Present Perspective.
Without treatment of some type, trauma can be stored in the body.
Incase you don’t know what Fight Flight,Freeze, or Faint responses look like, let me explain
Fight-a person may become enraged and become argumentative when startled.
Flight-A person may feel a compulsion to run away when surprised.
Freeze-An individual could have the impulse to stop in their tracks without thinking about it
Faint- You may have heard about a type of goat that will suddenly become stiff and then topple over when it is startled. This is the same as a faint response. An individual will simply pass out.
When I think of explaining the amygdala's function in the brain, I like to imagine how a person may respond when watching a scary movie.How do you respond when you suddenly hear a loud noise? How do you respond when you go to the doctor's office to get a shot? What do you feel in your body when you see the needle? When you’re on your way to the dentist's office, aware of what you are going to encounter, what emotions do you feel? What kind of mood are you in when you are approaching something daunting? .
After doing years of learning about how an experience can be memorized in the body and continue to be present in how we move, speak, and how we make decisions in our lives is astounding. Let me explain. When someone experiences a traumatic experience and try to move away from the experience. The mind will inform the body that it hasn’t recovered in at 3 forms-dreams, habits, and reactions. Although there are many more ways that the traumatic experience can manifest, lets explore these 3.
When a person’s trauma goes untreated, they may tend to have nightmares or difficulty sleeping dreams. Perhaps they may even become avoidant of going to sleep completely or for as long as they can. This could be represented by substance abuse which tends to lead to addiction. Next to this, we have reactions. The way that untreated trauma can manifest in someone’s habits, is that they may tend to avoid certain people.
Perhaps those people may remind them of someone associated with their trauma. A person may chose to avoid certain places that reflect difficult time that they experienced in their life. To take this understandinding ever further, an individual may choose to avoid the outside world all together. This can be seen represented by a person being avoidant or uncomfortable with leaving their home all together.
What we have just discussed is something called triggers. Becoming aware of the connection between our current habits and a persons traumatic history is the key to understanding how trauma remains present in our lives. If gone untreated for long periods of time, individuals become comfortable with how the impact of trauma influences their lives. What is meant by this, people have come to develop a relationship with their reactions to a trigger rather than dealing with the reason itself.
What this may look like is a person choosing to be avoidant, isolated, or become comfortable with managing their reactions to a trigger rather than addressing the reason why the trigger is there. It is almost as if the person has become ruled or governed by their reactions and have chosen to situate their lives surrounding the reactions (triggers) rather than approaching the reason why they are having them.
What happens when treatment to the cause (reason) of the trigger happens, over time, it is the person taking their power back, gaining control of the their reasons and immobilizing the power that the trigger has over them. By inviting interventions and modalities that have been known to work to treat trauma, an individual is exploring what their life would look like by not governed by their triggers.
