Trauma has no sense of time

Triggers are trauma memories

When you are ‘triggered’ you are having a bodily or emotional memory of the trauma. You’re experiencing the emotions and bodily sensations you experienced at the time of the trauma, even if you have no memory of what happened to you.

But most trauma survivors don’t realise they are having a memory. They feel like they are responding to whatever has triggered them right then. Or they might realise they are being triggered, and feel crazy, but they still can’t stop feeling the way we are feeling. Sound familiar?

Your body and emotions are responding to the people and situations around you as if the trauma never ended. When the trauma originally happened, your body compromised your sanity now, for your survival then.

Your brain shuts down so your body can survive

When your body or mind faces trauma, your nervous system goes into survival mode and prepares your body to get the heck out of there, fight back, or freeze (fight/flight/freeze) in the hopes of minimising the damage that will be done. Your body does all this automatically, because wasting time to think would waste valuable seconds.

Our body is pretty ingenious. But the compromise of a quick acting automatic survival system is that quite a few of our other brain functions get shut down – like the brain activity needed for memory processing, meaning making and being able to put our experiences into words. After the trauma, what we are left with is incomplete fragmented memories that don’t accurately record what actually happened or how we got through it.

Your trauma memories stay fragmented

Each element of the memory (sound, touch, smell, visual, emotion, etc.) are stored in different parts of the brain, but don’t get integrated together as a complete memory, they remain fragmented. Most trauma survivors experience these fragments with no idea they are experiencing trauma memories. For example, maybe every time your partner gets physically close you stiffen up, even though you feel very safe with them. Perhaps a certain smell makes you feel sick, even though most people would consider the smell harmless. You might have a deep distrust of all men. Maybe there’s a certain situation or thing that happens that gives you an unexplainable physical sensation or pain, every single time. Even repetitive dreams and sexual fantasies can be trauma memories.

Your trauma stays alive

The trade-off for surviving trauma or surviving it better than you may have without a survival defence, is that the trauma memories don’t get processed and integrated into your brain properly.

To use an analogy, if there were a manila folder for each memory, and each element of the memory -sight, sound, touch, smell, emotion, meaning etc.- were represented by a piece of paper in that folder, then each folder gets stored neatly, in order, in a filing cabinet in our brain, after the event has taken place.

After a trauma, it’s a little different. The folder, with the pieces of paper, gets thrown on the floor. The bits of paper come out of the folder and float and flutter all over the place. Everything is in disarray. Paper is everywhere. Nothing is filed away neatly where it should be. The elements of the trauma (sight, sound, touch, smell, emotion, meaning) are not together, they cannot be made sense of as a whole, they are scattered all over the place. Your partner comes along and steps on a piece of paper (i.e., triggers you) when they raise their voice at the dog because it ran out the gate and made them late for work. But you don’t have a memory of your father yelling and spitting in your face when you were six because you didn’t finish your homework, because the memory has not integrated, it’s fragmented from its other memory parts. So, you don’t realise you are having a trauma memory. All you know now, is that you feel like a child, you’re scared, your heart is racing, you feel vulnerable and fragile and feel like bursting into tears.

Your body is acting as if the trauma is happening all over again. Your body is acting as if you were six, and your dad is yelling in your face for not finishing your homework at that very moment. But you have no idea that is what’s going on. You probably just feel crazy. Your brain didn’t get the message that the trauma is over and you’re safe now.

If you want your brain to know the trauma is over and you’re safe now, I would be so happy to help you. Please feel welcome to fill out my enquiry form. There’s no obligation, it’s just the first step in getting a conversation started.