What’s going on when you know you are safe, but your body isn’t acting like it? This is a confusing and frustrating experience. And for many trauma survivors it’s a common one.
Trauma responses are learned, not chosen
You didn’t choose to be hypervigilant; your nervous system learned through experience that it needed to remain hypervigilant in order to keep you as safe as it could. Trauma responses were learned when you were not safe. Because these triggered reactions were in response to severe threat, the nervous system is going to hold on to them.
Knowing something doesn’t automatically retrain the nervous system
The nervous system doesn’t update it’s defensive responses on its own, although you can teach it that circumstances have changed and old responses are no longer needed. Unless that happens, you will continue to respond to trauma triggers in the way your nervous system learned early in your life.
Knowledge that you don’t need a trauma response to be activated doesn’t prevent the trauma response. Why is that? There are two reasons.
First, knowing that a traumatic situation is fully in the past does not stop the nervous system from reacting when it detects something it once learned to associate with danger. Trauma responses can activate even when there is no doubt that the original circumstances are gone.
Second, when the brain is assessing a situation, it does so using two parallel information processing tracks. One goes to the thinking part of the brain. The other has a much shorter route and therefore it gets acted on before the thinking brain has a chance to weigh in. That is why even though you know a jump scare is coming, you likely still jump when it happens.
Why old responses can stick around
Trauma responses that developed early in life tend to “stick.” They were effective at the time they were learned from hard experience. These responses were stored as protective patterns to be used in particular situations. Those patterns don’t update on their own, to match new, safer life circumstances. The nervous system will continue to default to what it learned was effective early in life. Please do not conclude that these patterns can never be revised. They can be, with your conscious effort.
If you’d like to learn more, you may find these pages helpful:
https://www.communidid.com/healing-after-trauma-testing-the-rules-that-once-kept-you-safe/
Related Page:
https://www.communidid.com/opposite-experiments-worksheet/