout for” in the future.  At the same time, it is experiencing an overwhelming event and the “Fight, Flight, or Freeze” response is activated repeatedly.

When this happens over and over again, as with chronic trauma, the brains pairs neutral stimuli with the “Flight, Fight, or Freeze” response.  Therefore, the traumatized person is often triggered by many neutral things.  These can include images, sights, smells, sounds, and one’s own feelings.  Over time, this becomes a pattern, and the brain chemistry actually changes; leaving the person in a state of hyper-arousal all (or a lot) of the time.  When this is the case, the chronically traumatized person often responds on a biological level to events that are not traumatizing as if these new events are traumatizing.  They are literally processing ordinary stimuli differently than a non-traumatized person. 

It is important for someone with this altered biology to learn to lower their general state of arousal and to learn to manage (and eventually change) their overly intense response to events.  Therefore, it is important that a person with this altered biochemistry learn, and regularly practice, relaxation skills, containment skills, and grounding skills, so that they can learn to alter their emotional and biological state when activated by current events.  They also need to learn how to categorize events so that they can begin to relate to events in a more realistic fashion. 

Sally Blackwood, MA, LPC

Adapted from Bessel Van der Kolk, PhD