Oh my—the brain. Under the microscope, a hundred billion neurons in your amazing brain connect to a hundred trillion synapses. It is the engine of thought, movement and response.
Your human mind on the other hand houses feelings and memory. It is subjective and intangible, holding the awareness of your existence and identity. It is how you have reasoned, learned and made decisions—even in the reality of severe trauma.
We are conditioned and molded by experience: how we have grown, and what we have suffered. Our pliable brains—changeable, malleable and modifiable—have the enormous capacity both to be both altered and to repair.
If you were able to see the brain behind your skin and skull in a time-lapse movie, you might note that there is a before and an after in the composition of brain matter when it comes to trauma.
Trauma—large or small, overt and subtle—affects your neural circuitry, disrupting and distorting your experiences. The brain changes. Violations, betrayal, profound loss, neglect, lost connections—pile up over time, especially if there is little repair or attention to the rupture.
Trauma shrinks the more evolved hippocampus where memory is stored. The amygdala, that almond shaped early alarm system that has been in the brain since before birth, is most closely associated with fear. The body does not lie; since it is where memory is stored, whether conscious or not. “The amygdala does not forget, even if it does not remember."¹ If the trauma happened early, there were no words to accompany the body responses. You adapted, using what you had learned to survive as your defense as the tools of the body to respond to violence, neglect, abandonment, betrayal. It is why survivors are often stuck with overactive survival strategies of fight, flight or freeze.
Trauma affects how your mind processes life itself, which impacts how the brain responds. It is why a survivor may not trust their experience with others, the feelings in their body or even their sense of self. One defense for profound pain or loss is to block off its immensity with numbness or dissociation, even an absence of empathy for anything outside of oneself, or for oneself.
When the neural circuits in your neuro plastic brain switched in trauma, it went into overdrive to keep you "safe." Dissociation, denial, escape in all its manifestations, (addiction being its own self destroying tool to weather pain) and even shame—are what Gabor Maté calls "stupid friends." But as Maté points out, their presence is hardly stupid. They separated you from your body to survive. Those voices persist even after they outgrow their usefulness. So whenever you are triggered, it is not what is happening to you now, but what has happened inside you as a result.²
Your trauma brain has certainly changed—but it does not have to be stuck in a feedback loop of hyper-vigilance, anger, passivity or even shame—in the company of "stupid friends." You, I—we—have the capacity to give birth to new learning and to trust what our brains, minds—and our hearts—are trying to convey. We have the capability to make new "friends" inside of ourselves.
Recovery does not heal with mere words. Your brain depends on your mind and surely your body—where the truth of memory is stored. But it will be your heart that may hold the key to recovery. Your heart has its own nervous system and is where engagement and love are connected.
The heart continues to beckon this truth that lives in your body. It resonates with authenticity and begs acceptance for even the most difficult things to accept. This is not the same thing as tolerating what is unacceptable or out of alignment with your authentic self. The heart can feel the realities of your anger, your pain, your grief—even that of evil itself.
It is your heart that can move your mind forward, if you allow yourself to actually be with your brain, stuck in its grief and pain. The irony here is that letting in the truth of it actually moves the needle to resolution, especially when it is truly seen and shared. This is how the brain can see the facts. The challenge here is how to allow your mind to change the brain.
First and last, you must have some compassion for yourself. Compassion, an overworked concept in our culture, is often a tough sell to survivors who have a hard time considering this essential to breaking free. The absence of empathy, especially for oneself, is the default position of fear of more hurt (another "old outdated friend"). But respect for all you are and have lived can wake you up to your gifts, not just to your wounds. This is the possibility in the present: to be who and what you truly are, and no longer need to claim. This kind of neurogenesis is a process.
It takes time to change the mind about your brain. It takes time for the heart to soften the rigid structures of defense and turn the ghosts of trauma into ancestors.³
But here you are, reading this blog. You would not be doing so unless some of the old paradigms were regenerating, so that the brain and its mind, reminded by the heart, re-members itself. It may take time to turn the triggers from the past into disruptions in the present. But meanwhile, the brain will continue to change itself as you-I-we grapple with our authentic emerging selves.
Of course, we don't do this alone, nor should we. We find our own way as we wake up to what we believe and know from our own inner experience. Therapy helps, but so does real community where we engage with one another in a meaningful way to see and be seen as we truly are. This experience of being part of something bigger than ourselves is as important as the questions we grapple with on our way to freedom, despite the politics and complexity of the times. That itself is activism and change—in the brain and in the mind, and truly, in the heart.
It may be that when we no longer know what to do
we have come to our real work,
and that when we no longer know which way to go
we have come to our real journey.
The mind that is not baffled is not employed.
The impeded stream is the one that sings.⎯Wendall Barry
¹Fisher, S. (2014). Neurofeedback in the Treatment of Developmental Trauma: Calming the fear driven brain. W.W. Norton & Company.
²Maté, G. (2022). The Myth of Normal: Trauma, illness & healing in a toxic culture. Penguin Random House LLC.
³Again Gabor makes his point. We must make sense of the environment that created the ghosts: the community, culture, family, neglect, and the emotional and moral injury that went with the trauma.