The relationship between the limbic system and the neocortex has profound importance. As Jamie Marich explains, “for a person with unprocessed trauma symptoms, the three regions of the brain are not optimally communicating with each other. Indeed, during periods of intense emotional disturbance, a human being cannot optimally access the functions of the neocortex because the limbic, or emotional brain, is in control.” The limbic system is activated during traumatic experiences to help the person survive via fight, flight, or freeze. Resolving trauma involves creating new neural pathways reestablishing the linkage between the limbic system and the neocortex. Only then does a person regain the ability to process traumatic events, make sense of them and the emotions with which they are connected, and place them in the appropriate context where they can be understood and integrated into the person’s overall experience.
I lived in my limbic system for most of my recovery. The slightest event would trigger an emotional reaction, and BAM! I was in fight-or-flight mode—mostly fight, because again, as men we are trained to ignore the fear, and fight. Moreover, flight or running away is unmanly and violates the Rules. This neural connection was built and then reinforced over years and even decades of emotional instability and repeated triggering/activation. Over and over again many misperceived cues and triggers had me jumping right into my limbic system, and then I was being driven by my emotions and my shame—a toxic combination.
There are a lot of people in the rooms of recovery with untreated trauma, some of which even rises to the level of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The problem for decades, particularly for men, has been our tendency to focus on the diagnosis of PTSD, which is on the far end of the continuum of trauma. As a result, we have missed a lot of male trauma. Trauma occurs when, after a traumatic experience (or experiences), people become and remain stuck operating out of their limbic system. The impact on one’s life becomes significant enough that it has serious impact on our ability to engage in everyday activities and live a productive life.
As Lily Burana, a woman who has written with courage, humor, and vulnerability about her experiences, describes it, “The overload of stress makes your panic button touchier than most people’s, so certain things trigger a stress reaction—or more candidly—an overreaction. Sometimes, the panic button gets stuck altogether and you’re in a state of constant alert, buzzing and twitchy and aggressive. You can tell yourself, ‘it’s okay,’ but your wily brain is already ten steps ahead of the game, registering danger and sounding the alarm. The long-range result is that the peace of mind you deserve in the present is held hostage by the terror of your past.”
Can’t you just hear the pain in that description? Can you feel it in your body? What does trauma feel like to you? Not just in your brain, but what does it feel like in your body? Can you notice the physical cues when you are getting ready to go “off-line”? Literally, that is what is happening. It may feel like a super-quick shutdown, but there is a complex process happening, and the more you can learn to notice it, know what your triggers are, be in your body, do conscious breathing, and use other tools, the more you can slow the process down and even interrupt it.
Here’s a specific example of this for me: For the first seventeen years of my recovery I used to be on the verge of panic attacks when I went into any public restroom by myself. Did you catch that? I said seventeen years—not seventeen months or even seven years. The door would shut and I feared for my safety. Every time the door opened I had this feeling I was going to be attacked. I imagined it and felt it. For the longest time I never talked about this because I was embarrassed. Essentially, I told myself to “man up” and suffered with that panic for years. It didn’t make sense, because I was a grown man merely going to the bathroom. It got better, so I figured that was good enough. But it never went away. I didn’t know it was a symptom of trauma. I finally brought it up when I started seeing a trauma therapist and made a commitment to tell him everything. It was the most honest I had ever been with anyone in my life. That was in 2012, when I was long into my recovery and even my trauma recovery. The Rules have a very powerful way of keeping us silent. It isn’t until you start to truly breathe again that you realize how much you had been suffocating.
Now some in the recovery community might say the problem is that I didn’t work a thorough Fourth Step. It’s just a fear, Dan. You had all of the tools you needed with the Twelve Steps. You didn’t need to go to a professional. Or maybe they’ll say that I needed to look more honestly at Steps Six and Seven because it is a defect of character showing itself. Or I just had to pray every time I went into a bathroom. And after. And whenever I thought about going to the bathroom. Unfortunately, sometimes in recovery we shame people into trying to work a better recovery program. I used to be guilty of it myself, assuming that the standard tools of recovery would be sufficient to overcome all pain and tragedy.
Shaming behaviors contradict the spirit of recovery. However, that doesn’t mean there isn’t some truth to those step-related comments. There is absolutely no question that the steps and other tools of twelve-step recovery can help men better deal with their most painful experiences. Almost every man I interviewed talked about how the steps, particularly Steps Four and Five and Eight and Nine, have helped them significantly in sorting through the pain of their past. There is no question there is something powerful about the power of prayer; it transforms our thinking and, in brain parlance, helps to create new neural connections.
The bottom line is that it’s important to understand that if you’ve had a traumatic experience and still suffer from it, this does not mean you’re weak, sick, or in any way at fault. More often than not, that’s just the Rules talking. The Rules are co-conspirators with trauma. They hide trauma. Our desperate attempts to be men often keep us from seeing our trauma and/or how much it has affected us. Only a few of the men I interviewed identified no trauma in their lives.
As Peter A. Levine, PhD, one of the leading authorities on understanding trauma, says in his book, Healing Trauma, “Recently, trauma has been used as a buzzword to replace everyday stress, as in, ‘I had a traumatic day at work.’ However, this use is completely misleading. While it is true that all traumatic events are stressful, all stressful events are not traumatic.” This notwithstanding, he goes on to say “. . . almost all of us have experienced some form of trauma, either directly or indirectly.” Put simply, per Bessel van der Kolk, MD, also among the world’s foremost experts, trauma occurs when an external threat overwhelms an individual’s internal and external positive coping mechanisms. So, if your first reaction is to say that you don’t have trauma, it may well be a defensive reaction—a way of proclaiming or even protecting your masculinity.
Until you have quietly reflected on this issue and looked into it at some length with an open mind, you may not know whether or not you have experienced any trauma. What I can say is that I know far too many men who have lived with trauma for many years of their recovery with no awareness that trauma was at the root of their suffering and feelings of disconnection. Do not let contempt prior to investigation prevent you from exploring something that could offer you a degree of peace and freedom you never thought possible.
The challenge a lot of men have is that they do not necessarily see their experiences as traumatic because they compare them to other people’s traumas—what they might consider “real” or more serious trauma, consistent with the big-T-versus-small-t trauma distinction. Many men probably look at their small-t traumatic experiences in hindsight with an adult’s understanding, saying to themselves something to the effect of “I see how this could be traumatic for a six-year-old, but I am forty years old now and it’s not a big deal. I am over it. That was a long time ago.” That is the danger. Our brain, particularly our brain’s limbic system, does not care about our age, then or now. And it maintains the emotional memories of those experiences, no matter how long ago they occurred. That is why people’s trauma reactions can be triggered