Researching the effect of trauma
The following includes descriptions of mental, physical, and sexual abuse and may be triggering for some readers
“Grace-Lee” is a survivor of abuse from CFC. She attributes her determination in research to her experiences within the church and interactions with the church leadership.
I accidentally stumbled across the neurophysiology of trauma during a history seminar. I thought that there was no way this subject could ever be worked into the discipline of history, but the more I read, the more I realized that trauma has historically been used as a tactic to keep subjects of a ruling party in line. Examples ranged from feudalism to colonialism, and to things like monarchies and ecclesiastical politics. The field intrigued me, but I felt like I didn’t belong within this discipline of study. So I did what any sane person would do: I added a second major on top of my other major and two minors.
This was unheard of at Christian Fellowship Center: a woman completely invested in medical and historical research, wanting a life beyond the scope of raising a family within the church, a life beyond marriage, beyond the life of rearing children as the church commands. I immersed myself in this research because it felt like I was figuring out myself more and more with every book, article, or dissertation I read. I was discovering who I was outside of CFC. To avoid scrutiny, I decided to keep my decision to go into medicine a secret from the church. The leaders and congregation members often had words from God that “God called me to teach.”
The more I learned, the more I became aware of the manipulative tactics the leaders of CFC were using on me. When I finally made this connection on that humid summer day, I vowed to oppose them and use my education to dismantle their tyrannical hold over the North Country and break the silence about all the trauma they have inflicted. I vowed to use the very thing male leaders of CFC shamed me for: my intelligence and persistent search for the truth.
I wanted to learn how common it was to experience traumatic events, so I started my research there. In 2018, the World Mental Health Survey Consortium reported the results of their survey from 24 countries around the globe. Over 70% of respondents reported a traumatic event; 30.5% were exposed to four or more. And after 2+ years of a pandemic, every single person has experienced collective trauma.
Countries surveyed in the World Mental Health Survey Consortium study.
For me, this trauma manifested itself as years of spiritual abuse and victim-blaming in the wake of sexual assault. I refer to this trauma as the silent scream because it is very much inside us, but others cannot see it, hear it, or feel it. Sometimes we are not even willing to talk about it. It’s like I was trapped inside of myself, wanting to get out but not knowing how to, not willing to talk about it, not willing to question my leaders’ authority. Questioning them was like questioning God.
Our Brains “On” Trauma
Let’s deconstruct how our brains process trauma and traumatic events. First and foremost, the brain’s main job is to ensure survival. Everything else is secondary. Our brain is really good at detecting danger; our “emotional brain” has first dibs on processing incoming information. This emotional brain is responsible for sending our body into a Fight, Flee, or Freeze state. A specific part of our body, namely, the Hypothalamic Pituitary Adrenal Access (HTPA-Access), is what is responsible for this fight, flight, or freeze response.
How does it work? Picture yourself on a walk in the woods, feeling the cool breeze on your skin, hearing the sound of the leaves rustling in the distance, smelling the fresh summer air around you, when all of a sudden a bear jumps out of the bushes up ahead. In our bodies, the hypothalamus sends signals to the pituitary gland, which then sends signals to your adrenal glands.
Your heart starts to thump in your chest, your blood vessels begin to open up, your pupils begin to dilate, your lungs begin to open, and you feel the adrenaline racing through your body. You are now ready to fight that bear, run from that bear, or in some instances, you freeze right in front of that bear. Each of these responses is amazing and so helpful. At least, it’s helpful when you are actually alone in the woods and you come across a bear.
The problem is when the bear comes home with you. In my case, the bear was preaching on the pulpit every Sunday, the bear was up on the platform leading worship, and the bear was preaching to young people every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.
After I had studied this perpetual fight or flight activation with repeated exposure to traumatic stimuli, I started looking into the fields of neurophysiology and neuroanatomy. I wanted to know how trauma impacted our brain's function and as I started to dig, my research started to undergo a metamorphosis of sorts. I found detailed studies that were able to show us exactly where trauma was traveling in our neural pathways. It enabled us to pinpoint neural activation and deactivation. It was a turning point in the field of neurology.
Dr. Scott Rauch performed a study using radioactive oxygen in the late 1990s that gave a new look into trauma and mapping it in our brain. It allowed us to see brain changes due to traumatic memories for the first time. The inhalation of radioactive oxygen allows fMRI and PET scan machines to detect changes in brain oxygen consumption due to any one part becoming more or less metabolically active. In this study, Rauch also introduced anxiety-provoking stimuli that the participant could hear while measuring heart rate and blood pressure and comparing those results with the changing metabolic brain activity by the inhalation of radioactive oxygen. After eight participants, a very similar pattern was detected. During trauma responses to familiar stimuli the right limbic areas as well as the visual cortexes, specifically Broddman’s area 19, showed heightened activation while Broca’s area, which is our brain’s speech center, showed markedly decreased activation.
Scans showing areas of the brain
The Right Hemisphere
Our brain’s right hemisphere is intuitive, emotional, visual, spatial, and tactile. The right brain stores memories of sound, touch, smells, and the emotions that they evoke. This part of the brain will react to sensory stimuli like voices, facial features, gestures, and places experienced in the past. While the left and right hemispheres are responsible for different things; they do work together under ordinary circumstances. Deactivation of the left brain and heightened activity in our right brain has an impact on the capacity to organize experience into logical sequences or to express our experiences into words. In people who experience trauma, the right brain reacts as if the past event is happening in the present.
Broca’s Area
Connected to this evidence, the deactivation of the Broca’s Area in the left hemisphere makes it difficult to organize words or express our experiences of the trauma. This evidence explains why survivors experience difficulty recalling or retelling painful stories. Our speech center is quite literally shut down and unable to organize sentences.
Brodmann's Area 19
When words fail and there is activation of our right hemisphere and amygdala; painful and traumatic images flood our brain’s visual cortex. It is specifically Brodmann’s area 19 that is affected. The images flooding this area of our brain often act as a façade to our actual vision. It blinds the survivor to the reality in front of them.
As a result of trauma, the adaptive, life-saving process our bodies carry out now turns into something maladaptive and health-compromising. Our bodies’ fight or flight mode becomes perpetually activated. This hyper-vigilance and hyper-arousal can manifest as insomnia, flashbacks, nightmares, night sweats, and panic attacks which all throw off the immune system's regulation function. With the immune system dysregulated, untreated trauma symptoms can not only lead to a myriad of chronic health conditions but change our brain structure and the way it functions.
It is projected that people who have experienced trauma are up to seven times more likely to develop chronic health conditions like diabetes, hypertension, cardiovascular disease, and even cancer. Trauma is more likely to cause health complications even in people who maintain a healthy diet, stay active, and do not indulge in drugs and alcohol. Young people are more at risk for the effects of trauma specifically because our brains are still developing and will not be fully developed until age 25.
For me, a healthy diet, regular physical activity, and abstaining from drugs and alcohol didn’t stop cancer. It didn’t stop sudden and unexplained chronic illness. The trauma I endured was making me very sick, and the longer I stayed within the church the sicker I grew. I was constantly in fight or flight mode because I associated my experience within the church as a threat to my life. I was curious about the prevalence of chronic conditions or health issues the survivor community had so I did some digging. Here are some quotes I have gathered from fellow CFC abuse survivors:
I was always nauseated. Mom took me to allergy doctors where they pulled over a dozen vials of blood, put me on super rigid diets, tried homeopathy, etc... I was exhibiting classic signs of trauma and childhood anxiety and she couldn’t see it.
I constantly battled with nausea and cyclic vomiting. When the prayers didn’t work and only made it worse, I turned to self-harm and became suicidal because I thought there was something wrong with me and I couldn’t receive healing.
My symptoms were debilitating. I had unexplained stomach cramping, I was throwing up blood, and even developed a bleeding ulcer at age 8. On top of that, I had heart palpitations that sent me straight to the ER and a pediatric cardiologist.
I realized this connection between trauma and chronic illness and health issues, and I thought clinicians would be eager to learn more about this significant connection and be invested in developing solutions. However, I found out that they were doing the exact opposite. Many clinicians were not researching. Many clinicians were not innovating trauma screening processes or gold standard therapies. Most clinicians were settling for what they already had.
This is why I do what I do. I research because I am able to distinguish patterns. I research for all my fellow church abuse brothers, sisters, and non-binary siblings of the world. I research for all my fellow sexual assault survivors. I research because I am the person who wants to produce answers for people when all other avenues have left them trapped at a dead end, their minds ensnared in lies.
My hope is to create an effective trauma screening process that is customizable for a diverse population and pair it with cutting-edge therapy to effectively stop trauma in its tracks and place it back where it happened on the timeline. With this process, we could help people live without being mentally and physically haunted by their past.
I’ll leave you all with this; when someone says you can’t do it, do it twice and take pictures.
“Grace-Lee” is a Ph.D. Student at the University of Vermont’s Larner School of Medicine. Her research focus is on mapping the pathways trauma travels in our brains and the impact of trauma on the human brain and body. She delivered a TEDx Talk in March 2022 which synthesized her research and stressed the importance of recognizing trauma symptoms, especially in young people’s developing brains.
