Why doesn't traditional "talk therapy" work for trauma?

 

Because trauma isn't a thinking problem, it's limbic.

Did you know that animals rarely get traumatized?

Animals don't have a neocortex like humans do. Let's say you're a cat being chased by a dog. The cat doesn't have to decide which tree is the best one to climb, the nearest tree is the best one. The dog eventually gives up, wanders off, and the cat goes about the business of being a cat again. No trauma.

Or you're an antelope being chased by a cheetah. The cheetah catches the antelope, which promptly falls down, stunned. The antelope is using the "play possum" approach but appears dead to the cheetah, who goes after its family for a good antelope feast. At a very primitive level of the antelope's brain, it senses that danger is no longer present, which causes the limbic system to arouse the antelope enough that it can wander off--still in a bit of a daze--but enough to be gone when the cheetah gets back with the wife and kids. The daze wears off, and--viola!--no trauma.

So what's the deal, you ask? How come people get traumatized and animals don't ?

Simple: it's the thinking part of our brain that gets us in trouble. It kicks in right away as what happened dawns on us and begins to "sink in," interrupting the natural resetting of the limbic system to its calm, pre-trauma state. And a calm state allows us to go about our business like animals do, unphased by what happened.

In regular "talk therapy," the therapist essentially uses their thinking brain part (the left prefrontal cortex) to talk to your thinking part of the brain (left prefrontal cortex), but all the talking in the world will never override the deeper, unconscious parts of your brain where the trauma is stored. You cannot "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" or simply "buck up," because your limbic system won't let you. Two of the biggest drawbacks of using "talk therapy" with trauma is that it does nothing to reset the limbic system and can actually overstimulate it, making the flashbacks, nightmares, intrusive memories, everything-out-of-whack worse. You just aren't going to feel safe again until your nervous system tells you that you are safe.

Funny how the cognitive behavioral researchers don't address that part.