Brianna Wiest - The Mountain Is You_ Transforming Self-Sabotage Into Self-Mastery (2020)

154 BRIANNA WIEST
RECOVERING FROM
EMOTIONAL TRAUMA
You might think trauma is in your head in the metaphorical
sense. It is actually in your body in the literal sense.
Trauma is what happens when something scares you and
you do not get over that fear. If you do not resolve or
“defeat” it, you get into, and remain in, a sustained state
of fight-or-flight, which is essentially the human panic
response for survival.
Trauma is the experience of disconnecting from a fundamental
feeling of safety. Unless you are able to reestablish
that connection, a particularly destructive bias distorts
your worldview: You become hypersensitive, which means
that you will ascribe intent, overthink, overreact, become
triggered by innocuous stimuli, personalize neutral situations,
and remain in a mental “combat mode.”
After experiencing trauma, your brain will rewire itself
temporarily to seek out the potential “threat” in anything,
which makes it very difficult to both move on from the
initial problem and then not to develop a victim complex.
After all, your brain is literally trying to show you every
imaginable way the world could be “out to get you.”
This is why exposure is so effective as a treatment for fear or
anxiety. By gradually reintroducing the stressor into someone’s
life—and showing them that they are able to handle