What is a Trauma Response?
It is totally understandable to react with shock or unease to an unexpected event that you were not prepared for such as when a loved one gets seriously ill, or you are in a car accident. You may connect the word trauma to an experience like this. Other common events associated with the word trauma could be war, assault, or abuse. You would be correct in thinking that these things embody the word trauma, but it only represents a small percentage of what is actually experienced as traumatic in our lives.
Michael Treleven the founder of Trauma-Sensitive Mindfulness, suggests that upwards of 90% of the population has lived through a traumatic event and roughly 3.5% struggle with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) as a result. This means that although trauma is a common experience, many typically still believe that the 3.5% is what constitutes a trauma response. I want to introduce a broader view of the word trauma and explain it on the continuum described above. The graphic below shows the continuum of trauma as another form of your biologically inherited stress response o.
STRESS ⇋ TRAUMATIC STRESS ⇋ POST-TRAUMATIC STRESS ⇋ PTSD
90% ⇋ 3.5%
When you look at trauma as another form of stress, then recognizing how we respond to or manage stress is actually managing your response to things in your life that have been traumatic. Have you ever had a big reaction to something or someone that did not make sense to you? Or maybe you notice yourself on edge about things that never used to bother you. There is a good chance that your body and brain are responding appropriately to a threat to your survival or connection instincts.
You are born with natural drives to survive and connect and when either of these are threatened it can cause your nervous system to react protectively. If you think of a baby first born they are naturally driven to cry for what they need for survival and connection: food, safety, comfort, and touch. There is no thought put into this; they are responding instinctually to meet their needs. Fast forward to small children and how they develop and grow, and they are constantly exploring through their senses of touch, taste, sound, sight, and smell experienced within their bodies before they can understand their environment logically. Again, this comes instinctually, and they are not told that this is how they must learn about their limits, their needs, or their felt experiences.
These same instincts are still at work in your life as an adult. You forget that the pit in your stomach has a message about what you might be needing or feeling about a situation. Maybe you just discovered that your best friend is moving to another city and although you are happy for them, you fear the loss of connection. You may talk yourself out of paying attention to emotions that surface or ignore them because it does not make “sense” to your logical brain. You convince yourself you are happy for your friend so why do you feel this pit?
One reason we do this is because most households we grow up in tell you that your brain should master your body and emotions and that you no longer have to pay attention to these instinctual drives. Our culture rewards those that can have “mind over matter” or “rational logic” towards decision making while labelling emotion and instinct as unreliable. This undermines the way your nervous system and brain works thus putting you in a disconnected state of stress. When you live with high amounts of stress for any sustained period of time your body’s natural protective response treats this like a traumatic event.
There are specific ways your nervous system responds when it senses a threat to your survival or connection which are: Fight, flight, freeze, and fawn. All four of these responses are to prepare you for survival and can look very similar in your body with a few small variations. Have you ever found yourself in an argument and you feel enraged to the point of explosion, or like you want to run away, or frozen inside, or completely shut down? These reactions could be one of your nervous systems natural protective measures for your safety and survival. We feel this in our bodies just like we did when we were children exploring and learning. All people experience some or all of these responses depending on the situation and the perceived threat. Here is a list of what you could experience in your body if one of these protective responses get activated:
Fight is often accompanied with a change in temperature, a racing heart, or tense muscles.
Flight could feel similar with a racing heart paired with a desire to move away. This can look like fidgeting, lack of eye contact, and shallow rapid breathing.
Freeze can look like shallow rapid breathing, heart rate decrease, shaking or trembling, and fixed eye contact.
Fawn is similar to freeze except there is a complete disengagement through loss of eye contact, physical shrinking down to become small, and slower shallow breathing.
All of these responses are normal reactions to any threat to your felt sense of safety bodily, relationally, mentally, emotionally, or spiritually. It is common to think that these responses should only be present in extreme circumstances that threaten our lives but as stated above they can show up frequently in the midst of your everyday life. Your nervous system is an expert at scanning people, faces, environments, or anything that reminds it of previous times of overwhelm in order to protect you.
This might look like your spouse asking you a question and looking at you a particular way that makes your heart start to race and your temperature to change. Or maybe you are at work and notice a co-worker is avoiding eye contact with you which also starts your heart beating a little faster and you just want to run the other direction when you see them. Another possibility could be maybe someone you care about is angry and expressing their anger towards you and you freeze inside not being able to move or talk.
As you learn to track what triggers these types of body responses you will raise awareness of what your system might be needing in that particular moment. Oftentimes just building this awareness can slow the process down enough to proactively respond with intention instead of just reacting instinctually. Giving yourself compassion, re-assurance, and support can provide you with a sense of safety and begin to calm the nervous system’s stress response. If you find yourself struggling to do this and would like additional support, reach out to me or any of the other counsellors at Panorama Wellness Group.
