The Effect of Trauma on the Brain
In John Rigg’s talk on the effect of trauma on the brain and how it impacts our behaviors, I learned that when we talk about the human brain we are actually talking about two brains—the intelligent brain and the animal brain. The intelligent brain is what allows us to reason, think and essentially “rule the world” as Rigg (2017) puts it. The animal part of the brain, which is smaller, but is still very much a part of the brain, is what reacts to the environment and controls the body’s response. So, in the example Rigg uses, if he were to challenge us to run across the street but to keep our hearts from beating, we would not be able to do it—and the reason is that our animal brain is in control of that function for us. It is not something that we control with our intellect. Our intelligent brain allows us to pick want we want to have for lunch, what we want to study at school and who we want to marry. The animal part tells our bodies how to react to our environment and to that degree that we are in an environment full of stimuli, our bodies are essentially out of the control...
Trauma is an experience related to our environment. We experience something in our surroundings that is particularly shocking to our system. The animal brain is actually responding by triggering our body to release hormones. The brain is actually hyper aroused—it is in a state of primitive animal-ness, to coin a phrase. The brain is operating at another level than the intellect. And a traumatic experience can be something that triggers the brain to be in a state of hyper arousal. Riggs explains it this way: “When the brain is hyper aroused, if it’s stressed out, certainly this is the situation that I see in military personnel who have been involved in combat but everybody gets stressed out: bills, family relations, neighbors making too much noise or whatever, OK. That hyper arousal, that primitive animal brain is pumping out stress hormones, interfering with sleep, keeping you up” (Riggs, 2017). The symptoms that people identify as symptoms of trauma or of PTSD are actually symptoms of the brain’s hyper arousal. It is not…
