How Emotional Trauma Works-- in COOL DIAGRAMS
We humans react to immediately serious, or else chronic threats by energizing fight, flight, or freeze reactions. Our nervous systems prioritize offensive & defensive processes, shut down healthier ones, and also disconnect some parts of the body, emotions, and brain from one another.
Wild animals recover, but separations, disconnects, & imbalances remain in us if we do not process and assimilate serious overwhelm.
Trauma is the name given to both the overwhelms & the lingering after-effects. Leading edge researchers now believe that most chronic emotional and physical illnesses have some root source in trauma.
But what are these "disconnects," anyway? Let's Go to the Pictures
Check out this first picture below. It's oversimplified but still core level correct. Notice that your right brain is streaming a unified, holistic flow of what happens to you.
The hippocampus passes this stream to your left brain which categorizes and creates your conscious story of your life. Right brain doesn't do this.
When Your Hippocampus Takes a Hike
But neither does left brain when you go into fight/flight/freeze overwhelm. Notice in Box 2--the hippocampus is offline.
That means fragmented, usually disturbing RAW, unprocessed memories remain stuck in the right brain--even after normal processing resumes. Like those darker squiggles in Box 3 below.
Well--So What??
These sit there until the present tense streams events that resemble the original trauma-inducing circumstances.
Then, this raw stuff piggybacks on the flow across the hippocampus bridge. And that brings old, disturbing perceptions and feelings into play as if they were--not memories of the past--but real, present-tense events.
So your conscious left brain is operating on the basis of some stuff that is NOT REALLY HAPPENING NOW.
Less often, or in extreme cases, these can literally take over the flow across the midbrain bridge. You see this in Box 4, which is what "flashbacks" or "floodings" in therapy look like.
Not Flashbacks, But "Blurbacks"
But far more common are what I have named "blurbacks." As you can see in Box 5, this is where there is a difficult-to-sort-out mix of present tense experience along with an inappropriate overlay of those raw, earlier trauma memories. These subtler intrusions of old stuff cause mistaken perceptions, unexpected setbacks, and a climate of worry or fear.
Clearing "Raw" Memories While Calming the Nervous System
With many of the newer techniques for healing trauma, what we are doing is calming the nervous system directly (with meridian tapping in energy psychology, for instance) while we bring up the blurbacks on purpose in a safe situation so that they can be witnessed and integrated by the left brain.
This simple understanding can be a great help to you in life. Sensing when you yourself, or others around you, are operating through a blurback can save you confusion and trouble. And knowing how to clear the old, raw stuff is priceless.