[libribook.com] Traumatic Scar Tissue Management 1st Edition

Clinical Consideration
The Task Force on International Trauma Training Guidelines note that
trauma training is to include the treatment of medically unexplained
somatic pain. In many settings, help-seeking involving medically
unexplained somatic complaints is very common. It is important to address
the linking of psychosocial services to medical services to contend with
somatization presentations (Weine et al. 2002).
Trauma produces physiological changes including a recalibration of the brain’s
alarm system, an increase in stress hormone activity and alterations in the system
that filters relevant information from irrelevant. With normal threat-response, as
soon as the threat is over, stress hormones dissipate and the body returns to
normal functioning (PSNS dominance). Stress hormone levels in traumatized
individuals, in contrast, take much longer to return to baseline and spike quickly
and disproportionately in response to even mild stressful stimuli. Additionally,
long after a traumatic experience is over, stress response may be reactivated at
the slightest hint of danger and mobilize disturbed brain circuits that trigger the
secretion of massive amounts of stress hormones (van der Kolk 2013).
Trauma can compromise the brain area that communicates the physical
embodied feeling of being alive, associated with interoception, explaining why
traumatized individuals can become hypervigilant to threat at the expense of
fully engaging in their present day lives. Not being fully alive in the present
keeps the individual more firmly imprisoned in the past.
New methods that utilize the brain’s own natural neuroplasticity can help
survivors feel fully alive in the present and move on with their lives (van der
Kolk 2014).