What Actually Is Trauma? Do you really know?
More Than Just an Event
Trauma is a word that gets thrown around a lot. But few people understand what it actually means. It isn’t just about major life-threatening events like war, abuse, or accidents. Trauma can come from emotional neglect, chronic stress, physical injury or even subtle experiences that overwhelm your nervous system. This article breaks down what trauma is, scientifically, neurologically, and emotionally.
Trauma Is a Response, Not the Event
One of the most important distinctions in trauma research, highlighted by experts like Dr. Gabor Maté, is that trauma isn’t what happened to you. It’s what happened inside you as a result of what happened. It’s the lasting imprint on your nervous system, not the event itself.
Think of trauma like a fire alarm that got stuck in the "on" position. It was meant to protect you, but now it won’t shut off.
The Autonomic Nervous System — Your Body’s Alarm
The autonomic nervous system (ANS) controls automatic functions like heart rate, digestion, immune response, and stress regulation. It operates mostly below the level of conscious control and has two main branches:
Sympathetic Nervous System (SNS): Responsible for the “fight or flight” response, it prepares the body to respond to danger by increasing heart rate, dilating pupils, and redirecting blood flow to muscles.
Parasympathetic Nervous System (PNS): Known as the “rest and digest” system, it supports relaxation, digestion, and recovery. It helps restore balance after stress.
These two systems are meant to work in harmony, creating a dynamic balance between activation and recovery. But when trauma occurs, especially if the threat is prolonged or unresolved, the nervous system can become dysregulated. The sympathetic system stays activated or the parasympathetic system shuts things down too strongly, leaving someone stuck in high alert, hypervigilance, numbness, or collapse.
In essence, trauma hijacks your body's internal alarm system, making it ring long after the danger is gone. Your system remains primed for threat, even in moments of safety.
Brain Structures Involved in Trauma
Amygdala: The brain’s fear centre, always scanning for danger
Hippocampus: Acts like the brain’s hard drive, storing both memories and the context in which they occurred. It helps you remember not just what happened, but when and where, linking experience to meaning. In trauma, the hippocampus often becomes impaired due to chronic cortisol exposure, which can disrupt memory formation and lead to fragmented or distorted recollections of traumatic events.
Prefrontal Cortex: The rational, decision-making part that evaluates risk
Trauma increases amygdala activity and decreases prefrontal cortex function, meaning people stay in reactive, emotional states and struggle to think clearly or feel safe.
The Vagus Nerve — Your Inner Calm Switch
The vagus nerve is the longest cranial nerve in the body, connecting the brainstem to nearly every major organ, including the heart, lungs, and gut. It plays a central role in regulating the parasympathetic nervous system, also known as the "rest and digest" system.
When functioning optimally, the vagus nerve slows the heart rate, promotes digestion, regulates inflammation, and helps the body return to a state of calm after stress. This capacity is known as vagal tone, a key indicator of nervous system health.
In trauma, vagal tone is often low, which means the body has a harder time returning to baseline after a stress response. You might remain on edge, feel constantly overwhelmed, or swing between anxiety and shutdown. This dysregulation can lead to both physical symptoms (digestive issues, chronic fatigue, autoimmune flare-ups) and emotional symptoms (anxiety, irritability, numbness).
Improving vagal tone is now recognised as a critical part of trauma recovery. Practices like slow nasal breathing, humming, cold exposure, chanting, and breathwork all stimulate the vagus nerve, helping to bring the body back into balance. In IMD Breathwork, both intense connected breathing and slower parasympathetic techniques are designed to engage the vagus nerve, helping people rewire their stress responses and finally feel safe again.
Why Trauma Lowers Vagal Tone
Vagal tone refers to the strength and responsiveness of the vagus nerve, which governs your ability to return to a calm, balanced state after stress. But when someone experiences trauma, especially chronic or unresolved trauma, the nervous system becomes hypervigilant, stuck in a loop of threat detection.
This prolonged activation of the sympathetic nervous system (your stress response) reduces the activity of the parasympathetic branch. Over time, this imbalance weakens the signalling pathways of the vagus nerve, leading to low vagal tone.
Low vagal tone makes it harder for the body to:
Down-regulate from stress
Shift into rest, digestion, and repair
Maintain stable heart rate and emotional regulation
This is why people with chronic trauma often experience symptoms like gut issues, sleep problems, anxiety, and emotional volatility — the body is still acting like it’s under threat.
Cortisol and Chronic Stress: Trauma’s Biochemical Imprint
When we experience trauma, the body doesn’t just respond emotionally or neurologically, it also mounts a chemical response. At the heart of this reaction is cortisol, the body’s primary stress hormone.
In acute situations, cortisol is helpful. It gives you energy, sharpens your senses, and helps you survive. But trauma, especially unresolved or chronic trauma, can lock the body into a prolonged state of stress, causing cortisol to remain elevated far beyond what’s healthy.
High cortisol over time leads to:
Chronic inflammation, weakening the immune system
Hormonal disruption, including thyroid, testosterone, and oestrogen imbalances
Blood sugar spikes and crashes, contributing to fatigue and cravings
Sleep disturbances, especially insomnia and light sleep
Shrinkage of the hippocampus, the part of the brain that stores memory and helps regulate emotion
Impaired digestion, due to constant sympathetic nervous system activation
This long-term cortisol exposure also affects the connective tissues, including muscles and fascia. When the stress response is repeatedly triggered without resolution, the biochemical changes — increased cortisol, adrenaline, and norepinephrine — can cause tissues to remain in a state of heightened tension. The body literally braces itself.
When the system lacks a proper resolution or outlet (as in freeze responses), this chronic tension and high cortisol environment can embed trauma patterns directly into the tissues. Over time, these imprints can manifest as chronic pain, tight shoulders, fatigue, jaw clenching, or backaches, all without a clear physical injury.
In other words, trauma leaves fingerprints across your entire system — not just your thoughts, but your hormones, immune response, metabolism, connective tissue, and brain function.
This is why so many people living with trauma feel tired but wired, foggy, anxious, or physically unwell. Their stress response never truly switches off.
The Body Keeps the Score — Coined by Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
This phrase highlights how trauma lives in the body. When your body is flooded with survival energy, rage, fear, or the urge to run or scream, and you can’t act on it, that energy doesn’t just vanish. It gets trapped in your tissues, muscles, and nervous system.
During trauma, stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline surge, but when the response is blocked or incomplete, those chemicals, along with heightened neural signals, can become embedded in the body’s systems. Over time, this can lead to a condition known as somatic imprinting, where the body holds onto these stress signals as if the threat is still present.
These trapped patterns can manifest as chronic pain, persistent muscle tension, ongoing fatigue, or anxiety that seems to arise without a clear cause. This is why trauma isn’t just psychological, it’s physical. The body remembers what the mind might forget, storing the unresolved experience at a cellular and neurological level.
Because the nervous system is wired to store experiences for survival. Unless that energy is safely discharged or expressed, it remains embedded, waiting for a chance to complete the cycle it never could.
Common Trauma Responses Beyond fight or flight, trauma can also cause:
Freeze: Feeling numb or immobilised
Fawn: People-pleasing to stay safe
Dissociation: Detaching from reality or emotions
These responses are the nervous system’s attempt to survive overwhelming experiences.
Healing from Trauma: Completing the Cycle
Healing trauma isn’t just about talking about it. It’s about helping the body complete the survival response it never could. This is where bottom-up approaches like breathwork, movement, and somatic therapy come in. These techniques work directly with the body’s sensory and motor systems, rather than relying on cognitive processing alone.
When trauma occurs, the body generates an intense physiological charge — muscle tension, racing heart, rapid breath — all of which were meant to help you fight, flee, or freeze. If these responses are blocked or incomplete, the body retains the charge.
Somatic methods help the nervous system discharge this trapped energy, restoring balance. Conscious Connected Breathing (CCB), for instance, stimulates the vagus nerve and promotes a state of safe arousal, allowing the body to access, express, and release the unprocessed energy that has been stored. With repetition, the brain and body begin to rewire, recognising that the threat has passed and it is safe to complete the cycle and return to calm.
Techniques like CCB help bypass the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for rational thought and executive function, which tends to inhibit emotional expression. By temporarily reducing prefrontal activity, CCB allows access to the limbic system, where emotional memories and trauma responses are stored.
This bypassing effect helps release stored tension and unprocessed emotions, not just psychologically but physiologically, by engaging the autonomic nervous system and allowing the body to express what was previously suppressed. In doing so, the nervous system gets the opportunity to complete the protective responses that were frozen during trauma, leading to true resolution and integration.
Resetting the Alarm
Your nervous system is like a smoke alarm. It should alert you when there’s real danger, then quiet down. But if it keeps sounding, even without smoke, you’re not broken, you’re just stuck in protection mode. Breathwork and other somatic tools help reset the system.
Trauma Isn’t Just in Your Head, It’s in Your System
Understanding trauma as a nervous system response rather than a mental failing removes shame and empowers healing. Whether you experienced a big-T or small-t trauma, your body adapted the best way it could.
Trauma can stem from anything that overwhelmed your system — yes, even a physical injury or emotional neglect. And while those adaptations may have protected you at the time, they can eventually start to hold you back.
Some might say, "That trauma made me who I am today," and that can be true. But at some point, those same protective mechanisms can become limitations. With the right tools, you can help your body realise it’s finally safe to let go.
Why I Created IMD Breathwork
Obviously, by now, you know I’m the creator of IMD Breathwork. And the truth is, I didn’t create it to be trendy or fill with gimmicks and fluff. I created it because I needed it. I’ve spent years learning, training, and experiencing different healing modalities, but nothing shifted me quite like conscious connected breathing.
So I built IMD Breathwork, combining ancient breathing techniques with modern science. Every element in the session is there for a reason. The sound, the pacing, the structure, even the silence. It’s all been designed to help reset the nervous system, release stored trauma, and bring you back to a state of safety and power.
The science you’ve just read about, vagal tone, the limbic system, trapped survival energy, neuroplasticity, it’s all woven into the fabric of each session.
You’re not broken. You don’t need to be fixed. You just need the right tools to help your body and nervous system feel safe enough to let go. That’s what IMD Breathwork was built to do. And I hope, wherever you are on your journey, it can support you too.