Trauma Was Never One-Size-Fits-All: The Neuroscience Is Just Catching Up

For years, I've watched two people move through the same guided practice and end up in completely different places. One softens, settles, finds their breath. The other goes quiet in a way that isn't rest. It's a kind of leaving. Same room, same cue, same teacher. Two entirely different nervous systems.

As a counsellor and a senior yoga teacher, and as someone whose own AuDHD nervous system doesn't read from the standard script, I stopped being surprised by this a long time ago. But it's worth naming why it matters, because the way trauma is usually taught doesn't leave much room for it.

The story we were handed

Trauma is often taught as a single picture: hypervigilance, a racing heart, the body braced for threat. Fight or flight. It's not wrong, and it's useful for understanding a lot of what shows up on the mat. But it's a partial picture, and the part it leaves out matters most for the people who are hardest to reach. The ones whose systems don't rev up under stress but shut down. Flat. Disconnected. Gone somewhere else.

If your entire model of trauma is activation, you will misread the person who dissociates. You might even read their stillness as calm.

What the evidence is starting to show

Here's where it gets interesting, and where I want to be careful, because this is exactly the kind of research that gets overclaimed.

A 2025 systematic review by Zhang and colleagues in Psychological Medicine looked across 53 brain-imaging studies of PTSD, asking whether the "subtypes" clinicians have long described actually show up at the level of the brain. Broadly, the differences clustered in two networks: the default-mode network (self-referential thought, inward focus) and the salience network (detecting and responding to what matters or threatens). Different presentations, including the dissociative subtype, showed different signatures across these networks.

In plainer terms: the research lines up with something trauma-informed teachers already work with in practice. The hyperaroused system and the dissociative, shut-down system may not be two points on one line. They may be different states, with different neurobiology underneath them.

That's a meaningful finding. It's also where I bring in critical thinking. 

What it doesn't prove, and why that matters

This is group-level research. It describes patterns across populations, not a scan that can diagnose or "subtype" the person in front of you. There is no brain image that tells you how to teach someone.

The review is also honest about its own gaps, and that honesty is the most useful thing in it. Of the 53 studies, only six accounted for the fact that people with PTSD very often live with other conditions too, and only four tested whether these brain-based "biotypes" actually predict anything useful about treatment. The authors' own conclusion is that the subtypes still need proper validation before they mean much clinically.

So this isn't evidence that we can now neurologically sort trauma survivors into boxes. If anything, it's a caution against certainty. What it offers is something quieter and, to me, more valuable: support for the idea that trauma responses really do vary, and that treating them as uniform was always the shakier assumption.

I'd argue the practice was ahead of the imaging here. Trauma-informed teachers didn't need an fMRI to notice that one sequence doesn't land the same way for everyone. The neuroscience is catching up to the clinic, not the other way around, and it should make us more humble, not more confident.

What this means for how we teach

If presentations differ this much, and if we can't know from the outside which nervous system we're working with, then the trauma-informed fundamentals stop being nice-to-haves and start being the method:

• Offer choice rather than prescribe a path. Options aren't a softening of the practice. They're how you meet a room of different nervous systems at once.
• Watch for the shut-down, not just the activation. The person who goes still and compliant may not be regulating. Build in permission to move, to opt out, to keep the eyes open.
• Pace for the system in front of you. Slow isn't automatically safe, and stillness isn't automatically rest. For some systems, both can tip toward dissociation.
• Hold the evidence lightly and use it honestly. We can say "research suggests trauma responses vary in the brain." We cannot say "this practice rewires your nervous system." The credibility is in the caution.

None of this positions yoga as a treatment for PTSD. It isn't, and I don't teach it as one. What it is, done well and taught by someone who understands both the nervous system and the limits of their own scope, is a practice that can offer choice, safety, and a way back into the body, for a range of people whose systems don't all work the same way.

This piece draws on: Zhang, C., Haim-Nachum, S., Prasad, N., Suarez-Jimenez, B., Zilcha-Mano, S., Lazarov, A., Neria, Y., & Zhu, X. (2025). PTSD subtypes and their underlying neural biomarkers: A systematic review. Psychological Medicine, 55, e153. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0033291725001229

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