Ask one hundred people, and you’ll get close to 100 answers. Many will have similar threads, some will start, but not finish the question. It will be like a trauma webinar I watched with credentialed professionals, and guess what? No two of them had the same answer. How then are we supposed to be able to deal with what could arguably be the worst health issue on the planet? If you don’t diagnose accurately, you certainly can’t treat accurately.
When I started my healing journey back in 2013, I started with reading Robert Scaer’s book, The Trauma Spectrum. I had one of those moments when reading the description of stress and it’s effects, that I saw how all these disparate dots of my life suddenly made a coherent, yet ugly, picture. Since then I have been studying books and studies, and applying what I can to my own experience of healing.
That being said, here is my definition of stress:
a cyclical, physiological strain on body resources in response to a perceived threat that demands physical engagement.
Let’s break this down, shall we? First, and a very important point, is that stress in our human history, is meant to be acute, and a cycle. That means it gets occasionally “turned on,” and then, “turned off.” To use more clinical terms, we are hard-wired to move from social engagement (safety), into fight/flight, or freeze, and fold if death is imminent, and then back into fight/flight, and finally returning to social engagement by discharge and reset. That is the complete stress response cycle.
The second point is that stress is primarily physiological, not psychological. Here’s a simplification of how the stress response operates in the body:
One of the sensory organs receives a signal:
Sight (knife or gun, or predator with sharp claws and teeth, fire in the popcorn pot),
smell (smoke, petroleum product),
sensation on skin (hot, cold, numb, an edge),
taste (we spit it out),
sound (car backfire, handgun “pop,” explosion, crashing of glass, rumbling as in earthquake).
That signal is sent to the hippocampi to check against memory. Memory says the smoke is a BBQ. That changes the response immediately. Same with the preceding sputtering of a starting engine that puts the backfire in context. If the hippocampi say’s “It’s cool,” we return to social engagement and invite ourselves to the BBQ. If however the memory says this is unknow, we are on alert until it’s clarified. If not good, then the amygdala reacts with the “threat” signal, and that activates a waterfall of responses in the body the moves to the brainstem, and the rest is autonomic:
The jaw muscles tighten
Hearing is diminished because blood flow is shunted to large muscles
The eyes get tunnel vision to focus on the threat, and the pupils dilate to allow more light into the tunnel
The breathing gets shallow, and fast
The heart rate goes up immediately
The myofascia system (muscles and fascia) braces for fight or flight.
The adrenals begin releasing adrenaline and cortisol
The glucose in the body is suddenly in demand, and the insulin response ready for it’s call to action.
Fine motor skills diminish
The body shuts off immune, reproductive and digestive system functioning.
The PFC goes on a dimmer switch
And that is where we usually leave it. All that build up of glucose, the re-directing of energy in the body (the brain takes 20% of that energy, and the PFC most of that), means there is a strain on those resources. Okay if it’s acute and a completed cycle. Not so okay if we go from one stressor to the next. To quote Robert Sapolsky, “sustained psychological stress is a recent invention...for a vast majority of beasts on this planet, stress is about a short term crisis, after which, it’s either over with, or you’re over with...unlike less cognitively sophisticated species, we can turn on the stress response (threat) by thinking about potential stressors...thus, the stress response can be mobilized in response to physical or psychological insults, but also in expectation of them.”
As we can see, a lot of the human organism goes into this threat response, and we haven’t even touched on belief systems, or the emotional aspects, and social implications. This is just to show how physiological the stress response is. And what happens to all that energy put into the system when we perceive a threat, and don’t engage physically? It can become the diseases that Sapolsky wrote about in his book. As Peter Levine says, “It works by understanding that trauma is primarily physiological. Trauma is something that happens initially to our bodies and our instincts. Only then do its effects spread to our minds, emotions, and spirits.”
Lastly, the threat response (which has many names, thus helping the confusion) is looking for an actual physical engagement of some kind. You either physically flee by running and climbing and jumping to escape a much faster predator, or we actually engage in fighting. Typically, we do neither. For example, “Honey, we need to talk.” Assuredly, the stress response is activated, and if you fight, well, not so good. If you flee, likewise. So the response is to freeze, and the stress response has the dubious action of shutting down not just the communication center called the Broca Area, it also inhibits memory to some degree, until and unless the cycle is completed. Another example is the boss saying, “Come into my office.” Again, threat response is activated, we don’t flee or fight, the memory is inhibited and Broca goes silent. Not the best combo. We start a lot of cycles, and never complete them. They accumulate in the body.
The body however, is equipped and capable of completing the stress cycle. Otherwise as a species, we would not have survived. The discharge and reset is, “the particular type of spontaneous shaking, trembling and breathing (they do).” Levine teaches that this is the particular ending of the threat response in animals in the wild, and as he says elsewhere, we have that same mammalian response. I have seen this in my time emergency responding, mostly with accident patients. I had one call that involved three different examples of it.
I was cruising down highway 525 and at the top of the a valley, down at the intersection, I could see trouble. Two people were in the middle of the highway, helping what was obviously an animal. I could see traffic coming in the opposite direction having to slow down to avoid the people, and I saw potential disaster written all over. I hit the lights and pulled into the intersection, providing protection at least from my direction. Sure enough, two ladies were “helping” what appeared to be a dead deer. I asked who hit it, and one woman said, the lady up the hill, who I hadn’t noticed.
Sure enough, there was a white compact half way up the hill on this two lane highway with narrow shoulders and guard rails, blocking half the lane. I told the two, to remove the deer from the road please (one of them had a small red pickup), and proceeded to the woman up the hill. And now I had to block that lane to protect the two of us. It was getting congested, but I didn’t think I needed back-up. I got out and walked over to her car, which didn’t register any damage at all, which is good. She was in the driver seat, shaking, and crying. I did my usual protocol to orient, rule out injury, and assess for cognition. Everything in that regard was okay. So I told her to stay where she was until what she was going through ended, which I figured would soon enough, and I stepped to the back of the car to listen, and not invade her privacy. Sure enough, I heard the diaphragmatic release, the sigh, and she told me it was done. I asked if she was okay to drive, she said yes, and I sent her on.
At this point in time, the red pick-up drove by, and one woman was walking up the hill towards my rig. When she gets to me, her hands are bloody and I asked if the pick-up driver was going to take the carcass somewhere. “Funny thing,” she says. “We were putting it in the bed, and it started these kicking spasms, so we backed off, and it started shaking and suddenly popped up, jumped out of the bed and over the guard rail and ran into the woods. I just want something to clean my hands with.” I was mid word with “I have just what you need,” when she, while standing there, started crying and shaking. I stopped and said, “Let this happen, it’ll go away soon.” I went to the rig and got wipes and towels, then we stood there for a few minutes, I watched the same reaction in her with her tremoring and diaphragmatic reset and a sigh, and then it was over.
I surmised that the deer was in freeze, meaning the threat is perceived as so great, the body shuts down either in anticipation of imminent death, or, to present an unpleasant meal to a predator. Once it perceived the relative safety of the straw lined truck bed, it’s brain stem and midbrain decided death wasn’t so imminent, came back into fight/flight, and fled. The two women had perceptions (high traffic congestion and potential accidents with injury) that proved unfounded, and their systems completed, as did the deer, that stress response cycle. That event was over, and none of them were. This part one post leaves out what the chronic response without cyclical completion does to the human organism. What we call trauma. To recap then, stress is a cyclical, physiological strain on body resources in response to a perceived threat that demands physical engagement. The next post will reference this as we look at what trauma is. Stay tuned!
References (in bold):
1. Robert Sapolsky, Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, pgs 5-7
2. Peter Levine, Healing Trauma, pg 30
3. Mobilization, activation, threat response, fight/flight, the four Fs, sympathetic nervous system arousal, arousal, to name some off the top of my head
4. . Peter Levine, Healing Trauma, pg 39