Understanding & Healing Trauma

If you are coming to counselling to work through trauma, you are probably wondering what the roadmap to peace is. We will talk through how we understand trauma to provide an understanding of how we will work through it in counselling. 

How we understand what trauma is will really impact how we go about trying to heal it. 

What is Trauma?

When we think of something, “traumatic”, we might think of an event or experience. When we think of trauma as an event, we think of it as something that happened in the past.

Traumatic events can include:

• Things we typically consider to be traumatic like violence, abuse, war, car accidents, near-death experiences, medical procedures that went very wrong, etc.

• Trauma also includes exposure to chronic environments, such as neglectful childhood environments, frightening or unpredictable caregivers, systemic discrimination, colonization, bullying, etc. 

Trauma from chronic environments comes from being subjected to an unsupportive or dangerous environment and then having to adapt to this environment to survive. For example, having to hide your racial and ethnic identity due to systemic racism and white normativity.

When we speak about trauma, we are referring to the impacts of certain events, experiences, or circumstances. In other words, trauma is not just something that happened, but the lasting impact on our present-day lives.

Traumatic Memory: Implicit Memory

How does trauma show up in the here-and-now? Trauma can show up in our lives in the present moment through the following:

• Intense physical sensations in our body-  ex. feeling hot, having tense muscles, etc.

• Changes in perception - ex. feeling like we are being stocked, post-traumatic paranoia, intense suspicion, etc.

• Emotional reactions - ex. intense anger, fear, rage, anxiety, shame, etc.

• Thought patterns - ex. “I am a bad person and deserve to suffer”, “I will never be able to do anything worthwhile”, etc.

• Impulses- ex. a sudden impulse to run or attack someone, urges to self-harm, etc.

• Other PTSD symptoms - Ex. dissociation, flashbacks, nightmares, etc.

Implicit memories are non-verbal memories. They are stored in the part of the brain that does not record a story about what happened, but rather how you felt. It is kind of like one part of the brain writes the song lyrics (the story-based memory), but another part makes the melody (the implicit memory). So you might be singing the Sound of Music soundtrack, but to the melody of the shark music in Jaws.. Sound familiar?

When we experience intense forms of trauma or are very overwhelmed, the part of our brain that records timelines and narratives turns off. This means that we don’t encode the type of memory that helps you to remember that you went to the store, then took the number 5 bus downtown, then saw your friend, then you made a phone call, etc. We don’t record the story of what happened to make sense of our experience.

So rather than storing memory in a story format, our brain picks up and records sensory information through our five senses, body, and emotions. These get encoded as cues that will later activate your nervous system to ramp up a defensive state and our survival responses (like fight-flight-collapse responses).

Traumatic memory might also come back in flashes of imagery but without the full memory of what happened. Smells, sounds, sights, touch, and tastes can also be very powerful cues that your body/ nervous system encodes.

Activation and Triggering

Our body and nervous system are always scanning for safety and danger. When we experience something dangerous or traumatic, our body and nervous system form associations to help us recognize signs of danger in the future.

For example, if we were hit by a red car, in the future red cars may elicit the non-verbal memories associated with that experience (like your heart racing, feelings of anxiety and panic). 

If we don’t notice that our stress response is activated, we may generally feel “bad”, stressed out, anxious or depressed and then feel confused about why. This is what we call being “activated” or “triggered”. 

When you are in a safe situation and get activated, there are ways you can learn to turn off your activated nervous system and update it with the information that you are safe, which we will work on together in counselling. It can be frustrating how activation of the stress response can interfere with our daily lives, and how our internal experience may often feel incongruent with our situation.

For example, we might be with a bunch of people we love, but feel extremely lonely and disconnected; we might be walking through a safe street in our neighbourhood, and be overwhelmed with fear and anxiety. If trauma occurred in the context of our home, family, neighbourhood or close relationships, these areas of life might be riddled with landmines and activators.

Separating the Past and Present

When traumatic memory is stored as non-verbal, feeling memories, we often don’t recognize that it is connected to a past experience that is surfacing as an implicit memory. We can wrongly assume that our present environment causing these feelings.

This might surface as thinking “they embarrassed me”, “she was attacking me”, “he was accusing and blaming me”, rather than realizing that these emotions were being activated from implicit traumatic memories. This can cause challenges in our relationships and functioning in our daily life. We might also interpret these memories as reflections on our present environment: ex. “this is not a safe place”, “I can’t trust these people”, “I am going crazy”

When we know signs of activation and trauma symptoms, it becomes easier to recognize when we are activated and to feel in control of our experience.

In counselling, our goal is to first help restore a felt sense of peace and safety and to help you find ways of managing the activation. Eventually, the chronic activation of the nervous system settles down, and there are practical ways we can support this process. Once we do this, we can work on reprocessing what happened to bring deeper resolution. 

Additionally, we offer a therapy similar to EMDR called Accelerated Resolution Therapy (ART). This helps to connect the implicit feeling memories that keep getting activated with the story-based memory in the other part of the brain. This reduces how much activation you experience in your daily life and restores a sense of peace. Feel free to reach out to us to book a consult and learn more.

A Neuroscientific Approach to Counselling

Blueprints from the past that surface in our here-and-now experience.

A neuroscientific approach to counselling- what does that even mean? Good question and glad you are wondering!

Blueprints From the Past

In simple terms, our present-day emotions, thoughts, behaviours, and relationships are all impacted by our past environments and relationships in which we were immersed. These experiences then lay the blueprint in our nervous system for how we experience our present life and relationships. As counsellors, we are interested in how your past experiences are showing up in your here-and-now experience, maybe without you even noticing it.

Here is an example to illustrate what we mean. Growing up, Jamie’s father was a tall man with an imposing presence. He was often angry and would snap unexpectedly when Jamie would express sadness or other emotions. Jamie is now 29 years old and often feels a looming sense of dread when speaking with authoritative or tall men, resulting in severe anxiety for Jamie when speaking with his boss at work.

His heart will race and his throat tighten. Jamie presents as unemotional and even detached in his relationships. He expresses little emotion, but when something is strong enough to provoke an emotional response, a wave of anxiety and a sinking feeling in his stomach accompanies the feelings of sadness, shame, or anger. Jamie is seeking counselling for help managing his work-related anxiety and feelings of loneliness. 

In this example, Jamie may be unaware that his present experience of anxiety is related to his experience with his father growing up. While he may not be consciously thinking of his father while speaking with his boss at work, non-verbal feeling memories (implicit) memories of his father are being activated.

In other words, the memory of how he felt with his father is coming up, despite not having a story-based memory to accompany it. These feeling memories show up in his emotions (anxiety) and in his body (heart racing and tightness in his throat). Most of the time Jamie is unaware that this is happening, he just feels bad and hates going to work.

Jamie’s experiences with his father created a blueprint for how he interacts with authority figures and people who remind him of his father. They also formed a blueprint for how he manages his emotions and how he automatically engages with his own experience. As a child, he had to shut down his emotions and disconnect from aspects of his experience to avoid his father’s anger, a pattern that continued into adulthood. 

Feeling Memory vs. Story-Based Memory

In counselling, we are concerned with not only the conscious verbal memory/ story you tell about your experiences. We are also interested in the non-verbal story that your body and nervous system remember. Feeling-based (implicit) memory is filed away in a different part of the brain than story-based memory. Feeling memory and story-based memory be disconnected, which is very common for survivors of trauma. So in other words, you may regularly have feeling-based memories get activated (like anxiety, shame, anger, etc.) without knowing why. 

However, how do you work with feeling-based memories when you don’t have a conscious memory of them? Confusing, right?

This is where some of our approaches to counselling may differ from what you may be used to. In counselling, we may ask you what you are noticing as we speak about something, what you are noticing in your body, to pay attention to the thoughts arising in your mind, if you are noticing any emotions bubble up, or to ‘notice inside’. These are all ways feeling-based memory (implicit memory) may show up and shape your experience in the present moment. 

Since these implicit memories are often detached from a story-based memory, we can continue to feel persistent feelings of anxiety, loneliness, shame, anger, etc. that do not match our present moment circumstances or beliefs. This can be part of the reason that despite reciting scripture and knowing what God thinks of us, our felt experience is incongruent. 

Part of our goal is to help address the feeling-based memory that leaves you feeling anxious, sad, etc. and that is incongruent with your present-moment experiences. We can also do this without you rehashing every painful thing that has ever happened to you. 

We want you to leave feeling better, to address the roadblocks that keep tripping you up, and to break the cycles that leave you feeling stuck. There are some very practical ways that we can do this in counselling together.