Creating Powerful Movement...
Change Your Brain, Change Your Life - at The Root Of It.
understanding the roots of neuroscience & neuroplasticity
The Brain, Trauma, Emotions, Energy, Behaviour and the Mind-Body-Spirit Connection
The human brain develops from infancy, through childhood and adolescence into adulthood in layers, beginning with the most basic survival centers and building upward toward higher-level thinking and reflection. The lower brain regions are designed to keep us safe in moments of danger, while the upper regions help us to process, regulate, and reflect on our experiences.
- Survival Brain (Reptilian Brain):
The brainstem and lower regions are responsible for automatic survival responses. When we sense danger, this part of the brain triggers stress reactions — a racing heart, shallow breathing, muscle tension, or a startle response. These reactions happen instantly, without conscious thought, because their purpose is to protect us.
- Emotional Brain (Limbic System):
The middle layer of the brain houses the limbic system, which governs memory and emotion. Two key players here are:
- The amygdala, which acts like the brain’s alarm system. It scans for threats and signals the body to release stress hormones, creating the full-body sensations of fear or anxiety.
- The hippocampus, which organizes memories and places them in context. It helps us know when and where something happened, weaving details together into a coherent story.
- The amygdala, which acts like the brain’s alarm system. It scans for threats and signals the body to release stress hormones, creating the full-body sensations of fear or anxiety.
- Thinking Brain (Prefrontal Cortex):
The newest and most advanced part of the brain allows for reflection, planning, and self-awareness. When this part is active, we can calm ourselves, make sense of what we feel, and choose how to respond.
Implicit and Explicit Memory
We hold two different kinds of memory:
- Implicit memories are body-based. They’re stored as sensations, movements, or emotions, often without words. For example, you might suddenly feel panic, nausea, or numbness without knowing why — a past trauma is being reactivated in the nervous system.
- Explicit memories are conscious, fact-based memories that include details like time, place, and sequence of events. These rely on the hippocampus and the brain’s language centers to put experiences into words and order.
When trauma occurs, the balance between these memory systems can be disrupted. The body may hold powerful sensory fragments (like smells, images, or sounds), while the ability to recall the full story remains incomplete.
How Trauma Affects the Brain & Body
During overwhelming or threatening experiences:
- The “fast track” survival circuit takes over, so we react before we think. This helps us escape danger but limits our ability to reflect in the moment.
- High levels of stress hormones can disrupt the hippocampus, making it harder to piece together details or timelines of events.
- The amygdala can become overactive, storing vivid fragments of sensation that may later surface as flashbacks or triggers.
- Broca’s area, the brain’s language center, may temporarily shut down, making it difficult to talk about what happened.
- Ongoing trauma can impair the prefrontal cortex, limiting the brain’s capacity to regulate emotions and stress responses.
Healing Is Possible!
The good news is that somatic mind-body-spirit work can change what your cells have learned and remember from the past! The brain is capable of change and repair and can create new healthy neuropathways to change our body, our emotions, our energy and our behaviour! Thanks to neuroplasticity — the brain’s ability to form new connections — healing and improvements can happen surprisingly quick.
You do not need to remember every detail of a traumatic event or even go back through it in order to heal it. What matters most is creating safety in the present moment with a skilled, clinician who understands the neuroscience, your body's potential organic healing and that only YOU are the expert of your mind-body-spirit connection. The answers lie within you and the clinician's job is to guide you to uncover, re-access and remember who you strive to be!
Most importantly, healing happens in relationship. Finding a therapist who works to deconstruct and actively remove power dynamics in the relationship where you can feel safe and trust is the most important part of your healing first step. No matter what you’ve been through, recovery and renewal are possible.
At The Root Of It, we known because we have seen and experienced that anything and everything IS possible and Katrina will guide you to see it, feel it and live it in a co-creative process where she will follow your mind-body-spirit's lead!