Our minds are capable of many feats that help us survive. We remember the past and use experiences to understand, adapt, plan, and prepare. We interpret the present and assimilate perceptions, events, and feelings into our schema, our maps of the world. We anticipate the future and formulate our responses to expectations of what will unfold.
Unfortunately, our impressionable minds are also sensitive and susceptible to retaining and magnifying experiences that are harmful or threatening. Along with our mental and somatic (body) memories of pain and danger, our minds tend to exaggerate, magnify, and catastrophize what might happen. Consider the following saying from Mark Twain:
“I’m an old man, and I’ve seen many horrible, terrible, awful things—only most of them never happened.”
And this venerable Yiddish adage:
Vos der mensch ken alts ibertrachten, ken der ergster soyna im nisht vinchen.
(What people can think up for themselves, their own worst enemies couldn’t wish upon them.)
We all recognize our inherent capacity to dream up and/or exaggerate fears or hypothetical expectations of misfortune or disaster. For some, it is an occasional pang of anxiety and speculation; for others, it becomes an obsessive way of life. The mixture of actual misfortune or trauma with imagined potential often confuses or tricks the mind. Unfortunately, many bad things do happen, and our bodies and minds store these events in emotional and physical memory. This continuation of the damaging memory and experience implants the foundation for a myriad of problems. It is the substrate for traumatic reactions.
Traumatic memory is the essential organizing principle for the majority of psychological distress: anxiety, fear, depression, flashbacks, disordered thinking, sleep disruption, and many others. To understand and effectively deal with traumas, it may be helpful to explain the concept of an organizing principle.
An organizing principle is a core assumption from which everything else, by proximity, can derive a classification or value. This is like a central reference point that allows all other objects to be located, often used in a conceptual framework. Let’s take a simple example of how an essential organizing principle that operates when you easily recognize an animal as a dog.
From an early age, any child can learn to recognize a dog—despite the many varieties of dogs and the fact that there are breeds and appearances of dogs that a viewer has never seen in person. Dogs have an essential organizing principle that our minds instantly recognize as belonging to the category of canine. When shown a picture of a Great Dane, no one will mistake it for a horse or pony, even though they may be similar in size. When looking at a Chihuahua, no one will mistake it for a cat. This is obvious because we have a learned concept of the essential organizing principle of canine that transcends the many individual variations. It is automatic, natural, and a bit hard to define.
Now imagine trying to describe to a Martian (who has never seen a dog) how to recognize a dog. If you say it has four legs and a tail, the Martian—without the reference of essential organizing principle—could easily think that cats or horses are examples of dogs. If you say that a dog barks, the uninitiated may think that a seal is a dog. Just as there are big dogs, small dogs, ones with long fur and those with almost none, particular observable and variable attributes do not uncover the essential organizing principle of dogness. And yet, something in our minds and experiences allows us to easily distinguish dogs from other mammals with some shared attributes. Something essential identifies and distinguishes canines from other animals.
We use essential organizing principles constantly to make sense of the world. Typically, this is not a conscious process unless we make a deliberate and orderly practice of critical thinking directed for some logical purpose. This powerful survival tool, however, can also go haywire and lead us astray into false assumptions, inaccurate beliefs, and detrimental lingering emotions. This is what happens when trauma occurs: the emotional brain extends, miscalculates, and misapplies overreacting negative emotions and perceptions to situations (real or imagined) that trigger memories of painful experiences.
Most psychological distress is constructed and continued around the essential organizing principle of trauma. The manifestations are not always recognizable as connected with traumas. Nonetheless, they evoke strong and often overpowering negative feelings. In traumatic perseveration—the continuing response to a past event that is no longer present, relevant, or related to current or imagined events—the essential organizing principle of the past trauma evokes a visceral negative response that is inappropriate to current reality. In this process, the emotional mind invokes an errant essential organizing principle upon the object triggering distress. A person with a fear of dogs may have a previous bad experience that originated the fear. However, he would not be afraid of a table with four legs!
This subconscious process of projection arises from a mutated template of an inappropriately adapted, essential organizing principle of trauma upon events and perceptions that are experienced as the same, or very similar, to what caused the original trauma. Thus, most continuing and recurring negative emotions are unwittingly (and often unconsciously) triggered by past experiences that continue to live as present traumas in the mind. Anxiety, fear, depression, etc., are our brain’s way of neurologically protecting us against threat.
To overcome trauma and be free from its relentless stranglehold, we need to break these inappropriate connections that the brain superimposes from past to present and future experiences.
A trauma may result from the following:
The traditional concept of trauma is predicated on an assumption of a catastrophic event outside the range of usual experience. However, trauma encompasses a much broader range of causal situations and is a very common occurrence. Traumas are universal, and they occur intermittently in everyone’s life. Recovering from traumas is necessary for basic physical functioning and mental and emotional health, and can be accomplished routinely by most people (given the right tools, training, and support).
In order to understand these points, you must start with the assumption that we all have vulnerabilities. Vulnerabilities make us physically and psychologically prone to attack and to breakdown from life’s events and forces.
As we accumulate experiences and get to know ourselves, we (ideally) identify (and often protect ourselves against) many of our own vulnerabilities. Certain vulnerabilities are genetically coded and specific. Vulnerabilities are the weak links that allow us to become ill or dysfunctional in a myriad of ways. For example, it is well known that particular diseases tend to run in families. A family history of heart disease, diabetes, depression, etc., doesn’t determine that you will be afflicted with these conditions, but it does influence the odds that put you at greater statistical risk.
Trauma occurs when we are caught in an “attack” on one of our “weak links,” whether the attack was intentional, random, or even imagined. The essence of trauma is that it penetrates defenses, seizes upon vulnerability, and leaves us feeling hurt, defenseless, and usually causes us to “relive” in some way the embedded traumatic experience. Common sense observation and your own experiences will confirm this cause-and-effect link.
After a vehicle accident or near-accident, many people habitually tend to tense up when reminders or even vaguely similar conditions present themselves, as if girding up for another accident. For example, suppose you were in an auto accident that really rattled you, perhaps even injured you. For a long time afterward, you might become anxious when approaching the scene of that accident. Or say the police were pursuing a speeding car that blew through a red light and almost hit your car. Subsequently, you might panic whenever you hear in the distance the sound of a police siren while you are driving. This reaction evokes both physiological (fight-or-flight) and psychological / mental / emotional responses. The set of defensive responses to an anticipated offending event (in the absence of its presence or direct evidence that it will necessarily occur) is called perseveration: responding to an event that is no longer present.
There are indeed many forms of trauma that occur when people are subjected to harsh conditions, abuse, overwhelming negativity, rejection, racism, isolation, poverty, and so forth. For many people however, it is overwhelming enough even to have to deal with the more mundane traumas that result from the daily interactions, demands, and conflicts typically associated with ordinary relationships.
When your spouse, boss, friend, child, relative, partner, teammate, peer does not react in the way you want or expect, it can be emotionally traumatic. You need not be oversensitive or even know that the trauma is occurring. You can, however, tell by the aftereffects. Remember: the nature of trauma is that it causes us to relive or anticipate an event or reaction that previously left us hurt, shocked, exposed, or defenseless. So when you find yourself (or your relationship partner) revisiting the same conflicts, scripts, and (quickly accelerated) emotional responses to the faintest of cues, you will know that a trauma has been incited and activated.
For these traumas, you don’t need access to an emergency room or years of therapy. What you do need is the realization that you are probably reacting to some provocation that stimulates a less-than-conscious, unresolved emotional vulnerability that initiated a trauma. Such awareness will enable you to see your inner responses and your outward behavior as reactions to a trauma that you may perceive viscerally as necessary, but are neither a function of choice and clear thinking, nor conducive to planning, keen observation, evaluation, or problem-solving.
A large-scale study headed by physicians Vincent Felitti and Robert Anda examined the relationships of adverse childhood experiences with disease in adulthood. Their study found significant correlations between adverse childhood experiences and incidences of obesity, heart disease, drug abuse, smoking, depression, anxiety, suicide attempts, sexually transmitted diseases, cancer, diabetes, traumatic brain injury, overall poor health, and early death. This study (known as the CDC-Kaiser Study “Relationship of Childhood Abuse and Household Dysfunction to Many of the Leading Causes of Death in Adults”) included over 17,000 Kaiser patients.
Among the striking findings from the research was the link between mental health precursors in childhood and the development of physical, life-threatening illnesses in adulthood. This marshals quite a challenge to the attitude that “it’s all in your head.” Statistically, it’s in your body—literally—and wreaking havoc consequentially with your health and longevity.
The basis for the study was correlations between scores on a self-reported instrument of childhood experiences and adverse adult health conditions. The instrument used for patient reports is called the Adverse Childhood Experience Test. This self-report is based upon individual recollections and answers to the following questions:
While you were growing up, during your first 18 years of life:
Now add up your “Yes” answers:
_______ This is your ACE Score
An ACE score is a tally of different types of abuse, neglect, and other hallmarks of a rough childhood. According to the Adverse Childhood Experiences study, the rougher your childhood, the higher your score is likely to be, and the higher your risk for later health problems.
According to the study results, a tally score of greater than 2—regardless of which questions were endorsed with “yes”—is highly correlated with adverse health outcomes in adulthood. The greater the number of “yes” scores, the stronger the correlation. Scores of 4 or higher were strongly correlated with incidences of adult health problems.
Persons who had experienced four or more categories of childhood exposure, compared to those who had experienced none, had a 4- to 12-fold, increased health risk for alcoholism, drug abuse, depression, and suicide attempt; a 2- to 4-fold increase in smoking, poor self-rated health > or = fifty sexual intercourse partners, and sexually transmitted disease; and 1.4- to 1.6-fold increase in physical inactivity and severe obesity.
The link between ACE scores and physical and psychological problems is correlational. That is, there is a significant statistical probability of a relationship between childhood trauma and predicted negative outcomes. This correlation is grounds for the assumption that there is indeed a high risk factor for those with such a history.
So what can you do—and what can we do as a society—to mitigate the effects of early adverse experiences? Let’s explore he various traumas people endure and the relevant steps to overcoming the negative impact and nightmares of trauma.
Traumas occur in many forms and variations. These include:
Traumas happen to everyone. They may be individually unpredictable, but they are unavoidable, as each of us undergoes adversity that can have prolonged impact. This impact, however, can be mitigated, healed, and resolved.
Four stages occur in the elimination of trauma:
By their very nature, traumas compel victims to relive the traumatic event repeatedly, sometimes without apparent provocation, and often with triggers that bring back the emotional terror as though the event is occurring continuously. Such restimulations, consciously connected or not, produce pain, shock, panic, and overwhelming distress. The trauma resurfaces with vengeance, inducing the overwhelming sense of vulnerability, helplessness, and threat.
We sometimes refer to recurring traumatic feelings as “encapsulated traumas.” This means that the memories, sensations, and feelings are isolated from the normal functioning of the brain and nervous system. This encapsulation protects the rest of the system from becoming completely overwhelmed and unable to function.
This is the neuropsychological equivalent of white blood cells surrounding microbial invaders, so the fight for conquest on behalf of the immune system can occur apart from threat and involvement with the rest of metabolic functions. This “back alley” brawl is nature’s way of protecting and battling against the threat. But a cost to the system is typically experienced in the nightmarish symptoms of reliving the event.
Trauma manifests in multiple ways. In many cases, the person is cognizant of the trauma and consciously relives (despite trying to forget) the event. This may occur as flashbacks, nightmares, loose or tangential thought associations, and the attendant visceral response of heightened arousal and fight-or-fight reaction.
The reemergence of traumatic response is visceral, regardless of whether it is attached to conscious memories. Its jarring effect elicits attention and fear, prompting reinforcement of heightened nervous system alert and a generalization to suspect and avoid stimuli and situations reminiscent of the trauma. This builds the habit of fear, uncertainty, lowered confidence, and general anxious anticipation of what might trigger another reaction.
Trauma can reveal itself as explicit painful memories, or it can show up in chameleon representations of varied psychological symptoms. Negative emotions (anxiety, depression, panic, anger, etc.), self-regulation disruptions (attention, concentration, sleep), motivational decay, and somatic disturbances can reflect the core essential organizing principle of trauma that is the linchpin for these emotional and behavioral symptoms. Recurring reminders, such as microtraumas, can remind and re-instigate the nervous system to posttraumatic responses.
In cases where no obvious or conscious cause connects the trauma to present distress, it’s not necessary to search for the buried or repressed event. Trauma can be healed without regression or bringing to the conscious mind what may have caused it. What’s important is to understand that persistent symptoms are perseverative continuations (and sometimes metastatic variations) of originating traumas.
Anxiety and depression have many sources, and the physiological and neurological habits that sustain them can arise and develop from causes beyond trauma. However, the converse informs us that unresolved trauma necessarily produces manifestations of psychological distress.
Consider these analogies: auditory processing disorders can occur as a consequence of different brain patterns and deficits, even in the absence of organic hearing loss. However, measurable physical hearing loss almost certainly causes some degree of auditory processing deficits. You can have a stomachache without a determinable medical cause. But if you have ulcers or cancer, you will definitely have symptoms directly traceable to the cause.
By assuming that persistent psychological distress reflects underlying trauma, it’s possible to treat the surface symptoms and the originating stimulus without knowing or even targeting the instigating event. The presenting symptoms reveal the maladaptive response, as well as the essential organizing principle of the body/mind’s response to previous trauma.
The healing component of traumatic cycles involves releasing the person from the continuing grip of the perseverative trauma. This is the work of trauma therapy with the goal of mental, emotional, and spiritual freedom. Release requires defusing and disconnecting negative emotional responses from the history that launched them. As stated, this can be done with or without conscious or specific associations with the event.
Effective release results in the abatement of persisting symptoms, and the ability to recall aversive events without negative emotions or the habit of obsessing or dwelling on the event. This happens when the emotional fusion with the trauma is separated. It’s as though a rattling alarm in the brain has been turned off. When traumatic response is eliminated, an accompanying breadth of emotional range and flexibility results. Freed from the stranglehold of emotional compulsion and constriction, the person experiences more consonance with present circumstances. That is, feelings come more naturally and harmoniously, and more often fit appropriately and functionally with imminent situations.
When trauma is released, the brain can better assimilate and accommodate new experiences and assess them realistically without the throwbacks triggered by the trauma.
To resolve is to finish something, to bring it to conclusion. When you are truly done with something, there’s no need to keep revisiting it, despite its potential consequences.
Resolving traumas means you are done with them. They stop haunting you and occupying your defenses. They are historical and may have lasting consequences, but resolution means that your body and brain have healed adequately enough that the trauma is no longer causing issues.
The resolution process does not require “reframing” the traumatic event in order to reduce emotional pain or dissonance. Effective trauma treatment accomplishes that. Resolution involves integrating the “new self”—without the persisting symptoms—with the freedom and growth that follows release. Over time, and perhaps with coaching and improved relationships, one learns to “fit” the terrible misfortune in with one’s life development and evolution. Memories are revised to incorporate how one overcame and adapted. The impact of the trauma is rescripted into one’s history without the overwhelming tinge of fear and damage. Wholeness tends to pervade and color memory more favorably.
Once trauma is resolved, it’s likely that confidence and resilience will be restored and enhanced.
Over decades of clinical work with patients, I have treated trauma in its many forms, both overt and in its disguises. Before I recognized the relevance of trauma as an essential organizing principle of various psychological symptoms and conditions, I treated them as separate entities. Nonetheless, I’ve had increasing and consistent success using the advanced techniques of EEG neurofeedback and Voice Technology.
Discerning the core relevance of trauma has made treatment success more rapid and pervasively applicable to broader conditions that were once thought to be beyond efficacy with therapeutic methods.
It’s increasingly apparent to veteran practitioners, using these (and other) techniques to heal trauma, that effective healing bypasses conscious processing and thought patterns, and defuses and separates the connections between past experiences and persistent negative emotions. By training the brain and nervous system to invoke and develop more functional patterns of neurological self-regulation, there evolves an automatic reduction of hypervigilance and dysfunctional arousal. These advanced, natural, and organic treatment methods allow and facilitate the brain to heal itself and to disengage the internal alarm system that fires without critical danger.
When traumas are healed (put to rest, resolved, left behind), victims are no longer victims continuing to suffer its effects. Most importantly, symptoms abate and stop inflicting pain and restriction. Resilience and rejuvenation emerge. There can also be a modest resurgence of innocence in the sense that one no longer feels damaged or shamed. The ability to trust is renewed. Trauma release and resolution bequeaths a sense of emotional freedom, wholeness, and improved well-being.
Living without the shackles of emotional prison facilitates the development of confidence, security, and the belief that the world can be a safe and manageable place, despite the reality of sin and danger.
— Mark Steinberg, PhD
Part of Dr. Steinberg’s trauma treatment resources.
