This Is How Your Body Remembers Trauma
When thinking about trauma, many people immediately think of the effects on the brain. Certainly, how the brain experience and processes trauma is crucial. But what people may not know is that trauma can get stored in the rest of your body. It goes beyond traumatic memories.
Think of it this way:
A person who spends years playing baseball will develop muscle memory. Their body knows how to set up for a swing and automatically adjust to the pitch. The same kind of muscle memory happens with trauma, too.
When someone experiences trauma, their body remembers it. When triggered, their body reacts, too.
How Does Trauma Get Stored in the Body?
It starts in your brain.
When trauma occurs, the amygdala activates our fight-or-flight response. This is a biological reaction designed to help keep us safe and escape danger. Ideally, once the threat is gone, this response would shut off. With trauma, it stays on.
This unconscious need to protect yourself gets locked into your memory. Whenever something reminds you of that memory, your brain activates the rest of your body.
And when this response stays activated, it causes your nervous system to remain in high alert so you're always ready to face the next threat, even when there isn't one.
Logically, you may know there is nothing to fear. But your brain disagrees. It remembers, and it wants you to always be prepared. As you can imagine, this gets exhausting very quickly.
Trauma affects something called your window of tolerance. This is the range in which you comfortably feel like you can safely handle stressful situations. Trauma shrinks this range so your tolerance for distress is significantly lower.
Signs That Trauma Is Being Stored in the Body
The tricky part with trauma being stored in the body is it can be hard to notice at first. Because we think of trauma as something mainly existing in our head, we don't immediately associate other physical responses with it.
Some common signs that trauma is stuck in the body include:
Muscle tension
Tightness in the chest
Sleep troubles
Brain fog
Memory issues
Unexplained aches and pains
Constantly feeling on edge
Being easily startled
Trauma can also exacerbate existing chronic pain.
How to Heal Trauma
Fortunately, there are several effective ways to treat trauma.
Cognitive processing therapy (CPT): Similar to cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT), this method helps people identify irrational thoughts associated with their trauma. From there, skills are learned to counteract these thought patterns.
Prolonged exposure therapy (PE): This method involves gradually revisiting traumatic memories over time with the goal of learning that the memories are not dangerous and don't need to be avoided.
EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing): Using bilateral stimulation, this method helps people overwrite negative beliefs fueled by trauma with more positive beliefs. Over time, the emotions associated with the trauma become much less distressing.
Somatic Experiencing (SE™): Designed by trauma expert Peter A. Levine, this method was created to help people recognize their trauma symptoms, use resources to overcome them, and then safely revisit those memories to properly process them.
Movement practice: While not an official method, movement is known to dramatically help in healing trauma that's stored in the body. Exercises like yoga are particularly beneficial because it pairs intentional movement with deep breathing exercises, which activate the parasympathetic nervous system, a.k.a. the body's natural antidote to the fight-or-flight response.
Of course, general forms of talk therapy can help as well because they can help you identify how your core beliefs and worldview are affected by trauma. It depends on what works best for you.
If you're experiencing trauma stored in the body, you don't have to keep dealing with it. I'm here to help. Reach out today and we'll talk more about creating a healing path forward.
Click here for more information on Trauma Therapy.