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Trauma’s Imprint on the Primitive Part of the Brain
The problem with trauma is that it starts off with something that happens to us or that’s done to us, but that’s not where it stops because it changes your brain. And for now that event itself is over, but you continue to react to things as if you’re in danger. We come into the world being able to do what little babies can do, and what can little babies do? They can breathe. They can sleep. They can suck. They can feel hungry. They can poop. They can pee. They can cry, and that’s about it. So we call that the housekeeping of the body. And little babies already can do that, and their system will get very activated. So babies will scream, and they will cry. They’ll look catastrophic, and then the people around them pick them up and soothe them and calm that part of their brain down.
Much of the imprint of trauma is in a very primitive survival part of your brain that’s already in place in little babies. The nature of trauma is that an experience enters into your ears, into your skin, into your eyes, into your sensations, and it goes down into a very primitive part of your brain that automatically interprets what’s going on. Something happens to you — your survival brain makes the first interpretation and says, “Is this dangerous or is this safe?” That decision is made for you by that primitive survival brain. So when you’re being raped, or you’re being beaten, or you see your parents getting killed, your body starts automatically going to the state to try to make yourself survive. One of the states is going into fight/flight — to get up, and to punch people, and to become very angry or on a more primitive level even, people’s brain shuts down, and they lose track of themselves, and they basically make themselves disappear, very much like animals can do that. Also in the wild, they can sort of collapse and play opossum as it were, and playing opossum is exactly what happens to people also. I mean, you beat a kid enough, that kids starts collapsing and no longer responds to this environment, and so it is either fight, flight, or collapse.
The research recently has been showing this little area just way at the base of your skull. It happens to be called the periaqueductal gray that I like to call “the cockroach brain.” There’s a part of you that just picks up what’s dangerous and what’s safe, and now it turns out that when you’re traumatized, that little part of your brain, which is usually very quiet for most of us, continues to just send messages to you when you’re traumatized. And so there’s always this sort of message you get from deep down inside of your body of, “I’m in danger. I’m not safe.”
Oftentimes, when people are traumatized those fight/flight responses continue to get activated in response to situations where people in their environment say, “Hey, hey, cool it. This is not so bad,” but people have these automatic responses. So you’re always uptight, always on alert, and you spend much of your energy trying to suppress those feelings of fear in order not to embarrass yourself, in order to be able to work with what we can do, and so it’s very primitive.
Trauma’s Imprint on the Limbic System
On top of that primitive part of your brain, you develop a limbic system, and your limbic system basically creates an internal map of the world that tells you what out there is safe and what is dangerous. So if you say to me, “Boy, after this interview is over, let’s go to the store and plow down the street and have a nice lager beer.” I go like, “wow, that’s so cool because I love that bar and I don’t love that bar.” So already in my internal mind I have a map of what is safe and what’s dangerous, and that map is created by the experiences we have.
The brain is a used dependent organ, and the brain gets formed on the basis of the experiences that we have particularly in the first few years of your life. So if you’re a little kid and you grow up in very safe surroundings, and people are delighted to see you, and people say, “isn’t she cute? Isn’t she wonderful?” then you grow up with a sense of “I’m so cute and people love me” because that becomes the map of your world of how people respond to you. And that basically stays with you for much of the rest of your life. If you’re a little kid and people say to you, as I hear all the time, “I wish you hadn’t been born. I tried to abort you, but I fail. You just really ruined my life. You’re just have always been a pain in the ass,” that becomes your map of the world. And a little kid doesn’t say when they’re three years old or five years old, “Mom, you’re crazy saying that about me,” because a little kid doesn’t have other ways of looking at the world. So the world that you live in is the only world there is, and if you’re being treated as a difficult, unpleasant person, that becomes your perception of yourself — “I’m fundamentally a bad, a defective person,” and people’s cognition does not make that go away. People can tell you until you’re blue in the face, “oh, you’re wonderful, you’re terrific.” I’ve known a whole bunch of people like that who were very abused and neglected as kids who have become amazing musicians, artists, athletes. The world adores them, and deep inside they still feel like crap, that they’re defective people because that imprint stays with them.
Trauma’s Imprint on Young and Old Brains
Trauma affects the mind of the brain very differently depending on the age at which you are. So if something terrible happens to me right now, I have a whole, well-developed brain, and my brain isn’t really growing all that much anymore. So I’ll get an imprint of the trauma that is pretty much super-imposed on a relatively well functioning brain. If you’re two, three, or four years old, your mind and your brain are growing, and what various of my research friends have shown is that trauma at different ages affects different ways of wiring the brain. And it gets very complex, as my friend Marty Tucker has really shown that trauma at age three changes the brain very differently than trauma at age five and trauma at age 14. The brain keeps growing and evolving and so different events have a different imprint on the brain.
That’s one aspect, and the other thing that is terribly important is not only what’s happening to you, but what’s happening to your environment. By and large, as I said before, if you are really freaked out as a kid, and your parents are there for you, and they smile at you and say, “I’ll take care of it. Don’t worry about it, honey. I know what to do” — or you have a doctor who really knows what they’re doing who you can trust — you go, “okay, I can relax now because even if I can’t take care of it, other people can take care of it for me.” So one of the largest mitigating factors against getting traumatized is who is there for you at that particular time.