Understanding Trauma and the Brain
Learning to Free the Authentic Self
Shelley Uram, M.D.
Mark C., a 35 year old sales representative, is 
about to either resign or get fired from his job. He does his job well and had enjoyed it until his new manager was hired several months ago. This new boss is a “my-way–or-the-highway” type of manager, and Mark frequently feels unappreciated, undervalued and disregarded by him. Mark has thought that his boss was clearly wrong about some of his decision and has argued with him several times and left the office early, as he had felt so agitated and angry. Mark’s co-workers also don’t care much for the new manager, but they think Mark is overreacting. Mark had similar strong reactions to a high school math teacher, and a team leader at an earlier job.
Jane M. is a 47 year old part-time clerical assistant for a realtor, and lives with her husband and youngest son, David. David is about to leave home for an out of state college, which will leave Jane and her husband in an “empty nest” situation. Her husband is sad to see David go, but welcomes the opportunity to have more time for himself. Jane had become quite depressed when the older two children had left home, and is already becoming more severely depressed than ever with David’s upcoming departure. She also had depressive episodes during her twenties, whenever boyfriends would breakup with her, and after her mother died several years ago.
What could Mark and Jane have in common?
They could both have underlying psychological “relational” traumas from their formative years, that continue getting “triggered” throughout their lives. Does either of them know this? No. Why not? Because the part of the brain that stores early psychological traumas, and re-triggers them, is completely unconscious.
At the time of our birth, we are 100% Authentic; there is no distinction between who we really are, and what we show to the world.
At approximately 3 months of age, we have a dawning awareness that there is a “me”. As our brain matures, this “me” sense evolves into greater and greater complexity.
What grows “part and parcel” with this evolving “me”-sense, is the brain’s desire to keep us safe.
The Fight/Flight/Freeze responses (FFF) tend to “fire” more often as our sense of self grows more complex. Unfortunately, the “thinking” and “understanding” parts of our brain are still quite immature when we are young children. Therefore, what typically follows is that during early childhood, our brain records many experiences as dangerous that really are not. But the reality does not matter; it is what our brain perceives as dangerous that matters.
As we grow through our formative years and young adult years, our personalities, coping skills, relational skills, etc. all evolve in complexity. A major part of the underlying foundation for all of these is our brain’s wiring to stay safe; keep parental approval, control our environment, etc. The underpinnings of our personalities and psychological patterns are ultimately fear-based for survival, with the goal of keeping us safe.
If we go back for a moment to our Authentic Self, we find that this core and most authentic aspect of ourselves is neither fear based nor survival based; it transcends these. It is our very essence.
What are some of the characteristics of the Authentic Self? It is Pure and Real, Peaceful, Joyful, no judgments of “good” or “bad”, no expectations of self or others, exists moment to moment without any form of judgment, and has no sense of past or future.
However, as we were just describing our fear and survival based personality development, if you think this seems contradictory…you are right! In my opinion, this is the very essence of the human dilemma. We are physical creatures hard-wired for survival as the highest priority in the brain; but at our essence, we are transcendent beings who are love-based. Until we expand our “Authentic-Self-consciousness” throughout our day-to-day experiences with ourselves and others, much of our experience of life is dominated by our fear-based survival circuitry through the Fight/Flight/Freeze mechanism.
As young children, with our very immature prefrontal cortex (or “thinking brain”), when our bodies and emotions strongly experience the Fight/Flight/Freeze response, we tend not to understand the accuracy of our perceptions of what is happening around us. We tend to mis-read dangers much more often than they are actually happening. We often become flooded with strong emotions and bodily responses, followed by our immature prefrontal cortex trying to make sense of it. We develop incorrect beliefs about what is dangerous to us. The accuracy of our deep false beliefs does not matter; they are stored the same way in the brain as actual dangers.
In our two examples at the beginning of this article, what occurred during
the childhoods of both Mark and Jane was their forming “deep false beliefs”. In Mark’s case, as a young boy, his father was a “my way or the highway” kind of father. As a typical young child, Mark did not understand that nothing terrible would happen when his father would quite sternly reprimand him for not following orders so closely. The “survival “ part of his brain would scream out that he is in big trouble if he doesn’t follow orders exactly. Again, this is due to the “thinking” part of the brain being relatively undeveloped and the “threat to survival” parts of the brain over-reacting.
Regardless of what caused it, once those experiences of his father are stored in the “survival” areas of the brain, it will operate as an “alarm” whenever the brain has a similar perception in the same and other situations. In Mark’s case, for example, whenever his brain perceives an authority figure that is threatening in ways similar to his father, he may be triggered into a “Fight/Flight/Freeze” response as he did when he was a child around his father. This reaction to others may continue for the rest of his life, unless certain types of interventions take place.
Even if Mark notices this pattern, this does not break the FFF response. Why is that?
When we have “Ahah!” experiences of understanding, it is primarily a cognition. The part of our brain that holds cognitions is generally very different than the part of the brain that holds the survival-related perceptions/experiences of FFF.
When a perception/experience is held in the survival brain areas, they tend to be very tightly anchored. Evolutionarily, the survival areas of the brain are mostly much, much older than the conscious thinking parts of our brain. In ancient times, when these survival areas of the brain were developing, the creatures that had them had very little capacity for thought. Therefore, when the animal was in a potentially dangerous situation, their primitive survival brain would tightly couple the dangerous experience with the FFF experience. This binding together would remain locked into place for the animal’s lifetime. Its purpose was to maximize the chance of survival; no thinking involved. We also frequently do not have a conscious awareness that we have been triggered by something that reminds our brain of the past. Our “thinking brain” (prefrontal cortex), generally makes up a logical reason for our bodily and emotional FFF response.
In Mark’s case, when his brain perceives an authority figure displaying a similar attitude as his father had during his childhood, his brain automatically switches “on” the FFF response. As a young child around his father, Mark’s brain would mainly go into the “Fight” aspect of the FFF response; therefore, this was how his brain encoded these experiences with his father. Therefore, whenever he is re-triggered as an adult by people who relate similarly to him, his brain again goes into the “Fight” response, automatically.
Mark gets into trouble because a) he is unaware that his unconscious brain is perceiving the authority figures as threats to his safety, (which they usually are not), b) his PFC is “making up” that he is having this strong visceral and emotional response to certain authority figures because they are somehow doing him wrong, and c) he then responds to his perceptions and bodily response of anger (Fight mode).
His co-workers tell him he is overreacting, but he does not see this.
What has happened is that some of the ancient survival areas of his brain (the “there and then” experiences of earlier trauma), have hijacked his thinking brain (the “here and now”), but he has no conscious awareness of this.
The second example was Jane. When she was a young child, her mother had a sudden illness and required hospitalization. Even though the hospital stay was relatively brief, her mother became preoccupied with her ongoing medical problems and had relatively “withdrew” some of her attention to young Jane.
Being so young, Jane’s brain areas for survival perceived her mother’s relative absence as abandonment, which triggered the freeze response in her young body. Was Jane’s survival truly in threat of being abandoned? No. But again, the reality does not matter; only what our survival brain areas perceive.
As Jane matured, even though her thinking brain came to understand her mother’s long term medical illness, the survival brain areas had long ago tightly coupled perceived abandonment with the Freeze response. This is a very important point that I’ve already mentioned, but is worth repeating…it does not matter that the thinking/understanding part of the brain has come to understand something. Once certain perceptions or experiences are tightly coupled with the FFF response, they remain available for triggering, retriggering, retriggering, etc for many years to come. Whatever your conscious brain has come to understand does not change this automatic FFF response.
So whenever Jane’s survival brain areas perceive a loss, she returns to the Freeze response.
(Please note that there is no predicting if a person will go into a Fight, Flight or Freeze response. For example, with the same stimulus of loss for Jane, another person’s brain may have triggered a Fight or Flight reaction.)
Now, let’s move to the next step…
When Mark was young and having these experiences with his father, his conscious thinking brain (PFC) was making up reasons for his strong reactions to his father. Since his thinking brain was still immature and lacking in the ability to accurately analyze this situation, his understanding came to be that “If I am to survive, I better do x, y, and/or z.” The corollary that was also tightly bound into his brain’s survival areas was something like…”If I don’t do x, y, and/or z, then I am in danger!”
What a psychologically intact child would then do is make up what the “rules” of life are, e.g., “I better do well at school, or I could lose my parents approval (love), and be in danger!” Many of our deep false beliefs can ultimately lead to hundreds of expectations that grow out of our deep false beliefs.
For example, the one deep false belief of “Whatever I do, I better do well, or I could lose my parents’ approval!” can have hundreds to thousands of expectation offshoots. These expectations could encompass just about everything we do. Similarly, our deep false beliefs can encompass our expectations of others.
If you consider that most of us have hundreds to thousands of deep false beliefs, and each of those could have many, many expectations of ourselves and others, then we are potentially looking at having many thousands of expectations….we are ultimately bound to meet some/many of these expectations with failure.
To the degree to which any of our multitude of expectations are also “locked into” the same FFF responses as the deep false beliefs, is the degree to which we become triggered when we don’t meet the expectations.
Now let’s go back…..
What does this have to do with our underlying Authentic Selves?
What has happened to our Authentic Selves that we were born with, as all of these layers of deep false beliefs and resultant expectations have been laid down?
Has out Authentic Self been contaminated, destroyed, lost?
I don’t think so…my perception is that our Authentic Selves are fully alive and well; just long forgotten about. From childhood through adulthood, most of us have gradually turned farther and farther away from our true underlying Nature.
So what can we do about this “case of mistaken identity”?
We can take several approaches, some of which are more powerful than others.
Let’s make a diagram of this:
Authentic Self à (trauma) à Deep False Beliefs à Expectations à Symptoms
Ideally, we want to work as close to the beginning part of the line as is possible. For example, if we can pull up by the roots a Deep False Belief, we will automatically pull out with it any related expectations.
If we “dust off” our authentic selves and allow it lead our life stream, we become more empowered to release the deep false beliefs and unreasonable expectations.
If we only erase the symptoms (the end of the above line), then all of the preceding elements are still locked into place. Therefore, it may be just a matter of time before our symptoms recur. In Mark’s case, this would be getting angry and belligerent at a boss or other authority figure (Fight response), and in Jane’s case, her depression and Freeze response would recur the next time she perceives a loss in her life.
I am a triple-board certified psychiatrist, and have seen over the years that our field is increasingly geared for addressing the last step of the above line. There are some great medications that can alleviate much suffering. If we don’t, however, clear the deep false beliefs and unrealistic expectations that often lead to the end-point symptoms, and empower our Authentic Selves, than we become “sitting ducks” to being re-triggered for years to come from a wide variety of FFF symptoms and behavioral patterns.
To the degree that our lives are aligned with our Authentic Selves, is the degree to which we have peace and deep happiness in our lives. To the degree to which our lives are lived out of alignment with our Authentic Selves, is the degree to which we suffer.
Treatments that are geared for breaking the tight link between the FFF response and old experiences are the “bottom-up” therapies. These include EMDR, Somatic Experiencing, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, certain types of Inner Child Work, movement therapies, art therapies, psychodrama, and others.
“Bottom Up” therapies tend to free up the old perceived dangers tightly linked to the FFF response. This, in turn, enables the deep false beliefs to be released. As our deep false beliefs are released, many of their accompanying unreasonable expectations of self/others are released.
Regular talking psychotherapy (primarily operating in the PFC) then becomes more valuable in reviewing our lives and how we may want to change it.
As this process continues, our Authentic Self begins to increasingly surface. Life becomes much more pleasurable and peaceful. Our bodies and emotions relax and begin to flow with life more easily. We are freer to see the inherent worth in ourselves and others.
As our Authentic Self is increasingly revealed to us, regular spiritual practice takes on a deeper meaning and value to us. This could be meditation, nature, reading certain types of literature, praying, or whatever connects you better to your Authentic Self and/or Higher Power.
Shelley Uram, M.D. is a member of the Senior Fellows team and The Meadows Treatment Center which specializes in trauma and related issues. The Meadows has been helping individuals who suffer from the effects of trauma for over thirty-five years.
