Autoimmune disease and trauma

Trauma can be conceptualized as stemming from a failure of the natural physiological activation and hormonal secretions to organize an effective response. Rather than producing a successful fight or flight response we becomes immobilized.

Probably the best model for this phenomenon is that of ‘inescapable shock,” in which we are unable to do anything to affect the outcome of events. The resulting failure to fight or flight, that is, the physical immobilization (the freeze response), becomes a conditioned behavioral response. Many traumatized children and adults, confronted with chronically overwhelming emotions, lose their capacity to use emotions as guides for effective action. They often do not recognize what they are feeling and fail to mount an appropriate response.

Failure to recognize what is going on causes them to be out of touch with their needs, and, as a consequence, they are unable to take care of them. This inability to correctly identify sensations, emotions, and physical states often extends itself to having difficulty appreciating the emotional states and needs of those around them too.

Being traumatized is continuing to organize your life as if the trauma was still going on unchanged and every new encounter or event is contaminated by the past. After trauma the world is experienced with a different nervous system, a survivor’s energy now becomes about suppressing inner chaos at the expense of spontaneous involvement in life.

These attempts to maintain control of these unbearable physiological reactions can result in a whole a range of physical symptoms such as autoimmune diseases, this is why it is important in trauma treatment to engage the entire person's, body, mind and brain. When something reminds traumatized people of the past, their right brain reacts as if the trauma were happening in the present but because their left brain may not be working very well, they may not be aware that they are re-experiencing and reenacting the past, they are just furious, terrified, enraged, shamed or frozen. After the emotional storm passes, they may look for something or somebody to blame for it, for their behavior. They/you might say...

“I acted this way because you looked at me like that or because you were late”. This is called being stuck in fight or flight.

In trauma recovery where the left hemisphere is activated through speaking of the traumatic past and making sense of what happened within a safe environment, the left brain can talk the right brain out of reacting by saying that was then and this is now. This can only happen when safety is establish through attunement. This happens where the amygdala is down regulated, this can often take some time for traumatized people as the amygdala tends to stay in a heightened state of arousal ready for fight or flight even years after then traumatic event or experience. Rewiring the nervous system contributes to long term character change and is critical for trauma recovery, these interventions may be undermined should they exclude left-brain based activities.

Treatment of traumatic stress may need to include becoming mindful: that is, learning to become a careful observer of your internal experience, and noticing whatever thoughts, feelings, body sensations, and impulses emerge. In order to deal with the past, it is helpful for traumatized people to learn to activate their capacity for introspection and develop a deep curiosity about their internal experience. This is necessary in order to identify their physical sensations and to translate their emotions and sensations into communicable language—understandable, most of all, to themselves.

Traumatized individuals need to learn that it is safe to have feelings and sensations. If they learn to attend to inner experience they will become aware that bodily experience never remains static. Unlike at the moment of a trauma, when everything seems to freeze in time, physical sensations and emotions are in a constant state of flow. We need to learn to tell the difference between a sensation and an emotion (How do you know you are angry/afraid? Where do you feel that in your body? Do you notice any impulses in your body to move in some way right now?).

Once we realize that our own internal sensations continuously shift and change, particularly if we learn to develop a certain degree of control over our physiological states by breathing, and movement, we will discover that remembering the past does not inevitably result in overwhelming emotions.

After having been traumatized people often lose the effective use of fight or flight defenses and respond to perceived threat with immobilization. Attention to inner experience can help us to reorient ourselves to the present by learning to attend to non-traumatic stimuli. This can open us up to attending to new, non-traumatic experiences and learning from them, rather than reliving the past over and over again.

Trauma and the Nervous system

Exposure to extreme threat, particularly early in life, combined with a lack of adequate care-giving responses significantly affect the long-term capacity of the person to modulate the response of the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems in response to subsequent stress. Overall, increased adrenergic activity is found in about two-thirds of traumatized children and adults.

People who are in the dorsal vagal state a lot which is the state when the amygdala is activated due to a detection of a slight threat in the environment consciously or unconsciously through neuroception and the traumatized person goes into a state of learned helplessness or what is called dissociation or freeze response which is an unconscious conditioned fear response. This will activate all the viscera, your heart, your lungs, your colon, your stomach, all of these are run unconsciously by the dorsal vagal nucleus and if you have syndromes where you are in the freeze response a lot, the dorsal vagal nucleus will be hyperactive, that can be characterized by Irritable bowel disease, colitis and other autoimmune diseases.These are cyclical diseases which means they oscillate between sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system meaning the symptoms come and go.

Problems with the gut are common with people who have had trauma, it is the physiology of trauma that drives these conditions and so if you heal the trauma you can heal the disease.

The freeze response is predicated by the effects of early childhood experiences, the freeze response is also called dissociation. When dissociation happens you are dysregulated,

If you have a threat and don’t discharge the freeze response, you are conditioned thereafter to any body cues related to that traumatic event.

What to do?

I just want you to understand that trauma can be big T-trauma and small T-trauma. Let me explain.

Most people associate trauma with harrowing events like war or a natural disaster. However, any distressing event that falls beyond the scope of normal human experience can be considered traumatic.

There are two main categories of trauma commonly referred to as Big “T” and little “t.” Big “T” traumas are the events most commonly associated with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) including serious injury, sexual violence, or life-threatening experiences. Threats of serious physical injury, death, or sexual violence can cause intense trauma even if the person is never physically harmed. Witnesses to big “T” events or people living and working in close proximity to trauma survivors are also vulnerable to PTSD, especially those who encounter emotional shock on a regular basis like paramedics, therapists, and police officers.

Little/small “t” traumas are highly distressing events that affect individuals on a personal level but don’t fall into the big “T” category. Examples of little “t” trauma include non-life-threatening injuries, emotional abuse, death of a pet, bullying or harassment, stress at work, family problems, marriage problems and loss of significant relationships. People have unique capacities to handle stress, referred to as resilience, which impacts their ability to cope with trauma. What is highly distressing to one person may not cause the same emotional response in someone else, so the key to understanding little “t” trauma is to examine how it affects the individual rather than focusing on the event itself.

It is very important to understand that we must see the body, soul and spirit as ONE. If we look at all of these 3 components as separate we will not have success in our healing journey. We need to take all of our worries and cares to Abba Father and prayerfully pray about each one of our Traumas, experiences, feelings and emotions.

In a lot of areas in our lives we have bee FEAR DRIVEN without us even knowing it. Subconsciously we have been driven bu fear and now it is showing up in the body in the for of pain, heart disease, gut issues, heartburn, endometriosis, Lupus, cancer and so many more autoimmune diseases.

I do not want you to be in condemnation, I want you to understand how important it is to walk in the FREEDOM that Abba Father has given you. When we are living in fear, weather consciously or subconsciously it will manifest in the body. By this I don't mean that there are no other factors involved. Of course there are things like lifestyle, toxin exposure, mold and so forth that are also contributing factors, but we have to look at it holistically.

At YadaYAh Holistic Health and Counseling we look to see if past experience is embodied in current physiological states and action tendencies and if the trauma is reenacted in breath, gestures, sensory perceptions, movement, emotion and thought, Our form of therapy can be effective/beneficial to you as an individual, because it facilitates self-awareness and self-regulation. Once you become aware of your sensations and action tendencies you can set about discovering new ways of orienting yourself to your surroundings and exploring ways of engaging with potential sources of mastery and pleasure.

I also know that working with you on a personal level with these different techniques and the promise of closeness to others and attunement for many traumatized (remember if can be a big T Trauma or a small T trauma) individual like yourself automatically can evokes implicit memories of hurt, betrayal, and abandonment, but I am committed to help you through the process. By feeling seen and understood, which ordinarily helps you to feel a greater sense of calm and in control, may bring a reliving of the trauma in you and others who have been victimized in intimate relationships. Or mabye you just feel overwelmed and confused. This means that, as trust is established it is critical to help create a physical sense of control by working on the establishment of physical boundaries, exploring ways of regulating physiological arousal (feelings and emotions), in which using breath and body movement can be extremely useful, and focusing on regaining a physical sense of being able to defend and protect oneself.

It is particularly useful to explore previous experiences of safety and competency and to help you activate memories of what it feels like to experience pleasure, enjoyment, focus, power, and effectiveness, before activating trauma-related sensations and emotions. I will be working with you on your trauma.

Charmaine Snyman

YadaYah Holistic Health and Counseling

FOLLOW THIS LINK TO BOOK A SESSION

yadayahcounseling@gmail.com

Remember trauma is as much about remembering how one survived as it is about what is broken.

Psalm 34:4

I sought the Lord YHWH, and He answered me, He delivered me from all my fears.

Resource: https://psychosocialsomatic.com/trauma-autoimmune-disorders/