In this blog, I’m going to cover why talking about trauma did not work to heal any of my mental health problems as well as what you can do to permanently heal from trauma, from the brain’s perspective. It all starts with understanding what I like to call, The Triad of Perception.
Response
The Triad of Perception is a feedback loop that happens when we are introduced to any type of stimulus. The response part of the loop is usually what people want to fixate on first when they are starting to heal from trauma or change how they respond to any type of trigger. Usually a response is some type of unwanted negative emotion. The thing about the response, however, is that just by definition of the word “response”, it refers to how you respond to something. By design, it is very difficult to change your response by focusing only on the response, since it is happening automatically. Moreover, talking about our response and our emotions over and over again is not effective. It is great for low level threats, such as stresses in daily life, but not for things that cause automatic behaviors like triggers to perceived threats.
Processing
The processing stage of the Triad is when your brain and your entire nervous system are working together to try and summate an experience from a pure, physiological reality. Trying to heal from trauma by focusing only on the processing stage also does not have a lasting impact. You process stimulus in multiple parts of the brain. (The brain is split into three different parts. Learn what each part does in this blog post here). When we are triggered and have a negative emotion, that usually comes from the brainstem, which is an automatic threat detection system that bypasses conscious thought. So, if we are talking about something, we are trying to consciously perceive it mainly from the frontal lobe, but it is not going to actually change things that are sensed from our brainstem threat detection system. So we cannot change our response to triggers and heal from trauma if we focus only on the conscious part of processing.
Stimulus
The first stage of the Triad is the stimulus itself. This is where you want to focus on when healing from trauma and changing how you respond to triggers. We will start with the senses: visual, auditory, kinesthetic, olfactory, and gustatory. Let’s take the olfactory system as an example. Have you ever smelled something like pineneedles or cooked a childhood dish and been automatically transported back to childhood at Christmas time? If so, that response was not a conscious thing. We can talk about it afterwards, but the smell touching our olfactory sense instantly took us through this old processing motion that was programmed from childhood to produce a hopefully pleasurable emotional response. This is why talking about a response that automatically takes place is not going to change it.
Next, we’ll talk about hormones from a chemistry standpoint. One of my favorite words to use with clients instead of “hangry” is “hypoglybitchy”. If I have not eaten enough that day and I try to have a serious conversation with somebody, I am probably not going to have a great time, because the chemistry of my hormones is setting me up for low blood sugar and having some more triggerable states. Talking about it is not going to help because I am going to have an automatic response due to my low blood sugar. The same thing ends up getting programmed when big, huge, triggered stimuli start to come in. It is almost as if traumatic events bypass the processing stage completely and go straight to the response. The brain stem’s only goal is survival. Did you survive? Yes, great. Do it again every single time that same or even similar stimulus comes in. Talking is not going to change that stimulus. If we are trying to fix these types of automatic responses and our triggers, we actually have to go after the senses themselves.
Let’s say, for example, the trauma stimulus is something you saw like a horrific accident, somebody you love getting abused, etc. That means, it’s the visual system that is the root of the trigger going to the brain, and that visual system will then look for things similar to the horrific accident, or even any of the events that lead to it, such as even being in a car. To heal from this trauma, you can start by reprogramming your eyes. One way is to use Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), which will help you heal these triggers neurologically, just by moving the eyes around. Another way is to do it yourself. Every now and then when you have a couple minutes to spare, hold your finger in front of your face and focus on it keeping the nose and the chin straight. Then, move your finger in a circle and track it with just your eyes, not your head. See how big you can make the circle. If you are like everybody else I have given this exercise to, you will find that there are certain parts of the circle where your head will start to try and move, that there’s a little bit of a visual disturbance that is going on. But if you work on this enough, you can start to retrain your eyes and the muscles of the face on how to actually perceive the world around you. This is especially critical if you have been staring at phone screens or computer screens, or you have a desk job where you are only focusing straight ahead. The challenge with the eye system is that once your eyes perceive that threat, they will look for it even after it is over. Your eyes will continue to go straight for it and the entire body will try and turn towards that threat over and over.
And working on reprogramming the eye system is even more effective if you can add the trauma you saw to it a little bit. Just a little bit as to not overwhelm yourself and fully think about the trauma event. Instead, start to think about small elements of what you saw or heard as you are doing this exercise. Every now and then, you will find that there are some interesting problems when you look in a certain direction. If you find something, start to pay attention to your breathing, put a smile on your face, relax the body, and then go back through that area of the circle repeatedly until it smoothes out.
I have tips on this process with the kinesthetic system, the gustatory system, and more, but the biggest gun you have are your muscles. If you can get the huge muscles involved with this, then you can really start to get a lot of the hormones, blood and oxygen, moving to specific parts of the body to go after these negative emotional responses, without having to consciously think about it. If you need a little help getting started, I have an entire course that will walk you through this process with different muscles and triggers to reprogram your system from trauma, big or small. It is called Healing (e)Motions: Trauma Release Exercises for People with Stress, and it’s the fastest, easiest way to start healing from trauma.
This is information I wish I had back in the day. It really transformed my brain a lot. I know you can reprogram yourself too. If this information is helpful to you guys, I invite you to share it with people that you think this will help. I hope this information is very helpful to you guys as always, have a happy and healthy rest of your day, and I’ll see in the next one.