The Neuroscience Behind Trauma Getting Stored in the Body 🧠
The Neuroscience Behind Trauma Getting Stored in the Body 🧠
The Science of Trauma - Understanding the Basics (6min Read)
TL;DR Summary
Exploring how trauma embeds itself in our mind, brain, and body
Unraveling the abuse cycle's impact beyond physical scars
The twist: our bonding system, meant for love, turns into a trap
Symptoms unveiled: alertness, tension, exhaustion
A journey toward understanding and healing through neuroscience
Welcome Back!
Today we will use Neuroscience to explain how trauma gets trapped in our bodies!
I spend the majority of my time working with people after abusive relationships or helping them heal childhood trauma.
That being said, I will use the abuse cycle to demonstrate how trauma can affect not just the Mind and the Brain, but also the Body!
This is one of my favorite topics, and I’ve got lots of visuals below, so if you’re listening, be sure to scroll through to see the images!
The Abuse Cycle
Below is the abuse cycle the majority of my clients have gone through in their childhoods and/or in relationships throughout their lives.
These kinds of relationships start off with a bang.
They’re your perfect match, understanding, spontaneous, your dream guy or girl.
This builds trust and dependency on their love and affection.
And it’s downhill from here, as you can see below.
It’s a cycle of love, hope, and fear.
We’ve got to remember that attachments to other humans are one of the most powerful kinds of attachments we form as humans.
As children, if we weren’t attached to our parents, we wouldn’t survive, we need their help to do literally everything for us for many years!
That being said, we have a powerful attachment system psychologically and neurologically that gets turned against us in toxic relationships.
So, while your life looks like the above cycle, the cycle below is going on inside your nervous system.
This attachment system uses some very powerful neurochemicals and hormones to help us form these attachments with others.
In abusive relationships, this system is at the bottom of a “trauma bond.”
You may have heard of this before, if not, it’s an addiction to the abuse cycle above and to the abuser.
It may seem nonsensical from the outside, but when you look at the neuroscience, it makes complete sense.
Abuse like this is like a drug, literally.
The trauma bond cycle you see above is the same cycle someone addicted to cocaine goes through.
This cycle keeps your Nervous System constantly hyperaroused, which can lead to brain damage.
Brain Damage & Complex PTSD
You may think I’m being dramatic when I say brain damage, but sadly, I’m not.
The chronic stress that your brain experiences during a relationship like this can damage the white matter of your brain.
White matter is what connects one region of the nervous system with another.
It’s the reason our brains are plastic and adaptable, and it helps nerve signals get from one place to another efficiently.
What’s Happening in the Body?
While this is happening in your brain, you can tell because you likely:
Feel tired constantly, no matter how much you sleep
Find yourself in a hypervigilant state constantly accessing "dangers" around you
Continue to find yourself in the same kind of relationships over and over again
Feel on edge or jumpy, and have difficulty sleeping or concentrating
Struggle with complex feelings (such as fear, dependency, love, or desire for revenge) towards the person who abused you (Trauma Bond)
Struggle with trusting others, feeling close to others, or feeling secure in relationships.
Have chronic muscle tension in your neck, back, shoulders, jaw, or chest that doesn't go away no matter how much you stretch or massage them
And let me guess, you've tried traditional talk therapy, medication, self-help books, magic crystals, apps, meditation…
The list goes on, but none of it has worked...
How do I know this? Because this is what happens when trauma is trapped in your body...
It's science. Let me explain
Trauma in the Body
The chart below describes the 3 states we shift between as humans.
These colors map to states of our Nervous System, and when all is well, we fluctuate between Green & Yellow in a healthy way.
For example, this could look like being relaxed & in Green, and then going for a workout, getting up into Yellow, and then relaxing/recovering again afterward, getting you back into Green.
This would look something like the black squiggly line below.
HOWEVER, when trapped in a trauma cycle like the abuse cycle above, we get bumped outside of this window of tolerance overtime (the squiggly line), and it looks more like the jagged line below!
As you can see, instead of coming back down to Green, and recovering, we continue to get more and more activated until we cross over the CAN/CAN'T line.
When this happens, we move into the Red Freeze Zone which can feel like:
Numbness/Hopelessness
Dissociation
Helplessness/Feeling Trapped
Shutdown/Depression
Shame & Guilt
What makes matters worse, is that this changes our baseline, whereas it was Green-Yellow-Green-Yellow... Slowly over time, it becomes Yellow-Red-Yellow-Red... And we get stuck.
Ok, So, How Does it Get Stored in Your Body?
I’m glad you asked. We’re getting there!
First of all, you've gotta understand that your Mind, Brain & Body are separate but inseparable.
This sounds confusing at first, but the diagram below can help.
The Body sits in your environment taking in billions of bits of information every second.
It passes this info to your Brain & NS, which then relays it to the Mind which is where you become consciously aware of it.
For example, if you touch a hot stove with your finger (Body), pain signals are sent through your Brain & NS to the Mind, where you then say, "Ow!"
This works in the other direction too. If you picture biting into a lemon with your Mind, your Brain & NS send signals to your mouth (Body) to start watering.
Try it out! My mouth is watering even just writing this out, ha!
Understanding this basic communication pathway is very important to understanding how trauma gets stored in your Body.
The Trauma Pathway
Let's imagine your Mind, Brain, & Body could talk during a traumatic event, it might sound something like this…
As this is happening, your nervous system, immune system and endocrine system are all work on overdrive as you can see below!
This is obviously EXTREMELY oversimplified for educational purposes, but it captures the basics of how trauma is actually “stored in the body.”
How This Affects You Over Time
Let's bring it all together now. When you're stuck in this always-on, hyper-activated state, it takes a toll on your Body.
These hormones get stored in the Body at first, and over time, this creates a toxic wasteland in the Body, as you can see below, this affects the Brain & Mind as well.
This keeps you locked in the Red-Yellow-Red-Yellow pattern we talked about earlier...
Which feels like:
Hypervigilance
Trauma Bonded
Chronic fatigue & pain
Emotional Dysregulation
Stuck/Frozen
Shameful/Guilty
So, how do we get back to green, out of the Red Freeze Zone, and start releasing trauma from the body?
Releasing Trauma From the Body
I don’t have time to go into all the details I would like to today, but I’ve written on this extensively!
Here are some suggested resources and blogs that I’ve written and created in the past that can be very useful:
I hope that you found today’s blog enlightening.
As I mentioned, this is one of my favorite topics to research and teach about, so it was a fun one to create!
If you’re stuck in this cycle, I want you to remember that you aren’t alone, and what happened to you sucks, but there is hope.
There is a light at the end of the tunnel, and I hope that understanding what’s going on in your nervous system helps make that light a little brighter for you!
Until next time… Live Heroically 🧠
Supporting Research
Suarez-Jimenez, B., Keefe, J., Zhu, X., Lazarov, A., Durosky, A., Such, S., Marohasy, C., & Lissek, S. (2022). Sequential fear generalization and network connectivity in trauma exposed humans with and without psychopathology. Communications Biology, 5(1). https://doi.org/10.1038/s42003-022-04228-5.
University of Rochester Medical Center. (2022, December 7). Researchers reveal how trauma changes the brain. ScienceDaily. Retrieved from https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/12/221207142255.htm.
Gilbert, S., Sigman, M., Miller, L. J., Alais, D., Atick, J., Klasen, M., Baranek, G., Stevenson, R., Thye, M., Panksepp, J., & Northoff, G. (2022).
(No author). (2023). Predicting PTSD: Brain scans unravel trauma’s long-term effects. (Neuroscience News).
Kringelbach, M. (2023). Trauma experiences change the brain even in those without PTSD. Oxford Neuroscience.
University of Northern Colorado. (2022). Neurobiology of trauma. Retrieved from https://www.unco.edu/assault-survivors-advocacy-program/pdf/neurobio_trauma.pdf
Rousseau, D. (2022, December 10). The neurobiology of trauma. The science behind trauma. Retrieved from https://sites.bu.edu/daniellerousseau/2022/12/10/the-neurobiology-of-trauma-the-science-behind-trauma/