Trauma and the Autonomic Nervous System

The traditional way of defining trauma is when you have a life-threatening experience that you cannot get away from, then you've had a traumatic experience. The problem with them is that as soon as something frightening happens, our autonomic nervous system generates some sort of attempt to either fight or flee. So my system kind of goes into this shock state and what happens in it is that part of us that basically takes care of time and place shuts off because it's very sensitive to stress hormones. And another part of us who deals with incredible intensity of meaning turns on very, very intensely. That will tend to create symptoms in us.