Healing Trauma

If your first few years of life, even had a couple of traumatic episodes, your brain would have changed. If you were repeatedly ignored, neglected or abused as a baby or young child, then it’s quite possible that some parts of your brain wouldn’t have developed at all!

Those parts of your brain, just above your Reptilian brain and the anterior structures those specifically between your right and left hemispherical lobes, might just not exist.

These brain structures would normally be help regulate your Fight or Flight response, these are the parts of your Limbic brain related to your sense of Self just wouldn’t have developed like those children who did have highly responsive and empathetic mothers or mother figures.

When a mother responds and is empathetic towards her baby, the babies temporal lobe develops and grows into a number of structures that create a healthy sense of self and the world.

The child learns that the world is a safe and loving place that responds to her needs and provides for her.

When that reciprocal parental communication and nurturing isn’t present and the child is unable to regulate their primitive animal fears, and the Fight or Flight response become the dominant and most active part of the brain.

Those parts of the brain relating to Time, (past, present and future), those parts of the brain relating to her body, and sense of self are simply absent.

This contributes to a sense of Generalized Anxiety, an ambiguous sense of Self, and an inability to forward plan and many other neurological and personality difficulties.

Other signs might include: poor sense of direction, lack of direction in life, poor co-ordination, nervousness, panic attacks, wearing tight clothing or back packs, avoiding eye contact, body disassociation, brain fog, mind going blank at the slightest stress, conflict avoidance, inability to focus especially around noise, anger, inability to self-regulate emotions and bodily sensations,  not being aware of bodily cues such as thirst, hunger or being tired, not being completely honest because of fear of not fitting in and other maladaptive behaviors.

Their underlying childhood trauma, is mapped into the fundamental neurological structure of the brain. The childhood trauma, is part of the very personality and perception of themselves and the world.

Almost anything can re-traumatize this child as an adult, and often they will use alcohol, drugs and sex as a form of self-medication for their underlying traumatic stress.

They may have developed Fight or Flight ‘super-powers’, such as hypersensitivity, an over-active visual or auditory perception, unusual feats of memory recall and many others and or socially avoidant behaviors.

Because of the structural lack of those parts of the brain relating to Self, they may feel ‘Empty Inside’ or have a tendency towards depression or any number of personality disorders.

Thankfully there is some real, science and evidence based science that points to actual long term neurological healing of Developmental Childhood Trauma.

All of these treatments have the same thing in common, stimulating and helping to develop those parts of the traumatized brain that didn’t grow in those critical years of childhood.

In contrast to Talking Therapies, these are Neurological and Physical Therapies and practices that move and stimulate, that part of the brain associated with the sense of self and the body. As well as reducing the activity of the Amygdala and Reptilian Brain and the associated Fight or Flight Response.

They all seem ‘alternative’ but the science behind using these therapies shows they are far more successful at treating PTSD and Developmental Childhood Trauma than any Cognitive Therapy or specially designed pharmaceutical drugs.

A Regular Yoga Practice.

Dancing With Other People.

Regular Deep Tissue Massage.

NeuroFeedback Therapy.

EMDR Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing. (Particularly Successful for PTSD).

Vipassana Meditation.

All this information is collected from a number of different talks and presentations given by Prof Bessel van der Kolk. You can watch the Video below and get his book The Body Keeps the Score.

https://youtu.be/53RX2ESIqsM