Trauma Isn’t the Event. It’s What Your Brain Did With It.
- Bree Coulter
- Mar 5
- 4 min read
Updated: Jul 1
You’re sitting at work.
Maybe you’re on a deadline. Maybe you’ve just walked into the office, coffee in hand, brain still booting up.
Then someone nearby slams a drawer. A colleague raises their voice across the room. Laughter erupts, loud, unfiltered, and sharp.
Your shoulders tense. Your breath gets shallow. Your stomach turns just slightly, but enough for you to notice.
You try to shake it off.
But 10 minutes later, you’re agitated. Distracted. Quietly spiralling. And you don’t know why.
You Weren’t “Triggered by the Noise.”
You were triggered by what the noise reminded your body of.
Your brain didn’t say,
“That drawer was loud.”
It said,
“I remember this.”
Because when you grew up in a house where yelling was normal, where raised voices meant danger, chaos, or control, your nervous system encoded a message:
Loud = threat.
And it didn’t just log the yelling.
It logged everything.
The exact pitch of the voice
The heaviness in your chest
The sensation of shrinking inside yourself
The need to become smaller, quieter, safer
That encoding lives in your "Feely Brain", the emotional memory centre that stores trauma through sensation, not logic.
Trauma Isn’t Logical. It’s Sensory.
You might not even remember the worst of it.
But your body does.
And when a similar sound, tone, or volume shows up years later, at work, in a café, in your own home, your nervous system reacts as if it’s happening again.
Not because it’s dramatic.
Because it’s designed for survival.
It Doesn’t Care That You’re Safe Now.
The job of your nervous system isn’t to make you happy.
It’s to keep you alive.
And it does that by prioritising what’s familiar, not what’s functional.
If your system was wired in an environment where:
Communication meant conflict
Volume meant volatility
Calm was conditional
Silence meant danger
Then anything outside that wiring, like stability, quiet, or emotional neutrality, feels… wrong.
And anything that matches it?
Gets flagged as “normal”, even when it’s no longer helpful.
This Is How a Loop Forms
You experience a sound.
The Reticular Activating System (your brain’s bouncer) checks:
“Have we felt this before?”
If the answer is yes, it lets the data in.
Then your Feely Brain goes:
“That drawer slammed just like dad’s did.”
“That tone matched mum’s when she was about to blow.”
“We know this. Prepare for shutdown.”
Cue the emotional hijack:
Irritability. Withdrawal. Overthinking. Shutdown. Over-apologising. Panic.
Even though you know it’s just a workplace moment.
Even though no one’s actually unsafe.
That doesn’t matter to your nervous system.
It isn’t reacting to this moment.
It’s reacting to a thousand other moments it never got to finish processing.
Your Brain Isn’t Sabotaging You—It’s Keeping a Promise
It promised to protect you.
And protection, for a trauma-wired brain, means remembering everything that used to hurt.
Even if the hurt is over.
Even if your life is different now.
Even if you’ve “done the work.”
So What Can You Do?
If your brain can wire a slammed drawer to danger,
it can also learn to untangle that connection.
But it won’t happen through logic.
Or journaling.
Or reminding yourself, “It’s not a big deal.”
Because your Thinky Brain knows that.
But your Feely Brain doesn’t.
And until you go to the root—
Until you collapse the emotional charge inside the loop—
The reaction keeps running.
This Is the Work I Do With Clients Inside SHIFT.
We don’t manage the trigger.
We collapse the loop that keeps it active.
Here’s how:
We track the emotional reflex to its origin (without reliving it)
We release the charge where it began
We rewire the pattern so your nervous system doesn’t respond as if it’s still in the past
No spiralling.
No shame.
No “why am I like this?”
Just peace.
That actually feels safe.
Want to finally stop reacting to echoes of your past?
Book a free SHIFT Clarity Call and let’s find the loop that’s still running your life—so we can end it at the root.
You’re not broken. You’re just wired like it.
Let’s rewire that pattern for good.
In Case You’re New Here…
A quick guide to what I mean when I say…
Feely Brain = Your amygdala. The emotional alarm system that reacts before you can think. It hijacks logic when it senses a threat, even if that threat is just a tone, a look, or a drawer slamming.
Thinky Brain = Your prefrontal cortex. The calm, logical part of your brain that can assess reality, but often gets overridden when your trauma loop is active.
The Loop = Your subconscious trauma pattern. A repetitive emotional sequence where your brain, body, and behaviour react from old pain as if it’s still happening.
Performing for Permission = Self-abandonment masked as success. When you overachieve, over give, or over-function just to feel safe, seen, or loved.
Survival Self-Split = Identity fracture. The moment you stopped being your full self and became whatever you had to be to survive.
Nervous System Neutrality = True emotional regulation. Not staying calm at all costs, but feeling safe enough to respond, not react.
Loop Collapse = SHIFT in action. When the emotional charge behind a trauma pattern is fully dismantled, so it no longer hijacks your system.
