Traumatic / Trauma Response

Trauma is described as an event or stimulus where the primal parts of the brain interpret the dangerousness to be overwhelming in its capacity to move through. Trauma triggers the fight, flight, freeze response in the body also known as the trauma response.

It is increasingly being recognized that events previously thought as non-traumatic are in fact triggering the trauma response in the body. Surgeries and painful dental procedures are two such events.

If the nervous system cannot manage the overwhelming energy that is being triggered it is believed that it stores it for release (discharge) at a later time when there is more safety in the environment.

The extent to which an event/stimulus is traumatic depends on the capacity of the nervous system at the time. As our nervous system is still developing in the first few years of life we are more vulnerable then in later years. Therefore, what might have traumatized me at two years of age does not at 20 years of age.

Especially for Therapists

In his chapter in the Red Book on "Dysregulation of the Right Brain" Allan Schore suggests that the history of our early development plays a key role in our susceptibility to PTSD:

"I would add that a focus on cumulative relational instead of "single hit" trauma emphasizes…the "affectively charged traumatic memory" is not of a specific overwhelming experience with the physical environment as much as a reevocation of prototypical disorganized attachment transaction with the misattuning social environment..." Affect Regulation and Disorders of the Self. pg. 259 Italics added.

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