Keeping score

your body remembers even when your brain does not

“We don’t know what we don’t know.”
—Tony Overbay, The Virtual Couch podcast

Photo by Ozgu Ozden on Unsplash

I’ve had a rough few weeks. It started with the flu, which gave way to higher-than-normal anxiety and an actual panic attack sitting in my living room, and ended with a short bout of depression. I say “ended” in a hopeful fashion.

Almost every time something like this happens, I Google symptoms to make sure I’m not making it up or just being dramatic or crabby or whatever, and that I am actually experiencing what is meant by these words we use. Of course, psychology being a “soft science,” some of this is subjective, meaning I am the only one who knows how I feel and what I am experiencing. There are no data that show my level of anxiety rising, only the subtle tremor in my neck that makes my head shake ever so slightly but is still noticeable if you sit and look at me. Or the shaking of my hands that prevents me from getting a lid on a jar. Or the feeling of tightness in my chest, the pit in my stomach. I’ve had these symptoms at various times for most of my life, but I didn’t know what they were. I’ve learned to recognize anxiety in my body when it happens.

But these terms do have agreed-upon definitions, and that’s what I search for when I need to know for sure if they are really happening and I’m not just crazy. Sometimes I need assurance.

Last week one day I was more agitated than normal (normal being not agitated at all) and fought it all day. Was it just the same virus-related anxiety of the previous two weeks? Of course, I gaslit myself, piled on the guilt and self-shame, telling myself that “All you’re doing is staying home recovering from the flu. There’s nothing to be upset about. What is wrong with you?”

So helpful. (Insert eyeroll.)

I wrote about the connection between acute viruses and anxiety here, so I knew it was a real thing. Unfortunately, that doesn’t make it easier to navigate in the moment. But this agitation was different somehow. I could feel that something wasn’t right, something more than run-of-the-mill, low-grade anxiety, but I couldn’t put my finger on what it was. It took a few days of struggling and then reading the therapy journal I loosely keep to realize it was the one-year anniversary of when I received an official diagnosis of C-PTSD. Ahh.

By now, almost everyone has heard the phrase “the body keeps the score,” which comes from the book of the same name by Bessel van der Kolk. Here’s what that means in a nutshell: your body remembers difficult or traumatic or stressful events even when your brain does not. The day I received the C-PTSD diagnosis was a very big deal to me. I can remember sitting on my therapist’s couch, listening to her describe exactly what it meant, feeling the rush of relief sweep through me that I wasn’t crazy, it wasn’t my fault, my symptoms were quite real, and finally someone was validating my experience. Once my journal reminded me of that day, my brain remembered. But before my brain remembered, my body did.

Last fall a few days before Thanksgiving, Ben was driving home from the gym one morning, doing so rather . . . exuberantly. One of Virginia’s finest met him on the side of the road and asked where he was going. Ben started explaining that he was very excited because all of his kids and grandkids were coming for Thanksgiving, and just a few words in, he started tearing up and had trouble getting the story out. The officer was patient and kind and gave him time to get it together, but still Ben struggled. Finally he was let go with a warning to slow it down. Every time Ben told this story he remarked that he didn’t know why he was so emotional, which is unlike him. He noted that in the moments of talking with the officer, his emotions took over and he had a lot of trouble reigning them in.

Just today, we were sitting at the table talking about all of this when he grabbed his phone and opened his calendar. At that moment he realized the day of his meeting with the officer was also the anniversary of his dad’s death. There was a reason he couldn’t keep it together—his body was keeping the score. It remembered.

This concept has been such a fascination to me since I first heard about it. Basically, the body’s stress response system becomes stuck in a moment of trauma or stress, and the imprint of that stress response remains long after the difficult event is over. It’s like the varicella-zoster virus that infects your body with chicken pox as a child, but hangs around for decades and reappears as shingles in your 70s. The virus never leaves your body. The nervous system’s response to trauma doesn’t either. It is there for life.

I think what is most interesting about this is that we have no choice in the matter. No matter how “strong” we think we are, no matter how intelligent or how much we try to talk ourselves out of it, our bodies do what they do. God must have made us that way, with this permanent filing system for all of life’s events as seen through our nervous system. We have no say over when and where a folder will choose to express itself, but it often happens at the same time of year as the original event, and we are powerless to stop it.

That doesn’t mean we have to be helpless victims to every whim of emotion. Remember, emotions are neither good nor bad; they are just signals that tell us there is an underlying thought there. My therapist always asks about an emotion, “What does that say about you?” In other words, what is the thought?

What we can do is acknowledge the feeling, ask what thoughts are behind the feeling, and determine if the thoughts are true, just, lovely, helpful, etc. This is just one way of “bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ” (2 Cor. 10:5).

When my body hijacks my emotions, it would be easy to throw myself down wallowing in despair. I need to remind myself that God created my body, my mind, and my emotions this way, and learn how to work with the system he made. That’s what therapy is for.