How Trauma Affects the Brain and How I’m Healing from PTSD

“Owning our story and loving ourselves through that process is the bravest thing that we’ll overly do.” ~Brené Brown

Several months ago, I was stoked well-nigh writing a piece on the living legacy of trauma, sharing how much we think we know well-nigh these so-called injuries of the mind, body, and spirit when, in reality, we know diddly squat.

I thought that a piece on this topic would inform and help folks like me. I’d suffered long and nonflexible from PTSD, triggered initially by the sudden death of my brother and, simultaneously, the unfortunate finding of an email that confirmed that my husband of twenty-five years was having an topic with a girl half his age who lived in Germany.

Little did I know that without broaching this idea on an vendible that explored how trauma manifests itself in intense physical, perceptual, and emotional reactions to everyday things, I would wits the wool worst trauma imaginable since that fateful day when my world turned into a nightmare that didn’t end when I woke up.

You see, without three years of working virtually with a therapist who specialized in drug and swig tendency and trauma—a woman with a gentle English vocalizing and passion for all four-legged creatures (her “family” consisted of a husband, cat, horse, and donkey)—I got a text that rocked my world like a magnitude 10 earthquake. An energy gravity that, to me, far surpassed what 32 Hiroshima two-bit bombs would finger like.

In tiny unvigilant font, I was informed on a Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. that my minion therapist, Vanessa, had died peacefully at home, surrounded by those who loved her dearly.

Although I should’ve found some sort of repletion in hearing that, I curled up in a fetal position on my deck, letting the warm summer walkover wash over my immensely shaking body.

I grabbed the folds in my over-sized Life Is Good T-shirt, using them to wipe yonder tears that didn’t stop. Not plane when I realized that my two Chihuahua rescues were whimpering next to me, tumbled as to why the sad, high-pitched noises coming out of me sounded a lot like theirs when I left the house.

And although it shouldn’t have come as such a huge surprise without she went into remission without her first tour of ovarian cancer several months ago, Vanessa’s death came fast and furious within a span of just two weeks of her terminal diagnosis.

Without the worthiness to correspond with her in the days leading up to her death (due to her illness rhadamanthine so severe it rendered her 99% incapacitated), I literally stopped, dropped, and rolled on the floor upon receiving this news. I felt as if I was lit on fire, with the pain from this liaison leaving me excruciatingly traumatized and broken.

Not knowing what was happening during these many weeks of radio silence, I was texting her number over and over and over again, not realizing that all of this liaison was stuff read by her husband. He was caring for her in their Vermont farmhouse, assisted by family who flew in from England a few weeks prior to spend whatever little time they had with this very special and minion daughter, sister-in-law, and cousin.

There are no road maps to trauma. No GPS or Waze apps can get us from point A to B. What I did discover during my three-plus years of work with my incredibly wise, informed, compassionate, insightful, and funny therapist in the trauma work we did each week was that there are alarms in our persons that go off, signaling that we have to find a unscratched place to get out of danger, yonder from the darkness lurking within.

Using a workbook that was vastitude helpful, Transforming the Living Legacy of Trauma: A Workbook for Survivors and Therapists, by Janina Fisher, PhD (2021), a huge epiphany for me was connecting the dots of trauma.

I learned that “the living legacy of trauma manifests itself in intense physical, perceptual, and emotional reactions to everyday things—rarely recognizable as past experience. These emotional and physical responses, tabbed ‘implicit memories,’ alimony bringing the trauma working in our persons and emotions then and again, often many times a day” (Fisher, 13).

Doing weekly homework was an integral part of my journey to wellness, although, as anyone knows, you don’t overly really rid yourself of a lifetime of events, symptoms, and difficulties worldwide to individuals who are traumatized.

Worksheets were incredibly helpful in guiding my work with Vanessa, holding me subject to “naming” the symptoms and difficulties I recognized in myself. Those include a feeling of emotional overwhelm, loss of interest in most things, numbing, decreased concentration, irritability, depression, few or no memories, shame and worthlessness, nightmares and flashbacks, uneasiness and panic attacks, chronic pain and headaches, substance vituperate and eating disorders, feeling unreal or out of body, and a loss of sense of “who I am.”

I had to examine how these symptoms helped me to survive. For example, if I suffered from depression, how did that help me get through my PTSD? How did losing interest in things help me? How did not sleeping help? How did using swig help me survive? (I unfortunately combined prescription meds with alcohol, putting my life in jeopardy for years).

One of the most important pieces of my trauma work was recognizing just how integral understanding the smart-ass was in experiencing trauma. Unrepealable areas of the smart-ass are specialized in helping us survive danger (van der Kolk, 2014).

“A set of related structures in the limbic system hold our topics for emotional, sensory, and relational experience, as well as the nonverbal memories unfluctuating to traumatic events. The limbic system includes the thalamus (a relay station for sensory information), the hippocampus (an zone specialized to process memory), and the amygdala (the brain’s fire watchtower and smoke detector). When our senses pick up the signs of imminent danger, that information is automatically transmitted to the thalamus, where, in a matter of nanoseconds, it is evaluated by threat receptors in the amygdala and in the prefrontal cortex to determine if it is a true or false alarm.” (Fisher, 15)

One of the most interesting parts of studying the relational pieces of trauma with the smart-ass is that the prefrontal cortex is designed to hold the “veto power” (Fisher, 15). Depending on how a stimulus is recognized, such as stuff healthful or threatening, I discovered that when I construed a stimulus as threatening (which I did many, many times), my adrenaline stress response prepared my soul to fight or flee.

Adrenaline causes our heart rate and respiration to increase, turning off non-essential systems, including the pre-frontal cortex, putting us in survival mode. Pausing to think might put me in danger, simultaneously losing the worthiness for conscious visualization making, acting, and reacting by crying for help and “bear witness to the entirety of the experience” (Fisher, 16). I often found myself freezing in fear, fleeing, fighting, or giving in when there was no way out.

My understanding of triggers and triggering was instrumental to my understanding of my post-traumatic stress, which forced me to squint at the behaviors of our forebears—cavemen and grotto women. They lived in a very dangerous world, where they were vulnerable to diseases, harsh climates, the challenges of providing supplies for their tribe, and potential attacks by unprepossessing and human predators.

Folks when then had to strike preemptively, something that their environment helped with (using stones, tree branches, etc. as weapons to fight off enemies or craft bows and arrows). Their survival was enhanced by this worthiness to sense danger and to alimony on going, no matter how they felt or what was in their way. They innately had the worthiness to sense danger surpassing the fact rather than unriddle the level of threat once it was in front of them.

Centuries later, human beings still have heightened stress and survival responses. The smart-ass and soul have wilt “biased to cues” indicating potential threat. Cues unfluctuating plane indirectly to specific traumatic events are tabbed “triggers.”

These triggers have caused me to shake in my boots (or Converse sneakers) simply by smelling unrepealable smells or experiencing unrepealable weather conditions. These strong physical and emotional responses are known as triggering, and I struggled with this for many years surpassing I was lucky unbearable to find a therapist who really “got it.”

I can literally hear my ex sacrilegious and screaming if I am in somebody’s vault considering that is where our fights often took place in our family home years and years ago.

I can start shaking when I momentum through my old neighborhood in upstate New York considering I start to “see” all of the vestige I found in our family home that confirmed my ex was having an extramarital affair.

Just driving lanugo a street a few miles from our family home, I can reactivate the sensors in the limbic system and amygdala and see a flashing “danger” sign. I then finger that lightning vendibles of obsessive wrongness that I felt when I found pictures, letters, and other paraphernalia confirming that I was “dumb and clueless” when my ex made up stories well-nigh where he had been or where he was going.

Vanessa would be extremely upset with me if she was here, knowing that I’m “time traveling” with the writing of this piece, and shaming myself in the process by calling myself names.

Her points are valid, and considering of the incredible growth and insight I gained through my work with her, I own both of those things and know that time traveling is incredibly triggering for me, causing me to stir up very upsetting and traumatizing feelings.

As for the self-shaming I have gotten to be very good at, I can recognize (now) that it is extremely counter-intuitive to undeniability myself names or demean myself. All it does is requite life to the negative, punitive, cruel, wraithlike words that my ex articulated to make me finger as if “I” was the crazy one in the relationship, and that “I” deserved to suffer from his extra-marital topic considering I was a crazy, terrible wife.

To all of that I say, bah, humbug, knowing that I have worked way too nonflexible to travel lanugo that visionless and syrupy road of the past, growing by leaps and premises through weeks of tears, laughter, increasingly tears, and hard-earned self-actualization and growth from sessions with an amazingly good clinician.

I know that Vanessa unchangingly gave me the credit for getting where I am today. I unchangingly argued that I never would have arrived at this destination without her patience, expertise, and no-go empathy, which I never experienced with the twenty other therapists I had over the years. I tell those closest to me that Vanessa saved my life, and I don’t say that lightly.

What folks who don’t have PTSD need to understand is that it is virtually untellable for anyone who has experienced severe trauma to truly believe that they “deserve” the good and positive things that come from the extremely nonflexible work they put in.

They’re convinced that they are not deserving of those good and positive things, and that stuff “messed up” will be a lifelong, integral part of them. As such, positive things are for other folks, and transpiration for the good is something that might be reachable but rarely is, due to the falls and flaws that pinpoint the lives of those with trauma.

Healing and forgiveness uncork to happen the moment when we winnow and forgive ourselves—the moment we see that small child who we once were through the vision of the understanding sultana we have become.

For me, I was convinced that the little girl of yesteryear would never be anything but wounded and broken, despite the pep talks and logical arguments presented by very intelligent, intuitive clinicians. But that was then and this is now.

And if Vanessa is looking lanugo at me (and I’m pretty sure she is), she would imitate Mary Poppins and say, “pish, posh” with a smile on her face, and remind me every time I achieved a new level of insight, understanding, and self-care with a “well done,” putting her right thumb up as an exclamation mark.

Well done, indeed.