- Can emotional trauma cause physical symptoms?
Of course it can.
But what does that look like?
We'll talk about it in today's video.
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Hi, I'm Alicia Decker, co-founder of Mended Light,
and I am passionate about supporting you in healing.
This channel is all about healing from trauma
so you can feel safe, whole, and worthy of love.
Please join us
and remember to subscribe and click the bell
so you don't miss a thing.
In one of the most comprehensive books on trauma
I have ever read, "The Body Keeps The Score",
the author states chronic emotional abuse and neglect
can be just as devastating as physical abuse
and even sexual abuse.
Not being seen, not being known
and having nowhere to turn to feel safe
is devastating at any age,
but it is particularly destructive for young children.
Chronic emotional abuse and neglect
are just as devastating as physical and sexual abuse.
Emotional abuse can be traumatizing,
but it is often so much more difficult to explain
and communicate and even to prove.
There can be narcissism,
gaslighting, and a whole host of other behaviors
that cause you to question yourself and your perspective.
If you've experienced emotional abuse as a child,
you wouldn't even have the cognitive development
to know that it was abuse or that something was wrong.
It was just your version of normal.
One of the aspects of trauma
that is not often talked about
is how you question your own judgment
and you lose your ability to trust yourself.
If the emotional abusive person in your life
is a parent or a partner or a person of authority,
it is that much harder to break free
of the web of lies of emotional abuse.
For all these reasons,
emotional trauma can be challenging to address
but we're here to support you.
Trauma, including emotional trauma,
can create a whole host of problems in your body
from fibromyalgia to chronic fatigue,
autoimmune disorders to insomnia,
anxiety, depression, migraines, and more.
I would go so far as to say
that all discomfort or dis-ease
is a cry for help from the body
that something needs to be addressed.
What if instead of trying to shut down
our bodies' cries for help, we recognize
that it is trying to communicate to us an unresolved need.
What if the pain, the discomfort
or disease didn't register as something to cover up
or make go away, but something to resolve?
What if instead of trying to take a prescription drug
to cover up the symptom,
we learn to connect with the buried emotion
honoring our need to heal our body
and our mind and our heart.
Okay, so you know, the book I mentioned at the beginning,
"The Body Keeps The Score",
Dr. Besel VanDerKolk explores the interconnectedness
between traumatic experiences
and the body, mind, and brain.
He says after trauma,
the world is experienced with a different nervous system.
The survivor's energy now becomes focused
on suppressing inner chaos
at the expense of spontaneous involvement in their life.
These attempts to maintain control
over unbearable physiological reactions
can result in a whole range of physical symptoms.
This is where the fibromyalgia,
the chronic fatigue and autoimmune diseases come up.
This explains why it is critical for trauma treatment
to engage the entire person, body, mind, and brain.
Did you know that the brain has an alarm system?
And when it is triggered,
it is designed to help you survive,
Even at the cost of you being actively engaged
in your own life.
When the alarm system is triggered,
it is almost like your brain
has pre-programmed escape plans.
It shuts down
or decreases the higher thinking parts of your brain,
the ones responsible for conscious thought
and engages in survival mode,
and what is sometimes called your reptilian brain.
Your body may respond to trauma or a trigger
before your conscious mind
has even had a chance to catch up
and know what is going on.
That is because the conscious part of your brain
literally goes offline
in the event of a trauma, threat or trigger,
yes, even triggers for emotional trauma.
For this reason,
you cannot just will yourself outta responding differently.
Your cognitive brain function literally shuts down.
To find true healing from traumatic events
and their subsequent triggers,
you need to bring your thinking brain back online.
To do this, it first needs to be safe
and needs to be safe
for you to vocalize what you know and feel.
If it is not,
the only option is to deny and disassociate with yourself
out of necessity to survive.
While this response is what your brain
and body is designed to do to keep you safe,
if you stay in that place,
it will also keep you stuck,
stuck in a place of fear, hypervigilance,
unable to thrive or fully enjoy life
because your brain is stuck in survival mode
even if the trauma has long since passed.
When you experience something traumatic
and parts of your brain go offline, like we talked about,
this creates new pathways in the brain.
These pathways are created by neurons
and we know that neurons that fire together wire together.
And when a pathway fires repeatedly,
it becomes a default setting in our programming,
or the way we will most likely respond.
I like to compare this to wagon wheel ruts.
Now I know we don't use wagons anymore
but everyone knows what wagon wheel ruts are.
If a dirt road is traveled just a few times by a wagon,
there are not any ruts in the road.
It is easy to take a different path.
But if you are following a road
or a neural pathway that has been etched deep in your brain
because you have followed it thousands,
if not millions of times before,
it becomes a deeply ingrained behavior pattern.
And if that deeply ingrained behavior pattern
is no longer serving you,
if the programming that used to keep you safe
is now keeping you stuck,
it may feel like there is no hope
for your future to be different than the past.
The nerves and chemicals that create pathways in our brain
make up a basic brain structure.
Our brain structure has a different connection
with our body through our nervous system.
If certain parts of our brain shut down out of survival,
it is going to affect the organs and the body processes
that correlate to that part of the brain.
If you need support in letting go of stuck emotions,
check out our video, "how to release trauma in the body".
Going back to the quote we started with,
all of these reasons are why after trauma,
the world is experienced with a different nervous system.
Your energy after trauma is now focused
on suppressing inner chaos
at the expense of spontaneous involvement in your life.
These attempts to maintain control
over unbearable stress caused
when you go into a state of fight, flight or freeze
can cause a whole range of physical symptoms,
including the autoimmune diseases,
migraines, depression, anxiety, and many more.
This explains why it is critical for trauma treatment
to engage the entire person, body, mind, and brain.
So if you're ever feeling like you're crazy,
or you're questioning what's wrong with you,
or wondering why you can't just get over it and move on
it's because your brain has literally been rewired
by the trauma and the subsequent PTSD.
Your brain was protecting you
in the moment to keep you safe.
Recognize that if you are now
in a place of safety and security,
those coping mechanisms are no longer keeping you safe,
they are keeping you stuck.
Show yourself love and appreciation and understanding
for the amazing ways
you have handled the challenges of trauma.
You are still here.
You are still trying,
and that is commendable.
You are worthy of love, understanding and happiness.
Get the support you need to heal.
If this video has been helpful, will you do me a favor?
Please share this with a loved one
who needs support in their healing journey.
Also remember to subscribe,
click the bell,
and watch the next video.
Until next time, keep shining.
We need your light.
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