After trauma, our clients are often left with many painful sensations and emotions . . .
. . . including shame and guilt.
And that’s especially true if they weren’t able to protect themselves or escape.
That’s why it can be so useful to help our clients understand how their brain and body did work to protect them during the traumatic event.
Because when people find out that their response was an adaptive reaction that helped them survive, that can open the door to healing.
So we thought it would be helpful for you to have a way to illustrate this for your clients. (Please feel free to share a copy with them.)
Click the image to enlarge
If you’d like to print a copy to share with your clients, just click here: Color or Print-friendly
(Please be sure to include the copyright information. We put a lot of work into creating these resources for you. Thanks!)
Now we’d like to hear from you. How will you use this in your work with clients? Please leave a comment below.
Great resource- many thanks for sharing.
thank you very much
Very, very helpful in expanding clients’ awareness of the trauma/reaction pathway.
Thank you !!!
Pat, Oakland
Dear nicabm – Thank you so much! I’m a parent to two special needs boys, both adopted. We know that adoption can cause trauma, as it did when we adopted our older son at 4 years old. The younger son has brain injury (brain tumor as a baby). When the campus police surrounded him at school last year (age 26) he was seated quietly, nevertheless, they started aggressively interrogating him. He had no advocate next to him, unfortunately. His response was definitely neurological as stated above. He ended up in a psych ward and expelled from school, all because the campus police did not know how to communicate with a special needs adult. This ended up with a lawsuit! I will use the above info for the school personnel, to help educate them!
– Betsy Kay Ridgway, M.S.
Advocating for Special Needs Families
http://www.sparklinghope.net
I will share it with the teachers at the elementary school I work in who are stressed!
What stage is it when u leave your body and watch on?
Thank you, this is a great diagram and will be very helpful.
So how does this explanation work with hyperfocus, a trauma response described by Jim Hopper, PhD, Harvard? Hyperfocus is often mentioned as tunnel vision in studies of first responders in highly dangerous situations.
That’s an aspect of hyperarousal – sympathetic nervous system response. Those first responders are not shutting down, they are mobilizing. Their nervous systems are registering that it is safe (enough) to engage. A risk though – if they cannot regulate back down to a sense of calm and safety – they stay hyperaroused and hyper-focused during downtime. This requires treatment and is a big occupational hazard. The other risk is that over time, the stress accumulates and then the nervous system starts shutting down (burnout) and instead of hypervigilance, we have dissociation and disconnection. I’m seeing a lot of this in medicine now.
Thank you for sharing. It is so important for trauma survivors to recognise that the responses during trauma where not a choice but a survival response. Self blame can be debilitating, particularly related to the freeze response and it is so important to help people understand this was not a conscious choice! This resource explains it so well!
Thanks for sharing the info graphic, very helpful!
Thank you for so kindly sharing your excellent knowledge to us.
The infograph is really helpful to me in my work with many of my traumatised clients. Thanks again.
Hi. This is so true for me experience of PTSD anxiety
Thank you for sharing
Thats really helpful – thank you NICABM !
This is exactly what happened to me nights I was molested.
I can still go into that state.
I can ignore physical pain because i was also beaten until I would dissociate and feel no pain.
Fortunately I have had excellent therapy, happily married mother
grandmother but still awake every morning in a panic.
Fantastic resource, thank you , Kind regards, Pat
Thank you! It is really well explained and will be very helpful to my patients.
Fabulous! One of the best infographics nicabm has created, IMO. And “YES” to the identification that the traumatic response begins at the brainstem. Many people, including professionals, often refer to the response beginning at the limbic region. I’m thrilled and grateful that nicabm is sharing this important and accurate distinction.
Hi thank you for the information, I am in the need to write a paper and I am looking information about how the human is affected with trauma, I would like to be able to learn what happened to a person who has commitment issues, it is clear that this person was affected, but I would love to know why is the fear affecting this person, what happens with the brain.
Very user friendly. Like the simplicity of the explanation.
Will use this. Thank you.
Some clients may blame themselves for their not being able to run away or protect themselves when danger happened. I will introduce them how their body and brain decided what to do at that time in order to keep them survive,not their cognition, so they are not to blame.
For example,one teacher may blame himself freeze not able to save students, and he felt very guilty. I would tell him, faced with so much fright, your body and brain choose to freeze to save you. Your cognition didn’t work at that time. So the result was not made by your cognition, it was made by your body and brain, esp. brain stem.
I am a #me too person who after sex abuse learned to comply instead of freezing. Reading suggests this is called ‘fawning’ . It’s rarely included in info/graphics let leads to shame / guilt and a lot of the misunderstanding of sexual assault reaction yet is not at all uncommon. It would be good to have a resource that includes this response / reaction to trauma.
I agree Jane.
Keep up the great work! Very useful info.!