You and I both know that trauma affects the brain. Science supports what we as survivors have already experienced. Yet, I bet you still hear people say:
- “PTSD isn’t real; it’s all in your head”
- “Just get over it already!”
- “Only veterans get PTSD”
I speak all over the country about PTSD symptoms and recovery. Inevitably, whether it’s before the presentation has started or after it has finished, someone addresses me to say some variation of one of those three things (on a really awful day, all three!).
Why don’t people “get” what it means to struggle with PTSD?
Essential PTSD Information
As a PTSD survivor I hated those comments while I was in recovery. They made me feel powerless, invalidated, stupid, pathetic and as if people believed I was actually choosing to feel as miserable as I did.
Now, as a healing professional I make it a point to educate everyone I meet about what symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder are, where they come from and what can make them go away. More than that, I like to dive deep below the surface of the science I shared with you in my last note to really get into what happens in the brain and how it creates the symptoms you experience.
How Trauma Affects the Brain
Today, I want to share with you some in-depth information that will change how you see your symptoms and let you know for sure that they are a function of your neurobiology. These are important facts that every survivor should know – and share with those who don’t understand:
Fact #1:
During trauma your amygdala (an almond-shaped mass located deep in your inner your brain) is responsible for emotions and actions motivated by survival needs. In threatening situations it:
- increases your arousal and autonomic responses associated with fear
- activates the release of stress hormones
- engages your emotional response
- decides what memories are stored and where they should be placed around the cortex
- applies feeling, tone and emotional charge to memory (including the creation of ‘flashbulb memory’: when strong emotional content remains connected to a visceral experience of fear or threat.)
Your amygdala tunes to dominant experiences. The fear induced by trauma makes a deep imprint on your amygdala and hypersensitizes it to danger, which makes it seek threat everywhere. In some PTSD cases, the amygdala has actually been shown to enlarge through excessive use. (In healing, this change often reverses.)
Fact #2:
Adjacent to the amygdala the hippocampus is responsible for the formation, organization, storage and retrieval of memories. Technically, it converts them from short-term to long-term, sending them to the appropriate parts of your outer brain for storage.
Trauma, however, hijacks this process: the hippocampus is prevented from transforming the memories and so those memories remain in an activated, short-term status. This stops the memories from being properly integrated so that their effects diminish. In some cases when the hippocampus’ function is suppressed it has been shown to shrink. (In healing this change often reverses, too.)
Fact #3
Lastly, the prefrontal cortex (located in the front, outer most layer of your brain) contributes two important elements of recall:
Your left frontal lobe specializes in storing memories of individual events; your right frontal lobe specializes in extracting a theme or main point from a series of events.
After trauma a few things can occur:
- your lower brain processes responsible for instinct and emotion override the inhibitory strength of the cortex so that the cortex cannot properly stop inappropriate reactions or refocus your attention
- blood flow to the left prefrontal lobe can decrease, so you have less ability for language, memory and other left lobe functions.
- blood flow to your right prefrontal lobe can increase, so you experience more sorrow, sadness and anger
There are many reasons why we know PTSD is not “all in your head”, and why you can’t “just get over it”. With the facts offered above I’m hoping you can start a conversation with yourself and others that recognized the proof of what you and I know to be true: if PTSD were easy to heal from, you would have done it yesterday. Since it isn’t, respect must be paid and support given.
