Written by: Deilen Michelle Villegas, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
What is Behavioral Health? Behavioral health is the way your habits impact your mental and physical well-being. That includes factors like eating and drinking habits, exercise, and addictive behavior patterns. Behavioral health differs from mental health in that mental health focuses more on your thoughts and feelings while behavioral health focuses more on the actions people take in response to situations. Because of this, two people can experience the same incident but walk away from it with two separate reactions.
Many adults walk around unaware that the reason they may have a temper problem, anxiety disorder, or addiction can be caused by an undiagnosed or unprocessed Trauma. That is because people think of trauma as a major catastrophic event and must fall under the category of something severe. But, trauma can be caused over some time due to exposure to an environment that is considered less than suitable for safety and security. It is more likely to impact an individual if they are exposed to trauma during their earlier childhood years.
Trauma does not always have to be physical in form it can also be emotional or mental. Trauma is described as, a psychological or physical response to a threat to a person’s well-being. It does not even have to be directly associated with you. People can become traumatized by witnessing something terrible happen to another person, a pet, or a loved one.
How Does Trauma Affect Behavioral Health? When individuals who are exposed to prolonged experiences including neglect, abandonment, and rejection, especially from loved ones, it causes distrust in others around them and impacts the way they form relationships, and move about in the world. Their life experiences have shown them that others regardless of who they are, are unreliable. Being forced to live in an environment that threatens your mental, emotional, and physical well-being is detrimental to your nervous system. When individuals are in a constant state of Fight-or-Flight after a prolonged period, their body will become dysregulated, meaning the nervous systems that they have internally to let them know when to be on alert and when they can relax are no longer functioning as they are supposed to. When in an environment that is a constant threat to their overall well-being whether directly or indirectly, it forces the body to stay in a permanent state of fear, stress, anxiety, and worry. This in turn causes individuals to seek out external factors to cope with these overwhelming feelings. This means satiating those feelings by consuming drugs and alcohol, engaging in unhealthy sexual behaviors, developing unhealthy eating and spending habits, and dangerous exercise habits (over-exercising) all of which can release the chemical and hormone components such as dopamine, serotonin, and oxytocin in the brain in while engaging in the activity to bring the individual some short-term relief. The need to replicate those positive or numbing feelings is where addiction can form. Individuals will start to chase that rewarding feeling through the negative coping mechanism which allows them to numb the negative feelings in a dysregulated body. Because the body adapts with prolonged use, over time it will require higher doses or increased frequency of the activity in order to achieve the same rewarding feeling.
The problem is, as long as the root cause of the issue is not addressed, this will be an ongoing situation. Addiction and self-sabotaging behaviors are secondary symptoms to an underlying cause.
Which is why trying to simply treat addiction alone is not as eIective, with a probability of relapse if the root cause to why the drug use started is not being addressed. The body’s inability to create these natural hormones and chemicals due to dysregulation will cause the person to seek those rewarding feelings from those external factors, causing these individuals in turn to develop unhealthy behavioral patterns throughout their life, which can be misinterpreted as a personality trait, rather than a traumatic response as it should be.
How does Trauma impact the behaviors of People of Color? The society we live in today causes severe emotional, mental, and physical distress to People of Color by having families living in communities that are in poor condition with limited access to proper housing, food, water, healthcare and safety. We have an educational system that does not properly prepare individuals for the real world, and a judicial and policing system that provides BIPOC communities less protection and rights than animals. People of Color are often written off as criminals and thugs that are up to no good and are treated like societal parasites. When in reality, the environment in that BIPOC individuals must survive often gives them no choice but to turn to these negative and toxic behaviors because they are too frequently dismissed and threatened.
Somehow, considering that BIPOC communities have amongst the lowest median income levels, their communities are riddled with expensive opioids and narcotics, liquor stores, and unhealthy fast food chains. Many of these communities are also in designated “food deserts” (areas lacking easy access to healthy food options). These communities are intentionally designed to keep the lower socioeconomic classes in a state of self-destruction. Studies have shown that people who are in despair will resort to desperate actions just to get the bare necessities; crime rates will be higher in these areas and poor physical and mental healthcare will result in a higher population of mental and behavioral disorders.
These neighborhoods will often have low-funded health centers that are crowded and do not have all the necessary resources for their community, and hospitals with proper resources will be located further away.
Marijuana is often the natural herbal drug of choice that BIPOC communities will prefer to use in order to manage behavioral, mental, and physical conditions. Although Marijuana has been medically and scientifically proven to have medicinal properties that can be used to treat different mental and physical ailments as well as a zero probability of being fatal, in the United States Marijuana is classified as a Class 1 Controlled Substance. When a drug is classified as a Class 1 Controlled Substance, this means that the government believes it has no medicinal properties and a high probability for substance abuse, making it illegal to possess and punishable with harsh federal penalties. Ironically substances such as Alcohol, Tobacco, Cocaine, Opioids, and other pharmecautical drugs, which have been known to be the cause of death in people and have severe addictive rates, have a lesser classification and come with lesser punishments. These lower classi1ed substances with higher addiction and death rates are the substances that seem to overrun lower-income neighborhoods.
All of these situations impose trauma on People of Color, but are often dismissed. When the system design is the cause of the issue, it is easier to blame the person who is a victim of their environment than to address what caused the problem to begin with. Low-Income communities by definition could not afford to have all of these expensive opioids and narcotics in the area, because the people in these areas live below the poverty line, meaning that an external source has to be providing the narcotics and opioids to the low-income communities to make it easily accessible to them. Until we can take a holistic view of how the system is causing mass trauma and behavioral issues in the BIPOC community, people will continue to accept these negative behaviors as a part of their personality and not as traumatic responses that should be addressed and treated.
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Deilen Michelle Villegas, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
Deilen Michelle is an Entrepreneur, Holistic Health Practitioner, Holistic Life Coach, and Spiritual Guide. She effectively works with clients using her Mind-Body-Spirit healing modality bringing awareness and healing to the whole self. She is a Recovered Trauma Survivor, and knows firsthand the effect life experiences can have on your Mind, Body and Spirit. Over the course of the last 11 years, she has not only worked on her own well-being but has also become educated in the Mind-Body-Spirit connection in order to help others who might need it. In doing so, she's created her own Modality named The Shamanic Goddess: Holistic Enlightening Method.
