PTSD Counseling NYC: 3 Big Reasons Your Brain is Counting on You to Seek Trauma Treatment
Are you coping with childhood pain, relationship betrayal, the emotional fallout of the pandemic, or a natural disaster? It’s crucial to note that your brain is changed by your experience. If you’re managing Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), you may also find that reactivity complicates your life and relationships. Acknowledging that your brain can be easily provoked and triggered helps put internal and external overreactions in perspective.
Simply put, PTSD shifts how you perceive threats real and imagined. Recognizing the changes in your brain helps put the past in its place and experience the clarity you deserve. Without trauma treatment, you might easily compare your cognitive distress to others’ and compound your anxiety.
It’s important to know that part of your recovery is learning about your brain and trauma as well as seeking out the tools and support available.
PTSD Counseling NYC: 3 Reasons Your Post-traumatic Brain Needs You to Seek Trauma Treatment
In recent decades, research indicates that cognitive decline can result from unresolved trauma. Why? Trauma affects both your immune system and your nervous system.
Your brain identifies what you’ve been through as danger and overcommits to protecting you. Essentially, you lose your ability to differentiate between minor annoyances and life-threatening situations. You may be coping with the following PTSD symptoms:
- Chronic fear
- Fatigue
- Restlessness
- Social isolation
- Anxiety
- Insomnia
- Poor concentration
If you are prone to infection, inflammation, or metabolic disease, you aren’t alone. A persistent state of depression or stress isn’t unusual either. All of this combined can be overwhelming to your brain and cognitive ability. So, what’s happening in your brain?
1. Problems Persist in Your Prefrontal Cortex: Unresolved trauma trips up basic functioning
Trauma can significantly interfere with your brain’s ability to receive information and stay organized. Referred to as the prefrontal cortex, the region in your brain that regulates emotions and supports daily functioning is compromised by unprocessed trauma.
Decision-making and the ability to rein in emotion are reduced considerably as your body remains in a reactive, triggered state. Time and space can feel disoriented. Language and learning may feel disrupted. Fear and anxiety become the norm as the prefrontal cortex is overcome by more automatic and visceral reactions, located in an altogether different brain region: the amygdala.
2. Your Amygdala is Overworked: Unresolved trauma keeps you on alert, reactive, & afraid
With your prefrontal cortex hindered, the initial flight-or-flight response tied to the trauma experience can get stuck in your brain and body. That automatic reaction originates in the amygdala.
Normally, this tiny structure in your brain supports short-term memory processing, emotions, and survival instincts. The amygdala is a life-saver. It detects actual threats on an unconscious level and appropriately assigns the responses that will keep you safe.
However, when trauma isn’t resolved, your amygdala can go into overdrive, keeping you in an exhausting stuck state of reactivity and hypervigilance. It may feel impossible to mentally discern what is or isn’t a genuine threat.
3. Your Hippocampus is Impaired: Unresolved trauma makes memory less reliable
Trauma causes you to link to the emotional side of your brain quickly, creating a vivid, biased, or incomplete traumatic memory. When the amygdala tricks your brain into thinking you are under perpetual threat, a constant flow of stress hormones floods your brain. These chemicals are actually believed to shrink your hippocampus, the brain region where long-term memories are stored.
Your hippocampus, which reasons, learns, and processes experiences, then have less influence on memory. Assigning appropriate meaning to the past is compromised. Thus, you remember things less clearly or in vivid fragments.
This can lead to flashbacks, nightmares, and intrusive thoughts or feeling triggered by reminders of the traumatic event. As a result, these memory distortions can lead to negativity and confusion that greatly impact how you see yourself and the world.
An experienced therapist can help you navigate and resolve these changes in your brain. Your brain is able to heal with guidance and care.
PTSD Counseling NYC: Retrain Your Brain with Trauma Treatment
Trauma is a personal thing. The truth is, some people can endure a traumatic event and rebound. Some are affected in more prolonged and detrimental ways and need to seek trauma treatment. Neither group is better nor stronger, there is no moral judgment attached. Each experience is unique and deserves compassion and attention.
The trauma-induced changes in your brain don’t have to be permanent. With proper support, your brain can be retrained. The negative impact of trauma can be stemmed and reversed. When you seek trauma treatment with a skilled therapist, you can calm the fight-or-flight response, stem the flow of stress hormones, and function the way you want to.
The Relationship Suite
We’re a group of skilled therapists ready when you are. We have the experience to support trauma sufferers. Please read more about PTSD therapy and Eye Movement Desensitization Reprocessing (EMDR) therapy and contact us for support soon. You can feel better and live well.
To learn more about our Post Traumatic Stress Disorder Treatment services, click here.
If you’re struggling, call 917-273-8836 or Contact us for a complimentary consultation to learn more about counseling in NYC and how we can help you.
We are a group of skilled therapists specializing in individual and couples counseling. Since Covid, we have been working with couples via Online Counseling in New York, and New York City including Manhattan, Queens, Brooklyn, Bronx, Staten Island, Westchester, Long Island, Roselyn, Port Washington, Manhasset, South Hampton, East Hampton, and Montauk. To schedule a complimentary consultation, click HERE.
We also provide Virtual Counseling in New Jersey, Hoboken, Jersey City, Princeton, Chatham, Morris, Westfield, Union, Bergen County, Colts Neck, and Tenafly. Schedule a complimentary consultation by clicking HERE.
