One of the profound and hard to reconcile affects of trauma and overwhelming stress is its whole body impact. This puts paid to the lie the we should ‘just get over it’ or can heal from trauma solely by changing our focus. In trauma our body and mind get stuck in or tend to oscillate between over arousal (flooding of stress chemicals, flashbacks and triggers affecting our sympathetic and nervious system) and states of freezing, paralysis, powerless (affecting the parasympathetic system.) Associated with the negative feelings and emotions about our selves are guilt or shame as well as disempowerment, a belief we are incapable and helpless (which was true when we found ourselves in the traumatising or traumatised situation).
The following excerpt from a we article by trauma therapist Owen Marcus explains some of these affects and highlights the bi polar nature of unresolved trauma.
There are many factors determining whether a person will go into hyper- or hypoarousal. Obviously, the intensity of the stress (i.e., is it dangerous or life-threatening) is one element; but perhaps most critical is the person’s ‘window of tolerance.’ Dr. Daniel Siegel proposes that between the extremes of sympathetic hyperarousal and parasympathetic hypoarousal is a ‘window’ or range of optimal arousal states in which emotions can be experienced as tolerable and experience can be integrated. Exposure to threat or trauma challenges one’s window of tolerance with ANS-activated states accompanying animal defense survival responses such as fight, flight, or freeze (submission).
Once the threat has passed, many victims stay in their hyper- and hypoaroused defensive states. Thus, traumatic experiences result in an array of cognitive, emotional, and physical symptoms: fear, shame, rage, terror; numbing of feelings and body sensations, overactivity of the stress response, and painful and negative beliefs about oneself. With a dysregulated nervous system that can’t modulate heightened emotional states or states of depression and numbness, a person reports an inability to tolerate arousal without being overwhelmed. Somatic responses become frozen, collapsed, or driven and action becomes impulsive or impossible.
Trauma leads to loss. What do we lose? Firstly, we lose our instinct. Intuition has its seed in ancestral instincts for survival and adaptation. Our ancestors’ responses had to be instantaneous; original instincts (now identified as intuition) were based on a rapid-access fast-track system separate from conscious thought and unencumbered by hesitation and doubt.
In cases of early traumatization, one may lose the ability to say “no” and experience difficulty defining personal boundary space. Recall my previous analogy to the wei chi . . . a leaking out of vital nature, a breaching; the person has lost the ability to protect him/herself. In addition to losing touch with instinct and the ability to say no, the traumatized person loses his/her sense of gut knowing – that settled feeling in the belly of personal safety – that everything will be okay and becomes chronically disoriented and confused while being caught between feelings of hyper- and hypoarousal.
Perhaps most importantly, a traumatized individual has lost his/her felt sense. The felt sense is the medium through which we experience the totality of sensation creating an integration of what has happened. It’s how we know that we are alive, a whole perception of where we are in our life at this moment. It’s a super-consciousness that’s non-cognitive. It arises out of the more primitive brain structures that are associated with a person’s early relationship with the mother or primary caregiver – the maternal attachment phase. A leading proponent of this relationship was Dr. Donald Winnicott, a pediatrician and psychoanalyst who described the mother’s ability to create a “holding environment” in which the infant was contained and supported in his/her experience of life. One of the elements Winnicott considered could be lost in childhood was what he called the “sense of being.” For Winnicott, the sense of being is primary, the “sense of doing” an outgrowth of it. The capacity to “be,” to feel alive . . . the baby’s lifeline, what Winnicott calls its “going on being”‘ is essential. This holding environment is ruptured with traumatic wounding.
What is affected by trauma? The whole organism! Merriam-Webster’s definition of organism is “a complex structure of interdependent and subordinate elements whose relations and properties are largely determined by their function in the whole.”
It’s not just muscles, bones, ligaments, blood, or fascia. It includes brain tissue, thoughts, beliefs, ideation, self-image, attitudes, and worldview – body and mind, emotions, intellect, and spirituality. In essence, trauma creates a ‘fracturing’ of our coherence in navigating life and leaves us fragmented and disembodied.
Emerging From The Dark Night 