Getting Past Your Past: Telltale Signs Of Trauma & How To Heal

The definition of trauma is antiquated. It's long been considered a psychological condition related to a life-threatening event like war, giving the illusion that it's rare and only affects the mind.

Trauma also hasn't been given the attention it deserves in the medical community. As a pediatric neurologist, I didn't learn anything about trauma during my nine years of medical training. It was only when I started seeing my own patients and taking the time to hear their stories that I learned about the decades of research describing how trauma affects the body and our health.

It would take many articles to list every possible source of trauma, but the most important thing to realize is that trauma is entirely personal.

One person who experiences war and displacement may not develop symptoms of trauma, while another person who swallows a piece of food the wrong way can develop an extreme fear of eating.

The subconscious mental filing of experiences is something we all do all the time: what you had for dinner last night, the movie you saw last month, and the birthday party you threw last year are all neatly tucked deep inside the brain through a process called "integration."

Integration involves linking new memories with existing memory networks for flexible extraction, much like a filing system. Because of this efficient filing system, most memories are effortlessly forgotten in the subconscious. Some memories can be recalled and retold, but mentally, emotionally, and physically, the experience is clearly in the past. 

But traumatic experiences are not like most memories. When an event is experienced as emotionally or physically harmful or life-threatening, it activates an extreme level of arousal. This level of arousal creates changes in the brain and body that store the experience in a special way to become unforgettable. This is an important aspect of our survival—we need to remember those things that threaten us.

Instead of being neatly filed and integrated, the experience "dis-integrates" and is not properly stored. As Bessel van der Kolk, M.D., writes in The Body Keeps the Score, "The imprints of traumatic experiences are organized not as coherent, logical narratives but in fragmented sensory and emotional traces: images, sounds, and physical sensations."

In my work, I've found that getting past our past involves integrating traumatic memories in the present.

Traditional therapies can offer some relief but aren't successful for every person. For example, traditional talk therapy focuses mainly on reconstructing a verbal or written narrative to integrate an experience. This can be difficult for several reasons, especially when the trauma story is not consciously accessible.

Dissociation within the trauma response can create memory loss or confusion surrounding the event. The event also may have occurred during infancy or childhood, during pre-verbal periods of development. Alternatively, repeated traumatic experiences may have occurred so often that talking about "an event or events" does little to integrate the experience in its entirety.

In addition, part of the trauma now lives in the body's unremitting arousal response, so talking about "the event" can actually perpetuate and further embed the trauma response in the body through reactivation rather than resolve it.

Instead, integration starts when trauma is brought up in a way that allows the body to access a state of safety and regulation instead of overwhelm. The concept of "That was then, but I am safe now" needs to be a lived experience by the body, not simply a cognitive endeavor.

Therapies that incorporate regulation into their model of trauma processing include Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), Brainspotting, Somatic Experiencing, Hakomi, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, Neurofeedback, and Psychedelic-Assisted Psychotherapy.

Even after the integration process, the traumatized body may still experience symptoms related to chronic dysregulation. When there have been months, years, or even decades of repeated trauma activation, the body's baseline nervous system function becomes wired toward activating the stress response. In these cases, practicing frequent daily self-regulation strategies (i.e., sleep, meditation, dance/movement, nature exposure) are an essential step in trauma healing.

When reprogramming the nervous system, it's also important to "catch" the default responses of anxiety, fear, or upset in the moment and train a new response right away. Otherwise, we continue to reinforce old patterns.

Slow, deep breathing automatically sends a message of safety from the body up to the brain that shifts the biological response away from stress activation and toward regulation. In a recent study from Stanford, controlled breathwork practices were more effective than mindfulness meditation for improving mood and reducing physiological arousal1. Breathing exercises are free, portable, universally accessible, and take only a few minutes to be effective.

And research from the HeartMath Institute and others has shown that adding a rejuvenating emotion, like care or appreciation, for something or someone in your life while you breathe provides additional benefits.

The more you can practice this technique throughout the day (in meetings, in traffic, in line at the grocery store, while doing the dishes, etc.), and in the moment whenever you feel anxious or upset, the more easily you can reprogram the nervous system toward balance and regulation.

As a neurologist who now specializes in treating chronic stress and trauma, I believe that finding the right trauma therapist and practicing Heart-Focused Breathing to regulate your body are two simple ways to relieve the emotional and physical symptoms left behind by trauma.