Unfuck Your Brain: Using Science to Get Over Anxiety, Depression, Anger, Freak-outs, and Triggers

by Faith G. Harper

If you serve in the military or work in a high risk profession, you experience terrible things regularly and know that they can occur at any minute of any day. Trauma puts us in survival mode for that first thirty days. And traumas may be coming so fast and furious that we don’t have a moment to stop and breathe. So our brains shut down the trauma-processing experience so we can continue to survive. The brain is actually being a protective motherfucker when it says “We are still in the foxhole and can’t deal with this shit right now!” Sometimes it isn’t a matter of continued trauma, but the demands of our everyday lives that cause this shutdown. Sometimes we don’t have the time and space to heal from our grief experience. Because we have to keep getting up in the morning, getting to work, feeding the dog, finding our kid’s missing left shoe. There is only so much work our overtaxed brain can handle. Taking care of OURSELVES often becomes a luxury we can’t afford, rather than a necessity we can’t ignore. And sometimes our brains just have no mechanism to make sense of the trauma. No matter how much time and space we give ourselves for healing, we can’t find a place for the traumatic experience that gives it the meaning we need to move on. That’s the storytelling brain again, stuck in telling the same story that just doesn’t work. Whatever the reason, the brain can shut down the healing process at a moment’s notice and our “new normal” becomes a trauma-informed experience ra...