by Vanessa H. Roddenberry, Ph.D.
The effects of psychological trauma on your brain, body, and behavior are extensive—and too often misunderstood or completely overlooked. Developing a clear understanding of the mind-body impact of trauma enhances your ability to recognize symptoms that may be pointing to unresolved issues in your life.
You might not think of your experiences as trauma. You might just feel overwhelmed or tired in a way that rest just doesn’t seem to fix. Maybe you wonder why you can hold everything together at work, but fall apart when you’re alone. Perhaps you tell yourself that what happened wasn’t “bad enough” to count.
But trauma doesn’t ask for your permission to have an impact. It changes things; quietly, deeply, and sometimes invisibly.
The experience of trauma doesn’t need to be catastrophic to be impactful. Trauma changes how we think, how we feel, and how we relate—to ourselves, to others, and to the world. It rewires how you think, reshapes how your body responds to stress, and can make everyday life feel like something you have to survive, even when nothing around you seems obviously wrong.
Recognizing these signs matters, because your experiences continue to echo through your brain, your body, and your behavior—not just as memories, but as living patterns shaped by trauma. Unless we understand the full scope of how trauma shapes us, true recovery can feel elusive.
This blog explores how trauma rewires the brain, alters the body, and influences behavior—and why working with a doctoral-level psychologist with a deep understanding of the neurobiology of trauma makes all the difference.
Trauma and the Brain: Built for Survival
The brain protects you by design. When exposed to overwhelming stress or danger, especially over time, it adapts for survival—sometimes at the cost of your long-term wellbeing. Experiencing a traumatic event forces your brain to switch into survival mode—and sometimes, it keeps you there long after the danger has passed.
- Your amygdala, the part that detects threat, becomes overactive and hyper-responsive. This results in heightened vigilance and reactivity, meaning you might feel jumpy, anxious, or constantly on edge (Shin & Liberzon, 2010).
- Your hippocampus, which helps put memories of experiences into context and time, may shrink or become less active, making it harder to distinguish the past from the present (Bremner, 2006). This can lead to vivid flashbacks, patchy memories, or a sense that the past is still happening.
- Trauma can impair your prefrontal cortex—the part of your brain responsible for reasoning, decision-making, reflection, and emotion regulation—causing it to become overshadowed or go “offline” (Thomason & Marusak, 2017). As a result, you may struggle to think clearly when you’re upset—or even to recognize what you’re feeling.
These changes aren’t your fault; it’s neurobiology and adaptations. Your brain is doing what it was designed to do: protect you, but when those protective patterns stick around they can start to hurt more than they help.
Through evidence-based therapies for trauma, we can help retrain these patterns. The brain, even after the experience of a traumatic event, retains remarkable neuroplasticity—the ability to change to form new connections and restore healthier functioning
That’s where trauma-informed therapy comes in—not to undo your past, but to support your nervous system in building new, more flexible ways of responding to the present (Thomason & Marusak, 2017).
How Trauma Affects the Body
While trauma isn’t “stored” in the body in the way some popular books suggest, it does leave a physiological footprint. The nervous system doesn’t operate in isolation—it runs through every organ, every muscle, every breath.
If you’ve experienced trauma, you might notice:
- Chronic pain or tension that doesn’t seem to have a physical cause (McFarlane, 2010).
- Gastrointestinal distress and digestive issues, like nausea, bloating, or stomach upset due to the gut-brain axis’s sensitivity to stress (Mayer et al., 2014).
- Cardiovascular symptoms like a racing heart, dizziness, or shortness of breath (Pole, 2007).
- Sleep disturbances, including insomnia, nightmares, and poor sleep quality (Germain, 2013).
- A sense of heaviness or fatigue that’s hard to explain. In fact, prior trauma often contributes to the development of chronic fatigue. Clinicians may misdiagnose these symptoms if they don’t view them through a trauma-informed lens (Kempke et al., 2015).
You can also visit trusted resources like the National Center for PTSD or the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) – PTSD Resource Page to learn more about PTSD and associated brain-body symptoms.
In sum, this isn’t just “in your head”. Your pain and distress are real and they’re in your nervous system. They’re somatic echoes of a nervous system stuck in survival mode. Fortunately, therapy can help regulate these patterns through intentional, body-aware care over time.
Your body learned how to protect you, but it just didn’t get the signal that it’s safe now. These are not imagined symptoms; they’re real, measurable responses to a nervous system still primed to protect you. Thus, therapy that honors this complexity helps bring the body back into balance—not through quick fixes, but through steady nervous system regulation and trust-building.
Effective trauma therapy helps your body remember what safety feels like—through regulation skills, insight, and a pace that honors your readiness.
How Trauma Shapes Behavior
Trauma often shows up in the way we move through relationships, work, and even our own thoughts. Trauma doesn’t only show up in memories or sensations—it often appears in behavior. Many trauma responses are misunderstood as personality traits when they are, in fact, strategies for survival that may have originally been adaptive but cause you problems later on in life.
- You might shut down during conflict, feel paralyzed by decisions, or panicked when given feedback.
- You might overachieve because resting feels unsafe or you feel your worth is contingent on performance.
- You might avoid intimacy, or chase it in ways that leave you feeling unfulfilled or chaotic in your relationships.
- You might blame yourself for patterns that once kept you safe; reacting with anger or going numb when vulnerable.
In light of a trauma-informed lens, these behaviors are not flaws or irrational, but actually intelligent, understandable strategies that reflect the way your mind and body adapted to past environments that didn’t meet your needs. The problem is that what helped you survive then may be harming your capacity for connection, rest, or peace now.
In therapy for PTSD or trauma, we don’t shame these patterns—we help you understand them. That understanding creates room for choice, and healing begins when new choices become possible. Therefore, the goal of therapy isn’t to erase these parts of you, but to help you build insight and compassion around them so you can begin choosing fresh responses with more freedom and awareness.
Why Trauma-Specialized Care Matters
Not all therapy is trauma therapy and that distinction matters more than most people realize. Not all therapy is created equal—and not every therapist is equipped to address trauma effectively.
Trauma layers itself through your experiences. It weaves itself into your life, your identity, and your relationships. It’s not just about what happens—it’s about how you metabolize those events and how they shape the way you move through the world. Trauma is deeply individual. It intersects with your identity, history, relationships, and biology. Working through it requires more than insight or support—it requires precision, attunement, and expertise in evidence-based care.
At Breyta, trauma isn’t a niche we dabble in—it’s our core.
Trauma is not just about what happened. It’s about how you were changed by it, how you adapted, and how those adaptations now shape your life. Healing isn’t linear, and it’s not one-size-fits-all.
That’s why trauma-specialized care must go beyond checklists and surface-level support.
It must be relational, intentional, and evidence-based. Trauma treatment requires both clinical precision and relational attunement.
Specifically, at Breyta, our team of doctoral-level psychologists uses gold-standard, research-supported approaches that are specifically designed to target trauma’s effects:
- Cognitive Processing Therapy (CPT) to help you examine and shift painful trauma-related beliefs that keep you stuck (Resick et al., 2008).
- Prolonged Exposure (PE) to help you reduce avoidance and reclaim control over your memory and body (Foa et al., 2007).
- Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) to build skills for emotional regulation, distress tolerance, and assertiveness (Linehan, 1993).
- Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) to help you reconnect with your values, make room for difficult emotions, be present, and take committed steps toward the life you wants by building psychological flexibility (Hayes et al., 2006).
And yet, therapy is never just about the model, and no model works in isolation.
Healing the Brain-Body Connection with Safe Relationships
Trauma often arises in relational contexts so it makes sense that healing unfolds there, too. We believe that true healing happens in the context of relationship—not just the therapeutic method, but the therapeutic bond. We believe, as research consistently shows, that the therapeutic relationship is one of the strongest predictors of positive outcomes (Norcross & Lambert, 2019). That means healing must occur in the context of relational safety.
At Breyta, we are focused on your full self—not just a diagnosis, but your story, your nervous system, and your needs. Our work is anchored in science and delivered with heart. That’s why our work is deeply attuned, human, and relational. Subsequently, we bring clinical precision, but also presence. We’re not just trained in technique, as we notice what’s spoken and unspoken; listening beneath the words. Trauma therapists at Breyta work at your pace, going at a speed your nervous system allows, as we help rebuild the sense of safety that may have been missing for a long time.
We don’t rush your story, or force insight. We earn trust, and we build healing in the relationship—one moment of attunement at a time.
Healing from Trauma
If therapy hasn’t worked for you before, maybe it didn’t go deep enough…there’s still time.
If people tell you that you’re “too complex,” maybe you just weren’t truly understood…there’s still hope.
If you’ve spent years surviving, we’re here to help you start living…and there is a path forward.
Being Seen and Understood Is the Heart of Trauma Recovery
At Breyta, we meet you not as a set of symptoms, but as a whole person with history, wisdom, and possibility. Whether your trauma is named or unnamed, recent or distant—we’re here to help you navigate it with skill, care, and compassion. Then, as we work together to foster a felt sense of safety, we can be your guides who see your capacity for healing clearly, even when you can’t. Hopefully, the information imparted in this blog on the neurobiology of trauma has helped you crystalize your understanding of some of the major ways trauma impacts you and, subsequently, created a deeper appreciation for how conceptualizing your experience in this context is important both for you and your treating clinician.
To conclude, we hope you’re ready to start therapy with a caring trauma specialist today. Click here to see our team of highly trained doctoral-level psychologists in Raleigh, NC who are ready to support you today. Similarly, you can also feel free reach out with your questions or scheduling requests —we’ll respond quickly and with the care you deserve. Don’t struggle alone any longer. Contact us now for the help you deserve.
References
Bremner, J. D. (2006). Traumatic stress: Effects on the brain. Dialogues in Clinical Neuroscience, 8(4), 445–461.
Foa, E. B., Hembree, E. A., & Rothbaum, B. O. (2007). Prolonged Exposure Therapy for PTSD: Emotional Processing of Traumatic Experiences. Oxford University Press.
Germain, A. (2013). Sleep disturbances as the hallmark of PTSD: Where are we now? American Journal of Psychiatry, 170(4), 372–382. https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.ajp.2012.12040432
Hayes, S. C., Luoma, J. B., Bond, F. W., Masuda, A., & Lillis, J. (2006). Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: Model, processes and outcomes. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 44(1), 1–25.
Kempke, S., Luyten, P., De Coninck, S., Van Houdenhove, B., Mayes, L. C., & Claes, S. (2015). Effects of early childhood trauma on hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis function in patients with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. Psychoneuroendocrinology, 52, 14–21.
Linehan, M. M. (1993). Cognitive-behavioral treatment of borderline personality disorder. Guilford Press.
Mayer, E. A., Labus, J. S., Tillisch, K., Cole, S. W., & Baldi, P. (2014). Towards a systems view of IBS. Nature Reviews Gastroenterology & Hepatology, 12, 592–605.
McFarlane, A. C. (2010). The long-term costs of traumatic stress: Intertwining physical and mental health. British Journal of Psychiatry, 196(5), 362–364.
Norcross, J. C., & Lambert, M. J. (2019). Psychotherapy relationships that work III. Psychotherapy, 56(4), 423–432.
Pole, N. (2007). The psychophysiology of posttraumatic stress disorder: A meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 133(5), 725–746.
Resick, P. A., Monson, C. M., & Chard, K. M. (2008). Cognitive Processing Therapy: Veteran/military version. Department of Veterans’ Affairs.
Shin, L. M., & Liberzon, I. (2010). The neurocircuitry of fear, stress, and anxiety disorders. Neuropsychopharmacology, 35, 169–191.
Thomason, M. E., & Marusak, H. A. (2017). Toward understanding the impact of trauma on the early developing human brain. Neuroscience Letters, 682, 1–6.
