Welcome back to the somatic series!

This is the series where I am using somatic psych theory to help people learn and map out their autonomic nervous system (ANS), develop a healthier relationship with themselves, and eventually build stronger communities.

This is the 2nd part of Unit 3, which will explain trauma from a somatic perspective, what triggers are, the concept of biological rudeness, what glimmers are, and how to regulate your ANS out of survival mode through self-regulation and co-regulation.

Last chapter, Chapter 12 covered an overview of how fear and anxiety shows up in the nervous system as a way to lay the foundation for talking about trauma.

This chapter, Chapter 13, focuses on trauma from a somatic perspective: What trauma is, acute vs chronic vs complex trauma, and some of the effects chronic trauma has on our brains, bodies, and communities.

Video versions here: Part 1 and Part 2.

Neuroception, Again?!

In order to understand trauma from a somatic perspective, we need to return to what we learned about neuroception in the last chapter. Once again, neuroception is your body’s ability to determine if you are safe or in danger and how it responds to the situation. In seconds, your body uses information from the people or things in your environment, from inside your body, and from the systems around us. And then, in those same seconds, your body compares that information with your past experiences to see if anything you’ve learned in the past could help you in this moment. No point in reinventing the wheel. If you’ve survived a similar situation in the past, why wouldn’t your ANS rely on that information to figure out what to do even faster. Ideally, your body would recognize a danger or stressful thing, start up a fight/flight response, use that extra energy to get you to safety, and then regulate itself back into a chill state. Makes sense, right?

The Basics of Trauma from a Somatic POV

Now let’s talk about a not so ideal situation. Your body’s neuroception notices a danger and starts up your fight/flight response. You might feel stressed, anxious, scared, or angry as your brain tries to make sense of what you feel in your body and the situation in general. If the situation feels really intense, your autonomic nervous system might decide to shut down for your own safety. That can look like going on autopilot, checking out of the moment, depression, or dissociation.

So what do we call it when the stress of the situation is so much that it even overwhelms your fight/flight, freeze, AND fawn survival responses? That’s trauma. Trauma is the complete overpowering of our capacity/ability to handle stress. It’s a level of stress that completely overwhelms the autonomic nervous system’s ability to process it and regulate back to ventral vagal safety. Shutting down in the face of trauma is your body protecting you from the full intensity of what you are dealing with.

Trauma can be acute (1 traumatic event with a beginning and an end like a car accident), chronic (traumas that last for weeks, months or years like chronic pain or abusive relationships), or complex (various different types of traumas like experiencing child abuse/neglect, poverty, racism, medical abuse, fatphobia, queerphobia, homelessness, etc).

Sometimes trauma can come not just from the traumatic event itself, but also from your conscious mind trying to find meaning and make sense of what happened. Your autonomic nervous system made those survival decisions before your conscious mind could catch up. And if you don’t have a solid relationship with yourself, it can be very confusing trying to figure out why you froze or why you freaked out for example. This confusion can lead to resenting yourself, and that can get in the way of healing. Part of somatic work is understanding your body and why it responded that way, having grace for yourself and your ANS, and then using your growing knowledge to be in a more intentional relationship with your body in the future. Healing a trauma is also about learning your ANS and your body’s physical responses, not just focusing on the details of the traumatic events.

Long-term Effects of Trauma

Emotional Regulation is a Skill That Must Be Taught

So again, ideally your body’s neuroception would recognize a stress or danger, kick up a fight/flight response (maybe throw in freezing or fawning if needed), use that extra energy to get you to safety, and regulate itself back into a chill state. However, like I’ve mentioned before in Chapter 4, chronic (and complex) trauma affects this process by making it hard for the ventral vagus to do its thing. And that leads to more fight/flight energy overwhelming the body instead of being processed or released. This extra energy can make it harder to feel safe, rest, be able to feel close to others, and all the other important things I highlighted in the chapter on stillness and rest. This can be especially hard if no one showed you how to regulate your emotions and no one created safety for you as a kid. Being able to handle our own emotions is not something that humans are born knowing how to do.

And it would be cool if everyone was able to learn how to do this as children. Childhood is technically a time of low stakes opportunities for your ANS to practice managing emotions with support from adults. Many of us have had more time being traumatized than we had time to learn how to deal with emotions in safe spaces. If you don’t have that practice time as a foundation, it’s easier to get dysregulated and triggered, especially if your past experiences led you to come to the conclusion that safety isn’t real and people aren’t to be trusted. And all this can lead to having a nervous system that struggles with stress tolerance, which can look like shutting down at the 1st sign of stress, being in a shutdown state for months or years, and/or going back and forth between fight/flight and shutdown for every single stress.

Some Effects of Chronic Trauma on the Brain

Thinking and Decision-making

• Fact: Our pre-frontal cortex goes offline when stressed or when triggered.
• Why It’s Important: This limits our critical thinking, ability to pay or hold attention, and the quality of our decision-making while also changing how we interpret our own emotions and other people’s emotions.

Learning New Information

• Fact: The hippocampus (part of the brain important in verbal memory and learning new information) is very sensitive to stress.
• Why This Matters: Chronic stress and/or trauma can lead to problems remembering the past and learning new information.

Your Intuition and Learning from the Past

• Fact: Our memories are organized through the brain’s limbic area, specifically a part known as the amygdala.
• Fact: The amygdala links our emotions to memories, what we learn, and our literal senses (sight, hearing, touch, smell, taste, vestibular, and proprioception) into 1 whole package like a time capsule.
• Why You Should Care: So (full circle moment) our neuroception uses the memories and emotions our brain has stored together as part of how it decides how to get out of a dangerous/stressful situation. Sometimes the information our ANS is working with is helpful: we got to safety and even saved some time. And sometimes, our ANS miscalculates, and we do things out of fear or anger that aren’t in our best interests.
• Why It’s Important: Both when we are triggered and when we remember a positive memory from the past, we feel all the emotions and physical sensations in our body that we felt back then. This happens because the time capsule our amygdala created when organizing our memories was opened. That’s why you might find yourself acting outside of your character or doing things that you know better than doing. All that wisdom can go right out the window once the triggered time capsule is opened.

Emotions

• Fact: Like I mentioned in Chapter 5, chronic (and complex) trauma negatively affects the vagus nerve’s ability to regulate the body out of survival/crisis responses. When in the middle of a crisis, the ventral vagus is literally unavailable for use, so critical thinking and being able to connect with others is really, really hard to do and may even feel impossible.
• Why This Matters: Chronic (and complex) trauma can cause people’s nervous systems to have really intense responses to the people, things, and situations around them and, as a result, feel their own emotions more intensely. Someone’s body might take up “Don’t have to get ready if you stay ready” as its main strategy for life – making it even easier to slip into fight/flight or shutdown and even harder for the body to regulate back into safety and regulation.
• Why It’s Important: This can cause someone to constantly feel unsafe, so their body slips into survival mode more easily and is more likely to make decisions in crisis mode at the 1st sign of stress.
• Why You Should Care: Remember, we act differently based on which part/parts of our ANS is active: how we act to protect ourselves vs how we act when we’re chilling. Our ANS affects how we see the world, how we interpret people’s facial expressions, body language, and tone when they speak. And over time, with chronic or complex trauma, we become used to acting in survival mode (black/white thinking, problems managing stress, etc) and these crisis responses become part of our habits and personality.
• Why It’s Important: These issues dealing with stress, thinking critically, and managing emotions affect people’s ability to feel safe in relationships and truly connect with people.

Chronic Trauma and the Body

So again, trauma is when our autonomic nervous system faces a stress that completely overwhelms whatever resources and coping skills we have in place. And our bodies generally respond to this level of stress by shutting down to protect us. Shutdown is supposed to be a short term solution, not a permanent strategy for surviving. Like I’ve said before in Chapter 4, our bodies shutting down regularly as its 1st line of defense in stressful situations can cause or make worse: fainting, impaired immune system function (and related health issues now that the immune system is not working normally), chronic lack of energy, digestive issues, dissociation, depression, and social isolation (and remember, the body sees loneliness as similar to pain and any other danger).

Like I discussed in Chapter 10, pain, especially chronic pain, is its own trauma. Chronic and complex trauma can also look like cycling between different survival responses (fight, flight, freeze, fawn, and shutdown) which can make pain worse. Although the adrenaline and cortisol that we get in fight/flight is really helpful in the short term and in many other situations, it also literally makes our muscles tense up and also causes stiffness, which can make pain worse. Pain, especially chronic pain, literally changes our behaviors, emotions, and how we see the world due to being constantly in a crisis response. Living with pain uses up people’s mental, emotional, and physical energy resources every day just trying to survive. It’s literally exhausting in every way. There’s also the psychological aspects of trauma  – the guilt, the resentment towards yourself, internalized ableism, believing you don’t deserve help, etc. that can make pain and people’s experience of pain worse. And that’s not even getting into how systemic ableism affects people’s bodies and their experiences with pain.

Systemic Oppressions and Trauma

Systemic oppressions like racism, ableism, misogyny, transphobia, ageism, capitalism, etc. automatically turn someone’s chronic trauma history into a complex one. Not only in terms of intensity and the complicated ways systemic oppressions show up in a person’s life, but also because systemic oppressions lay the foundation for other types of abuses and traumas to exist and thrive. Interpersonal abuse/neglect dynamics are taught, modeled after, and enabled by systemic abuse through socialization. Example: We are all socialized into ableism from birth and every single day. It is baked into how our society functions. And, like I mention in the socialization piece, it feels easier to fall in line with our pre-set (but not permanent) places in society and engage in fawning behaviors to protect ourselves AND also engage in enabling behaviors that keep the system going. However, if we don’t do the daily work of unlearning socialization in ourselves, we could be encouraged to abandon the growing number of disabled people during 5+ years of a global pandemic in the form of public policy, medical abuse/neglect, and in interpersonal relationships.

Even though that is against our collective best interests. And we see how systemic abuse and neglect traumatize people through the overwhelming stress of surviving in a world that is set against you. The stress and trauma of being abandoned (or taken advantage of) by people around you to different degrees, being purposefully harmed by systems, the stress of isolation/loneliness on the whole body, and any financial stress that often comes with being marginalized. Systemic oppressions add to, rely on, and normalize us being in crisis all the time.

All this stress passes down from generation to generation, affecting people’s behaviors, habits, perspective on life, goals, connection to their own emotions, their ability to connect with others, their stress tolerance, their ability to have patience, etc. Again, remember, the way we see ourselves, the people around us, and the world is hugely influenced by which part or parts of our autonomic nervous system is active at that time. We are different people with different gut reactions depending on if we are hungry, angry, sad, nervous, in the middle of a trauma response, or chilling. Many of us have mainly known our elders through the dysregulated versions of themselves – stressing over bills and/or reacting from old traumas from before our time. We can pick up their trauma responses until they become our own. We can experience similar personal or systemically traumatic experiences and fall back on habits that were started from before we were born.

So we know that systemic oppressions create the environment for and even encourage interpersonal abuse and trauma. And we know that people experience chronic and complex trauma as a result, which dysregulates their nervous systems and causes literal physical and mental health issues. We know that chronic and complex trauma makes it harder to connect with others and to build and maintain community relationships. And we know that this trauma can pass down to future generations. And we know that this difficulty connecting with others due to trauma can also make it harder for older generations to share wisdom with the younger generations.

A final piece (for now) is how systemic oppressions and the related suffering also act as constant weaponized triggers, used as a psychological weapon to dysregulate people’s nervous systems. Collectively kicking up people’s trauma responses from their personal, interpersonal, and systemic traumas. Keeping people in a routinely dysregulated cycle of trauma. Much of it is on purpose as a means to control the population. To keep us as a whole from thinking clearly with our prefrontal cortex turned on and from a regulated, emotionally connected place with a solid community surrounding and supporting us.

I know I say this a lot, but we all would literally think differently and make different choices. Poverty and lack of access to quality healthcare (both man-made problems that could be solved in our lifetime) are especially used to keep us hungry and under control. And politicians love to create and enable scarcity so they can campaign off of that instead of legitimate policy. And they keep us so distracted with our pain and stress that we have a harder time thinking clearly to actually get our needs met.

Thanks for reading. The next chapter will continue Unit 3 by covering what triggers are and how to identify them.