Time travel, trauma and the therapy time machine

Trauma is time-travel and psychotherapy is a time machine: if you live with trauma it can often feel like a long-distant traumatic experience is happening again. You feel the same sense of panic: your heart beats faster, muscles tense, and your breath gets fast and shallow. Images flash in front of you, sounds echo through your mind. Your body feels weak, in pain, terrified. This can happen years after the original event. Everything feels fine, you are living your life safely in the present when suddenly you’re pulled back in time to a stressful moment in the past.

Sometimes this happens so often that you feel you’re living in two separate times at once: in one part of your mind, you know the date and where you are, and you feel safe. In another part of your mind, you feel you’re living many years ago, at a time when you felt powerless and scared.

These two parts of you are not in contact: the knowledge that you are safe in the present cannot reach the younger, frightened part of you and reassure it. When you experience life through that younger part of you, you inhabit their nervous system, meaning you feel much weaker physically than when you live fully in your adult body. Everything can feel hopeless as if you’ll never get away.

Why can past trauma be re-experienced? 

This happens because, after a traumatic event, especially a prolonged series of traumas you were unable to escape from (such as the long years of an abusive childhood or relationship, or even a one-off event such as a sexual assault, where you felt powerless), the experience gets stuck in a part of the brain which doesn’t understand time or place. During an assault, for example, the amygdala (the brain’s alarm and self-defence system) takes in all the sensory information about what’s happening, assesses the level of danger and organises your defence through the fight/flight/freeze/submit/collapse system, sending stress hormones and signals into the body to prepare you to do whatever is needed to help you survive.

What is supposed to happen next is that you reach a place of safety and can relax. You sleep and the brain’s memory processing system goes to work, turning the raw data of the sensory, and emotional experience into memory and storing it away in the brain’s library –the hippocampus. That part of the brain does understand time and place so if a memory is stored there, you know that horrible as it was, it’s now over and you’re safe.

Where the trauma was prolonged or repeated, or you were overwhelmed and unable to escape, so much sensory information comes into the amygdala, the memory processing system is overwhelmed. The experience cannot be processed and stored in the library, so it gets stuck in the amygdala which, as we’ve seen, doesn’t understand time or place. If something happens to remind the amygdala of the original traumatic experience, it thinks it’s happening again and sends out the same stress hormones to make your body respond in the same way to get to safety. The trauma feels like it’s happening again.

Traumatic memories aren’t just visual – the images you recall will have thoughts, emotions and physical feelings attached to them, often frightening feelings and thoughts of worthlessness and shame. Physical feelings of tension, stress, and pain. All of this comes flooding back, not just the picture.

Dissociation is also a factor: as part of the freeze response to danger, the brain switches off your awareness of what is happening, to reduce the psychological impact. The part of you which went through the event is split off from your main consciousness, which is helpful in the moment but can cause problems later.

This “split” actually happens in the brain: dissociation moves your awareness into a new neural network (network 2) which is not in contact with the traumatic event but another network (network 1) carries on experiencing the assault. Because network 1 is split off from awareness, it gets left behind – it is network 2 which experiences what happens after the assault, getting to safety, recovering, and moving through the rest of your life. Network 1 doesn’t know that any of that has happened and gets stuck, constantly living through the assault. This is the part you find yourself living in again when triggered.

When this happens in the brain, when the fight/flight/freeze mechanism is activated, another part of the brain, the pre-frontal cortex (PFC), gets switched off. The PFC is the rational, thinking part of the brain and it switches off so the brain’s survival system, (the amygdala), can take over and do whatever is needed to make you safe. This is an evolutionary hangover, from days when humans were more regularly threatened by wild animals – if a bear is charging towards you, you need to act, get ready to fight, run or hide. Stopping to think could get you killed, so over time humans learnt to switch off the thinking part of the brain at times of danger. The problem is that the PFC is also the area of the brain which knows what day it is and where you are. Switch it off and there is nothing to stop you from travelling back in time.

How does psychotherapy help bring us back to the present?

Psychotherapy is a vehicle which helps you travel back to the present and live there safely. A time machine, combining techniques such as grounding and movement, with processing of the original traumatic experiences to bring all of you – including the younger, left behind parts of you – fully into the present.

A simple grounding exercise (tuning into the feel of your feet on the floor, the sounds you can hear, the scents you smell in the air, counting the objects you see in the room around you) switches your PFC back on by sending it sensory information from the sensors in your eyes, ears, nose, mouth, skin, joints, forcing it to activate to process the data, bringing you back into the present.

Pilates and Yoga, with their focus on paying attention to how the body feels as it moves and even weightlifting, when done mindfully (focusing on the feel of the moving muscles and joints, the feel of the dumbbell in your hand), also engage the sensory system and keep you in the present. Their focus on a body getting stronger counteracts feelings of weakness engendered by returning to your younger body when triggered.

EMDR (eye movement desensitization and reprocessing), works with all the elements of a traumatic memory (images, thoughts, feelings and physical sensations), using eye movements and other forms of bi-lateral stimulation (BLS) to stimulate the brain’s memory processing mechanism and move unprocessed experience from the amygdala to the hippocampus, from alarm system to library, where it can be remembered from a distance and not re-lived. This can be a great relief.

BLS directs your attention from left to right and back, engaging the left and right sides of the brain, dissolving the barrier between them, and encouraging the flow of information around the brain, meaning the part of your brain which knows you are in the present and safe can communicate with the part which thinks you are still in danger, re-assuring your frightened, younger part, bringing that part out of the past, to travel back with you to live in your adult life.

Bringing all of you into the present, living fully in your life as it is today, without the constant threat of being dragged back into the past, leads to calmer, more contented living, with deeper and richer connections to the people around you.