How Trauma Affects our Brain, Body, Feelings, Thoughts, and Healing
The trauma you’ve experienced from covert emotional and psychological abuse has caused long lasting effects on your body and brain. In order to heal from abuse, it’s important to understand how this has affected your thoughts, feelings, healing, and everyday responses to life.
We’re blamed for our reactions and struggles by our abuser, by friends, and even family for many, and of course, we end up blaming ourselves too.
As you read this I hope you’ll get a glimpse of why the abuse you’ve gone through has changed you from a peaceful, compassionate person into a nervous, anxious, panicked, confused, self-doubting mess. It’s not your fault! And I hope you’ll start having some compassion for yourself. Self compassion is essential for healing!
I know you aren’t crazy, or weak, or unstable, or whatever you’ve been told. I know you are strong and brave and resilient because of what you’ve survived.
One thing I do want to note is that we all have different resilience to trauma. For those of us who were abused as children or were raised with neglect and craziness, the adult trauma of an abusive marriage can have a greater impact on our body and brain.
Two things that can lessen the impact of trauma are having loving support and being able to effectively resist. Unfortunately, many of us are abandoned by friends and the church, and our resistance was pretty ineffective.
What is trauma?
Trauma comes from a serious or ongoing threat that overwhelms our ability to cope, and living with an abuser is severe trauma. All that psychological and emotional abuse, gaslighting, blame shifting, lies, manipulation, and betrayal is beyond anyone’s ability to cope.
Trauma isn’t just about what happened in the past. It doesn’t end when we leave the abuse. It’s the imprint that the abuse left on your brain and body.
Here are some symptoms of unresolved trauma:
~ Anxiety, a chronic sense of panic
~ Feeling like your nervous system is on high alert
~ Feeling overwhelmed by life
~ Feeling unsafe even after you are out of the abuse
~ Having a hard time thinking, concentrating, making decisions
~ Spacing out
~ Low motivation
~ Easily triggered by events or conversations
~ Feeling like you can’t control how you feel
~ Racing thoughts
~ Trouble sleeping
~ Not trusting yourself
~ Losing your sense of purpose and direction
~ Feeling chronically unsafe in your body
~ Being exhausted
~ Feeling empty, helpless, trapped, and weighed down
~ Shutting down and dissociation
~ Feeling disconnected from yourself, your body, and your feelings
~ Feeling like ‘somebody else’ or like ‘nobody’
~ Feeling lost and disconnected from the world, others, and God
Ultimately, trauma robs you of the feeling that you are in charge of yourself.
These symptoms aren’t originating in your mind or your feelings or your choices.
They don’t come from a character flaw or moral failing. They aren’t from sin!
They originate in your body and your brain that’s been dysregulated by the trauma of abuse.
So how does that dysregulation happen?
God made our bodies to be amazing. He created automatic body systems to help us in emergencies.
If you step off a curb and almost get hit by a car, the alarm bells ring in your brain, sending a message to your nervous system to go on high alert, and then lots of things happen in your body to give you speed, strength, and focus to get yourself out of danger.
You probably know what I’m talking about– your heart pounds, your blood pressure goes up, you get a rush of adrenaline, your breathing gets shallow, and you act on instinct instead of thinking things through.
This system was designed to calm down as soon as the danger is over.
During abuse, the alarm bells are ringing constantly and this causes dysregulation. The calming, regulating part of our nervous system takes a back seat to our survival system, and our body gets stuck on high alert. This changes our brain and physiology, and causes the symptoms of chronic, complex PTSD.
It even changes our experience of our self– even after we are free from abuse.
God didn’t create us to live under abuse or to live under constant threat.
How trauma affects our body to cause these symptoms
First let’s look at our nervous system. Very simply, we have 2 nervous systems– the sympathetic nervous system and the parasympathetic system:
~ the sympathetic system activates our survival system.
~the parasympathetic system keeps us calm and in balance. It’s often called the digest and rest system.
These two system are opposing nervous systems and only one can be active at a time. They work like the brakes and gas in a car.
God designed us to live in the calming, digest and rest system except when we are threatened.
Fight, flight, freeze and fawn
When the alarm bells go off in the brain in response to any threat, the sympathetic survival system goes into the fight, flight, or freeze response. These are our body’s survival instincts, triggered automatically, and we have little control over it.
Fight prepares us to fight to defend our self.
Flight prepares us to get away from danger.
Freeze kicks in when we can’t fight or run, and causes us to shut down.
Fawn is often confused with people-pleasing and causes us to manage the danger by being submissive and agreeable.
If we can’t take action to stop the abuse, or we have to stay in it, the body keeps activating these survival responses. They continue long after one event has passed.
When we live with abuse, these body systems get activated too often and too strongly. Stress hormones are being secreted, brain circuits are firing, and the sympathetic nervous system is on high alert. The longer the abuse continues, the more sensitive the system gets, and eventually it gets “stuck” in the high alert state.
After living with abuse, we experience the world with a changed nervous system. It takes much longer to return to baseline, it spikes quickly, and stress becomes harder and harder to handle.
“It’s like our nervous system becomes a TSA agent and every circumstance or person is a potential terrorist. And when we are accused or rejected by friends, family and the church, this ingrains threat even more deeply.”
The end result is that we get stuck in the over-reactive state in our daily life.
If we’re stuck in fight, we tend to get angry and want to lash out.
If we’re stuck in flight, we feel trapped, restless and afraid.
If we’re stuck in freeze, we numb out and dissociate.
If we’re stuck in fawn we feel safe by pleasing others, rarely saying “No,” and scared to stand up for ourselves.
Our physical stress load is like a cup. When you’re on chronic high alert, the cup is already full and one difficult situation like an argument with your child, or dealing with an unsupportive friend, or job hunting, makes that cup overflow and you can’t handle it well.
That’s why we end up with so many triggers and feel so out of control of our thoughts and feelings.
Healing involves learning how to turn off those alarms on a physical level and bring the calming parasympathetic system back to running the show again.
How trauma affects our brain
During a traumatic event, the following parts of our brain go offline or get highly reactive. But also, after repeated trauma (even after we’ve left an abusive marriage) they aren’t functioning properly.
~ The thinking part of our brain is underactive. This leads to difficulty with problem solving, concentration, memory, organization, decision making, motivation, and emotional regulation.
~ The part of our brain that processes experiences and information isn’t working so it’s hard to distinguish between what’s relevant and not, and it’s hard see what’s going on in our life and to draw proper conclusions about it. It can also make it hard to remember the abuse.
~ The part of our brain that helps us understand our experience is blunted. This includes experiencing pleasure and feeling alive.
~ The brain’s alarm system goes off easily, sending the signals, “You’re in danger,” activating the sympathetic nervous system and causing the thinking brain to go offline.
~ The processing system needed to resolve trauma stops so the trauma isn’t processed and gets frozen in time.
~ The brain’s ability to use imagination is shut down, and if you can’t imagine things, you can’t change your life as easily.
~ The speech center that you use to explain things goes offline and leaves you feeling dumbfounded.
(Interestingly, the speech center that generates four-letter words works very well because it’s in a different area!)
~ In daily life, the parts of the brain that get activated in a traumatized person are different from a non-traumatized person.
Also, neurochemicals are out of balance,
the size of the structures in our brain change,
the connectivity among brain regions doesn’t work as well,
our brain waves are messed up,
and our body chemistry is out of balance.
So when we put this all together– the brain, the nervous system, and our over reactiveness– we can see how this is having a big effect on our ability to sort out feelings, make decisions, change our thoughts, and see options for how we live our life. And on top of that, it feels like this will never end.
Feeling overwhelmed, lost, anxious, depressed, hopeless, like we can’t say no, and disconnected are coming from the brain and body.
I want you to know that I’m not saying you can’t hold down a job or parent well, although they certainly are harder. I’m talking about our relationship to our self– who we are, how we experience life, and how we heal. We can be smart and competent and still be dealing with the effects of trauma.
Why talk therapy isn’t enough
There are many of us for whom talk therapy hasn’t helped as much as we’d hoped. The effects of trauma are the reason why.
“Trauma changes not only how we think and what we think about, but also our very capacity to think. ”
Most of us grew up being told that talking about distressing feelings can resolve them. However, neuroscience research shows that the experience of trauma itself can get in the way of that. When the alarm bells keep signaling that you’re in danger, no matter how much insight and understanding you have, the rational brain is basically unable to talk the over-reactive brain out of keeping us hypervigilant.
I’m not saying that understanding, learning, and insight isn’t important or helpful. I know it is. That’s why I have this website to give clarity!!
And we do have very real feelings from abuse. Our grief, betrayal, and anger are all real and legitimate. And we have brainwashing and lies to sort out, too.
But we also need specific tools for our physical systems that aren’t functioning after abuse which leave us stuck in the symptoms and the reactions to abuse, leave us stuck in feelings, and make it hard to change our thoughts. When our body is calm, the thinking tools and talk therapy work so much better!
We are a whole being– body, mind, emotions and spirit– and we need healing for them all. God created them all to work in harmony. When we have restored the proper balance between them, we can calm our system and feel in charge of our decisions, our feelings, and how we respond to and live our life. And this brings us peace.
“Our whole system- body, brain, emotions, mind, and spirit were designed by God to work in harmony. When one is out of balance it affects all of who we are. Our woundedness will always manifest itself physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually. Thus the body of Christ must minister in all these ways for healing to occur.”
How can I heal?
The Arise Healing Community is for Christian women who want to heal from the trauma of emotional and psychological spousal abuse, and spiritual abuse. Arise offers an 8 Module, guided healing journey for all the parts of who we are– our body, brain, emotions, mind, and spirit. If you’d like to learn more, click on the link below.
Here’s a podcast I was featured on, talking about healing from abuse.