Summary:
This article explores trauma responses and how our team can help individuals through trauma-informed care, residential or outpatient programs, and comprehensive aftercare services.
Trauma responses are the physical responses the body initiates when it perceives a threat. This is a normal response system when exposed to danger. However, when individuals are struggling with unprocessed or untreated trauma, that same trauma response can happen when they are triggered.
At Sequoia Recovery Center, we provide trauma-informed care to help individuals recognize these trauma responses, how they might manifest in everyday life, lead to substance abuse, and, most importantly, how to get treatment.
Treating Trauma Responses
At Sequoia Recovery Center, we use grounding and somatic practices to move clients from a state of panic or fight or flight and into healing. This starts with:
- Medication-assisted treatment or detox helps individuals who have self-medicated to process the toxins that remain in their bodies so that they can move on to the next level.
- Residential or inpatient care, helping people focus full-time on their recovery, moving through individual and group therapy sessions, as well as somatic and mindful holistic sessions.
- Outpatient programs, helping treat trauma responses by providing reliable coping mechanisms, identifying personal triggers and therapy sessions, and practicing better trauma responses in real time
Our aim is to make it possible for clients to move through multiple levels of care while at our facility, getting the help they need most based on where they are. Through our dual diagnosis program, we help clients with things like PTSD and substance abuse, and other co-occurring mental health and substance use disorders.
Integrating Holistic Care and Mindfulness
In addition to individual, group, and family therapy, we combine things like holistic programs, yoga, and mindfulness. For many people, trauma gets stored in the body and manifests through physical ways, which is why traditional talk therapy, like our cognitive behavioral therapy programs, is made more effective when combined with physical regulation techniques.
Trauma-Informed Yoga
Many people find yoga to be highly effective in managing triggers. Trauma triggers cause physical changes like racing hearts, tension in the gut, and tight muscles, but our trauma-informed yoga sessions focus on reconnecting with the body, choosing to move away from dissociation or emotional numbness, and sitting with those initially uncomfortable feelings, knowing that they will pass.
Mindfulness Meditation
Tangentially, mindfulness meditation can help encourage that emotional awareness, recognizing where the body might be holding tension from trauma, especially in the moments when an individual is triggered and might be clenching their jaw or making fists. At our facility, we teach clients to observe those physical sensations and breathe through them so that they don’t escalate into things like panic attacks.
Combined with our other offerings like somatic movement, we help clients build mindfulness, recognizing the early warning signs of trauma triggers before they get worse, and helping move the nervous system from a fight or flight response into a rest and digest response.
Trauma Response Symptoms: Physical, Emotional, Behavioral, and Cognitive
How trauma responses manifest across four dimensions — and the treatment approaches used at Sequoia Recovery Centers to address each one.
| Symptom type | How it shows up | How it is treated |
|---|---|---|
| Physical symptoms Body-stored trauma | Racing heart, tight muscles, digestive issues, headaches, clenched jaw, shallow breathing, and fists forming involuntarily. These physical sensations occur because trauma gets stored in the body — not just the mind — and re-activates as though the original threat is still present. |
Somatic + body-based care Trauma-informed yoga, somatic movement, and breathwork teach the nervous system to recognize physical warning signs early and shift from a fight-or-flight response into a rest-and-digest state. |
| Emotional symptoms Mind-level responses | Emotional numbness, dissociation, sudden outbursts of anger or distress disproportionate to the situation, persistent anxiety, shame, hypervigilance, and difficulty trusting others or feeling safe — even in low-risk environments. |
Therapy-based care CBT, EMDR, and group therapy help retrain the brain’s threat-response system, processing unresolved memories so emotional reactions no longer mirror a past event rather than the present moment. |
| Behavioral symptoms Coping patterns | Substance use to self-medicate, avoidance of people or situations that feel unsafe, social withdrawal, hypervigilance in everyday environments, and difficulty maintaining work, relationships, or daily routines consistently over time. |
Dual diagnosis care Integrated treatment addresses co-occurring trauma and substance use simultaneously — through residential inpatient, PHP, IOP, and outpatient levels of care — with relapse prevention and aftercare planning built in from the start. |
| Cognitive symptoms Prefrontal shutdown | Difficulty thinking clearly, making decisions, or applying logic during a triggered response. This happens because trauma activates the amygdala and shuts down the prefrontal cortex — the brain’s rational center — making past traumatic memories feel as though they are happening in the present moment. |
Mindfulness + grounding Mindfulness meditation and grounding practices help clients stay present when triggered, gradually building a wider window of tolerance so that trauma responses no longer overtake daily mental wellbeing or function. |
Source: Sequoia Recovery Centers — What is a Trauma Response?
Start Care Today for Your Trauma
With Sequoia Recovery Center, we can help you better understand that your trauma responses are not a sign of weakness but rather a survival mechanism. We know that trauma responses relate to your brain perceiving a threat, and with our multiple levels of care, you can learn the behavioral and emotional patterns associated with trauma responses and learn how to process unresolved trauma.
Call our team today to get started.
Sources
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/jts.2490010302
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0006322302016633
FAQ
What is a Trauma Response?
A trauma response is an automatic reaction that the body generates to a perceived threat. In the amygdala, the brain might activate an alarm, that trauma response, when it thinks that there is danger present. Those who have struggled with a traumatic experience and PTSD might find that these trauma responses persist long after the actual danger has passed. At Sequoia Recovery Center, our goal is to provide trauma-informed care to retrain the body and mind into knowing when it is safe and when that trauma is over.
What Does a Trauma Response Look Like?
A trauma response usually looks like an overreaction to an otherwise small source of stress, like a loud noise, triggering someone to flee and hide behind a car, or a minor criticism from someone, causing the recipient to shut down emotionally and be completely numb the rest of the day. The reason for this is that trauma responses shut down the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for logic, and this can make it feel as though any memory triggered by the trauma is actually happening in the present.
Can Trauma Responses Lead to Addiction?
Yes, many people who struggle with trauma responses will try to diminish those responses by using drugs and alcohol instead of processing them. If, for example, the body is stuck in a high level of anxiety and hypervigilance, calming down and sleeping can be a challenge, so people might turn to things like excessive alcohol consumption to shut their bodies down. Similarly, when someone is stuck in deep numbness, they might use substances like cocaine to try to alert the nervous system and bring better energy levels. People who are struggling with co-occurring addiction and trauma benefit the most when receiving dual diagnosis care.
What is Hypervigilance?
Hypervigilance is one symptom of trauma, which refers to a person being constantly alert and on guard for potential threats. Under normal circumstances, an individual might become vigilant and alert when they hear or see something that could potentially pose a danger, such as a loud bang while watching TV at home in an otherwise quiet neighborhood. Once the source is identified, like a neighbor’s trash cans falling over in the wind, that individual can go back to being relaxed. With trauma, however, the body is unlikely to return to its relaxed state and more likely to stay in a state of vigilance and fear, constantly scanning for threats, which can lead to irritability, sleep disturbances, and exhaustion as the body never has a chance to truly settle and feel safe.
How Does Sequoia Recovery Center Help with Trauma Responses?
At Sequoia Recovery Center, we provide trauma-informed care for those with underlying trauma. This is a form of treatment for mental health and addiction that uses things like EMDR and somatic experiencing to change the way the body holds on to traumatic memories. These therapies, in tandem with things like traditional CBT and holistic programs, can help teach the nervous system that the trauma is in the past, not the present. Doing so helps to downregulate the response triggered in the body.
Are Trauma Responses Physical or Emotional?
Trauma responses can be either. For some people, a trauma response manifests as digestive issues, headaches, muscle tension, or a racing heart. For those same people, a different trauma response might be emotional. No matter the manifestation of your response, you can learn to help control and diminish it with increased distress tolerance and other healthy coping skills.
Can I Change My Trauma Response?
You won’t be able to get rid of the underlying survival mechanism that causes a trauma response, but you can change the severity of your response to triggers. This is often called the “window of tolerance,” and it relates to your tolerance for distressing things, difficult emotions, and triggers. With our multiple levels of care, clients can learn to stay present in the moment when triggered, and stop a trauma response from being so severe that it takes over mental wellbeing or focus.
