The front part of our brain, known as the prefrontal cortex, is the rational part where consciousness lives, processing and reasoning occurs, and we make meaning of language. When a trauma occurs, people enter into a fight, flight, or freeze state, which can result in the prefrontal cortex shutting down.
Brain areas implicated in the stress response include the amygdala, hippocampus, and prefrontal cortex. Traumatic stress can be associated with lasting changes in these brain areas. Traumatic stress is associated with increased cortisol and norepinephrine responses to subsequent stressors.
The Hippocampus, responsible for short-term memories, shrinks. The Hippocampus helps us distinguish between past and present memories.
The same way the body can wall-off an abscess or foreign substance to protect the rest of the body, the brain can dissociate from an experience. In the midst of trauma, the brain may wander off and work to avoid the memory.
If post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) develops, it can lead to lasting changes in the brain and, without treatment, may prevent you from living the happiest, healthiest life possible.
So, these three parts of the brain- the amygdala, the hippocampus, and the prefrontal cortex- are the most-affected areas of the brain from emotional trauma. They can make a trauma survivor constantly fearful, especially when triggered by events and situations that remind them of their past trauma.
Exposure to trauma can be life-changing—and researchers are learning more about how traumatic events may physically change our brains. But these changes are not happening because of physical injury; rather, the brain appears to rewire itself after these experiences.
Primary effects on the brain include various types of bleeding and tearing forces that injure nerve fibers and cause inflammation, metabolic changes, and brain swelling. Diffuse axonal injury (DAI), one of the most common types of brain injuries, refers to widespread damage to the brain's white matter.
When a person experiences a traumatic event, adrenaline rushes through the body and the memory is imprinted into the amygdala, which is part of the limbic system. The amygdala holds the emotional significance of the event, including the intensity and impulse of emotion.
EMDR therapy changes the way a traumatic memory is stored in your brain using eye movements or rhythmic tapping. This allows you to process the trauma so that you can remember the event without reliving it.
Here's how: Trauma can leave a chemical mark on a person's genes, which can then be passed down to future generations. This mark doesn't cause a genetic mutation, but it does alter the mechanism by which the gene is expressed. This alteration is not genetic, but epigenetic.
A plethora of complications from traumatic brain injuries, ranging from minor cognitive delays to debilitating and life-threatening symptoms such as seizures and coma, can follow the victim for years after the injury. You need to know that brain injury recovery time can take anywhere from a few weeks to ten years.
The most important thing to remember is that whether you do it with the support of friends and family or the support of a mental health therapist, it is 100% possible to completely heal from trauma and continue on to live a meaningful life. Your life doesn't need to end with a traumatic event.
Trauma survivors can capitalize on this plasticity to heal. A traumatized brain tends to experience excessive activation in areas related to fear, and reduced activation in "thinking" areas. Psychotherapy and mindfulness training can reduce activation in the fear center and allow for healthy emotional expression.
During the healing process, you can actually rewire and retrain your brain to reverse the effects of trauma. You can reinforce your prefrontal cortex and get back rationality and control. You can strengthen your hippocampus and help your memory work how it's supposed to.
The effects of exposure to trauma in childhood have repeatedly been linked to the development of maladaptive personality traits and personality disorders [1,2,3,4]. In contrast, much less is known about personality related problems that may arise in adulthood.
They found evidence that trauma can be passed between generations epigenetically, which means that trauma experienced by an ancestor might affect the way your genes are expressed. Bale's extensive work shows that parental stress can impact the following factors in children: risk for obesity. risk for diabetes.
Like a virus in our encoding system, unprocessed traumatic memories can become sticking points that cause our mental and physical processes to malfunction. Early evidence of cellular memory shows that it's not just our brain, but our body's cells that could hold an imprint of past traumatic events.
An MRI can see subarachnoids hemorrhages, bleeding in the brain, old parts of brain damage that where parts of the brain have basically form scarring. That will show up on an MRI often.