The Nervous System Remembers What the Mind Tries to Forget
A Trauma Therapist’s Firsthand Experience with Big T Trauma
Four years ago, I had my first and only near-death experience in which I came very close to running myself over with my own car. (0 out of 0 stars; I do not recommend). Fortunately, I lived to tell the tale, but I was definitely injured, hospitalized, and had some recovery. At the time when this happened, I had been a trauma therapist for almost 2 decades. I thoroughly understood the symptomatology of PTSD but had never actually experienced it.
Since that time, I have observed or been a passenger in a few automotive hiccups that have resulted in minor damage (and perhaps wounded egos). The first time this happened, I was in a parked car and, as the driver was reversing, he didn’t see the cement pillar in the parking garage, and off came the mirror. Annoying and harmless, but I had to leave the vehicle and take 15 minutes to calm myself down. I felt like an idiot, and the poor driver was concerned I was upset with him. I was not upset with him at all. Most of us have had those frustrating bang-ups, myself included. I was literally hijacked from what happened in that moment to the trauma of what happened to me four years ago, in which I was disoriented, terrified, in pain, and somewhere between fight, flight, and dissociation. I could not figure out the intense reaction I had until the next day, when I started to piece together that the sounds of the mirror being ripped off of the car were the exact same as the sounds from my accident. Hearing that crunching put me right back to the moment of my past trauma, and my brain (and body) had no idea what was going on.
Our Brains
Our brains are wild and wonderful, and I am going to do a brief and simplified explanation of the two hemispheres of the brain and how we understand them. The right brain is often used to describe the creative, feeling, imaginative, experiential, intuitive part of the brain. You will often hear artists describe themselves as very “right brain” people. The left brain is the hemisphere that is sequential, linguistic, logical, and analytical, sometimes described as our “thinking” brain.
Trauma is Stored Differently
Perhaps no one explains it better or more accessibly than Bessel Van Der Kolk – to put it simply, The Body Keeps the Score (van der Kolk, 2014). In his bestselling book, Dr. Van Der Kolk shows compelling brain scans of what I like to call the “brain on trauma”. He had eight patients who experienced PTSD and struggled with intrusive memories and flashbacks. He would deliberately re-trigger these clients, reading them scripts of their trauma, and scan their brain activity.
He noticed increased activity in the amygdala in the right limbic area, which warns us of impending danger and activates the body’s stress response. The right hemisphere of the brain is experiential, without a strong sense of chronology. He also detected a significant decrease in activity in the Broca’s area of the brain. Without a functioning Broca’s area, it is difficult to put thoughts and feelings into words. In summary, the brain scans clearly show that images of past trauma activate the right hemisphere and deactivate the left hemisphere. Thus, when triggered, the right brain reacts as if the trauma were happening in the present. (This explains my reaction in the parking garage!)
Why EMDR Makes Sense
Numerous cognition-based therapies have been demonstrated to be quite effective with clients. But given what we know about how the brain stores trauma, it makes sense that, to support healing, we need an approach that goes beyond just working with the “thinking brain”. As Dr. Van Der Kolk so eloquently states, “No matter how much insight and understanding we develop, the rational brain is basically impotent to talk the emotional brain out of its own reality” (van der Kolk, 2014, p. 47). When the memory or the experience is dysfunctionally stored as a “right now” experience, there is an immediate reliving of the experience in the individual’s memory network.
Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) therapy supports our systems to move towards an adaptive understanding of what occurred and what is currently occurring. In other words, the memory or experience moves from a reactive disturbance to a realistic, objective perception (Knipe, 2019). Rather than immediately feeling that my life is in danger, I can understand, in the real safety of the moment, that my poor friend just dinged up his car mirror. That was then, this is now.
When our brains and bodies are not in fight, flight, freeze, or fawn (which are trauma responses triggered in the moment), it allows us to function from a calmer, regulated adult place. Our behaviors and reactions make more sense in the present moment because they are grounded in the present moment. Sometimes the nervous system takes some time to shift, but even my capacity to observe my reaction rather than blending with it is enormous progress. Oh, there I go again! I am struggling to be in this uncomfortable, minorly inconvenient automotive moment because my reaction does not match what is occurring. Well, that allows me to take the time and space for myself that I need before I try to engage with others or problem-solve. My mind doesn’t need to forget the past trauma, because the memory is now desensitized and adaptively stored. I can now access the safety of the present moment.
This is how EMDR supports healing: not by erasing what happened, but by helping the nervous system recognize that the danger is over.
If you have questions or would like to learn more about EMDR therapy, please feel free to reach out or visit my website.
Citations:
Knipe, J. (2018). EMDR Toolbox: Theory and Treatment of Complex PTSD and Dissociation (2nd ed.). Springer Publishing Company. DOI: 10.1891/9780826172563
van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. Viking.