Resensitization
How doing my trauma work turned me off Big Macs
When I was in high school I used to eat a Big Mac every day. In college I subsisted mostly on coca cola, power bars, and cigarettes. I never really loved horror flicks, but I thrived on gritty, intense books and TV shows. I felt like they captured some jagged nugget of truth about this life in a way that was helpful to me. In college, I dove deep into the writing and psychology of the Vietnam War.
Now I haven’t had fast food or sugar soda in decades, I never drink alcohol or coffee, I feel like shit if I eat more than a cup of popcorn in the evening while watching a movie, and my partner pre-screens TV shows for violence before inviting me to watch. Seriously. Like I am one of the children.
So what happened?
I think that the biggest change is that I did my trauma work. And I became a trauma therapist. And between these two things, a process called resensitization took place. Slowly, mind you, but it happened.
Desensitization
You have probably heard a lot more about the opposite of resensitization - desensitization. Desensitization is often illustrated with the following example: Imagine that you were considering renting an apartment next to a train track. The first time you hear the train, you might think “I could never live here - I couldn’t think, would never sleep.” But then you meet the current tenant and they say, “Oh yeah I thought that too but I don’t even hear it anymore.” And you know it's likely that if you moved in that would happen to you too.
Desensitization happens when a stimulus that your body codes as threatening becomes recoded as safe when you are exposed to it repeatedly and nothing bad happens. In an apartment by the train tracks, the stimulus is the sound of a loud noise approaching rapidly. If you are walking out in the world and hear a loud sound approaching rapidly, your brain interprets that as a threat and instructs you to behave accordingly. This is a valuable function of your nervous system. But when you live next to the train tracks, you hear the loud noise approaching but the train never barrels into your living room, so your brain recodes the noise. It takes it out of the “danger” file and refiles it under “benign.” So you notice it less and less. You begin to be able to sleep through it. Some folks even come to find it soothing.
Desensitization is how we do exposure work for phobias and PTSD (read more about this in my article How Exposure Makes You a Superhero). It is also one of the ways that kids who play violent video games become more likely to be aggressive in their daily lives.
Desensitization is a learning process that our nervous systems engage in to help us adapt to a changing environment.
Trauma and desensitization
Now let's talk about the ways that trauma works with desensitization.
When we are exposed to aversive stimuli that we cannot physically escape because we are immobilized, because we are too young, too small, or because we are dependent on the source of the stimuli for our livelihood, we have to find a way to manage our distress. Our nervous systems come equipped with a number of tools for this predicament. One of them is numbing.
For example, I learned to sit in the car with my mom while she screamed angry tirades at other drivers. I simply numbed the parts of myself that were reacting to her and focused on other parts of my experience. Humans are born wired for learning and children have sensitive, malleable nervous systems. This numbing and redirecting was intuitive, helpful, and easy for me. I didn’t even realize I had done it until many years later.
With repetition, numbing leads to desensitization. Over time, my nervous system didn’t have to actively numb. A car ride with yelling was not different from a car ride without yelling - yelling became a part of the scope of experiences that were included in car rides.
Desensitization can naturally expand or “generalize.” This means when we desensitize to one stimuli it can be easier to desensitize to an adjacent, more intense stimuli. If I am desensitized to my mom yelling in the car, I might be newly upset and overwhelmed if she gets out and yells in the face of another driver, but not nearly as overwhelmed as I would have been if she had never yelled in the car. One makes way for the other. This is one way cycles of abuse escalate in relationships.
When our experience includes numbing and desensitization in multiple contexts, our internal map of the world comes to include numb spots or dead zones. Once this has happened, as we approach novel situations in life, our nervous system anticipates aversive stimuli in certain contexts and preemptively numbs. For example, if I got in the car with a friends’ parent, I wouldn’t be alarmed if that parent yelled. Later, when I was in the car with a boyfriend and he yelled, this wouldn’t register as a red flag for me. It would just be a car ride.
This is one way that cycles of violence perpetuate in our later relationships. We miss warning signs because our nervous system is numbed in particular places. This is what author and therapist Prentis Hemphill refers to in their book, What it Takes to Heal, “eventually, transgression became familiar, a fact of relationship. I learned to quiet my body’s responses, a wince, the desire to pull away. I could numb my own indicators that I’d had enough” (p. 43).
By the age of 25, when I entered a holistic recovery program, I had been systematically desensitized to the various chemicals in food, soda, and cigarettes, as well as to the images and stories of dismembering human decency and bodies. Through desensitization I had systematically disconnected from my nervous systems’ natural response to physical and emotional toxins.
It's important to note here that coping with substances or processes (food, cigarettes, shopping, sex, etc.) has its own desensitization cycle. This is one way that addiction and PTSD are intricately entwined. We can use substances to help us numb the intolerable feelings, but the effect that we get from them does not last and so we have to use increasingly greater amounts. In fact, the concepts of desensitization and tolerance are closely related.
Resensitization
Let’s talk about what it looks like when you are ready to let go of desensitization and do the hard work of resensitization.
That work, trauma work, involves slowly removing our old coping strategies and then, when a reminder of the trauma (a trigger) presents, following it back in our memory to the experience we were having when we numbed. This is a slow, tender, painstaking process. Done well, it feels like removing the bandage from the knee of a beloved child. We must go gently, checking in, speaking softly, looking in their eyes to see if they are ok, asking for consent and building trust at the same time. It cannot be hurried because we are teaching the body that it is safe to feel what could not be felt before. And it cannot be hurried because it must involve consent. I did not consent to be in that car with my mom as she yelled. In order to heal that experience, I must consent to go back there. To hold my own little hand and remember. Revisiting painful memories without full consent can reinforce the need to numb.
As we revisit those places where we numbed and feel the sensitive feelings that the numbing helped us tolerate, we resensitize. We feel again in those places. Through practice and repetition, the desensitization process reverses.
This is why I can’t eat Big Macs anymore. Part of me wishes I could. Part of me is jealous of the me who lived on junk food. But she truly was a shell of the person that I am now. I don’t know if there are people who can spend their lives in pursuit of the pleasures of the flesh and be deeply happy. I wasn't one. And those aren’t the folks that come to my door to do their work.
The folks who come to work with me often say they just want to stop drinking or having flashbacks. They want to be able to go to the grocery store or to fearlessly attend a 4th of July barbecue, which I get - being adjusted enough to be able to function in our daily lives is critical. But folks are often surprised by the transformation that resensitization instigates, and the way it expands into other parts of our lives. I mean, I just told you that I can’t eat Big Macs because my mom yelled while I was in the car with her as a 6-year-old. It sounds like a trope of the over-therapized. Of course, that connection was simplified for instructive purposes, but I would argue that the logic remains intact, although the exact form can be unpredictable. Meaning, we cannot anticipate the ways that finding our numb spots will resensitize us because we don’t consciously know what we numbed and what feelings await underneath. But inevitably, doing our trauma work makes us softer in places we had hardened, and so in some ways we become more sensitive.
So to bring it full circle, I started eating Big Macs because I was young and capricious. But I continued eating them and then began to eat them every day because they provided a convenient way to numb difficult feelings. Once I could tolerate feeling those feelings, I could choose to eat a Big Mac or not. I chose not to eat Big Macs for long enough that my body started to tell me how she really feels about Big Macs, which was not good. And now I can choose to be in touch with this more sensitive part of myself and make choices with her in consideration. I could watch violent and gritty media again, but I wouldn’t enjoy them as I used to, and - more importantly to me -I would be less capable of holding that extraordinarily tender stance that is required to move through the trauma healing process with my clients. I risk becoming desensitized to their pain, which I would never want to do.
Resensitization doesn’t mean avoiding life. On the contrary, it means being able to make conscious choices about the kind of material we connect with. It means being aware that there may be a softer you inside.
Quick note about trauma treatment:
Comprehensive trauma treatment actually involves a strategic combination of resensitizing and desensitizing. I cover part of this in my article How Exposure Makes You A Superhero. It also feels important to mention that I believe that culturally we have adapted to particular patterns of desensitization and resensitization/hypersensitivity that do not move us toward the true freedom that we individually and collectively are capable of. Both of these will be the subject of forthcoming writing so stay tuned.
Sources:
Brockmyer J. F. (2022). Desensitization and Violent Video Games: Mechanisms and Evidence. Child and adolescent psychiatric clinics of North America, 31(1), 121–132. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chc.2021.06.005
Hemphill, P. (2024). What it takes to heal: how transforming ourselves can change the world. Random House.