When the nervous system feels overwhelmed, everything feels harder to manage — for children and adults alike.
What’s a traumatic experience?
Trauma is an experience — or a series of experiences — that overwhelm the nervous system’s ability to respond, protect, or recover.
It occurs when one’s ability to defend, protect or say no is overwhelmed putting the body into a trauma response often referred to as a fight, flight, freeze, fawn, or flop response. It’s honestly a normal response to an abnormal situation and will vary from person to person. It is the outcome of what occurs when your active response to the threat does not work.
Some medical conditions can also leave the nervous system in a heightened or overstimulated state, even without a traumatic event.
the brain and how it's primed to respond
During a traumatic event or when the nervous system is overstimulated, the brain is primed to respond reflexively (meaning automatically or without conscious thought) to ensure survival. However, that very same response the brain takes often keeps us safe but can also keep us trapped in cycles of traumatic memory or patterns of behavior.
Sometimes this can feel like being stuck in a response pattern the brain hasn’t yet learned how to exit.
what you should understand
When it comes to trauma, especially childhood trauma, you should understand the brain physically changes. One of the changes is to the amygdala, the brain’s emotional reaction center. It can become more reactive during stressful or overwhelming experiences.
When a person is triggered, the brain is primed to respond reflexively going into high alert shutting down rational thinking to a degree. This is where feelings can become overwhelming (referred to as emotional dysregulation) and remember this is completely normal. This is a part of the nervous system automatically reacting to try and keep you safe going back into a trauma response.
When tackling different medical conditions, it's crucial to acknowledge that each person will have unique experiences. These differences are influenced by the specific condition and the way their brain interprets information.
For this very reason, we should strive to grasp and seek a greater understanding of ourselves and one another.
when left untreated or suppressed
If stress responses stay unsupported for long periods of time, they can continue affecting how the body reacts — sometimes months or even years later.
Without the tools or language to understand what’s happening, these patterns can carry forward across families and environments.
With support, people can learn how to recognize what their nervous system is doing and build skills that make overwhelming moments easier to move through.
Easy? Nope.
But learning how to understand and support your nervous system — and the nervous systems of the people you care for — can make a lasting difference.
