This is the 3rd in a 5-article series on polyvagal theory and trauma. For the initial article, click here.

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Wild animals are much more in touch with their bodies than we humans are. After an animal has engaged its protection mode and survived a dangerous situation, it takes the time to “shake it off”—it literally trembles, twitches, thrashes, or sprints to discharge its protective state.

In this way, the animal brings an end to the life-threatening experience. Any sense of numbness is reanimated and any pent-up fight-flight-freeze energy is released. The animal’s survival responses have been successfully activated and deactivated. It has survived and now it can return to connection mode—instead of focusing on the threat, it can relax and restore; it can play and eat and learn and rest.

We humans, however, can get tied in knots by our big brains. Our neocortex tends to override our primal instinct to feel and release our protective responses. Instead of allowing our instinct to take over, we get imprisoned by our thoughts and our emotions. We lose track of the path back to connection mode.

As a result, the survival response lives on inside us, lodged in our bodies’ tissues. This is trauma.

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Trauma psychologist Peter Levine writes, “Since the nervous system only recognizes that the threat has passed when the [protective] energy has been discharged, it will keep mobilizing energy indefinitely until the discharge happens.” [i]

On a deep, instinctual level, our ANS wants to de-activate our protection mode and “complete” our survival response, so we start looking for ways to do so. Unconsciously, we begin to apply our memory of our life-threatening event to anything resembling it.

For example, if our traumatizing experience involved us being pinned down during a robbery, we might start reacting strongly to any experience of feeling pinned down. Getting a massage while lying face-down might trigger us; or sitting in a dentist’s chair; or even wearing a seat-belt.

The drive to heal through re-enactment is powerful. This drive can take over our lives, distorting our experiences in an attempt to “complete” our initial survival response. And yet our petrified minds override our instinct, prohibiting therapeutic release and perpetuating our discomfort. We assume that the activation in our ANS means that we’re currently in danger; however, the ANS is trying to complete a survival response from the past.

Trauma occurs when we find ourselves trapped by our survival response.

Trauma can derive from any experience where we’ve felt overwhelmed. Natural disasters or war zones. Car crashes or medical surgery. Domestic violence or sexual assault. The sudden loss of a loved one or a home or a job. A persistently stressful home life, school environment, or occupation.

Trauma can also take root in our earliest, most vulnerable days as infants, especially if we were dependent on caretakers with dysregulated nervous systems. It can even occur in utero. We might have no conscious recollection of any particular precipitating event, and yet we find ourselves reacting in extreme ways to the slightest of provocations.

Trauma can manifest in so many ways, for so many of us. But the root of the problem is shared among us all: the incomplete survival response is the cause of our distress. We’re stuck in protection mode.

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In some cases, traumatized people are more prone to feeling “amped up,” as stress hormones race through the body. This is the hyper-arousal energy activated by the sympathetic nervous system. There might be sweating, muscular tension, a pounding heart, rapid breathing, and fidgeting.

In other cases, people tend to feel withdrawn, numb, and spacey, which suggests that the extreme parasympathetic activation of the collapse response has severely blunted the body’s metabolic aliveness. They might feel “shut down,” both emotionally and physically.

Often, trauma survivors vacillate between hyper- and hypo-arousal, or even experience aspects of each of them simultaneously. The gas and the brake are being pressed at the same time: a very uncomfortable experience!

As we established in the first article of this series (found here), a regulated nervous system operates within a “window of tolerance” (as shown in the image).

In the window of tolerance, there is a harmonious rhythm between the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems. These systems form a Yin-Yang, down-and-up dynamic: we rest (parasympathetic activation) and then become aroused (sympathetic activation), then we rest again, and so on.

Trauma survivors tend to experience a dysregulated rhythm—hyper-arousal slings them upward and hypo-arousal clashes them downward. Up and down they go (as depicted by the red line in the image).

Another way of imagining the window of tolerance is to picture it as a river flowing between two banks, with one bank representing hyper-arousal and the other hypo-arousal. Someone with a regulated rhythm is easily floating down a wide river, with plenty of room to maneuver. If an obstacle arises, they can smoothly navigate around it.

But the dysregulated person’s river is very narrow and choppy; their canoe gets tossed here and there. It keeps bumping against the banks. They’re bouncing back-and-forth between hyper- and hypo-arousal, which makes for a painful and disorienting inner experience. It’s no wonder trauma survivors are more prone to addiction, violence, and suicide.

Indeed, trauma takes quite a toll on the psyche. The traumatized person might experience anxiety, fear, panic, rage, dissociation, and hopelessness, as well as feelings of shame or blame around their condition. They might have mood swings; phobias; hypervigilance (always feeling on-guard); exaggerated startle responses; sleep disturbances; and problems with memory and cognition.

Trauma survivors often experience additional anxiety over not knowing why they’re feeling what they’re feeling; anxiety over not knowing when their symptoms will return and whether they will ever end; and anxiety over mounting medical bills, as they pursue tests and therapies and protocols. Lots of anxiety!

What’s more, since chronic states of protection place so much stress on human physiology, we tend to see trauma intertwined with pathologies of the digestive, respiratory, cardiovascular, endocrine, and immune systems. Trauma is correlated with higher risks of cancer, autoimmune disease, chronic fatigue, pain syndromes, gynecological issues, and chronic diseases of the heart, lungs, and liver.

I think you’ve gotten the picture by now: trauma can truly be devastating.

Survivors tend to contort their lives out of fear of being re-traumatized. They start avoiding places and people that once brought them joy. This can leave them feeling isolated, alienated—set apart from the world around them.

Ultimately, trauma represents a severing of connection. Our bound survival energy prevents us from the fresh flow of present-moment experience. It keeps us locked in the past and braced in anticipation of a foreboding future. It makes us feel like incomplete, partial selves. Not fully “me.”

So, that’s trauma. Now, what can we do about it? Click here for the next article in this series, where we examine how we can heal our trauma wounds.

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[i] Levine PA, Frederick A. Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books; 1997: 142.