When Your Brain Gets Stuck: Understanding Trauma Through the Lens of Neurofeedback
Based on a conversation with Dr. Andrew Hill, neuroscientist and founder of Peak Brain Institute
Your brain after trauma looks remarkably similar to your lower back after a car accident. You can walk away from both experiences, but ten years later, something fundamental has changed. Where your back might develop chronic stiffness and resistance, your brain develops its own version of protective cramping—neural patterns that once served you in crisis but now hold you hostage in daily life.
This isn't a metaphor. It's what we see on brain maps every day.
The Neuroscience of Getting Stuck
When I look at someone's brain activity after acute, recent trauma, there's a characteristic pattern that emerges. The brain essentially cramps up, with resources overactivated in ways that mirror that spasmed lower back. Areas that should be flexible and responsive instead become rigid and hypervigilant.
The posterior cingulate—the brain's "lifeguard" positioned along the back midline—shows this pattern most clearly. This region normally performs the appropriate and necessary function of environmental monitoring. It's the part of your brain that scans for threats, evaluates safety, and keeps you oriented to potential dangers. When it's working properly, it's like having a good security system that alerts you to genuine concerns without false alarms.
But when trauma teaches your brain that the world is fundamentally unsafe or unpredictable, this lifeguard goes into overtime. The posterior cingulate cramps up, getting stuck in what I call "overevaluation mode." Instead of appropriate environmental scanning, you get rumination. Instead of adaptive vigilance, you get the exhausting mental loop of constantly replaying threats, real or imagined.
This isn't a disease process. It's an accommodation—a natural, useful daily resource that has spasmed up super hard in response to overwhelming experience.
Making the Invisible Visible
One of the cruelest aspects of trauma and mental suffering is how invisible it feels. You're experiencing very real neural dysregulation, but from the inside, it just feels like something is wrong with you. You don't know why you can't relax, why your mind won't stop racing, why you feel constantly on edge. The suffering is real, but the mechanism remains hidden.
This invisibility carries an extra burden of shame, guilt, and disempowerment. When you can't see what's happening in your brain, it's easy to blame yourself for not being able to "just get over it" or "think positive." The brain patterns driving your experience remain as mysterious as they are persistent.
Brain mapping changes this relationship fundamentally. When you can see your trauma response painted out in colors and data—when you can observe the overactivation patterns that correspond exactly to what you're feeling—something shifts. Suddenly, your PTSD, anxiety, or hypervigilance becomes more like that separated shoulder from the soccer game: real, measurable, understandable, and most importantly, trainable.
You can still be annoyed at it. It's still frustrating and painful, and it still needs attention. But it becomes much harder to feel overwhelmed, guilty, or disempowered when you understand the mechanism.
Beyond the Spasm: How Neural Patterns Actually Change
The brain mapping reveals something else crucial: these stuck patterns aren't permanent fixtures. They're learned responses, which means they can be unlearned or at least modified. The same neuroplasticity that allowed your brain to adapt to trauma can be harnessed to create new, more flexible patterns.
In neurofeedback, we're essentially teaching your brain to recognize when it's stuck in that cramped position and providing tools to release the spasm. Just as physical therapy might teach you exercises to restore mobility to that injured back, neurofeedback provides exercises for neural flexibility.
The posterior cingulate that's stuck in hypervigilance mode can learn to modulate its activity appropriately. The networks that have become rigid with protective patterns can rediscover their natural flexibility. This isn't about suppressing or ignoring your brain's protective mechanisms—it's about restoring their ability to respond appropriately to actual circumstances rather than past threats.
The Spectrum of Stuck Patterns
While I've focused on classic PTSD patterns, the brain's tendency to get stuck extends far beyond trauma. Anxiety, OCD, sensory irritability, attention issues—many of these represent variations on the theme of useful neural resources that have become dysregulated.
Anxiety, for instance, often involves the same overevaluation patterns we see in trauma, but triggered by different circumstances or with different intensities. The brain's threat detection system, designed to keep you safe, gets miscalibrated and starts treating everyday situations as emergencies.
OCD typically shows up as circuits responsible for checking and verification—another protective mechanism—getting stuck in repetitive loops. What should be a quick mental check becomes an exhausting cycle that the person can't turn off.
Each of these represents a competent brain trying to solve problems with tools that have become dysregulated. The solutions aren't wrong; they're just applied too rigidly or intensely for current circumstances.
A Different Kind of Help
This perspective changes how we approach healing from trauma and other mental health challenges. Instead of focusing primarily on the content of traumatic memories or the specific triggers that set off symptoms, we can address the underlying neural patterns directly.
This doesn't mean ignoring the psychological and emotional aspects of trauma recovery. But it does mean recognizing that there's often a neurobiological component that can be addressed through training rather than just talking.
When someone can see their brain patterns and understand how they developed, they often experience a profound shift in self-compassion. The shame and self-blame that so often accompany mental health struggles begin to dissolve when you realize you're dealing with normal neural adaptations to abnormal circumstances.
The Path Forward
Your brain's response to trauma made perfect sense at the time. Those hypervigilant patterns, that constant environmental scanning, that hair-trigger threat detection system—all of these developed to protect you when protection was genuinely needed.
The problem isn't that your brain learned these patterns; the problem is that it's having trouble unlearning them when they're no longer necessary. With the right tools and understanding, those same neural networks that got stuck in protective mode can learn new, more flexible responses.
This is fundamentally empowering. It means that the patterns causing your suffering aren't character flaws or permanent damage—they're learned responses that can be modified. Your brain, which was competent enough to adapt to trauma in the first place, is also competent enough to learn healthier patterns when given the right training and support.
The journey from trauma to recovery isn't just about healing emotional wounds, though that remains important. It's also about retraining neural patterns, restoring flexibility to networks that got stuck, and teaching your brain's protective systems to calibrate appropriately to your current reality rather than past threats.
When the invisible becomes visible, when the mysterious becomes understandable, and when the unchangeable reveals itself as trainable—that's when real transformation becomes possible.