PTSD as brain injury

EMDR: Every Memory Deserves Respect

I read a lot about trauma. I try to understand it. For years, I was on that quest with depression, then anxiety, then PTSD and trauma. I am on a desperate quest to understand how my experiences have changed and shaped me, so that I may be better able to understand how to heal from them.

But I must admit, I had never really thought about PTSD this way—as a brain injury. For years I have heard of TBI - traumatic brain injuries and have felt terribly for some of those who have experienced the residual effects from car accidents, collisions, concussions, etc.

I have known for a long time that PTSD affected my brain and my hormones—levels of cortisol and adrenaline. I never really considered it a brain injury until I read this book.

Moments like these I am reminded of why I think it is so important to do mental health advocacy work and work to try to de-stigmatize mental health. Because even though I desperately know and believe that mental health IS health, that mental illnesses are not relegated to the part of the brain that we can control, or that is so weakness in character or emotion, it’s not so simple.

It’s not like I now have experienced that and know it so I immediately accept it and apply it to all other understandings. We live in a western society that separates out parts of the body; we don’t approach it holistically. We have been taught the stigma of mental health for a long time. Though things are better now and changing, we still can’t immediately erase all of the ingrained messages that we have been taught and have absorbed. (I think of this much like racism, sexism…these system of dominant ideology infiltrate our mindsets and operating systems. It’s not just knowing but unlearning and retraining our brains to have to continue to unlearn and learn and relearn and entirely re-orient our approach.)

So it is true for our approach to mental health. And all of these new ways of approaching it, likening it to a traumatic brain injury, that your brain is sick, that is has changed, are validating. They help to confirm all of the ways that we PTSD people live with the residual effects. (Even those of us who have gotten therapy and done a good deal of healing. Personally, I know it’ll take me some time. I know I should give myself some grace. It hasn’t even been three full years since my mother and my brother passed.)

In the book I’m reading, EMDR: Every Memory Deserves Respect, by Michael Baldwin and Debora L. Korn, PsyD, it is said that unprocessed trauma can affect most every aspect of your being—your mind, your body, your brain, your behavior and your heart (p. 270). Korn also notes that trauma can affect all the vital body systems: nervous, cardiac, circulatory, respiratory, digestive, endocrine, excretory, immune, reproductive, skeletal and muscular” (p. 84).

Korn says that: “Trauma leads buoys in the conscious mind—fragments of memories from unprocessed traumatic events.” She adds that trauma survivors: “…can no more act normally with an injured brain than we can walk normally with a broken leg.”

“Trauma can overload our emotional circuit breakers.”

“Trauma handicaps our ability to adapt and to adjust to our eternal world.”

It extends further outward, heart involves emotions. It involves our ability to function, adapt, survive, and, of course, it affects our relationships.

I am thankful for EMDR. I have written before about what a profoundly healing experience it has been for me. It has helped me so much, as has biofield tuning.

Still, there are many moments where I am triggered and have a hard time calming myself or remaining hopeful, positive, attracting good things, and I realize why this is. I think about that these are also reasons why my mother was like this. A lot of untreated trauma.

There is so much collective grief and trauma these days—from COVID, hurricanes in FL, revolutions and protests in Iran, war in Ukraine, systemic racism in the US and elsewhere, etc, etc, etc.

In a world with ever increasing amounts of people who experience trauma, I hope we remember this and can be especially kind and gentle, with others and with ourselves.