- We have a lot of words
for unpleasant experiences: We can call it negative mood, we can call it stress,
we can call it trauma. All of these words have
something in common, and what they have in
common is they all refer to events that are really
metabolically expensive. Trauma: it's an experience
that is constructed like any other experience is constructed- that doesn't trivialize it. That just shows you the real power of predictions in the economy
of your everyday life. What's happening when
an adverse experience becomes traumatic: The brain is weighting that
experience very heavily in its future predictions. From a metabolic standpoint,
it's always better to predict and correct, than it is to react. The traumatic event is
re-experienced again and again and again, which only
strengthens those connections, and only makes those predictions
more likely in the future. And the reason why a brain would do this is to avoid missing a threat. The brain is building a model of the world as a threatening place, and it's constantly preparing
the body to deal with that over and over and over again. And then the brain continues
to make those predictions, continues to model that world,
and hasn't updated itself. This idea that trauma lives in your body or that your body somehow carries with it, the mark of trauma. It's based on this idea that
you have this animalistic part of a brain and that this
somehow leads to adversity, trauma, marking your body, and you feeling the consequences
of the trauma in your body- and then treatments are
designed to remove those marks from your body. And it turns out that
many of the treatments that I'm familiar with actually
do show really good evidence of working, but they don't work because you have a cockroach
brain or a lizard brain, and they don't work because
trauma is marking your body. and your body is the scorecard. Your experience of your
body is actually constructed and experienced in your brain. Your body isn't what needs to be healed. What needs to change is
your brain's predictions because those predictions are
what construct your experience of your body in the world, and you have to find a
way to break that cycle. You are not trapped in
traumatic predictions. It is possible to change with
a number of different methods. The kind of dominant treatments
for trauma like yoga, the use of psychedelics, and
sometimes, dance therapy, or something embodied, like theater- those are all really good ways
of altering your predictions. Partly what you're doing
is creating new experiences for yourself to flesh out and make more flexible
your brain's ability to predict differently in the future. You could describe the brain
as a scientist, you know, a scientist with a hypothesis- that's what a set of predictions are. It's a belief, a guess about what sensations are about to happen, and why they happen. That's where those emotions come from. And so like a good scientist, you could test and see which
hypothesis is the correct one. That is something that, when
you're recovering from trauma, it's really important to
do because the arousal that you might feel might
have something to do with your uncertainty about
which category is the right one. And the only way to figure that out is to get more information. Some people might be
concerned that what I'm saying is that trauma is in your
head, and I am saying trauma is in your head, but
everything is in your head. Every beautiful sunset
that you see, every hug that you feel, every
delicious drink that you have- everything is in your head. It is possible to recover from trauma. That doesn't mean that traumatic memories won't rear their ugly heads
at some time in the future but they don't have to dominate
your brain's predictions. And the fact that you have some control over how to manage that content is a gift.
