Traumas happen to us throughout our lives. Some are bigger and some are smaller. Regardless of the severity of the trauma, the effects on us can be quite detrimental.
When any event happens, our brain responds. The brain’s first goal is to keep us safe. Before you even register what happens, you find yourself responding to the event. For example, if you see a tiger running at you growling, you may start running the other way before you even have a chance to really think about what is happening. This is because the lower part of your brain receives the information and tells your body what to do before the top area of the brain is even aware of what’s happening!
Let’s break this down by talking about the different areas of the brain involved here.
The lower part of the brain is where the brainstem lives. This area is responsible for body level functions, reflexes, and automatic body responses. Your brainstem tells your heart to beat and your lungs to breathe even without you thinking about it. It also tells you to pull your hand back from a hot stove quickly! Your brainstem does this all by sending signals through your spine to the muscles that need to be working to carry out the task needed to keep you alive and safe.
The middle part of the brain is where the limbic system lives. This area is responsible for emotions and short-term memory. The fight, flight, or freeze response lives here! In our example, when we encounter that tiger the limbic system is activated and we experience fear. Our limbic system will then activate our brainstem telling it to do something! Fight, flight, or freeze! If we experience something scary, causing us to feel fear, our brainstem will be told by our limbic system to send signals to make our leg muscles run, our heart to beat faster, our breathing to quicken, our pupils to dilate, etc. All to keep us safe.
This entire thing is happening very quickly, in a matter of milliseconds! How amazing our brains can be! Even more amazing is that the top part of the brain, the neocortex, hasn’t even been involved yet!
The neocortex, i.e. the top area of the brain, is responsible for making sense of things, logical thought, speech, having a sense of time, and long-term memories, to name a few. Basically, everything that makes humans unique from other animals. This area of the brain needs to be involved if an event is going to be processed adaptively. Once the tiger incident is over, the top area of the brain receives all of the information from the lower areas (basically they report up to their boss what they did!). At that point, we can start to make sense of what happened to us and organize the information where it needs to be stored in our brain for learning and memory. Our brain is made to process this information adaptively, but sometimes there’s just too much, or it’s too overwhelming that our brain struggles a bit. Next, we will review what happens to our thoughts, behaviors, and emotions when our brain doesn’t adaptively process the information from a trauma.