The neuroscience of trauma | Lisa Feldman Barrett

What sets trauma apart from regular bad experiences? A leading neuroscientist explains.

Aided by best-selling psychology books of the last decade, such as Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps The Score, discussions about trauma and awareness of how to deal with it have entered popular public discourse. From police departments to school classrooms, trauma-informed approaches have taken center stage.

But leading neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett challenges the popular notion that trauma resides solely in the body. She asserts that trauma is rooted in the brain's predictions and the construction of our experiences: When an adverse experience becomes traumatic, the brain heavily weighs and anticipates that experience in its future predictions. This ongoing prediction and re-experiencing of the traumatic event strengthens the neural connections associated with it, making the predictions more likely to occur in the future.

Rather than focusing on the body as the site of healing, she suggests that changing the brain's models of prediction is what needs to be addressed to break free from the cycle of trauma. By understanding the role of predictions and the brain's plasticity, Feldman Barrett offers hope for transforming traumatic experiences and finding new, lasting paths to healing.

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[was_a]

As someone suffering a lot, I this video didn't give me any new information or help me get closer to recovery. It's just a new way to say things I already know.

[leifrasmussench]

I have actually used this to help people get over trauma ... very effectively. From complete anxiety attacks to calmly being able to deal with situations. Beautiful to observe the happiness in people's eyes when the are suddenly FREE to live their lives again

[elynselu]

As a trauma therapist, I feel the need to flesh out your concept of "the body keeps the score". We're beyond the Cartesian model that separates mind and body, so let's start there. In trauma therapy we work with the body because that is where sensation and emotion are felt. When a patient brings awareness to the sensations of fight/flight/freeze/fawn they experience in their body, and build capacity and resilience to feel those sensations, then often, the body naturally releases or moves through the trauma and it becomes resolved in their system. The experience of being frozen in a particular time dissolves and the bad thing that happened becomes a memory rather than a living nightmare. We don't separate mind or brain from sensation in the body as you imply in your talk. Yes, the brain is in control of all of that. However, talk therapy often doesn't work in resolving trauma. It is more effective to start with sensation in the body and let the brain catch up and make meaning.

[ericenvironmentalist]

I appreciate hearing from a psychologist who has access to research on these issues. And one thing I did gain from this talk is the idea that the brain has a prediction function that needs to be understood. If we see things as threats based on past experiences we lose our ability to go into those new events with hope for a different outcome. I agree that the body is our portal to access this protective function. I like that she talks about yoga or other bodily treatment modalities as giving ourselves new experiences that counter and can en masse begin to override the traumatic event. I like the triune brain model which this speaker seems to deny here and in another video. Whether we actually evolved that way or not the idea that we can recognize and then detach from our emotions long enough to allow new experiences is all that matters.

[calmy]

i think the best way to heal from trauma is this, going back to the trauma and all those "bad" past memories and trying to feel the emotions you may were not allowed to feel like crying and grieving, and feel them now, i think this can help make traumas more like a normal memories or a film youve watched.

[kpunkt.klaviermusik]

"Everything is in your head"

So true!

[eduuco]

After much research, it has become evident that not everything is "in your head", and know that many memories are "saved" in the body. Where an occurrence is experienced and triggered an emotional state, this can stay in the "body" - the reason I am making this statement, is not merely from research and experiments, but one that I had personally, working with a patient with MSA, who's short-term memory was disabled, however, one day I surprised him with bringing a chocolate cake, which he loved. A week later, I asked him about it, and he did remember it vividly. I was blown away, since he would not have remembered what had happened 30 min ago. So there is more to the body, energy and emotions, and cannot all be in the brain. In a study in the 90's researches also found cells similar to Neurons in the heart, about 40K of them, and called them Sensory Neurites, where it can mean that our heart can "think" too - where the information seems to be more "felt" than thought or analyzed/thought the brain. There is still much to uncover about the human body, as well as the brain.

[gachzedek]

This has made more sense than all the psychologist that ever existed on the internet.

[lsrloip]

The way I read The Body Keeps the Score is that it provides a way for dealing with the physiological/mental chaos of trauma that makes effective, functional predictions possible. Barrett's ideas for dealing with trauma as presented here largely amount to CBT, ACT, and exposure therapy, which have been empirically demonstrated to be ineffective methods for trauma in most cases.

Perhaps a good way to think about trauma, using Barrett's terminology, is that it causes the brain to make predictions that severely inhibit the free development of the _new_ predictions that could be used to eliminate trauma in the first place. Trauma walls off experience and closes down new possibilities because the world, in the most important ways, is a dangerous place, so you cling to the predictions that have worked so well in the past to help you survive, particularly as a child, with all the force of terror and fear of death.

What I think _The Body Keeps the Score_ does, in effect, is find ways to route around the old predictions, in a sense, so that new ones can finally be created. That the author of _The Body Keeps the Score_ conceptualizes trauma as imprinted on the body might have enabled us to think about trauma in novel ways that actually lead to effective treatments, even if there's a possibility that that conceptualization isn't totally accurate. One trippy thing about conceptualizing all of human experience as predictive constructs is that it doesn't really matter if the predictions strictly adhere to reality. It only matters that they get us to something that works.

[IanDoesMagic]

While I am guessing that the underlying work here is really valuable and will help move trauma work forward, this video itself is almost recklessly shallow. Not sure anyone is confused that the pathways to healing trauma occur in the brain, it's just that recognizing and dealing with the physical symptoms helps a lot of people.

[spennny]

I brought both books after watching this.... brilliant

[adhdself-love]

Why do so many people not understand this info? It's plain and clear and sensical.

[Discoursivist]

It is controversial to say this, but: I think it is actually effective to downplay the severity of so-called traumatic events. This is the approach that is consistent with Lisa's theory of constructed emotion. Right now, therapists misguidedly try to emphasize all the worst aspects of a trauma-labeled event in order to "process" the event and make you less "numb" to it. But the goal of processing trauma should be to de-emphasize the importance of the event, not wire your brain into thinking that it controls your life.

[davegball]

This is fascinating. Creating new experiences for the brain. Seems simple but at the same time very powerful.

[humanyoda]

Once trauma has been healed, unpleasant emotions connected to it don't reemerge. I.e., there's nothing to manage. The concept of memory reconsolidation and knowing how it's used in therapy can help you understand that.

[JustWojtek]

I hope the predictive model of the brain eventually gets the attention it deserves and finds a way into common sense knowledge, because debating the triune brain in the common sphere is - metabolically speaking - too expensive at this point.

[tez]

I like LFB but here she's wandered too far into dualistic thinking and severely underestimates the degree to which the brain 'and' body are one system. No one is saying that trauma "resides solely in the body." And no, everything isn't in your head. That's a reductionist-dualist interpretation of phenomena that are part of a larger system.

[nicolaslg]

Yoga is what did it for me, especially pranayama breathwork.

[ButtercupBusyBee]

“Your body doesn’t keep the score..” shots fired 😅

[juliagoolia]

I really love this advice and insight. Thank you for sharing