2 - Neurological Insights into Trauma and Recovery of the Soul

2 – Neurological Insights into Trauma and Recovery

You don’t know that you have a soul until someone tries to steal it. Ironically, recent neurological research about what happens to the brain of traumatized people moves us further toward rediscovering the soul, if only because PTSD people can dispense with the cultural myth that their pain is “all in their head”.

Let me explain. In the past, the therapeutic response to trauma has either been to help people “understand” their feelings and intentionally change their behavior by learning new habits … sometimes with the help of drugs. Traumatized people became convinced that all their attention problems, relational difficulties, mood swings, frequent depressions, constant anxiety, and terror precipitated by the smallest triggers was “all in their head”. It was just rooted in their imaginations, and with more self-discipline they would be OK. Modern therapy simultaneously reinforced radical individualism and tried to equip you to take control of your life. Failure to do so suggested limited intelligence or weak wills.

Today’s neuroscience, however, has revealed that PTSD is not “all in your head” but rather all about physical, visible, changes in your brain caused by violent traumatic experiences. (I found the recent book by neurologist Bessel van der Kolk entitled The Body Keeps the Score very informative.) I do not pretend to understand the details and will not try to define the terminology. The basic insight is that trauma actually rewires the brain, dissociating the analytical left brain from the impressionistic right brain. PTSD people cannot “understand” and “choose to change” because they cannot even describe their experience of trauma as a sensible narrative. Trauma drive the mind beyond comprehension. All that is left are the impressions: images, sounds, and feeling all jumbled together, often revealed in nightmares and night-terrors. Perhaps one might say that the trauma never really gets communicated to the left brain but is sidetracked into our bodies undermining both physical and mental health. 

Modern therapy of past decades implied that the “fight/flight” reaction experienced in, and lasting long after, trauma was, in a sense, the last stage of reaction. The first stage of reaction to an attack is to fight back, which in the healthy brain is a quick communication between the alarming perceptions of the right brain and the situational analysis of the left brain. If an attack seems overwhelming, the next stage wold be to call for help. If the there is no one willing or capable to help, the stage after that is flight. But if fight or flight is impossible, and one is cornered, pinned down, and utterly helpless, what happens?  

There is a further stage of trauma, namely, to freeze. The right brain shuts down emotionally. The victim dissociates from the experience altogether, as if observing one’s body from a distance. I know my description is simplistic, but in this stage of trauma the right brain just shuts down entirely and the left brain takes no action because it hasn’t “heard” the need for it. Neurologists have discovered that this freeze literally changes the structure of the brain for the future. Dissociation becomes the norm for PTSD victims whenever there is even the modest moderate emotion (good or bad). However, that is as far as neuroscience can take us. It takes us to the realization of radical brokenness or emptiness. The neuroscientist talks about mind, emotion, and will, but not the soul.

I think it is this experience of emotional emptiness and artificial detachment from life that can make victims of trauma suddenly aware that some inner essence seems to be missing. If the retro-wiring of the brain is not possible, then traumatized persons do not really heal. The best they can do is cope effectively. You did not really know you had a soul until someone tries to take it from you.

I think the existential awareness of the void of being is what makes us long for the ground of being. The frozen nature of our existence makes us long for the power of being. Unable to full be alive in the present, we are enslaved by the past. We endure, but do not live. What would it take to be, once again, fully alive? This is where psychology ends, and spirituality begins.