Trauma and…
Our traumas, experiences, and environments all have an impact on our nervous system. We are wildly aware of the tissue damage that can and does occur, including arthritis, aging, wear, and tear. We know what the scans pick up. I’ve said over and over, scans are a moment in time, a piece of the puzzle. Our biology is important.
If you have followed me for any length of time, I hope you realize I firmly believe biology is part of our pain picture. It’s just not all of the picture. Chemistry matters and IS part of our biology! Our thoughts and behaviors matter in our pain picture. As do the communities we live in. The messages we grew up with about pain, disability, worth and so much more.
In this blog post, I want to touch on why our pasts matter to our current pain. Let me be clear. I am NOT saying that your emotions are coming out as pain, or that pain is a punishment for your past, or that the pain is not real. I feel like I can’t say these things enough. Pain is real, it simply has lots of components to why it hurts. Traumatic events from our past can be a very real part of why we experience chronic pain today.
Pain and Psychology
The field of psychology has a million different ways to categorize our responses to trauma. On my own journey, I have found much healing and revelation in studying attachment theory, core wounds, self-compassion, vulnerability, shame, abuse cycles, and many other theories. These theories helped me to see where things that I believed about life, my body, my world, and my relationships were influenced by my history, traumatic and boring as snot history.
In my search for understanding, I have come across many who have been helped by the works of people like Peter Levin, Bessel van der Kolk, and John Sarno. I will remind you, I do not agree with any single theory that “explains” pain. I think we are best-served understanding that pain and suffering are incredibly layered.
When we choose to accept a single explanation as gospel truth, we run into all the same problems of dogmatic thinking that plague tissue-only theories. Please do not trade only biological thinking for the cause of your pain to now singularly be that of trauma. That is not my intent, nor how I think the complexities of our situations work. I do think it is important to explore the various fields looking at how to help people experiencing chronic pain improve their lives. This is exactly why I am sharing these thoughts today.
Why trauma matters
Even if one has grieved and processed the emotional impact of trauma, the nervous system might still unwittingly ( unconsciously) be in survival mode. Survival mode is not a state we are supposed to live in. It has a lot of chemical consequences. Most of which tire out our systems and encourage hyperarousal of our nervous systems. We simply can’t ignore this level of stress so many of us are living under. Even if you don’t agree with the emotional toll, there IS a biological toll of stress.
Maggie Phillips, the author of Reversing Chronic Pain, writes: “Whether or not trauma was connected to the event or condition that originated their pain, having a chronic pain condition is traumatizing in and of itself. Lord knows this is so true in the case of my story. So many places where I was ignored, marginalized, and felt stuck in a loop of hopelessness in my pain journey. Those moments and experiences absolutely were traumatic and came from trying to get help for my pain. I know so many of you have experienced the same thing.
Understanding the connection
While research and science do not completely understand the causality between childhood adversity and adult chronic pain/illness, researchers now have enough knowledge about the way chronic stress impacts physiological health to make some educated guesses about how they are most likely linked.
When we are threatened, our bodies have what is called a stress response. This prepares our bodies to fight or flee. When this response remains highly activated in a child for an extended period of time without the calming influence of a supportive parent or adult figure, toxic stress occurs and can damage crucial neural connections in the developing brain.
According to Harvard’s Center on the Developing Child, the impacts of experiencing repeated incidents of toxic stress as a child “…persist far into adulthood, and lead to lifelong impairments in both physical and mental health.”
Please remember the brain continues to grow and develop until you are 25. Just because something happened to you in college, does not mean it wasn’t impactful on your system.
Past Trauma and pain
The fact that childhood adversity is so intimately intertwined with adult pain/illness does not mean that those physiological diseases experienced by adults who had traumatic childhoods are not real or valid. Nor that their causes are “psychosomatic.” The biological impacts of childhood adversity are not only genuine but can be very difficult to unwind.
Understanding our history of childhood trauma may help tame their overactive stress response in the present day, and in turn, provide some complementary health benefits for those also dealing with physiological distress or issues. In my case, while processing my traumatic childhood history in psychotherapy it didn’t magically make my SI pain go away. It did help me become aware of patterns of behavior or reactions that often increased my distress, pain, and suffering. Being able to identify and relearn how to react to stress and “triggering” situations had a huge impact on my pain, for the better. Understanding how my behavior and thoughts about my pain, my treatment of my pain helped me to undo and get rid of a lot of the things that were hindering me from recovering.
The Fight or Flight Response
When your body is exposed to a stress factor there is an immediate response. Known as the fight or flight response. Blood is withdrawn from your digestive system and sent to your limbs and all of your muscles, preparing you to run or defend.
Your brain is also rapidly producing a cocktail of stress hormones released throughout your body. This is a survival mechanism that helped us live back when we were hunter-gatherers. We needed this response to escape predators.
When a child is exposed to continual stress situations, without knowing when the next one is going to occur, actual genetic changes occur. The child develops changes in the genes responsible for switching the stress hormones on and off. This is what science calls epigenetics – or how certain genes in our DNA react in response to our environment.
As a result children with these epigenetic changes enter a cycle of constantly releasing inflammatory stress hormones. These children’s stress hormones stay constantly set on “high”. They are constantly responding to their environment with the fight or flight response even in the mildest situations. For instance – you get a bill in the mail you were not expecting- and your whole defense system kicks into overdrive. Ergo, past trauma feeding our pain cycle!
The stress cycle itself is actually inflammatory! It makes sense that individuals exposed to past trauma will be more prone to diseases like pain, chronic fatigue, irritable bowel syndrome, and migraines.
The bottom line
Can you see how all this stress changes our very being? Can you see how past trauma influences our pain? How it creates a situation where we are constantly aware, set on edge, and protecting ourselves? Rigid, tight muscles, shallow breathing, digestive slow down, anxiety, hyper-awareness. Our systems are in overdrive. Long-term stress teaches our unconscious bodies to behave this way.
I still contend, experiencing ongoing pain without help and with the loss of who we are and the things we love have experienced IS trauma. Mostly likely that trauma or stress continues today. It is interfering with living your life.
Handle the stress response through self-compassion, education, and self-care. With these additional tools, you will have more ways to dial down your nervous system that so many refuse to explore.
I hope you have found this blog post enlightening. To keep the conversation going, join my Facebook Group here.
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