Trauma and your body: Simplified

Our brains are divided: left side, right side. The left brain is logical, mathematical, the organizer, and the language side. I like to think of my left brain as a filing cabinet. I think of the right side of the brain like the bouncer outside of an exclusive nightclub. The right side of the brain is older and developed before the left side. The right brain is where you process emotions, color, and movement. When danger is near you “feel it” in the right side before the left can put words to it.  Anything that overwhelms the body is trauma. When the body experiences trauma the left side of the brain will sort of freeze and shut down while the right side takes over.  This takeover is what causes the fight or flight response.

The following are two examples of how the brain processes events.

Scenario #1

You are going for a walk at the park. You see a dog on the path, the dog is friendly and wags his tail at you.

1. You see the dog
2. The right brain processes the dog.
3. No threat is detected.
4. The right side then sends the information (nice dog) along for processing and storage.
5. The dog info travels from the right brain to the left brain.
6. The left brain processes the dog stimuli and puts it neatly in the filing cabinet where it becomes a memory.

Scenario #2

You are going for a walk at the park. You see a dog on the path and notice it is very large; the dog is snarling and barking at you. The dog breaks away from his owner, lunges, and bites.

Notice the change as this event becomes traumatic:

1. You see the dog.
2. The right brain processes the dog.
3. A threat is detected as the body is overwhelmed with fear. The body freezes, and may run away in an attempt to avoid a dog bite. (flight response)
4. The left brain has “shut down” during the trauma, therefore, the memory is stored in the right side of the brain and does not travel to the left to be placed in the filing cabinet.

Because the memory is stored in the right side, there is no language. This is why people sometimes have difficulty finding words to describe a traumatic event. The trauma is an emotional, current event (not memory) that is felt, rather than a logical memory to be understood, given words, processed, and then stored.

An emotional memory stuck in the right brain can create problems such as flashbacks, triggers, anxiety and panic attacks, migraines, body aches, and other symptoms associated with post-traumatic stress.

EMDR works because it forces the memory to move from the right side of the brain to the left by physically moving both sides of the body during processing. EMDR stands for eye movement desensitization and reprocessing. Through moving your eyes back and forth the body desensitizes and reprocesses the trauma so that it can be safely stored as a memory on the left side of the brain.

I have also written a blog post about how and why I use EMDR. 

I welcome feedback and look forward to reading your comments!