Compartments of the Nervous System

Recently I sat with a friend having the most amazing London Fogs outside of a local coffee shop and she was sharing with me about her trauma recovery journey. She had identified an old memory that resurfaced involving a normal, everyday object that had showed up in a very traumatic way in her early life. As she identified the memory and worked through the traumatic event that had been hidden away in her system, she got to learn why her reaction to the everyday object showed up as a trigger. She had always felt that her activation around this object was over the top… until she learned where it came from. But once released, she is no longer activated by this object. Her life has completely changed.

So why would such a benign object cause such an intense activation even when there was no threat present? Well, the nervous system is not able to differentiate between that initial traumatic experience and any other encounter with a similar object. I envision the amygdala, the part of the brain that processes our emotions, as the doorman of the brain. This doorman has a filing system for everything that enters. But that filing system, while quite complex, is at the same time quite rudimentary. For example, if you’ve had a car wreck, especially at a young age without much other context for cars, then after surviving a wreck, you very well might get activated every single time you see a car. That’s because the filing system of the amygdala has created a box for EVERY car based off your experience with the one involved in the wreck. It can’t tell the difference! But once we resolve the stored activation around the car wreck, then cars no longer need that box and the association can dissipate.

This is a very broad example. However, every unresolved, traumatic event that has not been properly processed has its own box in the amygdala! It may seem quite overwhelming. But that’s why, when we sit down to process a traumatic event, we may very well end up processing something completely different. The good news is that once we start doing the work, we can empty multiple boxes at the same time. As associations get made that the amygdala didn’t process as similar, we can clean house! Trauma work is simply amazing. As we begin to go through the boxes, it’s scary, large and overwhelming. And yet, as we see how the process unfolds, it becomes a thing of beauty. It is not uncommon after the first session or two, to feel quite excited about coming to sessions. It never becomes easy, but it does become transformative. With all change there is fear, anticipation and grief. But did you know that there can also be joy, excitement and enthusiasm? Heal your wounds, empty those boxes! I’m here to get started!