The Story of a Shotgun
I am a substance abuse counselor. I work with a special population of individuals affected by trauma. The disease of addiction begins with a choice, but that choice is almost always influenced and fed by the existing trauma that lives inside a body. In the most basic sense, I work with individuals who have long-standing, deeply rooted, previously experienced trauma.
When I’m teaching clients in group therapy about trauma, one of the most important aspects I focus on from the beginning is the way the brain changes when a human experiences trauma. Understanding what happens in your physical body can help you dictate how to fix your emotional being. When you understand how the brain changes when trauma occurs, you can be intentional in how you go about fixing it.
Trauma can be second-hand, generational trauma that changes the DNA (also known as epigenetics), or it can be first-hand trauma, a moment in time where the brain experiences an overload of chemicals. We all experience trauma, and every person deals with it differently. Some of us have the resources to seek out counseling or therapy if the trauma warrants excess help, and some of us only have the ability to deal with it how we were taught, or how we feel is best. There are so many facets to this, and it takes a great understanding of how the brain works to conceptualize how trauma affects the brain. But, in the most basic sense, when a person experiences trauma, a new pathway in the brain is created. This is called imprinting. The chemicals released during an episode of extreme stress are heavy on the brain, and they leave a stamp. Our brains cannot think clearly, and the systems that govern become overwhelmed at dealing with all the excess chemicals. Think of the brain as a city; there are a lot of roads, pathways, trails (all of these the squiggly gray matter and the makings of it), a government we call the Central Nervous System that dictates how it all functions, and the governing bodies inside. Inside of this are other systems, which release neurotransmitters called dopamine, serotonin, adrenaline, etc.. so when the governing body stops working properly as a result of the heaviness of all these chemicals, we get an imprint from the weight; thus, resulting in what’s called a “trauma response”.
When you have this happen over and over and over again, or what’s called repeated trauma, the imprints on your brain start to change the way things function. Your governing bodies start to over or under produce, you begin to get jumpy in your own skin, and you often exhibit symptoms of PTSD. Nightmares, excess stress, anxiety, nightmares, and more.
Last Saturday, in the middle of the night, while police searched my home for a shotgun slug they eventually found underneath my kitchen table, this is what I was thinking about.
Last Saturday, in the middle of the night, someone drove to my house and blew a shotgun into my front living room window. Intentional, hurtful, horrifying.
I woke up to the blast of the gun just fast enough to hear the glass shatter and the bullet rip through three other walls, into my living room wall, through wall decor and picture frames, the shrapnel ripping apart the lampshades and curtains that stood in the way. There was only one bullet, but the damage looked like there was a spray of bullets that went through our home.
I slowly got up out of bed, with truly a peace that surpasses understanding, and I walked into the living room. I heard the truck drive away and I stood in the dark, staring out the window at the gunpowder covered mess and an enormous hole in my living room window.
I have researched and read enough about trauma to understand what has been happening to my body in the days that have followed this traumatic event. I have been jumpy, have been having extremely strange and stressful dreams, and my intrusive thoughts about the bullet ripping through my children or my husband instead of the walls have gotten the best of me.
While I was at work on Thursday, the building where my office resides is under construction. An unsuspecting person dropped a large piece of glass and my brain seemingly stopped all functioning and my body instinctively jumped, my eyes teared up, my heart began to beat faster.
Friday night while I was laying on the couch with my children, just under where the bullet came through, I was thinking through a million and one scenarios where the person came back, shot again, and hit one of my children. What would I do if I lost my child to a random act of violence? How would we ever comprehend what happened enough to move forward? Just then, as my intrusive, anxiety-provoked thoughts began to supersede my concept of reality, my son began to have a horrible nose bleed. My thoughts were still in trauma-mode, as we sat there on the couch and his face began to gush blood, my heart nearly stopped. He gets these nosebleeds enough for them to be a common occurrence in our house, but with the blood and the anxiety, I nearly fainted. As I stood there holding his head with a paper towel soaking up the blood from his tiny little button nose, I began to think through what this trauma has caused to happen to my body.
Can you imagine a scenario where you live like this all the time? I explained to my husband a few days ago that I felt a strong pull to write about what happened to us, and mostly just to relate it back to how I can help others better understand trauma. If we consider what people who go through trauma really think, feel, and experience, can we even blame them for trying to quiet their pain? For me, I understand it.
While the police were here on Saturday, I held my dog in my lap and watched them shine flashlights through the window and search around the house. I began to think of clients I’ve had in the past who this was a common event for. A shooting, a death, a person who overdosed next door, a child who died as a result of a rogue bullet. Women who have been molested and children who grow up to shoot heroin because they were been raped and drugged under the watch of their parents. These are people I know, and these are people who’s trauma I experience second-hand with them when they relay it to me in counseling. Try to imagine it, truly- think of the scariest thing you’ve ever experienced, and how your body felt, how your brain and your emotions changed from it, and think of that ten fold. That’s what happens to people all over the world, every day. They experience trauma they can’t prevent and they can’t stop from happening, all while being held back by society and never being able to move forward. Never being able to leave the cycle behind them. Not because they don’t want to, certainly, but because they never have the means or the resources to do so.
Can we even blame them? Surely, if you have a heart and a brain that function well, you can’t. You just can’t. If you work on exercising your empathy muscles, feeling for people who experience these changes, perhaps it causes you to feel more empathy for others.
Perhaps, in fact, when we understand what happens to the brain in episodes of trauma, and repeated trauma after that, we can begin to understand why some people act the way they do. Or why people make the choices they do, regardless of how harmful they may seem. Why some people choose a more dangerous path, because danger is actually the safer option when it’s all you’ve ever know. Why, overall, human suffering is not looked at more deeply but passed over as just a part of life. Sure, it is a part of life, and for many, it is a deeply painful road to walk all the time.
For me, I must learn to embrace and let go. I must squeeze these emotions and feel them hard, and let them go to be able to fully work my empathy. With the working of my empathy comes better understanding of the human condition, of pain, of the deep need we have to care for one another. With the working of my empathy comes a deeper understanding of connection, of the power of not being alone, of the way our brains begin to heal when we find a spark between ourselves and another person who is also walking the road we are on. Only there, between the feelings and the empathy and the compassion, can we begin to lead each other to a different road, one with less pain, and more belonging. We can take the hand of another and say, “I know how this feels, let me help you find the way out”, so that the woods don’t seem so deep and dense. When we take our pain and transform it to empathy, the lights begin to flicker and we can start to see our way out. If I wanted to get deeply scientific, I could say we’re working to reverse the imprints of trauma on our brain and create plasticity in our brain functioning. But if I wanted to say it in a human way, I’d say we’re living out the Calling on our lives.
