Around 2018 I was introduced to the term “emotional trauma” and started to explore what that meant to me and things I experienced in my adolescence. However, it wasn’t until the summer of 2021 that I really understood the importance of working to heal that. Leading up to then my reality was hundreds of misunderstood conversations, having hurt many that I loved and perhaps, most importantly hurt myself in the process.

The trauma that I experienced as a child, left unacknowledged, has caused immense hurt and frustration that could have been mitigated. While I started to understand why I react the way that I do, it wasn’t until I started the journey of deep self healing in the Spring of 2022, that I became mildly obsessed with understanding why my brain, and therefore my emotions, reacted the way they do.

My childhood was filled with varied trauma events, some I don’t desire to discuss, and others like abandonment and complex trauma at an early age. These events, which I have just recently learned, are stored in my body, specifically my brain, for the rest of my life, and have such an in depth effect on how I respond to things on every level.

As I have been working through my own healing journey I was introduced to a book: The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the healing of trauma (Van Der Klok, MD 2014). Within these pages there are so many words, my own brain started to mush together, I realized I needed to get my “book pens” out and start underlining and making notes everywhere I could. It was after just the first underline I realized this was far bigger than I was ready for and very relevant for the rest of the world, or at least the few people that read this blog.

Before I get too far into this, my post will not really have the deep, spiritual undertone that my posts typically have. So I won’t be offended if you close the post now. 🙂

Back to the trauma.

I experienced so much at a young age, it took me a while to really filter through what was going to cause long term issues. What continued to crop up in many aspects of my life was anxiety. I was desperate to find a way to self regulate after years of using medication (disclaimer, I have no issue with medication to treat this). So, while reading this book, the moment I realized I needed to get the “book pens” out was this:

“Back in the early nineties I had heard that some people had begun to divide the world between left-brainers (rational, logical people) and right-brainers (the intuitive, artistic ones), but I hadn’t paid much attention to this idea. However, our scans clearly showed that images of the past trauma activate the right hemisphere of the brain and deactivate the left” (The Body Keeps the Score, Van Der Klok, MD pg 44)

That’s when it hit me. Trauma response is Intuition vs Logic and in this case, Intuition (which in this case is emotionally driven and illogical) wins. The left part of the brain remembers facts and the right remembers the emotions. Example, you are in a serious car accident at a young age, rear-ended by another driver and as you get older and start driving, there may be a time or 2 that you are driving and notice someone following too close behind you. Your knee jerk reaction may be emotion filled or even paralyzing in the moment because when something reminds a traumatized person of a past event the right-side of the brain has a reaction to it as if it is currently happening rather than remembering that the trauma occurred decades ago. Your intuition (right side of your brain) is firing first and reminding you of the emotion you felt even though the logical side (left side of your brain) knows that you are still safe and nothing has happened.

The left side of your brain has essentially been deactivated and we are left purely responding with the right, emotionally driven, illogical side of the brain.

Studies have shown, that the part of the brain, the neurons, that fire most repeatedly growing up, are the ones that are going to fire first later in life. Much like the development of muscles, if you are only lifting weights with one arm and not the other, when the time comes to lift something heavy you will carry more of the weight of that item with the arm that you have been weight training with. The same goes for the brain.

So for me, as current events cropped up, I was responding from a place of intuition masked by illogical realities which were driving my emotions, words and skewed views of current time. This stems from growing up in a state of fear and feeling unwanted so my brain was “weight training” in managing those feelings. The emotional brain’s “job” is to watch out for your own welfare and is the very core of your central nervous system. One of the many things it does is holds onto pre-programmed escape plans, aka “fight or flight”

What I was faced with on a daily basis was the inability to regulate my own emotions because I was being driven so much by the right side of my brain, no matter what facts I knew I wasn’t able to differentiate between reality and learned behavior response.

I first noticed this in my early 30’s when scrolling social media and saw my friends all out doing things and I wasn’t invited. My immediate response was typically something like:

“Why didn’t I know”
“How come I didn’t get invited”
“Why don’t they like me”
“What did I do wrong”
“Why am I such a horrible person”
“What can I do to make them like me”

I was immediately going to a place that I was used to in my mind. I was questioning everything and then went into “how can I make them not abandon me again” This is the learned intuition response when the logical answer was actually, I was still working at the time the movie started so I wasn’t going to be able to make it anyway.

Do you see how this pattern can so easily become reality? How the spiral starts and unless you are willing to stop the spiral at some point, it will continue on until you are back to a familiar, albeit unhealthy place, that results in your own self preservation.

So for now, I will leave you with this. Are there places in your life that are traumatic and can you identify how you have been driven by your right-sided brain to have emotionally fueled, illogical responses to every day events or conversations?

Yeah, me too. So let’s learn how to overcome this together.

“Prior to the advent of brain, there was no color and no sound in the universe, nor was there any flavor or aroma and probably very little sense and no feeling or emotion. Before brains the universe was also free of pain and anxiety” – Roger Sperry