I didn't catch the speakers name, but heard her on Sirius radio say, "trauma is experienced in the right brain and stays there until you express it. The left brain categorizes our experiences and it needs to be expressed or it gets left on the right with no way out."
I had never heard trauma explained quite this way. I had looked at trauma being felt in the body, but I hadn't considered the brain, except to note that my category lady was filing things in a haphazard way. And actually, she was doing a fairly good job without the experiences noted of abuse.
When you connect the trauma and file them in correct categories, you then get a complete picture of reality.
As a child, my trauma was not allowed to be expressed or let out of the right brain...so there was a divide between what the left brain was saying and what the right brain was holding on to.
I believe that while the right brain is holding on to trauma, it leave little room for creative tasks, or space for love, peace or joy. The overall humming of trauma, the screaming fear muffles out the music of our souls.
When my niece spoke up, she opened a pathway to my left brain, allowing the trauma to escape my right brain. It started as a small trickle, but a waterfall of expressions flowed forth. In a short amount of time, my trauma which had been stuffed in my right brain for 40 years finally made connections with my left brain.
It is quite incredible how the two sides are designed to work together and when the right side holds back expressions how frozen you become or numb and unexpressive in all areas.
When Dr. Jill Bolte-Taylor spoke of the right and left brains, she wasn't speaking of childhood sexual abuse, so I failed to understand the meaning of what happens when traumatic emotions get lodged inside and have no way out.
Dr. Jill did say that the duties of the left brain is to weave the most plausible story with the least amount of information. What I hadn't considered is how a story is written minus expressed emotions.
It was shocking to be me as the first trickles of traumatic expression flowed forth, for it was very alarming in the velocity and strength, the years seemed to have added volume and force...or perhaps it was exactly as a 6 or 7 year old would have felt it at the time of the original event.
Incredibly horrific and wildly freeing at the same time. Like riding a wild horse yet fully in control. Experiencing traumatic emotions, riding their waves to freedom...expressing and releasing myself from the years of holding it all inside.
