Why Living in Betrayal Trauma Feels like Living with a Lion

Your brain and body are miraculous! The human body is designed to keep us alive, safe, and comfortable. When our ancestors came in contact with something dangerous, say a lion that wanted to eat them, their bodies and brains learned to produce hormones, or messenger chemicals, to kick them into gear to keep them safe.

“Watch out! Get ready to run, or fight, or freeze!”

These messenger hormones are controlled by the sympathetic nervous system. The sympathetic nervous system is the “status quo” regulator and defense system in our body. It helps us keep our heart rate, pupil dilation, and other responses at a comfortable hum. When something threatening occurs, this system takes messages from our external senses like “I see a lion with big-sharp- snappy-teeth that probably wants to make me his dinner!” and tells the adrenal gland to pump out important

“fight-flight-freeze” hormones such as adrenalin, noradrenalin, and cortisol.

The activated sympathetic system increases:

• Blood pressure
  
• Heart rate
  
• Fuel availability
  
• Increased adrenalin and cortisol
  
• Oxygen circulation to vital organs
  
• Blood clotting
  
• Pupil size and peripheral vision (improves vision)
  

And decreases:

• Fuel storage (decreased insulin activity to store glucose)
• Digestion

All of these effects help our body to protect itself in the best way necessary. As you can tell, this system is important because it helps us get away from dangerous situations, such as the lion with big snappy teeth.

However, if the “lion with big-snappy- teeth” moves into our bedroom, we end up with a cumulative effect of these hormones, adrenalin and cortisol. And that can cause big problems.

Adrenalin is the same as epinephrine. If you’ve ever had an allergic reaction and had to get an epinephrine shot, you’ve been given a big dose of adrenalin. Adrenalin has a lot of jobs. Adrenalin aids in:

• Increasing heart rate
• Expanding air passages in the lungs
• Increasing blood pressure
• Moving blood to the muscles in the arms and legs
• Decreasing inflammation

As you can imagine, chronic (ongoing)-acute (intense) stress, resulting in a lot of Adrenalin surges, can have damaging effects on the body.

Going back to our example, if the lion moves into the house, our ancestor is going to have several adrenalin surges every day. Imagine our ancestor in her everyday life. She wakes up, looks across the bed, and there the lion is licking his lips. “Run away!” screams her body. Then she goes into the bathroom brushes her teeth minding her own business, when all of a sudden the lion’s head pops out from behind the shower curtain. “Grab the plunger and stab it in the eye!” Over the course of her life, our ancestor’s body will become hypersensitive to any kind of threat and those adrenalin surges will take its toll.

Pretty bleak right? Let’s move on to cortisol.

Cortisol is a steroid and is released in abundance during periods of chronic stress. It is cortisol’s job to aid in the metabolic processes. It also influences similar body systems that adrenalin does. Cortisol influences:

• Blood sugar levels
  
• Acts as an anti-inflammatory
  
• Influences memory formation
  
• Controls salt and water balance
  
• Influences blood pressure
  

Chronically high levels of cortisol due to stress can lead to a whole host of problems as well. Some include:

• Weight gain (primarily in the abdomen) • High blood pressure
  
• Skin Changes (Eczema)
  
• Muscle weakness
• Mood swings including anxiety and depression
• Fatigue
• Problems with short term memory formation

Imagine that every day you feel the kind of stress and exhaustion that our ancestor felt living in a house with a hungry lion. Your cortisol levels are probably going to be very high. Over time, you might start to notice some unwanted weight gain, but you think, “well it’s the holiday season and I have been giving in to a lot of sweets.” Then you notice that you’re exhausted all the time, you have difficulty sleeping, and you feel weak. You may feel emotionally out of control, high highs and low lows, you feel constantly on edge, and sometimes in deep despair. You also notice that you tend to lose things and you can’t remember easy things, like simple words or people’s names. The problem with chronic and chronic- acute stress is we often grow so accustomed to all of these feelings that we begin to ignore or even justify away these very uncomfortable symptoms of high stress.

Now imagine that this hungry lion is actually your husband. You aren’t

quite sure if he’s going to strike out at you and hurt you with his words. You’re not sure if he’ll withdrawal into his den just at the moment when you need his help the most. And you aren’t quite sure if he’s going to be there when you open up to him. You may not even know if he’ll stay in the marriage, or if he’ll betray you again.

On top of it all, a part of you might really love this “lion” or at least a part of you did once, and you want him to come closer to you and help ease this stress. It is possible that the lion is gone, and now you’re left feeling on edge all the time. Either way, this probably feels extremely confusing, painful, and STRESSFUL.

It is likely, considering what you’ve been through, that you have elevated levels of cortisol and adrenaline. The long-term influence of these hormones can be as severe, some of which you may have already experienced or are currently experiencing.

• Heart attack
• Stroke
• Obesity
• Diabetes
• Generalized Anxiety
• Major Depression and possibly thoughts of suicide

Stressing About Stress

“Great so now I get to stress about my stress??!!” This is often what people ask me once we’ve talked about the harmful effects of long term stress. As you can imagine, stressing about stress is not helpful.

Instead, consider DE-STRESSING. Involve yourself in techniques daily to lower your heart rate and purposefully aid your sympathetic system in bringing your body back to its usual hum. It may have been years since the last time you felt truly calm, so it will take practice. Here are a few things that have been found to decrease stress.