Episode Transcript
Speaker 0 00:00:00 Hello everybody, This is Kim Neely and this is the Trauma Informed slp. This is a podcast where we learn how to promote safety and empowerment and to build resiliency in everyone we know, including ourselves.
Speaker 0 00:00:21 So on this episode, we're gonna be talking about the survival mechanisms, the physiology that occurs when we have to survive a threat, and then we're gonna talk about what happens in our nervous system physiology that occurs when we've developed a trauma response, how that balance gets off. Due to that. We're also gonna talk a little bit about the triune model of the brain. This model, I'm really just using it as a model to discuss processing speed. And then we're gonna connect these survival mechanisms and the physiological cascade that happens to a really solid way of thinking about a nervous system when it's, Hello everybody, this is Kim Neely and this is the trauma informed S L P. This is a podcast where we learn how to promote safety and empowerment and to build resiliency in everyone we know, including ourselves.
Speaker 0 00:01:26 So on this episode, we're gonna be talking about the survival mechanisms, the physiology that occurs when we have to survive a threat, and then we're gonna talk about what happens in our nervous system physiology that occurs when we've developed a trauma response, how that balance gets off due to that. We're also gonna talk a little bit about the triune model of the brain. This model, I'm really just using it as a model to discuss processing speed. And then we're gonna connect these survival mechanisms and the physiological cascade that happens to a really solid way of thinking about a nervous system when it's regulated versus dysregulated called the window of tolerance. So we're gonna go through the window of tolerance just to discuss what does a regulated nervous system look like versus dysregulated when it comes to sympathetic and parasympathetic activation. So those are the sections for this episode today. Let's get going.
Speaker 0 00:02:31 So welcome to the survival mechanisms. Woo. This is the second episode in our trauma physiology series and the survival mechanisms that we have. The physiological survival mechanisms are a key player in how a trauma response occurs in a person. So our main players here in our survival mechanisms that, that we're talking about today is the fight, flight, and freeze mechanisms. You might have heard about a FA response, and I think for the purposes of this part of becoming trouble aware for this information, FA is seen as more of a response because you've had trauma. Essentially you're trying to avoid future trauma or future threat by fawning, which really just means that you are trying to keep everybody happy and calm around you so that you stay safe from people's reactions. So for the purposes of talking about where trauma comes from, um, and the physiology involved, we've gotta get into the survival mechanisms, which are the ones that kick in when you're sympathetic dominant. And that is the fight, flight, or freeze response. These survival mechanisms are what are engaged when a threat is detected. So this is when the amygdala has said, Yep, we are under threat. We need to kick in some epinephrine, some adrenaline, we need to get things going and we need to react to this threat because it's a real issue for our safety. So that's why the fight, flight, freeze response are what are considered the survival mechanisms instead of what you hear as as a fun strategy to ensure continued safety.
Speaker 0 00:04:27 All right, fight, flight and freeze are three main survival mechanisms. Let's talk about these and what they are and what distinguishes one from the other. So when I present this, I use a slide with an image of deer. Deer are great animals to discuss this because deer show all three just like we have the capacity of doing all three depending on the situation. So it's a nice analogy, you know, nice comparison. So fight would be in the deer. I have a picture of essentially two bucks going at it. You know, they do the headbutting, they like try to ram each other with their antlers, right? And that is a fight response. I think they usually do it for like mating or for like protecting their mates or like protecting their herd, right? Like keeping the other male out of there. So that is definitely what fight is.
Speaker 0 00:05:18 It's it's physically fighting or verbally fighting in the case of humans that can also be part of that response. Um, flight as a survival mechanism. This is what a deer might do when a predator is around or if you encounter them when you're hiking. Like let's say, you know, around where we live, there's a fair number of deer and if we're out walking our dog and the deer see the dog, the deer are gonna run, right? They're going to flee. Uh, because the dog is probably fairly similar to their predators like coyotes and mountain lions and things, right? So they run from those because their brain has determined I can run away from this threat and probably still survive. Deer are pretty quick, right? When deer encounter cars, they tend to go into freeze response a lot of the time. So I actually have a picture of a deer literally caught headlights where it just freezes and stares at the car.
Speaker 0 00:06:11 And so that is what a deer is doing because somewhere in their dear brain, they, um, there's so many opportunities for puns there, you guys, and I'm holding myself back, okay? But <laugh> inside their dear brain, they, if they've encountered a car before or have seen cars before, they know a few things. The car is too big to fight, right? And it's too fast to flee from. So their brain freezes because the thought is their brain is basically saying, Okay, I can't fight this thing. I can't run away from it. Maybe if I get really still, I won't look like a threat and I also won't look like food because food tends to run away from predators. So if they freeze, they look non-threatening, right? They look kind of like the idea is like, I'm basically a rock. Like just leave me alone, okay, <laugh>, just, just drive around me.
Speaker 0 00:07:05 I'll stay really still until you leave. You can just totally leave me alone. I'm not worth your time, right? That's the freeze response. In the animal kingdom. There are animals that have the playing dead response. Um, not all animals have that, and I don't believe we have solid evidence that humans have that. So for human survival mechanisms, we tend to really just talk about fight, flight, and freeze. So similar to deer, the reason humans have a capability of going to all three of these things is because different situations might call for a different response, right? So like, so if I go for a hike or something and a squirrel has gotten used to being fed by humans and tries to approach me, I don't like that idea. I don't really want wild animals to interact with me. I'm not one of those humans that think that's cute.
Speaker 0 00:07:52 So I might choose to fight it. I might be like, uh, right? Cause I'm a lot bigger that squirrel's gonna run away from me in a different situation. The same human that decided to fight the squirrel because you know, I'm so, I'm so awesome and strong. I can get a squirrel to run away from me. <laugh>, it's not that hard. Um, you know, I can't fight against like a thunderstorm that's approaching, right? I can't fight against like a building fire, like not by myself, not without like a fire extinguisher or something. And the fire extinguisher is only really useful if the fire is a certain size, right? Once it gets to a certain size, you gotta go, right? So we wanna flee in those situations so it makes sense that we have these different responses. And then it also makes sense that we have a third response if those other two fail, if we, you know, feel we need to, you know, our brain still wants to survive. So it makes sense that there's sort of a third option if those other two don't seem to work out.
Speaker 0 00:08:50 Okay, So before we get into the actual physiological cascade, I want to introduce the Trione brain model or perhaps refresh your memory on it. If you took like a psychology course back in undergrad or something and you remember hearing about this, this is that model that divides the brain into three different sections. The lower sections. So the brain stem and some of those structures right above the brain stem are considered the ancient or reptilian brain. Then there's the mammalian brain, which comprises most of your mid-brain structures, kind of those structures that sit around your temporal lobes immediately and a little bit laterally too. And then there's the neocortex, which is present in primates and humans and includes our five layer thick with two Cs, uh, cortex, right? And that is the seat of our awareness, our consciousness, our metacognition, our ability to, you know, analyze what we're doing and to problem solve and all that kind of stuff.
Speaker 0 00:09:48 Okay? This model, I believe has some contention in certain fields of research as most models do because um, people try to use it as an explanation for how the brain evolved. And I, I believe there's been a lot of evidence since that's been proposed that it's not a very accurate uh, model for evolutionary purposes, but for our purposes it still serves pretty well because when you think of the brain in these three different sections, what you actually end up with are different areas of the brain with different processing speeds. And this becomes really important when you think about survival and survival mechanisms. Cuz if you're gonna survive, you gotta be like sonic the hedgehog and you gotta go fast. Okay? So the neocortex is a pretty fast area, right? When we make conscious decision making, it happens pretty quickly, right? If somebody offers me a piece of dark chocolate, 72% or higher, that tends to be my preferred dark chocolate just for people out there if you ever meet me <laugh>.
Speaker 0 00:10:51 But yeah, if somebody's like, Hey, you want a piece of this dark chocolate, I'm gonna be consciously aware that I'm gonna be like, Yeah I do. Of course I do. That's like not even a question. Um, so that decision happened pretty quickly that the whole processing that went up from that stimuli, from hearing somebody say that and seeing the dark chocolate to getting into my seat of conscious awareness and being like, Heck yeah I do, because I really don't think my answer's gonna be no, honestly it happens pretty quickly, right? So it's pretty fast. But the midbrain structures, if you don't have to go up to that neocortex area, if you don't have to engage that part of the brain, then decisions can happen really quickly. So sort of those subconscious kind of reactionary decisions, those can happen very quickly because we didn't really get the neocortex involved.
Speaker 0 00:11:39 So it's faster, it's a faster processing system than the neocortex. Fewer connections need to be made for decision to happen and for action to take place. Okay? And then when you get down to the ancient or atilian brain, that's where decisions are gonna happen the fastest. It's like the one step up from reflexes, okay? Not true pure reflexes, but kind of one step up level of okay, we can react super fast to this input cuz we didn't have to get all these other brain structures involved. All right? So that's why it's nice to think of it in this division, especially when it comes to our survival mechanism, physiological cascade because that's processing speed. And whether or not we have the neocortex involved in decision making is a key part of what makes survival mechanisms, survival mechanisms. But it's also a key part of what makes a trauma response possibly occur due to a traumatic event.
Speaker 0 00:12:36 All right, so let's talk about that physiological cascade that happens in relation to this processing speed that we just discussed. So this is the physiological cascade as far as we know it. This is the one that happens when people move from just regular calm state into a survival mode. Okay? So that sympathetic and parasympathetic information is going up our sensory system into our brain, right? And if the sympathetic system signals that there's a change, the amygdala is going to determine if that change is a threat or a danger to our safety. If it determines yes it is, then the amygdala is gonna sound the alarm and it does this using direct connections to the hypothalamus. So it uses this direct connections to the hypothalamus to say let's release him epinephrine, let's ramp up our sympathetic motor. Basically ramp up that response, get get ready to get the energy really up our pupils dilated, our attentional systems really online and our muscles have tons of energy to use and we're ready to go, right?
Speaker 0 00:13:51 And at the same time, thanks to those direct connections to the hippocampus, the amygdala is also going to encode that that threat or danger occurred essentially it's going to encode an emotional memory, pretty much immediately thinks those direct connections because this becomes useful in the future, right? If we wanna survive, we need to remember the situations we've already survived. So it's gonna do that. And then once that epinephrine gets released and the sympathetic responses start to ramp up, so our heart rate starts to increase, our breathing rate goes up, our ventilation gets more efficient cuz our bronchiales dilate, all of that stuff happens, okay, Thanks to the hormones. And then according to Vander Col in his, the Body keeps score book, he stays, there's a social engagement system that's activated. I don't know of a ton of other research into this to really demonstrate it happens, but I think it's a behavior that's observed.
Speaker 0 00:14:45 So I'm going to include it because pretty much what that is saying is this is the stage where you might scream or cry out for help. Essentially it's a social engagement system in the sense of maybe I can get another human in here to help me since we are humans are much better when we work as teams in terms of safety, right? Like in terms of animal kingdom and living out in like tribal world. Like we're not, we're not much of a one on one match to many predators out there, but with other humans around, we might be able to handle it, right? So that's the thought behind that is the social engagement system is when you're screaming or you're crying out for help. So those higher cortical areas in our linguistic areas and stuff are still active. And the thing about this stage is I think it's like a passing stage quite frankly.
Speaker 0 00:15:31 It's like you're, you're moving through it. So your, your epinephrine and your adrenaline is starting to ramp up that sympathetic response. You're gonna scream and cry around the same time. So you're not, maybe you're not fully in fight or flight or freeze at that time yet, but you're kind of heading that way, right? You're passing through it. So if no help comes, like if, if you get some help, you might start to calm down immediately, right? The parasympathetic might kick in, but if no help comes and depending on the type of threat, your brain is likely going to figure out if it needs to use fight or flight, those tend to get initiated next. So you might try to run away from the threat, you might try to fight the threat a bit, right? But this is where the higher cortical areas are starting to be down regulated, meaning not a whole lot of feedback, all that like that nice loop of like uh, the amygdala and the hypo like the amygdala sending the information out is not as strong and the feedback mechanism from the higher corticus is also not as strong because essentially when you go into a fight or flight, your brain has decided, your mid brain has decided we need to go faster than the neocortex lets us go.
Speaker 0 00:16:43 We need to make these decisions faster. So it starts to be like you can stay on neocortex but we're not gonna listen to you very much, okay? The actual reactions are gonna happen a little lower and a little faster cuz we need to survive this thing, right? If fight or flight don't work or if your brain has determined neither of them are a good choice to survive, your brain goes into freeze. Okay? So this is typically it's listed as if fight or flight fails, then people go into freeze response. It's kind of your last ditch effort. Does that make sense? So in this case, sometimes you do see people say it's parasympathetic mitigated, it's not, it's not the parasympathetic system coming back on, it's still sympathetic system dominant, okay? But it looks different physiologically because you get really stiff muscles, you get a really still body.
Speaker 0 00:17:39 People tend to get a very flat facial as affect, the heart rate actually decreases and the breathing becomes restricted and shallow. So it becomes almost like panting, it's like a <laugh>. So it's a really, really small breath. And the idea there is once again the thought is you're trying to not move, you're trying to be very non-threatening. And so you don't even want your breathing to be something that you move around a lot for. Does that make sense? So what happens in freeze that's so terribly different is that the lower limbic areas are amygdala, the hypothalamus, all that stuff is pretty much going rogue. It's like a free agent at this point. It's handling all the reactions, it's handling the behavior to survive the situation. And those higher cortical areas are effectively cut off from talking to or receiving input from those, those mid brain structures.
Speaker 0 00:18:38 Does that make sense? So the person's still consciously awake, they're still aware consciously that something's happening. But what happens in freeze response, people who go into freeze response often report feeling that they're detached from their body, they feel like they are outside of their body. They feel like they were a like observer to the situation without any emotion related to it. They feel very detached from the situation physically. They probably didn't even notice their body had feeling at the time. So this happens with a lot of people who go into a freeze response. They have this weird sort of surreal, I'm aware of what's happening, but I'm not in control of anything I'm doing and I don't have any particular knowledge of physical sensation or emotion happening. And their reason they're having that is because in order to have that awareness of an emotion and in order to have the awareness of physical sensation, you need that information to come from the midbrain and the midbrain has decided that the neocortex needs to be basically shut off from the situation.
Speaker 0 00:19:43 So it's kind of like corralled, it's almost like it's in its own little, you know, it's like a, what is that movie that the room or whatever, the safe room or whatever where they <laugh> where people like built a safe room in the house, they had to go hide there or whatever. It's like, it's like the mid brain's like all right, neocortex, you, you can stay awake but you're not involved. We're just gonna handle this, okay? Because we can make these decisions really quick and um, we can survive this. Okay? So that's really important to remember about a freeze response. Um, not that people can't have traumatic responses from fight or flight as well, but moving into freeze response because the cortical areas are so caught off and because the person has that feeling of dissociation from the situation, they are much more likely to develop a trauma response from that than they are from fight or flight.
Speaker 0 00:20:32 But like I said, people do still develop trauma responses from fight or flight. So we're gonna get into that next, when we talk about um, what happens when this cascade gets triggered if there's actually not a real true threat around the person, Okay? So if this error in signal detection between the interior singulate and the amygdala breaks down in the presence of a threat, why would it be that people wouldn't have that connection reestablished after that initial threat has passed? Right? Why would it be the people who suffer from trauma responses from p PTSD type trauma responses, Why would they still struggle so much? Right? So in the event where someone does not have that trauma response, that is where you're talking about a resilient person and perhaps they were able to reintegrate that memory, they're able to place correct error on incoming information, right?
Speaker 0 00:21:30 But what happens when that initial threat is done and somebody has developed a trauma response? So in this case, what happens is there's been a shift in the nervous system such that the sympathetic system tends to become a bit more dominant. The body can't quite get back to the balance it used to have. And so the sympathetic is essentially always ready to go, okay? And the amygdala might become more reactionary when it comes to any stimuli. That's just the tiniest reminder of that initial threat. It could be a sight, a smell, a sound, a touch of something. Anything that's gonna remind the amygdala is going to trigger that survival cascade again. So that is what a trauma trigger is and that is what essentially is at the foundation of a trauma response is you end up having this survival mode triggered even if maybe from the outside perspective you're not in any danger but the person's brain believes it is.
Speaker 0 00:22:40 The amygdala believes it is. And the mid-brain structures very much believes it is. And when it kicks into survival mode, next time it will happen likely faster, it might be bigger, there might be more down regulation of the communication between the interior singulate and the amygdala. And so you end up with yet again another recurrence where the person survived a perceived threat. The interior singulate didn't quite get all the information, the amygdala didn't receive any sort of error signaling. So they got pushed into a certain physiological state that perhaps they didn't really understand at the time. And then over time, if that happens over and over and over again, the system has now super reactive. It's kind of hyper reactive. That person's nervous system is likely been kicked into sort of a hypervigilant state where it's always looking for some kind of threat and that sense of safety has been impaired such that their survival mechanisms are essentially always on or are always ready to go basically, and can respond very quickly, much more quickly likely than what they responded initially.
Speaker 0 00:23:52 That's what happens in trauma. So when I took my training with Arizona Trauma Institute, um, with Dr. Rod Logan, he mentioned this one definition of trauma that is a little different than what I presented to you guys, but is a great way to think about this cascade that happens when the initial trauma event is over. But the cascade, the survival mechanism, cascades are still being activated to a great degree in somebody. His definition states that trauma is created when the body experiences more change than it can manage. So what does that mean? It means that say a single event trauma occurs, someone goes into survival mode. But that sympathetic dominance was so extreme for that person and perhaps the down regulation of the anterior singulate and the communication with the midbrain was so strong, it was so down regulated that that person's body wasn't able to get back into a natural balance afterwards.
Speaker 0 00:24:53 It wasn't able to really do a nice easy healthy recovery back to finding a calm state, you know, and maybe it wasn't able to get back there prior to feeling like another threat has presented itself, for example. So this leads us into the window of tolerance and how this might help us conceptualize this, uh, this effect. The window of tolerance is a model created by Dr. Dan Siegel and it is considered the optimal range of autonomic arousal where emotions can just ebb and flow in a really manageable way. Okay? So it's often depicted as a graph that looks like a sine wave where you sometimes have a little bit of sympathetic dominance and then it dips down into parasympathetic sine wave being that nice little like super even up and down wave, right? So if you think about it like that, it's a natural ebb and flow just like the waves on the ocean of like sometimes sympathetic, it's a little dominant.
Speaker 0 00:25:51 You get a little arousal like you know, this thing is due and you gotta push through and you gotta just really get it going. So you need a little adrenaline, you need a little sympathetic dominance, you need a little extra energy to get like say your school building done <laugh>, cuz that's always a nightmare. All right <laugh>. So, um, so yeah, like maybe you got your billing, it's gotta get done. So you kick a little bit of sympathetic kicks in, you get a little anxious, you get a little stressed so that you can get a little extra energy and you could push through and get that thing done. And then once it's done, if you have a healthy regulated system, the para of sympathetic is gonna kick in and you're gonna take a nice big whew breath and then you get to return to this natural state of calm thanks to the reactivation of the parasympathetic system.
Speaker 0 00:26:34 Okay, so now that we know what a healthy regulated system looks like, thanks to the window of tolerance, what does it look like? In the case of trauma when someone gets dysregulated, if you recall one of the main aspects of the definition of trauma that I went over in the first episode is that it overwhelms a person's ability to cope. And that means physiologically they get overwhelmed by the actual threatening event such that their entire autonomic nervous system balance is thrown way too far off and they can't really get back to that nice balanced ebb and flow that they had prior to the event. And in the case of someone who's actually resilient against that single event, that resilient person will be able to go back to balance, but the person with a trauma response will not. That's essentially what differentiates the two. Let's do a really broad example.
Speaker 0 00:27:32 So in some hypothetical situation, two people are present. Maybe there's a group of people present for a life threatening event, okay? Something happens nearby and they're all present for that situation. The person who's resilient, they're going to have those survival modes kicked in probably to somewhat same extent, but following the event, they are likely to access resources, community, loved ones, caregivers, whoever, mental health services, perhaps someone who can help them integrate the experience they had during survival mode with their higher cortical areas perception of what happened. And they're able to either reconnect or maintain that connection between our amygdala system and the interior singulate. They're able to maintain that error detection essentially. Okay? So that's what happens when someone's resilient. And then through maintaining that connection, they're able to work on calming their body and getting back into that natural ebb and flow state of the sympathetic and parasympathetic in the case that the person who walked away from the same event and was traumatized by that event, what effectively happened is when their body got kicked into survival mode, it, you know, they get this huge flood of, of hormones and things that are gonna help them get this excess energy to survive.
Speaker 0 00:28:56 The brain goes through the whole survival cascade. The higher cortical areas get down regulated, at least when it comes to their connection to the mid-brain structures and lower and their body kind of goes on autopilot basically is what it sort of is perceived as. Right? Somebody's basically functioning on autopilot, they're not making conscious decisions at the time cuz it's all happening below the level of your consciousness and the subconscious areas that the brain after the event has resolved. You're still gonna have that flood of hormones in your body for a while. It takes a while for hormones to really flush out and the parasympathetic might not kick in immediately because they might not feel calm for a while thanks to that flood of hormones. So what happens is that person becomes so sympathetic dominant that when there is a swing back, it likely sort of overshoots it basically, you know, and instead of going to a place of calm, maybe they go to a place of feeling kind of lethargic, withdrawn or something like that.
Speaker 0 00:29:52 So the body's gonna try to find that balance again, but it's not gonna succeed in finding that balance. And the person who has a trauma response to that event, their body's gonna get stuck in this sympathetic dominant state where it's really hard to calm down from it. The parasympathetic response actually gets kind of sluggish in people with trauma responses and it gets really slow to engage and calm someone down after something happens. And the entire nervous system because of the sympathetic dominance, the entire nervous system gets really reactionary basically. So, you know, there might be what is perceived as a very small stressor by other people in the area or in the room or somebody's going through the same thing. Maybe they're like, ah, this is just one of those little annoying things of life, right? For the person with the trauma response, their body is already so ready.
Speaker 0 00:30:47 We call it hyper vigilant. It's in this state where it's looking for threats all the time, basically. And so this tiny thing happens, Someone with a well regulated system might go, that's not that big of a deal. It's easy to take care of, it's annoying, but we can do it that the person who's hypervigilant and sympathetic dominant due to their trauma response, their system is gonna react like, nope, that is definitely a threat. We need to take care of this and this, We need to go into survival mode. Basically we need to trigger that survival cascade again. So then what happens is the amygdala starting to kick off survival mode way too easily, way too readily, way too often, right? And because the higher cortical areas have been down regulated so frequently, that feedback to signal and error in threat detection with the amygdala isn't really engaging very well at all.
Speaker 0 00:31:37 Essentially the amygdala and the interior ula in these prefrontal areas are not, uh, working together very well. So instead of experiencing a natural ebb and flow of emotions, this traumatized person is now experiencing really large reactionary swings, right? So their system is just reacting to anything that that happens to disrupt it, that happens to um, cause any level of stress essentially, they're gonna have a big stress reaction instead of a small one. Does that make sense? Okay. So what this might look like, I'm gonna speak for myself. Prior to getting any mental health treatment or any really good mental health treatment, when I was in graduate school spring semester or my first year of graduate school, I had anxiety attacks like panic attacks, like excessively like three to four times a week I would like melt down and have a panic attack. Maybe they're meltdowns, I don't know.
Speaker 0 00:32:33 But, um, so what was happening is essentially me and my, my traumatized state and grad school wasn't the thing that traumatized me <laugh> initially just to cover that. Yeah, I had plenty of other traumas going into grad school. So my amygdalas kicking off all too readily. I was in this constant state of like anxiety and racing thoughts. I had insomnia. I couldn't really calm down. I felt like I didn't have enough time for anything, right? I couldn't really relax. So I was in this very sympathetic dominant state, especially during like midterms. Okay? And then once I got over that hump of whatever it was that was busy, like for example after the semester was over, I would end up crashing. My system basically would crash into this really low energy state where it's like I felt kind of numb. I felt withdrawn, lethargic for like a couple weeks at a time.
Speaker 0 00:33:29 I would just like basically be numb and have no emotion. And that's actually what prompted me to get help because my husband was like, you know, this isn't normal, right? Like people don't usually like have no emotion for two weeks when they come off of being busy. And I was like, Oh, they don't, Okay, that's, that's okay. That's news to me. Uh, so then I sought some treatment, right? So that's the deal is essentially you're gonna go from that like super revved up, maybe you get really angry, maybe you blow your top too fast, um, you just feel really anxious, you get overwhelmed real easy. Maybe you get really panicky or you get really angry really quickly. And then you're also gonna have these other swings where essentially the body is trying to balance, it's trying to find that ebb and flow. But like I said, because of the sympathetic dominance and the parasympathetic sluggishness to respond to it, it essentially kind of goes too far and kind of taps out basically.
Speaker 0 00:34:25 So it's like you end up feeling lethargic or withdrawn or exhausted chronically like, you know, you might have that kind of thing going on. So that's what happens in a traumatized brain and in a disregulated nervous system essentially. And that is at its essence that is what the trauma response is. It is this dysregulated nervous system where the body is really trying to heal. It's really trying to find that balance again, but it just can't do it. And the higher cortical areas are down regulated enough that the person doesn't really know why sometimes their body is reacting that way. And a lot of times people with trauma, especially when people experience like trauma later in life, if they weren't traumatized and they become traumatized, a lot of them report feeling like they're going kind of crazy because it's like suddenly their body is reacting to things in a way that they never used to react that way.
Speaker 0 00:35:20 And it's because the higher cortical areas aren't being really told what's going on. It's essentially like the autonomic nervous system is kind of a, a free agent. It's kind of going rogue and it's causing these reactions and the prefrontal cortex areas, those, that seat of our awareness, our metacognition is not being made aware of why it's going on. So people might just not know why they're having this reaction. People might perceive the situation differently because our brain really likes to know what's going on. It likes to kind of, if it doesn't quite know what's going on, it'll probably make something up, right? So like if the prefrontal cortex areas are like, we don't know what's going on, but our body says something big is going on, we're gonna kind of make it to be a bigger thing. Or we're gonna say, you know, the person might perceive that the person who said something was actually insulting them when that person wasn't doing that at all, right?
Speaker 0 00:36:16 But they perceived it incorrectly. Does that make sense? That said, I do feel compelled to add that incorrect perception does not mean the emotions are invalid or wrong. The, the emotions are always valid. Emotions or emotions we have them. That's the deal with emotions. They're not to really be judged too harshly. The danger of the inaccurate perception is that it can just lead to a lot of relational turmoil when you're working with people or in a relationship with somebody who like just isn't seeing things the way they're intended. Does that make sense? Okay, so that was a little tangent.
Speaker 0 00:36:56 Okay. This episode pretty much covered our survival mechanisms, our fight, fight, flight and freeze response and these survival cascades that we are all susceptible to going into depending on the situation and our past experience, cuz we can do itty of those three in the moment of survival. And we also talked about the trying brain model, but more in the sense of processing speed and how it's the processing speed that becomes so important during survival that also leads to down regulation of our higher cortical areas and might lead someone to be not able to regain their natural ebb and flow in their autonomic nervous system after a traumatic event. So this nervous system dysregulation is what becomes the trauma response. That is what makes the initial event a traumatic event to that person because it dysregulated them. It was more than their body was able to cope with. They got kicked more into sympathetic dominance and the body wasn't able to get back to its original balance.
Speaker 0 00:38:02 All right, I think it's about time I wrap this episode up. I hope you guys got a lot out of this. Please join me again in another couple weeks. I am going to start going through this big watershed study. You might have heard of it, the ACE study. It has a whole CDC page, um, CDC.gov, they have a a page on the ACE study, but we're gonna go through it and we're gonna talk about the potential, uh, long term health effects of having untreated trauma as well as the types of trauma people experience and the characteristics of the trauma and what those characteristics could tell us about that person's resiliency. With all that said, I hope you guys all have a great couple of weeks and please join me again as we all figure out what it really means to be trauma informed slp.
