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The Most common cause of trauma is developmental.
From our birth (and actually before) to our adolescence our brain is developing at it’s highest rate. We start to learn movement, emotions, consequence and a sense of identity.
We are also at our most vulnerable. We cannot protect or defend ourselves and we cannot meet our own needs nor express them. We are totally dependent on our caregivers to make us feel safe and that we belong.
Should that care and reliability not be there we are left trying to manage more than we could possibly handle. Emotional or psychological damage is almost unavoidable.
The result can be an overriding sense of longing for care and love, along with a potential parallel of fear, shame, rage, a sense of abandonment and rejection.
The most painful of these beliefs… ‘I am not enough’ and ‘I won’t survive’.
Single Incident Trauma:
Being attacked, surgery, car accidents, seeing or being part of a horrifying incident. People working in the armed forces and front line personal such as medical staff, police, teachers, social workers, firefighters can all experience intense and overwhelming experience that prove to be ‘too much and too quick’ for our nervous systems to handle. The truth though is that anyone, absolutely anyone, can have an incident that just proves too much.
Chronic Stress/Anxiety:
Our nervous system gets stuck.
Whatever the incident or experiences we have been through it proved too much and our protective defensive self has now taken over permanently in an effort to keep us safe.
With chronic anxiety It has now become locked in fight/flight/freeze, refusing to hand back control to our authentic self for fear of any potential threat.
Our whole body is on a ‘hair trigger’ pumping with adrenaline and cortisol. Our muscles are tight, our heart over working, and there is no respite. It does not matter what we try and convince ourselves of, how much exercise, self help reading, yoga or meditation we may do.
It will not relinquish control.