Traumatic Stress Response
What does Post-Traumatic Stress look like?
Small 't' Trauma
 

• Small 't' disturbances are frequent exposure to intense situations that activate shame, guilt, sadness, loneliness, rejection, humiliation, rage and abandonment

• Trauma occurs when exposure is frequent and intense in childhood, severely disrupting attachment to other humans in regard to feeling safe

• Long-term frequent and intense exposure can lead to complex PTSD

• Unresolved small 't' disturbances may or may not fully debilitate us, but they accumulate over time, eventually causing difficulty in life

• Like any other system, our nervous system can fail under prolonged stress. As a result, it takes less and less to trigger the body's stress response because the nervous system is more often than not too close to peak levels of tolerance

• Consequently, our ability to correctly interpret what is and is not threatening is impaired.

• Small 't' traumatic stress can to one degree or another present as fight, flight, freeze and dissociation. When this happens, a person is considered more often than not to be in hyper (fight or flight) arousal or hypo-arousal (freeze dissociate)

• Multiple emotionally intense exposures cause changes to the areas of the brain that regulate fight, flight, freeze, or dissociation

• While many people would consider a trip to the grocery store or mall a normal social experience, a person with prolonged emotional stress in childhood would find this same event very uncomfortable and even threatening

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Big 'T' Trauma

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• Big 'T' traumas are life-threatening events over which a person has little or no control

• This can result in damage to the brain's ability to correctly interpret what is and isn't threatening

• Big 'T' events are:

  • exposure to war/natural disasters​

  • domestic violence

  • impending threats without those events actually occurring

  • motor vehicle/workplace accidents

  • exposure to critical incidents such as those experienced by police, fire, ambulance and child protection workers

• Unprocessed big 'T' traumatic events cause a greater intensity of intrusive thoughts, images, memories, emotions and body sensations

• Multiple exposures to traumatic events cause changes to the areas of the brain that regulate perception and the release of adrenaline (speed) and cortisol (strength)

• Traumatic stress can present in the form of dissociation, freeze, flight or flight

• When big 'T' trauma occurs, it too causes a person to more often than not experience fight, flight, freeze or dissociation

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Recognizing what's happening

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• We either don't recognize there is a problem because we've become used to the stress and no longer consider it problematic, or we do recognize something is wrong and avoid it

• Isolation is a way of avoiding too much activation

• Defensiveness (fight response) is a reaction to a perceived threat in the absence of one

• Avoidance (flight) is an attempt to avoid reminders of the event

• Frequent trips to the doctor for aches and pains and autoimmune responses are beginning to occur with more frequency

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Recognizing the stress response in reaction to Traumatic Events

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• The brain learns and stores information in a different way during emotionally intense interpersonal experiences and/or life-threatening events

• The degree of intrusion of unpleasant information depends on the intensity of the event (shame, guilt, powerlessness, hopelessness, humiliation, loss of control, impending death and grief)

• The unwanted intrusion of thoughts, images, memories, emotions and body sensations after the fact are the brain's way of trying to rerun the event to avoid injury or death in the future

• When we are traumatized, old protection mechanisms activate without conscious effort (ex. think of pink elephants. Now try to get that thought out of your mind...we can't do it! This is evidence that our brain can do things we don't want it to)

• Exposure to disturbing events disrupts our ability to make sense of how we think and feel about what is happening and accurately perceive space and time

• Our thoughts, i.e. 'I have no control; I'm not safe; I failed (I'm a failure); I should have done something; I can't stand it' etc. are rapid and not easily interpreted, often occurring as feeling states

• The brain has difficulty keeping our thoughts, images, memory, emotion and body sensations as an organized, coherent narrative

• As a result, the memory remains fragmented, unprocessed and "stuck" in the body

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Flashbacks

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• Flashbacks are the brain's way of replaying the traumatic event in order to find a solution to the disturbing experience

• Flashbacks can be in the form of thoughts, images, emotions and body sensations

• Flashbacks are examples of how things are fragmented and stuck in the body

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The Brain is a Body Organ

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• The brain needs the same attention as all other body organs when it is unwell

• Stomachs and lungs are body organs; if they ail, we see a doctor 

• The brain is a body organ but we don't think of it the way we do about other parts of our body

• Shame, guilt, powerlessness, hopelessness, humiliation and grief are activated by traumatic stress which makes it very difficult to seek help. We need to push past these self-imposed boundaries and find our way to good mental health

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