This is a guest post from my friend, Caroline Beidler, MSW. Her new book, You Are Not Your Trauma: Uproot Unhealthy Patterns, Heal the Family Tree launches today and I think it’s an important read.
I’ve been talking a lot about trauma recently with friends and family. And so I asked Caroline to explain a little bit about the science. She also covered that in a post last week that’s worth reading as well.
Did you know that during a traumatic event, the body and mind tries to protect itself? The body and brain shut down all nonessential processes and get stuck in survival mode. This is when the sympathetic nervous system increases stress hormones and prepares the body to fight, flee, or freeze. Trauma propels the body and nervous system into a state that causes us to be unable to self-regulate.
In other words, our brains “on trauma” are in overdrive.
Not surprisingly, our systems get all sorts of messed up. Our nervous systems get stuck in the “on” position and lead us to be overstimulated, unable to calm, and always in a state of “fight or flight” or near it. Or, if not this, feeling numb, detached, or dissociated.
Maybe you are feeling this now as you read this.
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, along with being a famous trauma researcher, also wrote a foundational book called The Body Keeps the Score. He asserts that “as long as the trauma is not resolved, the stress hormones that the body secretes to protect itself keep circulating, and the defensive movements and emotional responses keep getting replayed.”1
It’s no wonder that so many of us turn to unhealthy coping mechanisms to ease this suffering, one of the most popular being substances like alcohol and other drugs.
Regardless of what comes first, the unhealthy coping or the trauma, like the chicken or the egg argument, we need to start talking about it. What happened, how we feel today, and importantly, how its lineage can creep up our family trees. When we start to recognize the patterns, we can start to rebuild.
Keep reading by picking up a copy of Caroline’s new book here.
Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (New York: Penguin Books, 2014), 206.
 | A guest post by
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Really good info. My favorite quote regarding trauma is from Dr. Peter Levine: “Trauma is not what happens to us, but what we hold inside in the absence of an empathic witness.”