The brain-body disconnect: A somatic sensory basis for trauma-related disorders

Breanne E. Kearney, Ruth A. Lanius

Summary & key facts

This paper argues that many trauma symptoms may come from how the body senses itself in space. The authors describe two body senses — the balance and movement sense and the touch/body-feeling sense — and suggest problems in those low-level senses, rooted in a deep part of the brain, can change arousal, emotion control, and thinking about the self. They offer a step-by-step model that links these body senses to the brain systems for emotion and thought, and say this idea could help shape how clinicians assess and treat trauma, while noting the model still needs more testing.

Key facts:

The authors introduce the idea of "somatic sensory processing," meaning the body’s balance and movement sense plus the touch and body-feeling sense, as important for how people regulate emotions and relate to others.
They suggest trauma-related symptoms may come from problems in these body senses that start in the brainstem, a deep and evolutionarily old part of the brain that helps control basic body functions.
These early sensory problems are proposed to affect bodily arousal, the ability to manage emotions, and higher-level mental functions like a stable sense of self.
The paper presents a new hierarchical model that connects low-level body sensing with the brain’s emotional systems and the thinking brain, to explain how trauma can affect both body and mind.
The authors say this framework could guide neurobiologically informed assessment and treatment that pays attention to body sensations, not just thoughts and feelings.
The paper is theoretical and synthetic. The authors acknowledge that the exact brain mechanisms are not yet proven and that the model needs empirical testing and further research.

Abstract

Although the manifestation of trauma in the body is a phenomenon well-endorsed by clinicians and traumatized individuals, the neurobiological underpinnings of this manifestation remain unclear. The notion of somatic sensory processing, which encompasses vestibular and somatosensory processing and relates to the sensory systems concerned with how the physical body exists in and relates to physical space, is introduced as a major contributor to overall regulatory, social-emotional, and self-referential functioning. From a phylogenetically and ontogenetically informed perspective, trauma-related symptomology is conceptualized to be grounded in brainstem-level somatic sensory processing dysfunction and its cascading influences on physiological arousal modulation, affect regulation, and higher-order capacities. Lastly, we introduce a novel hierarchical model bridging somatic sensory processes with limbic and neocortical mechanisms regulating an individual's emotional experience and sense of a relational, agentive self. This model provides a working framework for the neurobiologically informed assessment and treatment of trauma-related conditions from a somatic sensory processing perspective.

Topics

Conditions & symptoms

PTSD Anxiety or worry Feeling disconnected from others Poor sleep Sadness or low mood

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