Trauma, PTSD, & The Pain Of The Past

This topic (trauma, PTSD, and the pain of the past) was requested by several of my YouTube subscribers and FaceBook friends due to the fact that either they or someone close to them was dealing with this issue. This is understandable in that many people describe how past trauma continues to influence how they think, feel, and react today.

Of course, I like to help people understand and influence how they think and feel by understanding how the brain processes information, and I really believe this perspective can help those who are experiencing problematic thoughts, memories, or feelings from the past. Of course, the brain is VERY complex, and trying to understand how it works can easily dissolve into a tangle of medical jargon and neurophysiology. Therefore, I like to simplify this information so that it is usable.

This means that I divide the brain into three parts. The lower brain is the brainstem, the upper 80% of the brain is the neocortex, and the middle brain is the limbic system. It is this middle brain that is important to understand, because it plays the role of a scanner, processor and router. In other words, it scans incoming data (or thoughts), interprets them as either dangerous or not, and then engages either the brainstem or neocortex.

What we need to know about this middle brain is that its prime directive is to keep us alive as a specie. This means that it tends to scan the environment looking for signs of danger. With respect to trauma, when we have experienced something traumatic in our past, our limbic system tries to keep us safe by ensuring that we don’t forget and don’t let it happen again. This means it tends to run the traumatic event over and over in our mind, while also interpreting any situation that is similar to what happened in the past as dangerous to us in the present. This actually triggers the stress chemicals of adrenaline, nor-adrenaline, and cortisol, which raises our heart beat and blood pressure, and basically throw us into a panic, or a fight-or-flight response. I believe this is what Akshay Dubey means by the damage from the past “controlling our life.”

So, what can we do? Well, first, understanding how our middle brain is triggering the memory of the traumatic event, and why, can help us avoid being traumatized by the old trauma. If we know this is just a rather small part of our brain trying to keep us safe, we can override the fear and anxiety that often accompanies these experiences by choosing to write it off as a misinterpretation. This won’t totally prevent the limbic system from triggering some degree of anxiety, however, it will ensure that we don’t feed that anxious response and make it worse, or worry that it means that there is something wrong with us. In other words, it will keep our anxiety from making us anxious, and/or our worry from making us worried.

We can then decide how we would recommend someone we love to respond to this misinterpretation and begin to practice this new response. For example, maybe we would encourage someone we love to access their clarity, confidence, and creativity, and respond accordingly. Given that we will eventually get better at anything we practice, soon we will begin to feel less and less anxious about what has happened in the past. The reason we can be confident of this is that the brain is always rewiring itself. It’s called neuroplasticity, which means that as we begin to think differently about the pain of the past, these thoughts actually create new neural pathways, and as we practice thinking in this new way of thinking, it becomes a new, habitual way of experiencing the past.

This doesn’t mean that we pretend the problem never happened… it just no longer controls our life! If you would like me to create a presentation for your organization around how to become skilled at this new way of life, feel free to contact me. This is what I love to do, and I would love to support you in becoming more influential in your life and the lives of others.