by Kora Klapp
Frozen in Trauma
One of the first points he made is that typical reactions to the trauma experienced in war seem to have changed. Veteran soldiers from WW1 often showed sluggish, restricted movement, frozen faces and awkwardness. They might tremble repetitively. This matches a “freeze” state of the autonomic nervous system that the body then tries to shake off, but conditioned triggers keep the freeze loop in place.
While awaiting attacks from ground and air forces, the soldiers hiding in the trenches almost necessarily had conflicts of prohibited and suppressed (“frozen”) motion. Moreover, they had to numb their fears and emotions in order to function, both in combat and later in life if they survived the horrors. Consequently, many lost the capability to feel pleasure.
In the brain, the functioning of the motor cortex and cerebellum are altered by the freeze loop. To prevent or to heal this impact of trauma, movement is essential – to feel able to run, to feel some agency, and to reconnect with the resources of both brain hemispheres!
Disrupted Social Interaction
Bessel shared that the typical symptoms of PTSD have changed over time. He illustrated this with a scene from the movie “Warriors”, which is about a Afghanistan war veteran who observes a scene of a crying child and screaming mother in the supermarket. While he seems to have lost focus and purpose for the actions of his daily life, he is attracted to the emotional fight for dominance and interferes, scaring the child and blaming her for her unreasonable behaviour. The mother and bystanders turn against him, and he is ostracised.
Empathy and the code of acceptable social interaction, which in the brain are connected to the anterior cingulate and the fronto-temporal prefrontal cortex, are clearly being impaired by the sustained trauma of violence. This can lead to bouts of rage and cruelty and to changes in the reward system where the traumatized learns to feel pleasure from hurting or from being hurt, instead of numbing their own sensations. This is particularly true in the case of “moral injury”. To explain that term we want to look at our “social immune system” first.
Bonding and Shunning
In order to feel safe and protected together with other humans, we have a face-heart-connection of recognizing social signals, such as a smile that calms our heart rate and makes us feel good. The work of Stephen Porges delves deeply into the ventral vagus nerve and its role in the “social engagement system”. This system is established by the interaction of the mother with her baby. Newborns mirror the facial expression of a person opposite to them and learn how to build a range of expressions for emotions and recognize those they “belong” to. Physical touch from our near ones relaxes us and reduces pain by the release of oxytocin, the neurotransmitter of belonging.
People like to get along with each other, and their fights are usually more about their role in the community than about actual survival. The “social immune system” is about knowing who belongs to our community and who doesn’t, who we intuitively trust and who we don’t, and how much distance we find appropriate to keep between the other and ourselves. Naturally, the less another person looks and behaves like us, the more this system kicks in to make us skeptical and pulls us back into our own safe tribe – just as the child and the people in the supermarket do in the scene from “Warriors”.
To make people fight wars and kill each other, propaganda utilizes this system by emphasizing and exploiting these differences to the point of de-humanizing the enemy. Our morals and ethics build upon the social engagement system and tell us that we have more similarities than differences, and that other humans have basically the same needs and the same rights as us. But are those enemies humans, who are said to “slaughter babies”?!
Disgust is a feeling that belongs to the “social immune system” and that pulls us away from a threat to our health. In a “moral injury”, the injured person breached their own moral standards, e.g. by recognizing it was actually humans they killed. They now feel disgusted with themselves. To survive such an injury, a “trauma identity” with a logic of its own forms in the person – and by the way, the same is true for whole societies and their cultural traumas! Meanwhile, this identity also keeps them from healing.
Can Imprinted Trauma be Overcome?
I can’t but think of Dr Hamer’s concept of “constellations” that alter and shape our personalities in various ways, to adapt to situations of sustained unresolved conflict. The changes in our brain and behaviour make sense, and they are self-maintaining, creating our beliefs that match our way to perceive and evaluate what happens around us. Can peace ever be possible, given that most of us seem to be traumatized on some level, very often in childhood when social bonding and our capability to trust was disrupted?
On a side note, it was already observed by Pierre Janet in the early 20th century that failing to integrate traumatic experiences can halt the development and maturation of our personality:
All traumatized people seem to have the evolution of their lives halted: they are attached to an insurmountable obstacle.
Dr Hamer said the same about the impact of “territorial constellations” (i.e. several conflicts about our place and role in society, that affect both brain hemispheres) at an early age. How often do we see adults not acting as the free, compassionate, rational, responsible beings that they should be?
Trauma-Informed Practice
To heal, a traumatized person has to see and try other options. How can that be done, given an established trauma identity? Obviously, medication to numb and calm is only covering the festering wound. But using movement, mirroring, art, sound, and touch are ways to influence and stimulate the brain regions in similar ways as to how the social engagement system develops in kids.
The goals and steps of overcoming trauma, according to Bessel van der Kolk, are:
- (Re-)establishing community
- Effective action
- Dealing with affect regulation
- Accessing the emotional brain – knowing oneself
- Dealing with parts
- Processing traumatic memories
- Rewiring neural circuits
And that resembles exactly how we work in META-Health, in a variety of ways!
There is a range of tools and methods that have been shown to help in this process, so that there is hope that trauma healing for individuals as well as societies can be attempted by collaborating therapists, trauma-informed practitioners and self-help groups:
- Trauma Releasing Exercises: TRE® utilizes muscle stretch reflexes, voluntary contraction of muscles induced by quick stretches, and tremoring to release tension and stress. Shaking and shivering are a natural way to exit the freeze mode that is a typical reaction upon trauma. Evidence
- “Trauma tapping“: This method works by tactile stimulation of points mostly in the face (gently tapping the skin with the fingertips). The face-heart connection via the ventral vagus nerve and its implications for social signalling and co-regulation among mammals have been described by Stephen Porges. Research about tapping for PTSD
- EMDR: This technique involves moving the eyes repeatedly from side to side like in a hypnosis induction. While doing that we stay in touch with our feelings and/or trauma, eventually processing them in the brain. Also other “cross-over” movements, ball playing or dancing do the same by stimulating connectivity between the brain hemispheres. Evidence
- Sound and Rhythm: Just as singing or humming are self-soothing, harmonizing behaviours, the use of instruments like gong, sound-bowl, or drums helps in accessing emotions and changing the impact of trauma. Evidence;
Watch the webinar “Sound, breathing and healing“ and get your own impression - Yoga: The core principles to be re-learned from yoga practice include choice, interoception, taking effective action, and present-moment experience. Evidence
- Animal Care: Humans and mammals share the same social engagement system. When we have lost trust in fellow humans or in ourselves, animals can fill the gap and help to reconnect us to bonding and caring for one another. Evidence
- Theater Playing: By trying on different roles with distinct behaviours and emotions, we can explore new experiences without being judged for the role we’re playing. Examples
- Changing the Story: We know that our mind creates the story to match our impressions and emotions, and that even our memory changes over time. Like in playing theatre, amending our story with resources to have a happier ending and to provide learning for the future, can give us peace of mind. Memory reconsolidation can be facilitated by combining renegotiation of the trauma with other techniques previously mentioned, like in Hypnosis, Matrix Reimprinting, Inner Child work or Wingwave coaching. Study, Review
- Assistance by Psychedelic Drugs: By inducing a sense of empathy, euphoria, and reduced fear responses, the therapeutic use of MDMA (Extasy) has shown to be very effective in helping to re-establish self-compassion and to access a meta-view of the trauma. Evidence
This article was published on the METAHealth4U blog
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pictures:
Bessel van der Kolk
WW1 Trenches Scene by Gordon Griffiths, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons
John Hains via Pixabay
Ortal Pelleg
I thank Heather Lakatos and Mariyam Suboh for their help in reviewing this article.
META-Healthy Life articles are created by professionals and friends of META-Health International CIC, supporting individual and global health by deepening and sharing our understanding of how resilience and well-being are achieved.