Understanding "Stuckness" or Repeating Unhelpful Patterns

Living with post-traumatic stress symptoms can be overlooked and underestimated, despite the overwhelming feeling it creates. When traumatic or stressful information is "stuck" on "replay" through cognitive or behavioral patterns, it can impact nearly every aspect of one’s life and thus, hard to name or even spot as a pattern. Seeking help from a professional therapist who specializes in trauma can be a crucial step towards healing when you get that feeling that you're "stuck" or "lost." Many of my clients describe this frustrating pattern as having a "neon sign" over their heads inviting a behavioral pattern to play out either through a relational experience or environmental circumstance. They may find themselves saying, "why does this always happen to me?!"

Here's why--

When trauma is stuck, it goes on "replay" anytime that unconscious (or conscious) information gets "triggered" in your present environment (relational or otherwise). When triggered, the body is called into an actionable response to defend itself against the old trauma information (but in the present moment). These defenses may enable the body to either flee or panic, freeze or dissociate, hide or shut down or avoid, "fawn" or submit in shame and/or fight with aggression, etc even in a non threatening environment.

Have you ever over-reacted to low-level stress that you logically know isn't dangerous, but couldn't help it from happening?

It's not your fault, your body is conditioned by old relational/environmental patterning and the impulses, behaviors, emotions or cognitive processes are ways it is expressed automatically. The great news is--this neural networking can be "rewired" with somatic reshaping to install safety, connection or trust in neural networks holding incomplete trauma responses. Incomplete trauma responses are active and "ready for rapid response," which looks like nervous system dysregulation. This causes "stuckness" or "looping" in old behavioral, emotional or cognitive patterning because it's never found the ending of its story--

------------------------------------------------------- the nervous system returning to homeostasis!

A trauma response completes when the person experiencing the trauma finds biological safety, trust or connection! The perfect ending for any traumatic or overwhelming experience is physical and emotional safety, like, love, compassion and connection.

As with all animals, the human brain/body needs to return to safety after a traumatic event to "close the loop" or complete the natural trauma response. When this doesn't happen, the body stores the traumatic information as if it is necessary for present day survival. An incomplete trauma response may look like one's constantly assessing risk, efficiency and/or bracing oneself for "impact;" and that's stressful! Sometimes without conscious awareness, a small trigger can send your brain/body into a survival response, and your natural automatic defenses to dissociate, fight, flee from, submit to it can often move you farther from your goal. However, when you build somatic awareness of your experience in a safe enough environment, you can recognize your bodily response is rooted in the past and move your nervous system back to homeostasis. That is one way the brain naturally processes unresolved trauma or dysregulation.

When that "stuck info" is called into action by a trigger, you will feel like you're experiencing the trauma or threat as if it's happening now, despite your environment being non threatening. I use the term, "whole brain" to describe the somatic interventions I employ to treat trauma by "closing the loop" with a biological sense of safety, trust and connection. By this, I mean, we keep your executive brain structures "online" while bringing up trauma that is "stuck" in the lower brain. By achieving this "dual state of awareness," you can complete the trauma response with more physiological safety and "file" it away in the past, no longer needing the trauma coded information always awaiting danger and ready to rapidly responding with old behavioral, emotional or cognitive patterns.

Whole Brain Psychotherapy is a private practice that offers an eclectic mix of evidenced based approaches to address PTSD, complex trauma, and inherited trauma.