My brain - what can I do to heal it?

[BigLittle]

Hi,

Reading the Body keeps score made me aware that my brain is damaged from chronic childhood trauma.

What can I do to heal my brain?


Thanks

 

[TimWheatley]

Once the emotional component of the childhood trauma is changed, the childhood trauma will lose it's unconscious control over your decisions.
There are numerous ways to avoid, distract, distance yourself from the trauma, but very few ways to change the unconscious beliefs of the brain.
The brain is wired for safety. One of the best ways to begin is to find the reasons in the past for the emotional reactions in the present. That can be done emotionally.

 

[Friday]

I’m not really sure what you mean about your brain being damaged? Could you talk a little bit more about that, or excerpt relevant passages?

***
The study of neuroscience is in its absolute infancy, and what’s understood out in the wide world is even less than that (for a super common example, anyone who says “memory” is stored in XYZ area of the brain is about 20 years out of date. Memories are stored diffusely in every area of the brain, as well as in the nerves that run throughout the body).

That said, there are still one whole helluva lot of cognitive therapies (not psych, but neurology, like for stroke/ TBI/ etc.) that literally reteach the brain/build new neural pathways, or use different parts of the brain to accomplish the same tasks in different ways. So that people can relearn how to walk/talk/think/etc. when those preexisting pathways have been damaged.

Some of them are super wacky, but highly effective (like for people who have lost their written language skills, and can no longer recognize nor write letters? Tracing on sandpaper teaches the brain to recognize language by texture, rather than by visual shape, and then the shapes are later associated movement, and then later still eventually by sight. Many prefer to skip that multiple year process, however, and stick with braille or Morse code, or sign language… depending on which sense -touch, spund, or movement- they just relate to best/fastest. Oftentimes learning entirely new language systems in a matter of days/weeks, whilst others take months, whilst the system they’ve used for decades takes years to reacquire).

Even so? New therapies are being discovered, constantly, especially as neuroscientists & computer scientists collaborate more and more.

So it would really depend on what kind of damage you’re talking about, what therapies already exist, and what are currently being studied.