Trauma Changes the Mind
“How do horrific cause people to become hopelessly stuck in the past? What happens in people’s minds and brains that keeps them frozen, trapped in a place the desperately wish to escape?” – “The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, And Body In the Healing of Trauma” by Bessel Van Der Kolk, M.D.
For those of you who do not know, I wrote a memoir several years ago called “Collapsed: A Survivor’s Climb from the Wreckage of the I-35W Bridge.” The most emotionally painful part of the memoir to write was also the memoir’s beginning. It was a scene that took place just before my wedding and about a year after my accident. In it, I confess that on the precipice of my wedding I felt the opposite of what I was supposed to be feeling. I felt numb. And I felt terrible about it. My fiancee did not deserve that. Nor did I. It wasn’t that I did not want to be married to Sonja. I did. But there I was, devoid of the joy that I should have been awash in.
I couldn’t shake that feeling of being stuck then, and many years later I still could not shake it. But by then the trauma had played its role in ending my marriage as well as snuffing out a subsequent engagement. And as I strived to be the best father in the world, I felt like even though I was there I definitely wasn’t fully present for my son. I was the problem as the effects of trauma continued to cling to me. Trauma simply had become my shadow.
Over the years I believed a lie I had been telling myself repeatedly: This post-trauma “you” is the new “you” and I and everyone else around me was going to have to accept that. The trauma’s effects couldn’t be divorced from me. It was what it was.
Sure, I had heard success stories of others who had overcome PTSD and were living healthy lives. But were they, I skeptically wondered? Or had they just fooled themselves?
Each day that passed I felt I had wasted as I handed it over to the trauma. I wasn’t living. I was existing. Finally I got to the point where something had to give. I had hit my low point when my ex-fiancee had left for the second and final time. I realized that all I had been doing was unsuccessfully managing my trauma. But I didn’t want to “manage” it any longer. The only solution was to best it.
While being very familiar with the emotional effects of trauma, I realized that I had never really understood its biological impacts, that there are actual changes to the brain that explain my feelings and behaviors. Trauma wasn’t just a “thing” to “get over.” My brain had actually changed. But that didn’t mean my situation couldn’t also be changed.
That’s where Bessel Van Der Kolk comes in. Bessel is the leading researcher in the area of trauma. In fact, he was brought in to speak to the special masters tasked with distributing compensation funding for I-35W bridge survivors to help them understand the long-term effects of trauma. In his book “The Body Keeps the Score,” he shares his experiences studying trauma patients and the results of various studies in the past two decades regarding PTSD.
Bessel shares this example: A normal person’s thalamus (a part of the brain) acts as a filter. We use it when we need to be attentive, concentrate or when we are learning something new. It helps us by weeding out non-critical sensory information (like the music playing at Starbucks while we are working) and focus on the task at hand. For trauma suffers, the thalamus can be broken and the flood gates are always open. This person’s brain is overwhelmed with sensory information. He/she will cope by shutting themselves down or hyper-focusing. And if that doesn’t work, trauma survivors can slip into other unhealthy coping mechanisms such as alcohol, drugs or sex. When they shut down, they are sadly filtering out joy and pleasure found in the present.
Knowing this helped me immensely. I have been rightfully accused of being hyperfocused, enough so that my ex-fiancee even used it as my nickname in her smartphone. For years I had thought it was just a trait, and I had even been proud of it. It helped me write my memoir, for instance. But now it makes sense as to why I am this way. This doesn’t excuse my propensity to shut down. But it does help me understand why I do it and that if I want to overcome the trauma then this is something to be worked on because it interferes with relationships.
For those truly wanting to understand how trauma changes the brain and keeps trauma sufferers stuck, I cannot recommend Bessel’s book enough. There is life to be lived, truly lived, for all of us, including trauma survivors. Understanding how our brains have changed and that such a change is not a death sentence provides hope and encouragement for those in trauma’s grip to begin to move forward.
I will always feel bad about how trauma stole several years of joy for me and for others. But I also refuse to let it continue to steal from me. It’s a painful lesson to learn, and that’s why I hope I can help other trauma survivors shorten their sentence.
