In an Unspoken Voice: How the Body Releases Trauma and Restores Goodness

by Peter A. Levine

group of clients and compared two brain regions in each (measured with fMRI). The researchers found that the amygdala, the so-called fear or “smoke detector,” lit up with electrical activity; at the same time, a region in the left cerebral cortex, called Broca’s area, went dim. The latter is the primary language center—the part of the brain that takes what we are feeling and expresses it with words. That trauma is about wordless terror is also demonstrated in these brain scans. Frequently when traumatized people try to put their feelings into words—as when, for example, one is asked by the therapist to tell about his or her rape—they speak about it as though it had happened to someone else (see the story of Sharon in Chapter 8). Or clients try to speak of their horror, then become frustrated and flooded, incurring more shutdown in Broca’s area, and thus enter into a retraumatizing feedback loop of frustration, shutdown and dissociation. This language barrier in traumatized individuals makes it especially important to work with sensations—the only language that the reptilian brain speaks. Doing so both helps people to move out of shutdown and dissociation and diminishes a client’s frustration and flooding when working with traumatic material. The body must be doing something to keep the insula, the cingulate cortex, and Broca’s area online. Even though the capacity for engagement is inhibited by the sympathetic nervous system, it is not thoroughly squelched in the debilitat...