Understanding trauma responses

But it was so long ago!

When remembering a traumatic event feels as frightening as, or even more frightening than, living it.

People often come to therapy with an awareness of past challenging events impacting their current lives. It is common to feel frightened and unable to think about those events when they have been especially traumatic and, for many people, I hear this fear in statements like “But it was so long ago, how can it still be so hard?” or “Why does it feel harder now than it was then?”. 

This can apply to anyone who has experienced something that felt traumatic and threatening including childhood traumas, but also in adults who have faced life-threatening or deeply challenging events, such as injury, abuse, displacement, conflict or oppression as adults. Some traumas seem objectively more threatening than others but seemingly smaller issues can also have huge effects on the brain depending on individual situations.

Traumatic events can lead to problems such as (but not exclusively):

• Difficulty regulating emotions
• Difficulty maintaining relationships
• Somatic responses – pain or illness in the body
• Feelings of shame and low self worth 
• Flashbacks, where the memory returns as if it is actually happening in real time. This is more common in people with traits of  Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).

When we experience events or circumstances that threaten our lives, our safety and our sense of self we can react with ‘fear responses’ named, according to the ‘trauma response framework’, as ‘fight’, ‘flight’, ‘freeze’ and ‘fawn’. These responses are automatic and are there to help us survive in the moment of danger. They are automatic in the sense that they do not require conscious decision making and thought, and so they tend to be nonverbal. 

One characteristic of fear responses is dissociation. In order to get through a threatening event our brains shut down the functions that would normally fully process and take in detail. We are prevented from analysing the scenario in favour of fast action for survival and dissociate from the event. Because of the nonverbal aspect of this process, we may remember an event in sensations, images, sounds, tastes and smells, rather than words, which can be particularly difficult to describe or make sense of later. This, for example, is why people sometimes experience distress when they smell something related to an event, sometimes not even knowing what association the smell holds for them, only knowing that it leads to panic.

What happens when trauma is not processed?

Personal history, the type of event and the level of safety found after the event can all influence the way threatening events are processed in the brain. Sometimes it is as if the brain has not been able to file an event away as a past memory and it reappears, feeling like it is still happening. This can be most prominent when there was an absence of care and protection from others. When the pain is not acknowledged and soothed and safety cannot be found, the memory can remain in an abstract, dissociated form.

Why does it feel so hard to speak about something that happened in the past?

When we reacted to events with a fear response there is a good chance we were dissociating from it. This means we cut part of ourselves off from the event, the part that did experience the pain but that could not be tolerated at the time. In this case, the pain was never truly fully felt and, when it feels like the right time to attend to it, suddenly we are faced with the true experience that we had to dissociate from before. This can flood us with the feelings we could not feel before and it can be overwhelming without help. There are ways to manage this though, beginning with finding some aspects of what was unavailable in the past, like someone who can acknowledge the difficulty and pain, who can offer some safety in which to feel the pain and who can help to guide you through, what can be, a complex and uncomfortable process.

Going back to past memories can be daunting and, in therapy, it is important to find someone you feel you can trust, who can go at the right pace for you, recognise your limits and work with you in a way that attends to your pain carefully, whatever the modality of therapy you choose. Some of the things that were missing in the past can be found in the present, albeit in a different way.

If you find yourself wondering how your past is shaping your present and future and wondering about unhelpful patterns you seem to repeat, it is a good indicator that there may be something unprocessed that could be helpful to explore.