38 What are trauma reactions?
TO THE TRAINER
PART II: THE TRAINING
What are trauma reactions?
Aim. To explain and understand how people react in traumatic situations.
Biological mechanisms
This session focuses on how people respond to traumatic experiences. Start by explaining the notion of automatic‘ survival reactions’ because the ways we react to dangerous or overwhelming situations can be understood as‘ strategies’ designed to help us survive. The main reactions or survival‘ strategies’ that human beings display when faced with life-threatening events are:
• Fight.
• Flight.
• Freeze.
•‘ Playing dead’/ submission.
When a traumatic event occurs that threatens life, we cease to process events in the usual way. We no longer store our emotions, feelings, and perceptions of the situation in the cerebrum, as we usually do, but process them at a‘ deeper’ level. This can produce the‘ primitive’ defence responses mentioned above.
Explain to the group what these concepts mean. Try to demonstrate the reactions, showing that all these things happen in the“ mid-brain”( the purple part of the brain).
Fight You experience a strong physiological reaction without mental planning. Flight
Freeze
You feel less contact with the ground; your body mobilises to run as fast as it can, without thinking or planning.
Flight and fight are impossible, energy levels are intense but the body is immobilised. Some parts of the defence-action system work by immobilising as a strategy: freezing( for example, rigid muscle tone and analgesia, tonic immobility).
‘ Playing dead’ When no other options are available, submission or‘ playing dead’ may be the final survival strategy.
We do not register these defence responses consciously, which speeds up our reaction time( and thereby improves our chances of survival). As we have noted, our reactions after a trauma are also very different.
The drawing shows different patterns of reactions in the brain. It illustrates the activities of the different parts of the brain, schematically.
TEACHING INSTRUCTION. Note the following:
• The body remembers.
• The body reacts as if the event is happening again.
• We are talking about reactions that the person cannot control.