The core 4 Trauma Ingredients?
The Symptoms of Trauma
There are 4 main ingredients of trauma that will always be present to some degree in any traumatized human being:
- Hyper arousal
- Constriction
- Dissociation
- Freezing (immobility), associated with the feeling of helplessness.
Together these 4 form the core of the traumatic reaction. All other symptoms develop from these 4 if the energy mobilized to respond to an event is not discharged or integrated within a few weeks or months after the experience.
Hyper arousal is the nervous system’s response to threat, whether internal, external, real, or imagined. In the short term, the three other components; constriction, dissociation, and helplessness operate to protect the organism.
These natural functions protect us from the external threat that initiated the aroused response as well as from the internal threat that develops when the aroused energy is not used for active defense.
