Our stress responses are there to help us navigate, overcome or get out of situations that we perceive as a threat.  Whether it is a real threat or that you think you are facing something threatening both will trigger the stress responses, also referred to as fight/flight response.

The stress response is a whole-body response, it is a collection of physiological changes that occur through our brain & body, it changes which part of our brain is more activated, it triggers our nervous system to respond, it suppresses’ our immune system while activated and it pushes up our blood pressure and inflammatory biomarkers are activated in response to stress response to help repair tissue and fight potential pathogens.

I like to explain this to clients - it’s a little bit like the accelerator in the car, when we need to overtake, or navigate something we put our foot on the accelerator to increase the engine power, this is quite similar in our bodies, but we are not often aware of that change in our system until we feel the symptoms which can be:

• Feeling hot/flushed
• Heart beating faster
• Stomach churning/needing the toilet
• Shaky/woozy headed

This response doesn’t do us any harm if we calm down and only use it when we need it, so like the car, only using it to overtake, or get around obstacles, returning to cruising steady speed the majority of the time.

How does this response become trauma? 

If you take the car metaphor and imagine driving round with your foot flat on the accelerator or even the accelerator and the brake at the same time (which would be a freeze response) there would be a lot of smoke, noise, overheating of the engine and parts of the car would start to burn out.  It’s not much different in us as humans, except we are a lot more resilient than most cars, for a while anyway.

Very often with trauma not many people realise they are living in trauma, if it is childhood adversity, family stress, disability, medical trauma, long term stress, abusive or controlling relationships, as humans we adapt a live in some highly stressful situations and find other short-term ways to cope with it, but in reality you are often going through life with the internal ‘accelerator’ flat to the floor, and very often this has been learnt in earlier life so you won’t notice it until you have symptoms.  

This is the difference between stress and trauma; they are both in the stress response, trauma is when you are stuck using the stress response the majority of the time.

How does that link to health problems?

This is linked to long term health conditions such as, chronic pain, ill-health and poor mental health because of the amount of stress chemicals, inflammation and over-working of internal systems.

Trauma is the most misunderstood and under rated cause of a lot of physical and mental health conditions. I  have been researching the links between various different types of trauma and chronic conditions for about 10 years now.

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If you want support in your own healing, get in touch with me to book 1:1 counselling.

If you are a professional who would like to expand your knowledge working with disability and chronic pain, sign up for my training programme.