What Causes Trauma?
At the root of a traumatic reaction is the 280-million-year-old heritage that we share with nearly every crawling creature on earth – a heritage that resides in the area of the nervous system known as the reptilian brain. Primitive responses that originate in this portion of the brain help the organism protect itself against circumstances that are potentially damaging or dangerous to survival. Animals in the wild routinely encounter such events, and routinely respond to them. Human beings, however, due to our more sophisticated brain structure, have an astounding proclivity for overriding these primitive responses. Thus, whereas animals are fairly quick to recover from potentially traumatic encounters, we are not. Whether or not a person will be traumatized depends largely on the individual’s ability to respond to a threatening event in a specific way, with specific results. When the reptilian brain perceives danger, it activates an extraordinary amount of energy – a phenomenon akin to
