Trauma is a mental injury, not a mental illness. But when that stress becomes chronic it takes root
in your body and it can become PTSD. In the last video we talked about how stress hurts your body.
In this video you'll learn how trauma gets trapped in your body. We're going to talk about ACES and
crocodiles and how Holocaust survivors pass down anxious genes to their kids. You'll learn why
you feel stuck in chronic stress, and in the next video you'll learn what to do about it.
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Research shows that people who experience trauma or abuse have physical and emotional illness at
much higher rates for the rest of their lives. According to the CDC, toxic stress from trauma
can change brain development and affect how the body responds to stress. Trauma leads to higher
prevalence of depression, high-blood pressure, asthma, cancer, diabetes, heart disease. It
leads to higher rates of substance abuse and early death. People who experience trauma
are more likely to have autoimmune disorders, chronic pain, and other chronic conditions. But
trauma is incredibly common. One in eight kids grow up in a home where their parents fight.
One in three women and one in five men have been sexually assaulted. Poverty, racism, and natural
disasters can all trigger that trauma response. But trauma doesn't have to be some extreme event.
Any situation where you feel overwhelmed and unsafe can trigger a trauma response.
At its essence, trauma is in the nervous system. When your brain perceives a threat
like a crocodile, it turns on the self-protective fight-or-flight response. This is the sympathetic
response in your autonomic nervous system. You move from a state of safety to activation:
fighting off an attacker, running away, defending and protecting yourself. Your nervous system
triggers a massive physiological response, pumping out adrenaline to jolt your muscles into action
and the stress hormone cortisol to increase blood sugar and to power intense movement.
But cortisol also turns off non-immediately essential functions like your immune system,
your digestion, healing, and repairing in your body. So after that fight-or-flight response,
if a threat is too overwhelming, when your brain subconsciously interprets a threat as too
dangerous to fight off or too powerful to escape, it then triggers an even deeper survival response,
the freeze response. This nervous system reaction makes your muscles lock up. You can't speak, you
can't move, you feel numb, you may dissociate or detach from your body. Freezing can help you hide.
It makes you appear dead to an attacker. It can protect you by showing that you're not a threat.
Fighting back might antagonize your attacker and put you into more danger. The numbing
and dissociative response protects you from the pain of a situation. So the fight/flight/freeze
responses are all adaptive, they're all functional, they're all helpful. They're
short-term survival responses in your body. You experience these physical changes in your body
when you're faced with a perceived threat. But humans also have a natural way to resolve
trauma in our bodies. So the fight/flight/freeze response is the sympathetic response, and the
counterbalancing response is the parasympathetic response. That's the heal and rest and digest and
restore safety and feed and breed response, right? One of the ways we can trigger that
parasympathetic response is through connection and safety. So for example, a little boy who
gets hurt on his bicycle but then he's swept up and he's comforted by his father, he learns that
he can process through his pain. He can resolve his fear and pain with safety and connection.
Those stress hormones of cortisol and adrenaline, they're replaced with connection hormones. The
nervous system re-regulates, the parasympathetic response kicks on, and his body starts to heal.
On the other hand, a little boy who is beaten by his father lives in fear. He learns that the
world isn't safe, that it's not predictable, and that there's no escape and that he's in constant
danger. So his nervous system gets stuck in that fight/flight/freeze response for days,
for weeks, for years. He's in a chronic state of survival, and that chronic state of stress
and fear basically sets the body's default mode as one of high alert. It's like the brain says,
"Keep that fight/flight/freeze response on at all times or else something bad could happen."
Like muscles that get used over and over in a workout, the sympathetic response becomes habitual
and stronger. The boy may be more quick to anger. That's the fight response. He may be more
sensitive to signs of danger and leave the home or hide in his room. That's the flight response.
And these are all adaptive. They help him survive his abusive environment. But they also leave him
tense. Maybe he gets stomach problems or he can't sleep well, and being stuck in fight/flight/freeze
probably gets in the way of his ability to function at school. He can't concentrate,
he gets into fights, or he withdraws. When stress becomes chronic, it interferes with everything.
Trauma basically sets your body's threat thermostat higher. So imagine someone who had
nearly died of hypothermia. They get home to their house, and they set that thermostat to 80 degrees.
Anytime the temperature dipped to 79 degrees, the thermostat would sense that the house
was cooling off and it would kick on that furnace. Someone who's experienced trauma
has a higher sensitivity to threats. Their anxiety thermostat is set high. They'll be hyper-vigilant,
they'll be jumpy, they'll be quick to assume that others are attacking them, or they'll feel
anxious and nervous all the time. They'll see danger everywhere. Their experiences have set
their nervous system to pay more attention to things that might be possibly dangerous.
Now again, this is functional, right? Your body is not out to get you; it's trying to keep you alive.
So let's say you get badly bitten by a dog as a child. You learn that dogs are dangerous.
And when you see a dog you're more sensitive to that dog as a threat, and you avoid that dog.
You're less likely to get bitten again. Or someone who's been fired for unfair reasons, they may
see the next performance review as a threat to their job, even though their new boss is kind.
So there are pros and cons to trauma sensitivity. The pros of a higher thermostat,
a higher sensitivity is that it makes you more likely to avoid things that might be dangerous.
So if you imagine our ancestors living in a dangerous natural environment - let's say
they're in a village by a river, then there's crocodiles in the river. The people who never
ever worried about crocodiles, the people who never checked for crocodiles in the water,
they're more likely to get eaten by a crocodile. And the people who saw their
neighbor get eaten by a crocodile, the ones who maybe have a little trauma response to that,
they're more likely to worry and to be more jumpy when they see the water move,
and they were more likely to survive and to make babies and to pass their anxious genes down to us.
So our ancestors most likely passed down anxious genes to us because they're the ones who survived.
There are some fascinating studies that show that Jews from Germany who survived the Holocaust
actually passed down anxious genes to their descendants at higher levels
than the average population. And if you think about it, this makes great evolutionary sense.
If another Holocaust were to occur, the people with a higher sensitivity to anxiety
might be more likely to leave the country earlier in the timeline when the borders were still open.
Being more sensitive to a threat made them more likely to survive a horrific event.
But anxiety comes with a cost. The people in that village who worried excessively about crocodiles
or they were so traumatized by crocodiles that they wouldn't go to the river to get water or they
were extra jumpy so they always spilled the water and they broke their jug every time a frog jumped,
they were also at a disadvantage. Their fear thermostat was set so high that it interfered
with their ability to get water. They might die of thirst, or they might spend so much time
walking 10 miles away to get more water that they didn't have time to gather food or to make babies,
so their survival was also under threat. Being stuck in that trauma response
is exhausting. So when your body's natural adaptive response to threats gets too strong,
that can interfere with your ability to live a fulfilling life. The descendants of these
Holocaust survivors, while living in the United States over the next 60 years in relative safety,
they experienced significantly higher degree of anxiety,
and this can interfere with their relationships and their work and their happiness.
So what it boils down to is trauma impacts the body on a physiological level, and when
that thermostat gets set higher it can make your house too hot and wear out your furnace.
If you look at how trauma works, this all makes sense. That fight/flight/freeze response
makes your heart beat faster, it makes your blood pressure rise, it messes with your blood sugar,
and it turns off your immune system. It's like it's basically like if your furnace was running
all the time, your parts would wear out. You wouldn't have time for it to cool down
or perform maintenance. And so it is with someone who's experienced trauma.
Their fight/flight/freeze response is kicked on very easily, and it stays on for a long time.
People who have experienced trauma often develop autoimmune disorders, chronic pain, and other
chronic conditions. It exhausts the body and prevents the body from healing and making repairs.
The good news is that we can reset that thermostat by retraining the body's response. So like I said
before, your body has a natural counterbalancing response to the fight/flight/freeze response.
It's called the parasympathetic response. It slows breathing, it slows your heart rate,
it turns on digestion, and it allows the immune system to do its work of healing and repairing.
The parasympathetic response kicks on when your brain perceives safety,
and it kind of clears out those stress chemicals. Now, just like the fight/flight/freeze response
can become ingrained into a habitual response in your body, the rest-and-digest response can also
become a trained reaction. As an adult, you can learn to turn that response on. You can learn
to heal the impacts of trauma on the body. The more we learn about trauma, the more hope I have
about our abilities to treat it. So I'm gonna go into a lot more details on this
in the next video, so please stay tuned to keep learning more about how stress and trauma
get trapped in our body and how we can release them. Okay. Thanks for watching, and take care.