Trauma

What is trauma?

When therapists refer to trauma we generally refer to an event that rocked your world, an event where maybe you were in danger, where you did not feel safe. Trauma can refer to an experience or series of experiences that impacted you and your sense of safety.

Trauma not only refers to one single event that impacted you. It can also refer to the experience of constant concern for your safety such as witnessing domestic violence, living with an alcoholic parent, having a parent come in and out of the prison system, and not having control on what was going on around you.

The common theme in trauma in my opinion is a loss of control, a loss of your sense of safety.

“Moving on”

Maybe after you went through trauma you had to “move on” and did not even have time to DIGEST the magnitude of what happened to you. Maybe you had to go to work the day after having been assaulted or had to go to work or school days after the death of someone close to you. You had to “move on” and not think about what happened to you.

However, trauma has effects on the brain. One can’t go through trauma and come out unhurt.

Processing trauma

Trauma has lasting effects on the brain. Trauma stays encapsulated under the cerebral cortex.

If you consider that trauma gets encapsulated under the cerebral cortex, and consider that traditional talk therapy mainly engages the cerebral cortex; it will be very difficult to get to those capsules of trauma with traditional talk therapy.

In traditional talk therapy the therapist asks questions and you as a client reflect and think about those questions in order to answer. At those moments you are engaging your cerebral cortex. Our capacity to reason, think and talk is in the cerebral cortex. However, trauma resides under the cerebral cortex, it is encapsulated under the cerebral cortex.

If you want to be able to access those capsules of trauma, reprocess trauma, rewire your brain, and heal trauma from the inside, there are therapy models such as Brainspotting which facilitate accessing those capsules of trauma under the brain cortex.

For more information about Brainspotting click here.