Season 3. Ep 56. Trauma and the Body: Being a Virtuous Catholic
This episode of Physically Spiritual explores the interaction of trauma and sin.
Video Version
Audio Version
Timestamps
1:00 Fear and Responsibility
1:45 What is Trauma?
5:15 Physical Effects of Trauma
7:30 How to Renegotiate Trauma
10:00 What Happens in the Brain During Trauma
17:00 Talking About Trauma Does Not Resolve It
20:00 Sin and Trauma
Notes
“Imputability and responsibility for an action can be diminished or even nullified by ignorance, inadvertence, duress, fear, habit, inordinate attachments, and other psychological or social factors.” Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1735. - https://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG0015/__P5N.HTM
Dr. Bessel Van Der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score - https://www.besselvanderkolk.com/resources/the-body-keeps-the-score
Trauma - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_trauma
“Research from these new disciplines has revealed that trauma produces actual physiological changes, including a recalibration of the brain’s alarm system, an increase in stress hormone activity, and alterations in the system that filters relevant information from irrelevant. We now know that trauma compromises the brain area that communicates the physical embodied feeling of being alive. These changes explain why traumatized individuals become hyper vigilant to threat at the expense of spontaneously engaging in their day to day lives. They also help us understand why traumatized people so often keep repeating the same problems and have such trouble learning from experience. We now know that their behaviours are not the result of moral failings, or signs of lack of willpower or bad character. They are caused by actual changes in the brain.” Dr. Bessel Van Der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score, Introduction.
3 Ways of Recovery/Renegotiation
Top down - Talking, Reconnecting, and coming to understand their situation
Medicines/Technologies that change the way the body organizes information
Bottom Up - Allowing the body to have experiences that contradict the trauma
Learned Helplessness - https://ppc.sas.upenn.edu/sites/default/files/lhtheoryevidence.pdf
Traumatic Memory - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traumatic_memories
Broca’s Area - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broca's_area - https://dspace.library.uu.nl/bitstream/handle/1874/257906/Mphil%20Thesis.pdf?sequence=1
Broadman’s Area 19 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brodmann_area_19 - https://www.shortform.com/blog/ptsd-brain-imaging/
Lataralization of the Brain Frunction - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lateralization_of_brain_function
“Reliving a strong negative emotion causes significant changes in the brain areas that receive nerve signals from the muscles, gut and skin. Areas that are crucial for regulating basic bodily functions. The team’s brains scans showed that recalling an emotional event from the past causes us to actually re-experience the sensations felt during the original event” - Brain activation in sections below the limbic system which is typically linked to emotion.” Dr. Antonio Demasio, Science, 2000 - https://academic.oup.com/cercor/article/10/3/295/449599
“Perhaps the most important finding in our study was that remembering the trauma with all of its associated effects does not, as Broyer and Freud claimed back in 1893, necessarily resolve it. Our research did not support the idea that that language can substitute for action. Most of our study participants could tell a coherent story and also experience the pain associated with those stories, but they kept being haunted by unbearable images and physical sensations.” Dr. Bessel Van Der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score.
“I, the Lord, am your healer.” Exodus 15: 26 - https://bible.usccb.org/bible/exodus/15
