Unveiling the Brain’s Role in Modern Trauma Treatment

Unleashing Neuroscience’s Potential for Lasting Recovery

Antonieta Contreras, LCSW-R, CCTP-II, BCN, Author

Therapy and the Brain First Studies

It seems ironic that after Freud — a neurologist — dismissed his studies on brain functioning to replace them with the studies of the unconscious and behavior, he actually abandoned his studies on traumatization. It’s also ironic that the trauma therapy world is arriving at a point comparable to the point where he started: the understanding of the brain as the basis of understanding the mind.

Trauma therapy as it has evolved is leveraging on neuroscience. Having an understanding of how traumatization affects the brain helps to not only dismantle common misconceptions and to stop victim-blaming statements, but it also explains many of the common behaviors and experiences of survivors experiencing either excessively stressful events, or prolonged intensely dysregulating circumstances.

After a focus on treating the brain with drugs (medication), and the mind with words (talk therapy), today neuroscientists have broadened the scope by studying the molecular, cellular, developmental, structural, functional, evolutionary, computational, psychosocial, and medical aspects of the nervous system.

These advances are finally finding solutions in the same ways that the father of psychology was trying to find them almost a hundred years ago. Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920), a physician, physiologist, and philosopher, started his interest in human behavior as an assistant of Hermann Helmholtz, one of the principal founders of experimental physiology, when psychology was part of philosophy and biology. Helmholtz was interested in neurophysiology and was conducting studies on the nervous system and the speed of neural transmission. That influenced Wundt to use equipment of the physiology laboratory to conduct his studies, which helped him in founding the first formal laboratory for psychological research in 1879.

Many other scientists of the 19th century were studying brain functioning in ways that helped psychology methodology and treatment to develop. Unfortunately, electroshocks and lobotomies were…