September 1, 2025 • 54 mins
We often think of trauma as something extreme - a dramatic, life-altering event. But trauma isn’t just what happened to us. It’s also how our body learned to survive. It can be quiet, subtle, and long-lasting, shaping how we live, cope, and exist in the world, often unconsciously.
In this episode, we unpack the quiet, psychological reality of trauma - especially in our twenties. Why do some of us feel numb, disconnected, or constantly on edge? Why do we shut down in relationships or over-function when things get hard? And how do we begin to reconnect with our bodies again?
We explore:
- Why trauma is subjective
- Survival strategies we carry into adulthood (and why they’re hard to let go of)
- Does the body really keep the score?
- How pain and shame are linked to trauma
- What “safety” feels like in our bodies - and how we can begin to access it
Whether or not you identify with the word ‘trauma’, or simply want to understand our bodies’ emotional responses, this episode is for you.
For help: Resources
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The Psychology of your 20s is not a substitute for professional mental health help. If you are struggling, distressed or require personalised advice, please reach out to your doctor or a licensed psychologist.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hello everybody, and welcome back to the Psychology of Your Twenties,
the podcast where we talk through some of the big
life changes and transitions of our twenties and what they
mean for our psychology. Hello everybody, Welcome back to the show.
(00:26):
Welcome back to the podcast. New listeners, old listeners. Wherever
you are in the world, you know the deal. It
is so great to have you here. Back for another
episode as we, of course break down the psychology of
our twenties. Today, we are talking about a word. We
are talking about a topic, a concept that carries a
(00:46):
whole lot of weight, but is also used pretty flippantly
in conversation and is very misunderstood. We are talking about
trauma specifically.
Speaker 2 (00:57):
I really want to.
Speaker 3 (00:58):
Talk about how trauma is not just emotional, not just
psychological or cognitive, but physical as well. This is something
that in my own personal life, I've been doing a
lot of deep research, deep knowledge searching on trying to
find the best resources, trying to find personal experiences, trying
(01:20):
to find the best books about how trauma is essentially
trapped in the body. Long story short, I feel like
I've had a lot of realizations about the kind of
rage and anger that I carry in my body, about
the kind of irritation that I'm constantly carrying around, the detension,
(01:42):
all of these reactions that I have to certain situations
that I literally have no idea where it came from.
I've just kind of always been frustrated by until I
started to really sit with past experiences and sit with
trauma and just appreciate how you know, it's not just psychological,
(02:03):
it's not just in my mind. It's not just something
that happened to me, but it has had like real
long term behavioral and physical I don't want to say consequences,
but implications, And it just felt like the appropriate time
to kind of take all that knowledge and that research
that I've been doing and put it into an episode
so that hopefully it's helpful for some of you guys
out there, those of you who are in their twenties
(02:26):
like me, who are maybe figuring this out for the
first time, or even if you are older. Now I
know that the word trauma it can feel really big.
It can feel very clinical, very intense. You know, for
a long time I didn't think that it applied to me.
I hadn't survived a war, I hadn't lived through some
(02:47):
giant film screen worthy event. You know, my childhood was
pretty normal. But this term and this concept means a
lot more than I think we have been taught it means,
and it is a lot less limited than previous definitions
(03:08):
or previous understandings of this experience would make us believe.
It's one of those terms that we hear a lot,
and I feel like a lot of us still don't
think that it applies to us. We have to have
lived through something really obvious and something very obviously painful
at the time to be part of this group or
(03:29):
part of this category of humans who have experienced trauma.
I think also we tend to sometimes judge the pain
of a past experience by the symptoms that we have
now or how much that pain is carried forward. So,
you know, if we're not having a seemingly big reaction
to something that's happened in the past, well then that
(03:51):
experience mustn't have been as traumatic as we thought it was.
But the thing with realizing how trauma is stored in
the body is you also start to realize how almost
unconscious and invisible a trauma response or the long term
impacts of trauma actually are because we often think about
it purely. Is this like emotional response, but it is deeply,
(04:15):
deeply physical. It shows up intention It shows up in
chronic pain, It shows up in fatigue, It shows up
in these like immediate behavioral reactions that we have no
control over, you know, crying when someone raises their voice,
even if like they're not actually angry. Trauma is stored
in your nervous system. It's stored in your gut reaction.
(04:35):
It's stored in how you breathe. You know. It's the
famous book your body keeps the score even when your
brain tries to move on. So in this episode, I
really want to talk about what trauma really is, what
happens within us when we experience traumatic, something traumatic, even
if we don't acknowledge or know that it was traumatic
(04:56):
at the time, and how we kind of get stuck
in a chronic arousal or chronic stress mode that.
Speaker 2 (05:05):
We don't even realize.
Speaker 3 (05:07):
I also want to talk about how small moments in
the past really shape our sense of safety, our identity,
our sense of connection, how we relate to other people
as well, in again ways that are often quite invisible
and not acknowledged. I'm going to say this episode is
not going to try and pathologize every single experience that
you've had, and it's not going to say that if
(05:28):
you have trauma, that's it, it will always be there,
this is who you are. Instead, I just hope you
understand yourself and your body better through this discussion and
what it may be holding and storing for you, what
it may be hiding, so that you continue to feel
like you are strong and that you are capable enough.
I think this episode is really about acknowledging that you
(05:50):
can be soft, and you can be gentle, and you
can be vulnerable. And that doesn't mean that the trauma
has won. It's meant that actually you have and you've
acknowledged its impact on you. So of thoughts, a lot
to unpack here, a lot of science, a lot of
research that I have been searching through and digging through
for many, many months, maybe even years of stage. So
(06:10):
we're going to take a deep breath and we're going
to get into exploring exactly how trauma is trapped in
the body. Stay with us. So before we get into
how trauma gets trapped in our bodies, we need to
talk about what trauma really means, which is actually kind
(06:31):
of tricky because by its very nature, trauma actually means
very different things for very different people, and it's very
hard to categorize. But psychologists have given it a go.
Researchers have given it a go, and there are a
couple of ways that they see or I hate to
say it, but rank trauma. Firstly, the big type of
trauma we often think of is a large, significant, one
(06:55):
time life threatening event like a natural disaster, a car accident,
near death experience. This is what we call type one trauma.
These moments, they just flip life on its head. They
are unexpected, they come out of nowhere, and the reason
they are so traumatic is because they make us realize
how inherently unsafe we are as humans, how vulnerable we are,
(07:18):
and they cause us to really have to rethink our
lives and also rethink how we can return to a
point where we feel safe and stable, which is very
hard for people. These moments, I think, are very clearly
traumatic in the eyes of many people, in the eyes
of society, they are not the only trauma that occurs.
(07:39):
Smaller repeated traumatic events over time or prolonged exposure to
traumatic situations are another type of trauma. We call type
two trauma. Type true trauma includes things like having maybe
a violent childhood home or experiencing domestic violence, but even
(07:59):
things racism, discrimination, sexism, workplace harassment, chronic health conditions, all
things that over time reduce our sense of safety and
make us feel like we are not in control of
our life, or our environment or our surroundings. You know,
I've got to say in twenty nineteen, I don't think
(08:21):
I've ever talked about this on the podcast before, but
I survived the Australian bushfires in an evacuation zone and
I genuinely thought the house was going to burn down.
I could not call my family. I was absolutely terrified.
I remember driving through like an active bushfire zone, the
smell of smoke being like everywhere.
Speaker 2 (08:40):
It was so loud.
Speaker 3 (08:42):
That was traumatic, But it was not as traumatic to
me as when my boss at the restaurant I worked
at in the same year was intimidating me and harassing me,
even if from the outside. You know, those bushfires are
the thing that people remember to me, Like when I
look back at my life and I'm like, oh, what
has really like left a scar? It's not that it's
(09:02):
this smaller repeated situation that made me feel a lot
more unsafe day to day than the big natural.
Speaker 2 (09:09):
Disaster that I live through.
Speaker 3 (09:11):
The focus on trauma, what I'm trying to say here
is that it's less on the magnitude of the event
itself and more on our own personal response to it,
and that's often influenced by things like previous experiences, previous
personal experiences, upbringing, even like our DNA and how stress
(09:31):
is encoded into our DNA.
Speaker 2 (09:34):
A lot of the.
Speaker 3 (09:34):
Time, I think we tend to dismiss our own trauma
because it's not big and bad enough compared to what
others have gone through. It feels like there is this
ladder almost or this like pyramid of how we rank trauma,
and if we're not at the top of the pyramid
experiencing the very worst of what humanity in life can
(09:58):
throw at us, then we don't don't belong in the
category of someone who has trauma. And here's the thing
I always say to this. Someone can have a broken
leg and you can have a broken arm, and your
broken arm is still going to hurt. Like, just because
someone has more pain than you doesn't mean that your
pain isn't being subjectively experienced as painful. Someone could have
(10:19):
more trauma than you. It doesn't mean that the trauma
you're experiencing isn't just as awful. Like it's this weird
thing where our bodies and our minds can continue to
adapt to really really terrible, terrible things and our pain
threshold or our trauma threshold gets bigger and bigger and bigger.
(10:40):
It doesn't mean that the threshold that you had when
you experience your trauma wasn't already at a point where
pain was going to be experienced. I feel like that's
a really complicated way of explaining it, But hopefully what
I mean and what you interpret from that is that
this is an entirely subjective experience. What constitutes a traumatic
event for one person may not for another, depending on
their individual biology, their psychological resilience, their support system. You know,
(11:04):
you could be in a car accident. You could walk
away and be completely unfazed, but someone else might not
be able to ever get back in a car, you know,
as compared to you know, someone maybe in a situation
they see as life threatening, another person wouldn't see it
as life threatening. Whose definition of life threatening do we
therefore follow? And also sometimes something doesn't need to have
(11:26):
threatened your physical safety to be traumatic, you know, is
the case with vicarious trauma. A person working in an
emergency department could be entirely safe from actual danger themselves,
but still leave that workplace five years later deeply traumatized.
The point is, if we're looking for some kind of
yardstick or questionnaire as to whether a situation was traumatic,
(11:50):
and whether you're looking for a questionnaire or a yardstick
that is universal and will apply to everyone, we aren't
going to find one. And yes, that may mean that
some people may call something traumatic that you wouldn't, but
I would much rather even the smallest things be labeled
as traumatic and be treated with grace and gentleness and care.
(12:14):
Then one person not receive the acknowledgment they need for
their trauma because they think it's too small to count.
People can disagree with me on this and say, well,
that invalidates people who were actually traumatized and who have
actually lived through terrible things, to which I always say,
who is determining what actually means? And secondly, we're focusing
(12:35):
on the wrong thing. Why are we focusing on excluding
people from the trauma definition when we should be focused
on reducing shame for all people, expanding resources, expanding how
we collectively think of trauma as a systemic issue and
as a community issue where we need to support each
other and you know, hold each other accountable to not
(12:58):
harm other people. Like I think we're focusing on the
wrong thing when we're trying to get people to jump
over a certain hurdle to be considered to be considered
as traumatized. It's also important to note as well that
often the signs of trauma don't immediately show themselves, the
same way that a bruise doesn't immediately appear on the
(13:21):
skin after you've experienced like a blunt force trauma injury.
This is known as delayed trauma on set, and it's
a lot more common than we think, especially with childhood trauma,
because our trauma response is often delayed by the fact
that we may not have the cognitive abilities to process
what happened or the words to explain what happened until
(13:44):
our brain catches.
Speaker 2 (13:45):
Up later on.
Speaker 3 (13:47):
Also, a lot of time, a lot of times, people
are experiencing traumatic things, and the only way they can
get through that traumatic experience is to completely dissociate from
the fact that it is happening to them. So it's
only once they feel a maybe minor or general sense
of psychological safety or environmental safety and they are out
(14:08):
of that situation that they are able to appreciate.
Speaker 4 (14:12):
Like, hey, that was really messed up, Like that really.
Speaker 3 (14:14):
Shouldn't have happened to me. Happens a lot of times
with relationships, or a lot of times again with childhood,
where you are living under your parents' ruth, you are
living in a house. You do not have the independence
and the agency to escape that situation when you're a child,
so you just have to really like bury deep into
whatever coping mechanism you may have available to one of
(14:37):
those being a complete dismissal of your circumstances. A twenty
twenty paper out of Australia actually found that a lot
of people have this experience.
Speaker 2 (14:47):
A lot of.
Speaker 3 (14:48):
People report this delayed trauma onset and they also say that,
you know, the signs that they've been through something really
difficult only became more noticeable at a certain stage or
phase in their life. You know, they didn't realize how
their childhood impacted them until they got into their first
(15:08):
serious adult relationship and suddenly it was like wow, I
am a deeply wounded human being. You know, you don't
realize how much the death of your parent impacted you
until your family pet dies. You don't process how much
the bullying you experienced as a child really sat with
you until you know you're in your thirties and you
weren't invited on like the bachelorette trip, and suddenly you're
(15:30):
thirteen again, and all that anxiety and all that social
claustrophobia and all that fomo is back. But potentially one
of the biggest ways trauma starts to show up for
us later on in life or even immediately after a
traumatic event. And the whole theme of today's episode is
that it begins to show up physically through the body. Basically,
(15:54):
you suppress all of this stuff emotionally and psychologically, and
the only outlet has is physically, and so it starts
to kind of like trickle out through tension, through fatigue,
through pain. This is the sematic impact of trauma, the
sematic response to trauma.
Speaker 2 (16:14):
And of course we.
Speaker 3 (16:14):
Cannot talk about this without firstly acknowledging the book that
really put this on the map, which is the Body
keeps the Score, very very famous I think it has.
I think it's sold like three million copies worldwide. It
was written by a very famous Dutch psychiatrist, doctor Bessel
van der Kolk. Hopefully I pronounce that I don't speak Dutch,
(16:36):
but I think that's right. I think it's been on
the New York Times bestseller list for like six years.
Speaker 2 (16:41):
Now.
Speaker 4 (16:41):
Everyone knows this book. You have seen it before.
Speaker 3 (16:44):
It's safe to say this has just like completely changed
how we think about trauma. The core premise of this
book is that trauma isn't just this story we tell
in our minds. It's not just memories. It's actually stored
in our bodies. When we experience something traumatic, our brain
and our nervous system are significantly impacted in a way
(17:07):
that can leave us physically stuck in the past. Because
our mind and our body, like their relationship, cannot be disentangled.
Something happens that shakes us mentally and emotionally that doesn't
happen in isolation. Our body is also wrapped up in
this Prior to this book coming out, the clinical conversation
(17:29):
and the general social conversation around trauma often centered on
the cognitive side of things and on cognitive behavioral therapy,
which really placed an importance on the idea of changing
thought patterns in order to change feelings, and it doesn't
so much acknowledge the body is part of this and
this work, this book really shifted the paradigm from the
(17:50):
idea that trauma is something purely cognitive to the notion
of this mind body link. The brilliance of this book
is that it gave people the language to understand things
that perhaps a doctor had never given them, the words
to understand things that the medical community or more traditional
medical community, had never been able to explain for them.
(18:11):
Their chronic pain, the way their body was responding to
certain environmental cues, their stomach issues, their nausea, they're like fatigue.
None of this was random, none of this was an accident.
So it's definitely safe to say that the body keeps
the score has been very important in this discussion. But
there have been a few criticisms, which is why I
(18:33):
talk about this book, but I always talk about it
kind of with like, kind of with a little bit
of like skepticism. It definitely got some things not wrong,
but maybe a little bit misconstrued. You know. There was
an editorial published in twenty twenty three in the Research
on Social work Practice that highlighted that for many people
(18:53):
with PTSD, the body keeps the score is deeply revealing
for them, but it doesn't always give them accurate recommendations
about where to go from there, and it often when
it does, it introduces people to these very like intense
themes and very intense ideas and then makes it seem
(19:14):
like you can kind of diyatt that you can diy
some of the therapy therapeutic techniques that are introduced in
this book, and that's not the case, Like this stuff
needs to be performed or introduced through a trained practitioner,
and we don't want people to, you know, read this book,
or what this article says is they don't want people
(19:36):
to read this book and then think that somatic techniques
are the only thing that's going to help them. It's
often a lot more complex. Another article I read on
the site mother Jones, it also suggested that this book
really stigmatizes survivors and it blames victims by making the
trauma an individual issue, not considering the fact that there
(19:56):
are these huge social and political systems that are actually responsible.
Instead of looking at the social context. For example, things
like systemic racism or poverty, or structural violence or deep misogyny,
and how the shape trauma. The book really focuses on
how you as an individual can heal through somatic practices
(20:17):
and throughout the book. If you've read it, this may
have given you the ick as well. But the author portrays,
you know, survivors as self sabotaging, as not willing to
take responsibility for their trauma, without actually acknowledging the fact
that can they really take accountability for their trauma when
(20:38):
it was caused by a system and a context that
hasn't taken accountability itself and that continues to retraumatize them
and continues to keep them down. What this has the
danger of implying is that it is your personal responsibility
to deal with trauma, to heal from trauma, and to
(20:59):
do that alone. And if you aren't able to do that,
that is a personal failing, and that means that you
weren't discipline enough, you didn't try hard enough, you were
self sabotaging. When that is just like seriously not the
case and also seriously unhelpful, because you know, trauma takes
(21:20):
a long time to overcome. Some people never overcome it.
Sometimes it's just something you live with. But if you
were in those early stages and you're feeling like nothing
is working and you're reading this book, that's like, if
you can't manage this, then you're not trying hard enough
or you're not taking enough responsibility. It's like, well, that's
going to be deeply discouraging. So I just think that
(21:40):
that is something that people should really understand when reading
this work. I know it is a huge introduction to
this idea of how trauma is trapped in the body.
But there are also amazing other works and other books
that you can read on this. Trauma and Recovery by
Judith Hermann is a great one. The book by Stephanie
Fu My Bones Know also amazing. If you get a lot,
(22:03):
if you've got a lot out of The Body Keeps
the Score and want to expand your knowledge, or you
haven't read that book yet, those are some other really
amazing entry points to this discussion.
Speaker 4 (22:12):
So The Body Keeps.
Speaker 3 (22:13):
The Score an amazing introduction to this concept. It is like,
it's done amazing work in terms of introducing people to
this like mind body relationship that we all have. But
I want to kind of go a little bit further
and explaining why exactly that is the case and how
to manage it, perhaps in a more collective.
Speaker 2 (22:34):
Space as well.
Speaker 3 (22:35):
So we are going to take a short break here,
but when we return, I want to talk about the
exact biological, psychological, neurological mechanisms behind how trauma gets trapped
in the body, and also how we can start to
release some of that tension and some of those physical
effects stay with us. So we know that trauma has
(23:01):
felt in the body, we know that it's stored there.
How exactly does that happen? How is this the case?
Like what is actually happening in our cells, in our muscles,
in our stomach lining that makes this occur. The first
way we need to understand this, and the first theory
we need to understand this through, is something called polyvagal theory.
(23:23):
It was developed by the American psychologist Stefan Porgus, and
it is like the dominant theory explaining how exactly this
comes to be, and the way that we can picture
it is by imagining a ladder, or even better, I
want you to imagine one of those games that they
used to have at old carnivales or fairs where you
(23:46):
would get the hammer and you would hit it on
like some sensor and this like little thing would fling
up and you would hit different parts of if you
know what I mean, Like you would hit different parts
like that would tell you how strong you were. I'm
hoping that you're getting what I'm saying. For some reason,
I cannot give any more words as to how to
(24:06):
explain this imagining. It is a ladder, imagining it as
this carnival toy thing, if you know what I'm talking about.
But at the bottom of this ladder, at the very base,
we have what we call the ventral vaguel state. This
is a state of your nervous system where you are
deeply regulated. You're content, you're calm, you're grounded, you're connected,
(24:30):
You're present with your environment, You're present with the people
around you. You're able to respond and you know, be
kind of at peace, like you're just kind of existing.
That is the bottom of the ladder. That is where
we want to spend most of our time. Above that,
on the ladder, we have the sympathetic state. Now you
may know the sympathetic state from the fight or flight response.
(24:54):
This is where we experience a sense of tension. It's
where all of our like vible mechanisms are kicking into gear.
We may be afraid, we may feel threatened, we are scared.
During a traumatic event, our brain's threat detection system goes
into overdrive and pushes us into this state. Adrenaline, cortisol.
(25:16):
They're flooding our system and our body is prepared to
receive and respond to whatever danger or threat it has
already kind of recognized.
Speaker 2 (25:27):
In this state.
Speaker 3 (25:28):
This is like where you are having an intense stress response.
That's not the top of the ladder, though. At the
top of the ladder you have the dors or vaguel
state where the body it just stops fighting, just completely
shuts down. You feel like you can't fight back. The
situation you are facing is so awful that you are trapped,
(25:49):
You're helpless. This is where you really feel like your
life is threatened, your sense of safety is threatened, and
unlike during the sympathetic state, there's nothing you can do
about it. Healthy nervous system will rarely encounter the dorsal
vagel state, if not hopefully ever, and instead it typically
(26:09):
jumps between the sympathetic state and the ventral vagal state,
but it spends most of its time in the ventral
veagl state. It responds to stresses appropriately, then it returns
to that regulated baseline. But someone who has experienced a
deep trauma, they have gone all the way up the ladder.
Think of it like a door has been opened, like
a whole new level is unlocked. The brain now it
(26:33):
can't forget that that new level, that new level of
deep stress and just deep hopelessness, is there. It can't
forget what it felt like to just be in a
state of complete overwhelm, and it most certainly does not
want to go back there, and yet it often ends
up going back there by being retriggered through memories, through
(26:59):
environmental queue, through any number of triggers. It starts to
respond to minor things by swinging the stress state all
the way up to the highest notch, because it believes
that that is what we have to do in order
to survive the process. The stress process, the nervous system process,
has now become dysregulated. And you will hear that word
(27:21):
a lot when we talk about trauma and and how
it relates to the body. The intense kind of energy
caused by the stressful event, it basically gets us stuck
or trapped in that highest gear, and what we've experienced
is not processed, it's not released, it's held. It's held
there waiting for a signal of safety that often never comes.
(27:44):
And so what you might find is that you're either
in a state of constant arousal, a state of constant
stress and hypervigilance, or you're in a state of complete
numbness or emotional shutdown, both of those estates that we
do not want to be and we want to be relaxed,
we want to feel alert, we want to feel content.
But the vaguest nerve here, it is the key player.
(28:07):
It is really what is trapping all of these experiences
in like the deep nerves and the deep cells and
the deep responses of our body, this chronic state of dysregulation.
It doesn't just stay in our vague nerve. It doesn't
just stay in our mind. The vague nerve is the longest,
(28:31):
biggest nerve in the whole body. It stretches almost the
length of your body, and it's kind of like the
highway through which all information is sent out. Now, imagine
if that highway like is blown up. Imagine if that
highway is flooded, is swept away, is like something chaotic
(28:52):
happens to that highway. If you want to get to
anywhere else in the body, and you can't take that highway,
and you can't take you have to take back roads
or there's no road available. Connections or messages sent from
the brain to the rest of the body, to your limbs,
to your stomach, to the muscles in your arms, they're
(29:13):
kind of either not getting there, or when the message
does get there, it's a bit scrambled and it's been
a little bit shaken up, and it's not the same
message that was initially sent out. This chronic state of dysregulation,
this is why we experience those physical symptoms that we
acknowledge now our physical responses or the physical manifestations of trauma.
(29:38):
It's why we get that muscle tension, the digestive issues,
the chronic pain, the headaches, the jaw clenching, the unexplained
autoimmune conditions, because our body is still in that state
of hyper or hypo arousal. And also it just can't
regulate every single system that's going on because it still
feels like it is in that really heightened stress response
(30:02):
and it is in that state of just complete helplessness,
where there's no point focusing on digestion, there's no point
focusing on our immune system, there's no point focusing on
fighting off illness, there's no point in focusing on relaxing
our muscles or feeling you know, stable, because it still
feels like it's not going to survive. It still feels
(30:24):
like there is this terrible thing that is happening to it.
So let's talk about the pain component of this, and
the fact that a lot of people who experienced trauma
end up with chronic pain conditions. There is a very
famous study. I don't know if it's famous, definitely, I
hope it becomes more well known, but it's a study
that essentially found that in groups of participants who were
(30:45):
experiencing chronic pain, the level of PTSD within those groups
was significantly higher than in the general population. Up to
eighty percent of people who reported chronic pain who came
to their GP their doctor for chronic pain had a
previous personal history of PTSD or something that was deeply
(31:07):
traumatic happening to them.
Speaker 2 (31:09):
Now.
Speaker 3 (31:10):
It wasn't just the kind of it wasn't just physical trauma,
so it wasn't like, Oh, I have chronic pain because
I was in a car accident, or I have chronic
pain because.
Speaker 4 (31:18):
I was I fell out of a plane. A lot
of these.
Speaker 3 (31:21):
People had deeply interpersonal an emotional trauma that left no
physical stars but was obviously leaving real physical pain. A
twenty eighteen study published in the Canadian Journal of Pain
Management looked into the physical symptoms of PTSD in one
hundred and sixty six participants, and what they found was
(31:42):
that almost half of the sample actually experienced pain for
lashbacks associated with memories of past events and trauma. So
when they relived a past moment of trauma, they could
tell you where they felt pain in the body, and
they would say, oh, I can feel this here, and
(32:03):
I can feel this triggering something in me, and it
is very very intense for me. These are results, you know,
you just you can't ignore those results, especially as they
continue to be replicated time and time again across countries,
across population groups, across ages, across The type of trauma
(32:23):
that people have experienced, like this level of pain or
of physical discomfort is really an epidemic. So if trauma
is so clearly and vividly present in the body, why
are these very real symptoms and experiences often ignored, misdiagnosed,
or just in general dismissed by society. I think it
(32:46):
comes down to the fact that for a long time,
the medical community approached health issues with a sense of
mind body duality. So basically the idea that the mind
and the body they are two separate things, two separate entities.
If a physical symptom couldn't be explained by a clear
organic cause, like a gaping hole in your arm, a
(33:10):
broken bone, something of the sort, it was often dismissed
as being in your head.
Speaker 2 (33:17):
But with the.
Speaker 3 (33:18):
Scientific access we now have, neuroscience has really debunked this
idea and it's provided very compelling proof that the pain
is absolutely, unequivocally like it is.
Speaker 2 (33:29):
It is real.
Speaker 3 (33:30):
Research using fMRI scans have shown that when people recall
a traumatic event or they are triggered, the brain regions
that process psychological distress overlap significantly with the brain regions
that process physical pain. And I want to say this
pain is not felt in the body. Pain is felt
(33:53):
like in your mind.
Speaker 2 (33:54):
If people who are.
Speaker 3 (33:56):
Paralyzed like and their nerves and their like their nerves
below their waist or below wherever they don't work, and
someone stabs them in the foot, someone drops a cinder
block on their foot, They're not going to feel it
because there's no like that message isn't being sent to
the brain. The brain is the home of pain, and
(34:17):
so these fMRI studies are like so revealing that essentially
all these receptors that we usually associate with physical pain
are also being triggered by emotional experiences as well. Like
the brain is literally processing this as a real physical threat.
(34:37):
The vital point is again pain is the pain is real.
It may have an emotional, mental, or psychological origin, but
the pain receptors are being triggered in a very real
way that will have us experiencing the sensation of pain.
It is not in someone's head. Just because you can't
point to a physical wound or a broken limb, I
(34:59):
think another huge barrier and acknowledging this and getting help
for this is shame. Shame, God, It is like a
plague on society. Shame just is like, oh my god,
I think it just keeps so many people miserable and
hurt when they don't have to be trauma, you know,
especially when it's dismissed when it's unseen. It really breeds
(35:23):
this feeling of if I talk about this, if people
know this about me, they will only see me as this.
They will see me differently, they will walk on eggshells
around me. They will cringe or be embarrassed at what
I've been through. Like there's always that voice that is saying,
this isn't that serious. Don't ruin your reputation, don't make
(35:45):
people uncomfortable, don't make too big of a deal of this.
And it has to be be silent, be quiet, deal
with it, and guess what, it never works. The dealing
with it is not actually dealing with it.
Speaker 2 (36:00):
It's just suppressing it.
Speaker 3 (36:01):
This shame, you know, it prevents people from seeking help
because they're terrified of being charged. They're terrified of being
seen as weak. They're terrified that they're going to speak
about their trauma and someone's going to say, oh, that's
not that big of a deal. Stop being so dramatic.
There's also the real kicker to trauma in that you
often have to retrigger it to get through it. You
(36:24):
have to talk about it, You have to expose yourself
to things that you've avoided in a manner that's safe
so that you can rewire that physiological and psychological reaction.
That's bloody heart. If all that we're saying is true
reliving trauma, reliving the memories brings about real pain, then
the path to healing is.
Speaker 2 (36:43):
Going to be painful.
Speaker 3 (36:44):
And sometimes people just don't want to go through that,
which is totally totally understandable. But I want to provide
the silver lining in this very heavy conversation. There are
some wonderful therapeutic techniques that minimize the pain as you
are healing and in the long term that don't necessarily
(37:09):
retrigger you and leave you in that retriggered space and
can really really help you. And I want to talk
about some of the ones that have been introduced recently
that maybe aren't spoken about that much, in which are
these new frontiers of how we manage mental pain as
physical pain. Now, I will say one of my criticisms
(37:31):
of the Body Keeps the Score is that it presents
these ideas and it kind of makes it seem that
you can just like, DII why this. You cannot you
cannot DIY this unless you have like gone through extensive training.
There are so many amazing people who are experts in
this who can guide you through these therapeutic techniques. We're
(37:51):
just going to discuss them from like a lens of
psycho education and from a lens of like knowledge and
just knowing they're out there, knowing they're available, knowing the
core premise, and knowing that they're not scary, so that
you can go and seek out someone who can help
you with this at a deeper level. So I just
have to put that little disclaimer in here, But to
(38:14):
dive in a lot of trauma therapy these days is
really about, thank gosh, really about integrating the mind and
the body. In a large part of that maybe talking
about what occurred in the past, but it's equally about
controlling how we respond physically and helping our nervous system
feel safe so that it can return to a state
(38:34):
of homeostasis and equilibrium. A really fantastic evidence based therapy
often recommended for people with PTSD or complex PTSD, is
called I movement desensitization and Reprocessing therapy or EMDR, which
you may.
Speaker 2 (38:52):
Have heard of more recently.
Speaker 3 (38:53):
I feel like it's having a little bit of a
moment because it is fantastic. This was actually developed by
Francie Shapiriir. The story of how she came up with
this therapeutic technique is actually, I like it. I think
it's quite beautiful. She came up with it or discovered it,
I guess, almost by accident. Like she was walking through
the park one day and she was reliving or thinking
(39:15):
about something that was deeply painful to her and traumatic
to her, and she was moving her eyes side to side,
like looking at birds and looking at plants and looking
at the trees, and as she was doing it, she
was like, Wow, this actually feels like the intensity of
this memory is going down, Like I'm really starting to
feel better about this. So she took that experience, she
(39:38):
did obviously a lot more research and put it into
a lot of clinical applications, and she came up with AMDR,
which uses the same principles. Specifically, it uses this method
known as bi lateral stimulation, which basically means both halves
of your brains of your brain are active at the
same time, like a therapist will guide your eyes from
(40:01):
side to side, or we'll tap you on each side
of your head as you are recalling a traumatic memory,
and it's thought to help the brain kind of reprocess
and reintegrate this memory by moving it from the part
of the brain that keeps it stuck and active, so
the amygdala, to the part that stores it as a
(40:21):
past event that can no longer hurt us, the hypocampus.
When we experience something really overwhelming, our amygdala takes over
and our prefrontal cortext the part of our brain that
is responsible for executive thinking rational thinking. It's basically demoted.
That means that when we are retriggered or something reminds
(40:43):
us of the past, it can feel like it's happening right.
Speaker 2 (40:47):
Now all over again, leading.
Speaker 3 (40:50):
The brain in the body to have that disproportionate response
because it genuinely thinks like this is really happening. It
doesn't recognize like, oh this is this is a memory,
This isn't real. So EDMR helps us reduce the intensity
of these memories by reducing activity in the brain's fear circuits.
Whilst we actively recall this event so that it loses
(41:13):
some of its sharpness, the memory doesn't disappear. It's not
like hypnosis. We're not trying to make you forget. It's
just that the emotional physiological charge is neutralized in a
way that allows us to recall it without the associated terror.
So this is one of the ways that we can
create psychological and physical safety for ourselves so that we
(41:35):
can integrate our experience. We are going to take a
short break, but then I want to talk about a
few others, including one of my own favorite techniques that
I have tried that I love, that I could talk
about for literal days. So stay with us. We will
be right back. So let's talk about a few other
(41:58):
ways that people have studied, examined, and are trying to
kind of help us integrate our trauma on an individual level.
Now I did acknowledge this before, but that is something
about trauma that is very frustrating for many people. Trauma
is often systemic. It happens within large systems, it happens
between two or multiple people. Yeah, it's annoying. We are
(42:22):
kind of forced to heal from it individually.
Speaker 2 (42:24):
It's very unfair. There are definitely.
Speaker 3 (42:27):
Collective methods for this that are I think a little
bit more underground, collective trauma therapy support groups, things like
yarning circles. In Australia, these are practiced by First Nations
people where a group of people sit in a circle
they share experiences, they share knowledge, advice, support, surrounded by
their community. But a lot of Western trauma therapy is
(42:51):
definitely focused on the individual. There is a book I
really want to read. It's on my bookshelf right now.
It's called Very Appropriate Appropriately Healing Collective Trauma. But we
are mainly going to talk about individual methods here, acknowledging
that there is like a huge gap in the mental
health and psychology and trauma space to try and help
(43:13):
people in a collective community way, hopefully and definitely without
retraumatizing them. It's definitely I think something that more research
and more funding needs to get to be put into,
Like we need to stop thinking about trauma is just
an individual issue and more as a community issue and
one that can be helped with community. But back to
(43:36):
these individual therapies, things like somatic therapies, for example, I
still think they are really, really effective. The goal of
these therapies isn't, you know, to retell the story of
the trauma. It isn't to like try and make it
make sense, because it never will. It's just to gently
guide the body to let go of its defensive response
and say this doesn't have to make sense. But I'm
(43:58):
still safe. Just because I don't have closure for this
doesn't mean that I'm not in a space where I
can let myself relax. One of these therapies is known
as smatic experiencing and it was founded by the psychologist
and the author, doctor Peter Levine. So within this process,
therapists use this thing called titration to guide a client
(44:21):
to just feel or re experience a really small, manageable
piece of the traumatic sensation in their body and then
let it go. So it's like slowly releasing the pressure
from a locked valve, tiny bits at the time, so
it doesn't all flood out, allowing the stored energy to
kind of discharge itself bit by bit without overwhelming the system.
(44:44):
Whilst Lavine, I think he's definitely come under similar criticisms
to Vanderkolk, sematic experiencing really demonstrates at least some use
in reconnecting with our bodies and understanding certain physical sensations
so that we can feel in control of something that
has often robbed of people who have repeatedly experienced or
(45:04):
been exposed to trauma. They didn't feel in control of
how their body reacts and their body responds because it's
operating on a different plane, as we know. When I
was also looking into the research behind further body based
practices for trauma, I also came across a lot of
evidence for yoga, which didn't surprise me. I have a
(45:25):
friend who, one friend in particular only thinking about who
has this like totally truly spiritual story about how yoga
has helped her overcome some pretty terrible childhood trauma stuff.
Every time she tells this story to me, like I
get chills and I get tears, Like every single time,
I think, I've got to ask you to come onto
the podcast and if she'd be willing to talk about it.
(45:46):
But it's just beyond brilliant yoga as a therapeutic technique.
It's just groundbreaking, you know. For example, there was a
twenty fourteen study based in the US that looked at
the effect of twelve sah of yoga on a group
of women with PTSD, and it compared their symptoms to
those of people who didn't take part. And what they
(46:09):
found was that those who completed the twelve sessions demonstrated
less anxiety, less hyper arousal, and they reported that they
had less pain and less mental discomfort. Or distress associated
with re experiencing their trauma on the day to day.
And if we think of the crucial elements of yoga,
(46:30):
it really makes sense, you know, the focused, controlled breathing,
moving our bodies alongside other people. Again, maybe that's pointing
to again a more collective way of managing trauma. Even
like the stretching and the release of muscular tension, the flexibility,
the sense of personal control and agency over our bodies,
(46:52):
it all comes together to combat the negative side effects
that stored trauma can cause. In a slightly different vein person,
I found that running and weight lifting has had a
similar effect for me. Could never get into yoga, But recently,
I feel like I've talked about this on our run
Club episode, I have just found like a new love
(47:12):
for like endurance running. I don't know where it came from.
It's not just the endorphins either. It's this sense of
strength and power that I get from pushing myself traumatic experiences.
I think they make us feel so weak sometimes and powerless.
That's literally their very nature. And when I run, I
(47:33):
feel so strong, I feel so capable.
Speaker 2 (47:35):
I feel a lot.
Speaker 3 (47:37):
Of the rage that I've been carrying kind of releasing
itself into something that I can feel proud of and
that I can see my body doing. I also trust
my body more. I feel like my stress and my
anxiety have lessened. There is this incredible podcast that I
actually listened to on this the other day. I'm literally
(47:58):
gonna get my phone up and I'm going to find it.
It was with this running influencer that I follow called
Maddie Runs, and she lives in Utah, and she sat
down and talked to this person. I'm literally trying to
find it.
Speaker 2 (48:11):
Here it is.
Speaker 3 (48:12):
It's from the Everyday Ultra podcast. It's called how to
Heal Through Running and Build Self Belief with Madeleine Wolfbauger.
And I listened to that podcast and I was like, oh,
this totally makes sense. This like physical connection that she's
had with her body has allowed her trauma to be
expressed in a way that she feels is manageable. When
(48:33):
she's running, she feels so capable and she feels so
in control that the negative thoughts can come up and
she's still she still is like again in control of
her body and so they're allowed to be released. Incredible podcasts.
Should absolutely listen to it. She is amazing as well.
She's just really really cool. But again, all this is
about connection. Breath work is another one that people talk
(48:54):
about a lot. We just did an episode on that
with our expert guests Jessica Dibb. There's so much neuroscience
to all of this. There's so much neuroscience to the
way that having a better physical relationship with our body
allows us to build self trust in the fact that
we can handle the physical manifestations of our trauma and
(49:14):
we can. We are in control, We are in charge,
even if the emotional side of it doesn't make us
feel that way. I think ultimately healing from trauma that
is trapped in the body is about helping the body
understand that the threat is over. That is like the
line we keep coming back to, It's about building a
sense of safety. Trauma is the disruption of safety, coming
(49:37):
back to your body, feeling safe in your body. Therefore,
I think just like undercuts all, like all the stories
that trauma is.
Speaker 4 (49:47):
Telling us that we are not safe. You know.
Speaker 3 (49:49):
Of course, we also have to give a shout out
to like our cognitive and like our talk therapies as
well for getting a lot of people to the point
where they can have this sematic and physical approach. But whatever,
whatever you can do, whatever practice you can find that
is going to allow you to realize that your mind
and your body are in unison, and that your emotional
(50:13):
experiences show up physically in a way that is completely
valid and completely real and completely felt. That is going
to help you. The body, like our body, this is
going to get kind of spiritual, is like, but it
is like it is such a gift and it is
(50:35):
such a vessel through which we can deepen our connection
with our sense of self psychologically, it is like this
domain and this tool that we have hopefully a lot
of power over and that we can use as I
don't even know how to explain this. It's just something
I've been really like, really feeling deeper and deeper recently,
(50:57):
Like the guys look at me going but like the
body is not us, but the body is like an
extension of us that by taking care of by understanding more,
by treating with respect, by treating as much like in
the same way we treat our mind, can really heal us.
(51:19):
I feel like psychology is it has done so much
for allowing us to understand the mental side of trauma.
Speaker 2 (51:27):
And how our.
Speaker 3 (51:29):
Sense of self and our sense of safety, and our
sense of peace, and our sense of harmony and our
sense of meaning is disrupted by trauma. We need to
like add this body peace into it and understand that again,
when these deep painful feelings cannot be expressed through the
mind and are not allowed to be expressed maybe verbally
(51:51):
or maybe mentally by thinking about them, they will find
other ways to come out. And the body is the
body is like kind of the sacrifice at that point.
So I hope that this episode has just allowed you
to understand the mechanisms behind that better and what people
mean when they say the body keeps a score or
trauma is stored in the body.
Speaker 4 (52:12):
Yeah, I don't know.
Speaker 3 (52:13):
I feel like once you understand this, you're just like
I see my life differently and I see my body differently.
And hopefully you go and check out some of those
other resources that I've shared and those other people who
talk about this a lot more excellently than I do,
and who have even more marvelous and incredible stories and
facts and insights to share. If you have made it
(52:35):
this far, leave a little emoji down below of what
represents peace for you. The opposite of trauma, the opposite
of pain. Where do you feel most at peace? Like
what symbolizes real contentment and safety for you? Thank you
for listening if you did make it this far as well.
I really appreciate when people make it all the way
to the end of the episodes, when you make it
(52:56):
all the way the end to my little rants.
Speaker 4 (52:59):
And my little brand poo and me going off script,
So thank you.
Speaker 3 (53:03):
Make sure as well that you are following us on
Instagram at that psychology podcast if you already follow us,
you know, we do like episode summaries. We sometimes ask
for episode suggestions, we announced tour dates, We do all
that stuff over there that we don't always do.
Speaker 2 (53:18):
On the podcast.
Speaker 4 (53:19):
Whoopsies, that's totally my fault.
Speaker 3 (53:21):
But follow me over there so that you can be
engaged with the community. Make sure that you are following
us as well on Spotify or Apple podcasts wherever you
are listening, and give us a five star review if
this episode resonated with you, if you feel called to
do so, make sure you take care of yourself. I
know this episode was rather heavy. It was a bit
of an info dump. It definitely was perhaps a little
(53:41):
bit retriggering if some of these concepts are ones that
you know, you don't always talk about and which are
very heavy for you, so I'm going to leave some
resources below as well, but please again be kind to yourself,
be gentle, take care of yourself, and we will of
course talk very very soon.
Speaker 2 (53:59):
See you later,
Hello everybody, and welcome back to the Psychology of Your Twenties,
the podcast where we talk through some of the big
life changes and transitions of our twenties and what they
mean for our psychology. Hello everybody, Welcome back to the show.
(00:26):
Welcome back to the podcast. New listeners, old listeners. Wherever
you are in the world, you know the deal. It
is so great to have you here. Back for another
episode as we, of course break down the psychology of
our twenties. Today, we are talking about a word. We
are talking about a topic, a concept that carries a
(00:46):
whole lot of weight, but is also used pretty flippantly
in conversation and is very misunderstood. We are talking about
trauma specifically.
Speaker 2 (00:57):
I really want to.
Speaker 3 (00:58):
Talk about how trauma is not just emotional, not just
psychological or cognitive, but physical as well. This is something
that in my own personal life, I've been doing a
lot of deep research, deep knowledge searching on trying to
find the best resources, trying to find personal experiences, trying
(01:20):
to find the best books about how trauma is essentially
trapped in the body. Long story short, I feel like
I've had a lot of realizations about the kind of
rage and anger that I carry in my body, about
the kind of irritation that I'm constantly carrying around, the detension,
(01:42):
all of these reactions that I have to certain situations
that I literally have no idea where it came from.
I've just kind of always been frustrated by until I
started to really sit with past experiences and sit with
trauma and just appreciate how you know, it's not just psychological,
(02:03):
it's not just in my mind. It's not just something
that happened to me, but it has had like real
long term behavioral and physical I don't want to say consequences,
but implications, And it just felt like the appropriate time
to kind of take all that knowledge and that research
that I've been doing and put it into an episode
so that hopefully it's helpful for some of you guys
out there, those of you who are in their twenties
(02:26):
like me, who are maybe figuring this out for the
first time, or even if you are older. Now I
know that the word trauma it can feel really big.
It can feel very clinical, very intense. You know, for
a long time I didn't think that it applied to me.
I hadn't survived a war, I hadn't lived through some
(02:47):
giant film screen worthy event. You know, my childhood was
pretty normal. But this term and this concept means a
lot more than I think we have been taught it means,
and it is a lot less limited than previous definitions
(03:08):
or previous understandings of this experience would make us believe.
It's one of those terms that we hear a lot,
and I feel like a lot of us still don't
think that it applies to us. We have to have
lived through something really obvious and something very obviously painful
at the time to be part of this group or
(03:29):
part of this category of humans who have experienced trauma.
I think also we tend to sometimes judge the pain
of a past experience by the symptoms that we have
now or how much that pain is carried forward. So,
you know, if we're not having a seemingly big reaction
to something that's happened in the past, well then that
(03:51):
experience mustn't have been as traumatic as we thought it was.
But the thing with realizing how trauma is stored in
the body is you also start to realize how almost
unconscious and invisible a trauma response or the long term
impacts of trauma actually are because we often think about
it purely. Is this like emotional response, but it is deeply,
(04:15):
deeply physical. It shows up intention It shows up in
chronic pain, It shows up in fatigue, It shows up
in these like immediate behavioral reactions that we have no
control over, you know, crying when someone raises their voice,
even if like they're not actually angry. Trauma is stored
in your nervous system. It's stored in your gut reaction.
(04:35):
It's stored in how you breathe. You know. It's the
famous book your body keeps the score even when your
brain tries to move on. So in this episode, I
really want to talk about what trauma really is, what
happens within us when we experience traumatic, something traumatic, even
if we don't acknowledge or know that it was traumatic
(04:56):
at the time, and how we kind of get stuck
in a chronic arousal or chronic stress mode that.
Speaker 2 (05:05):
We don't even realize.
Speaker 3 (05:07):
I also want to talk about how small moments in
the past really shape our sense of safety, our identity,
our sense of connection, how we relate to other people
as well, in again ways that are often quite invisible
and not acknowledged. I'm going to say this episode is
not going to try and pathologize every single experience that
you've had, and it's not going to say that if
(05:28):
you have trauma, that's it, it will always be there,
this is who you are. Instead, I just hope you
understand yourself and your body better through this discussion and
what it may be holding and storing for you, what
it may be hiding, so that you continue to feel
like you are strong and that you are capable enough.
I think this episode is really about acknowledging that you
(05:50):
can be soft, and you can be gentle, and you
can be vulnerable. And that doesn't mean that the trauma
has won. It's meant that actually you have and you've
acknowledged its impact on you. So of thoughts, a lot
to unpack here, a lot of science, a lot of
research that I have been searching through and digging through
for many, many months, maybe even years of stage. So
(06:10):
we're going to take a deep breath and we're going
to get into exploring exactly how trauma is trapped in
the body. Stay with us. So before we get into
how trauma gets trapped in our bodies, we need to
talk about what trauma really means, which is actually kind
(06:31):
of tricky because by its very nature, trauma actually means
very different things for very different people, and it's very
hard to categorize. But psychologists have given it a go.
Researchers have given it a go, and there are a
couple of ways that they see or I hate to
say it, but rank trauma. Firstly, the big type of
trauma we often think of is a large, significant, one
(06:55):
time life threatening event like a natural disaster, a car accident,
near death experience. This is what we call type one trauma.
These moments, they just flip life on its head. They
are unexpected, they come out of nowhere, and the reason
they are so traumatic is because they make us realize
how inherently unsafe we are as humans, how vulnerable we are,
(07:18):
and they cause us to really have to rethink our
lives and also rethink how we can return to a
point where we feel safe and stable, which is very
hard for people. These moments, I think, are very clearly
traumatic in the eyes of many people, in the eyes
of society, they are not the only trauma that occurs.
(07:39):
Smaller repeated traumatic events over time or prolonged exposure to
traumatic situations are another type of trauma. We call type
two trauma. Type true trauma includes things like having maybe
a violent childhood home or experiencing domestic violence, but even
(07:59):
things racism, discrimination, sexism, workplace harassment, chronic health conditions, all
things that over time reduce our sense of safety and
make us feel like we are not in control of
our life, or our environment or our surroundings. You know,
I've got to say in twenty nineteen, I don't think
(08:21):
I've ever talked about this on the podcast before, but
I survived the Australian bushfires in an evacuation zone and
I genuinely thought the house was going to burn down.
I could not call my family. I was absolutely terrified.
I remember driving through like an active bushfire zone, the
smell of smoke being like everywhere.
Speaker 2 (08:40):
It was so loud.
Speaker 3 (08:42):
That was traumatic, But it was not as traumatic to
me as when my boss at the restaurant I worked
at in the same year was intimidating me and harassing me,
even if from the outside. You know, those bushfires are
the thing that people remember to me, Like when I
look back at my life and I'm like, oh, what
has really like left a scar? It's not that it's
(09:02):
this smaller repeated situation that made me feel a lot
more unsafe day to day than the big natural.
Speaker 2 (09:09):
Disaster that I live through.
Speaker 3 (09:11):
The focus on trauma, what I'm trying to say here
is that it's less on the magnitude of the event
itself and more on our own personal response to it,
and that's often influenced by things like previous experiences, previous
personal experiences, upbringing, even like our DNA and how stress
(09:31):
is encoded into our DNA.
Speaker 2 (09:34):
A lot of the.
Speaker 3 (09:34):
Time, I think we tend to dismiss our own trauma
because it's not big and bad enough compared to what
others have gone through. It feels like there is this
ladder almost or this like pyramid of how we rank trauma,
and if we're not at the top of the pyramid
experiencing the very worst of what humanity in life can
(09:58):
throw at us, then we don't don't belong in the
category of someone who has trauma. And here's the thing
I always say to this. Someone can have a broken
leg and you can have a broken arm, and your
broken arm is still going to hurt. Like, just because
someone has more pain than you doesn't mean that your
pain isn't being subjectively experienced as painful. Someone could have
(10:19):
more trauma than you. It doesn't mean that the trauma
you're experiencing isn't just as awful. Like it's this weird
thing where our bodies and our minds can continue to
adapt to really really terrible, terrible things and our pain
threshold or our trauma threshold gets bigger and bigger and bigger.
(10:40):
It doesn't mean that the threshold that you had when
you experience your trauma wasn't already at a point where
pain was going to be experienced. I feel like that's
a really complicated way of explaining it, But hopefully what
I mean and what you interpret from that is that
this is an entirely subjective experience. What constitutes a traumatic
event for one person may not for another, depending on
their individual biology, their psychological resilience, their support system. You know,
(11:04):
you could be in a car accident. You could walk
away and be completely unfazed, but someone else might not
be able to ever get back in a car, you know,
as compared to you know, someone maybe in a situation
they see as life threatening, another person wouldn't see it
as life threatening. Whose definition of life threatening do we
therefore follow? And also sometimes something doesn't need to have
(11:26):
threatened your physical safety to be traumatic, you know, is
the case with vicarious trauma. A person working in an
emergency department could be entirely safe from actual danger themselves,
but still leave that workplace five years later deeply traumatized.
The point is, if we're looking for some kind of
yardstick or questionnaire as to whether a situation was traumatic,
(11:50):
and whether you're looking for a questionnaire or a yardstick
that is universal and will apply to everyone, we aren't
going to find one. And yes, that may mean that
some people may call something traumatic that you wouldn't, but
I would much rather even the smallest things be labeled
as traumatic and be treated with grace and gentleness and care.
(12:14):
Then one person not receive the acknowledgment they need for
their trauma because they think it's too small to count.
People can disagree with me on this and say, well,
that invalidates people who were actually traumatized and who have
actually lived through terrible things, to which I always say,
who is determining what actually means? And secondly, we're focusing
(12:35):
on the wrong thing. Why are we focusing on excluding
people from the trauma definition when we should be focused
on reducing shame for all people, expanding resources, expanding how
we collectively think of trauma as a systemic issue and
as a community issue where we need to support each
other and you know, hold each other accountable to not
(12:58):
harm other people. Like I think we're focusing on the
wrong thing when we're trying to get people to jump
over a certain hurdle to be considered to be considered
as traumatized. It's also important to note as well that
often the signs of trauma don't immediately show themselves, the
same way that a bruise doesn't immediately appear on the
(13:21):
skin after you've experienced like a blunt force trauma injury.
This is known as delayed trauma on set, and it's
a lot more common than we think, especially with childhood trauma,
because our trauma response is often delayed by the fact
that we may not have the cognitive abilities to process
what happened or the words to explain what happened until
(13:44):
our brain catches.
Speaker 2 (13:45):
Up later on.
Speaker 3 (13:47):
Also, a lot of time, a lot of times, people
are experiencing traumatic things, and the only way they can
get through that traumatic experience is to completely dissociate from
the fact that it is happening to them. So it's
only once they feel a maybe minor or general sense
of psychological safety or environmental safety and they are out
(14:08):
of that situation that they are able to appreciate.
Speaker 4 (14:12):
Like, hey, that was really messed up, Like that really.
Speaker 3 (14:14):
Shouldn't have happened to me. Happens a lot of times
with relationships, or a lot of times again with childhood,
where you are living under your parents' ruth, you are
living in a house. You do not have the independence
and the agency to escape that situation when you're a child,
so you just have to really like bury deep into
whatever coping mechanism you may have available to one of
(14:37):
those being a complete dismissal of your circumstances. A twenty
twenty paper out of Australia actually found that a lot
of people have this experience.
Speaker 2 (14:47):
A lot of.
Speaker 3 (14:48):
People report this delayed trauma onset and they also say that,
you know, the signs that they've been through something really
difficult only became more noticeable at a certain stage or
phase in their life. You know, they didn't realize how
their childhood impacted them until they got into their first
(15:08):
serious adult relationship and suddenly it was like wow, I
am a deeply wounded human being. You know, you don't
realize how much the death of your parent impacted you
until your family pet dies. You don't process how much
the bullying you experienced as a child really sat with
you until you know you're in your thirties and you
weren't invited on like the bachelorette trip, and suddenly you're
(15:30):
thirteen again, and all that anxiety and all that social
claustrophobia and all that fomo is back. But potentially one
of the biggest ways trauma starts to show up for
us later on in life or even immediately after a
traumatic event. And the whole theme of today's episode is
that it begins to show up physically through the body. Basically,
(15:54):
you suppress all of this stuff emotionally and psychologically, and
the only outlet has is physically, and so it starts
to kind of like trickle out through tension, through fatigue,
through pain. This is the sematic impact of trauma, the
sematic response to trauma.
Speaker 2 (16:14):
And of course we.
Speaker 3 (16:14):
Cannot talk about this without firstly acknowledging the book that
really put this on the map, which is the Body
keeps the Score, very very famous I think it has.
I think it's sold like three million copies worldwide. It
was written by a very famous Dutch psychiatrist, doctor Bessel
van der Kolk. Hopefully I pronounce that I don't speak Dutch,
(16:36):
but I think that's right. I think it's been on
the New York Times bestseller list for like six years.
Speaker 2 (16:41):
Now.
Speaker 4 (16:41):
Everyone knows this book. You have seen it before.
Speaker 3 (16:44):
It's safe to say this has just like completely changed
how we think about trauma. The core premise of this
book is that trauma isn't just this story we tell
in our minds. It's not just memories. It's actually stored
in our bodies. When we experience something traumatic, our brain
and our nervous system are significantly impacted in a way
(17:07):
that can leave us physically stuck in the past. Because
our mind and our body, like their relationship, cannot be disentangled.
Something happens that shakes us mentally and emotionally that doesn't
happen in isolation. Our body is also wrapped up in
this Prior to this book coming out, the clinical conversation
(17:29):
and the general social conversation around trauma often centered on
the cognitive side of things and on cognitive behavioral therapy,
which really placed an importance on the idea of changing
thought patterns in order to change feelings, and it doesn't
so much acknowledge the body is part of this and
this work, this book really shifted the paradigm from the
(17:50):
idea that trauma is something purely cognitive to the notion
of this mind body link. The brilliance of this book
is that it gave people the language to understand things
that perhaps a doctor had never given them, the words
to understand things that the medical community or more traditional
medical community, had never been able to explain for them.
(18:11):
Their chronic pain, the way their body was responding to
certain environmental cues, their stomach issues, their nausea, they're like fatigue.
None of this was random, none of this was an accident.
So it's definitely safe to say that the body keeps
the score has been very important in this discussion. But
there have been a few criticisms, which is why I
(18:33):
talk about this book, but I always talk about it
kind of with like, kind of with a little bit
of like skepticism. It definitely got some things not wrong,
but maybe a little bit misconstrued. You know. There was
an editorial published in twenty twenty three in the Research
on Social work Practice that highlighted that for many people
(18:53):
with PTSD, the body keeps the score is deeply revealing
for them, but it doesn't always give them accurate recommendations
about where to go from there, and it often when
it does, it introduces people to these very like intense
themes and very intense ideas and then makes it seem
(19:14):
like you can kind of diyatt that you can diy
some of the therapy therapeutic techniques that are introduced in
this book, and that's not the case, Like this stuff
needs to be performed or introduced through a trained practitioner,
and we don't want people to, you know, read this book,
or what this article says is they don't want people
(19:36):
to read this book and then think that somatic techniques
are the only thing that's going to help them. It's
often a lot more complex. Another article I read on
the site mother Jones, it also suggested that this book
really stigmatizes survivors and it blames victims by making the
trauma an individual issue, not considering the fact that there
(19:56):
are these huge social and political systems that are actually responsible.
Instead of looking at the social context. For example, things
like systemic racism or poverty, or structural violence or deep misogyny,
and how the shape trauma. The book really focuses on
how you as an individual can heal through somatic practices
(20:17):
and throughout the book. If you've read it, this may
have given you the ick as well. But the author portrays,
you know, survivors as self sabotaging, as not willing to
take responsibility for their trauma, without actually acknowledging the fact
that can they really take accountability for their trauma when
(20:38):
it was caused by a system and a context that
hasn't taken accountability itself and that continues to retraumatize them
and continues to keep them down. What this has the
danger of implying is that it is your personal responsibility
to deal with trauma, to heal from trauma, and to
(20:59):
do that alone. And if you aren't able to do that,
that is a personal failing, and that means that you
weren't discipline enough, you didn't try hard enough, you were
self sabotaging. When that is just like seriously not the
case and also seriously unhelpful, because you know, trauma takes
(21:20):
a long time to overcome. Some people never overcome it.
Sometimes it's just something you live with. But if you
were in those early stages and you're feeling like nothing
is working and you're reading this book, that's like, if
you can't manage this, then you're not trying hard enough
or you're not taking enough responsibility. It's like, well, that's
going to be deeply discouraging. So I just think that
(21:40):
that is something that people should really understand when reading
this work. I know it is a huge introduction to
this idea of how trauma is trapped in the body.
But there are also amazing other works and other books
that you can read on this. Trauma and Recovery by
Judith Hermann is a great one. The book by Stephanie
Fu My Bones Know also amazing. If you get a lot,
(22:03):
if you've got a lot out of The Body Keeps
the Score and want to expand your knowledge, or you
haven't read that book yet, those are some other really
amazing entry points to this discussion.
Speaker 4 (22:12):
So The Body Keeps.
Speaker 3 (22:13):
The Score an amazing introduction to this concept. It is like,
it's done amazing work in terms of introducing people to
this like mind body relationship that we all have. But
I want to kind of go a little bit further
and explaining why exactly that is the case and how
to manage it, perhaps in a more collective.
Speaker 2 (22:34):
Space as well.
Speaker 3 (22:35):
So we are going to take a short break here,
but when we return, I want to talk about the
exact biological, psychological, neurological mechanisms behind how trauma gets trapped
in the body, and also how we can start to
release some of that tension and some of those physical
effects stay with us. So we know that trauma has
(23:01):
felt in the body, we know that it's stored there.
How exactly does that happen? How is this the case?
Like what is actually happening in our cells, in our muscles,
in our stomach lining that makes this occur. The first
way we need to understand this, and the first theory
we need to understand this through, is something called polyvagal theory.
(23:23):
It was developed by the American psychologist Stefan Porgus, and
it is like the dominant theory explaining how exactly this
comes to be, and the way that we can picture
it is by imagining a ladder, or even better, I
want you to imagine one of those games that they
used to have at old carnivales or fairs where you
(23:46):
would get the hammer and you would hit it on
like some sensor and this like little thing would fling
up and you would hit different parts of if you
know what I mean, Like you would hit different parts
like that would tell you how strong you were. I'm
hoping that you're getting what I'm saying. For some reason,
I cannot give any more words as to how to
(24:06):
explain this imagining. It is a ladder, imagining it as
this carnival toy thing, if you know what I'm talking about.
But at the bottom of this ladder, at the very base,
we have what we call the ventral vaguel state. This
is a state of your nervous system where you are
deeply regulated. You're content, you're calm, you're grounded, you're connected,
(24:30):
You're present with your environment, You're present with the people
around you. You're able to respond and you know, be
kind of at peace, like you're just kind of existing.
That is the bottom of the ladder. That is where
we want to spend most of our time. Above that,
on the ladder, we have the sympathetic state. Now you
may know the sympathetic state from the fight or flight response.
(24:54):
This is where we experience a sense of tension. It's
where all of our like vible mechanisms are kicking into gear.
We may be afraid, we may feel threatened, we are scared.
During a traumatic event, our brain's threat detection system goes
into overdrive and pushes us into this state. Adrenaline, cortisol.
(25:16):
They're flooding our system and our body is prepared to
receive and respond to whatever danger or threat it has
already kind of recognized.
Speaker 2 (25:27):
In this state.
Speaker 3 (25:28):
This is like where you are having an intense stress response.
That's not the top of the ladder, though. At the
top of the ladder you have the dors or vaguel
state where the body it just stops fighting, just completely
shuts down. You feel like you can't fight back. The
situation you are facing is so awful that you are trapped,
(25:49):
You're helpless. This is where you really feel like your
life is threatened, your sense of safety is threatened, and
unlike during the sympathetic state, there's nothing you can do
about it. Healthy nervous system will rarely encounter the dorsal
vagel state, if not hopefully ever, and instead it typically
(26:09):
jumps between the sympathetic state and the ventral vagal state,
but it spends most of its time in the ventral
veagl state. It responds to stresses appropriately, then it returns
to that regulated baseline. But someone who has experienced a
deep trauma, they have gone all the way up the ladder.
Think of it like a door has been opened, like
a whole new level is unlocked. The brain now it
(26:33):
can't forget that that new level, that new level of
deep stress and just deep hopelessness, is there. It can't
forget what it felt like to just be in a
state of complete overwhelm, and it most certainly does not
want to go back there, and yet it often ends
up going back there by being retriggered through memories, through
(26:59):
environmental queue, through any number of triggers. It starts to
respond to minor things by swinging the stress state all
the way up to the highest notch, because it believes
that that is what we have to do in order
to survive the process. The stress process, the nervous system process,
has now become dysregulated. And you will hear that word
(27:21):
a lot when we talk about trauma and and how
it relates to the body. The intense kind of energy
caused by the stressful event, it basically gets us stuck
or trapped in that highest gear, and what we've experienced
is not processed, it's not released, it's held. It's held
there waiting for a signal of safety that often never comes.
(27:44):
And so what you might find is that you're either
in a state of constant arousal, a state of constant
stress and hypervigilance, or you're in a state of complete
numbness or emotional shutdown, both of those estates that we
do not want to be and we want to be relaxed,
we want to feel alert, we want to feel content.
But the vaguest nerve here, it is the key player.
(28:07):
It is really what is trapping all of these experiences
in like the deep nerves and the deep cells and
the deep responses of our body, this chronic state of dysregulation.
It doesn't just stay in our vague nerve. It doesn't
just stay in our mind. The vague nerve is the longest,
(28:31):
biggest nerve in the whole body. It stretches almost the
length of your body, and it's kind of like the
highway through which all information is sent out. Now, imagine
if that highway like is blown up. Imagine if that
highway is flooded, is swept away, is like something chaotic
(28:52):
happens to that highway. If you want to get to
anywhere else in the body, and you can't take that highway,
and you can't take you have to take back roads
or there's no road available. Connections or messages sent from
the brain to the rest of the body, to your limbs,
to your stomach, to the muscles in your arms, they're
(29:13):
kind of either not getting there, or when the message
does get there, it's a bit scrambled and it's been
a little bit shaken up, and it's not the same
message that was initially sent out. This chronic state of dysregulation,
this is why we experience those physical symptoms that we
acknowledge now our physical responses or the physical manifestations of trauma.
(29:38):
It's why we get that muscle tension, the digestive issues,
the chronic pain, the headaches, the jaw clenching, the unexplained
autoimmune conditions, because our body is still in that state
of hyper or hypo arousal. And also it just can't
regulate every single system that's going on because it still
feels like it is in that really heightened stress response
(30:02):
and it is in that state of just complete helplessness,
where there's no point focusing on digestion, there's no point
focusing on our immune system, there's no point focusing on
fighting off illness, there's no point in focusing on relaxing
our muscles or feeling you know, stable, because it still
feels like it's not going to survive. It still feels
(30:24):
like there is this terrible thing that is happening to it.
So let's talk about the pain component of this, and
the fact that a lot of people who experienced trauma
end up with chronic pain conditions. There is a very
famous study. I don't know if it's famous, definitely, I
hope it becomes more well known, but it's a study
that essentially found that in groups of participants who were
(30:45):
experiencing chronic pain, the level of PTSD within those groups
was significantly higher than in the general population. Up to
eighty percent of people who reported chronic pain who came
to their GP their doctor for chronic pain had a
previous personal history of PTSD or something that was deeply
(31:07):
traumatic happening to them.
Speaker 2 (31:09):
Now.
Speaker 3 (31:10):
It wasn't just the kind of it wasn't just physical trauma,
so it wasn't like, Oh, I have chronic pain because
I was in a car accident, or I have chronic
pain because.
Speaker 4 (31:18):
I was I fell out of a plane. A lot
of these.
Speaker 3 (31:21):
People had deeply interpersonal an emotional trauma that left no
physical stars but was obviously leaving real physical pain. A
twenty eighteen study published in the Canadian Journal of Pain
Management looked into the physical symptoms of PTSD in one
hundred and sixty six participants, and what they found was
(31:42):
that almost half of the sample actually experienced pain for
lashbacks associated with memories of past events and trauma. So
when they relived a past moment of trauma, they could
tell you where they felt pain in the body, and
they would say, oh, I can feel this here, and
(32:03):
I can feel this triggering something in me, and it
is very very intense for me. These are results, you know,
you just you can't ignore those results, especially as they
continue to be replicated time and time again across countries,
across population groups, across ages, across The type of trauma
(32:23):
that people have experienced, like this level of pain or
of physical discomfort is really an epidemic. So if trauma
is so clearly and vividly present in the body, why
are these very real symptoms and experiences often ignored, misdiagnosed,
or just in general dismissed by society. I think it
(32:46):
comes down to the fact that for a long time,
the medical community approached health issues with a sense of
mind body duality. So basically the idea that the mind
and the body they are two separate things, two separate entities.
If a physical symptom couldn't be explained by a clear
organic cause, like a gaping hole in your arm, a
(33:10):
broken bone, something of the sort, it was often dismissed
as being in your head.
Speaker 2 (33:17):
But with the.
Speaker 3 (33:18):
Scientific access we now have, neuroscience has really debunked this
idea and it's provided very compelling proof that the pain
is absolutely, unequivocally like it is.
Speaker 2 (33:29):
It is real.
Speaker 3 (33:30):
Research using fMRI scans have shown that when people recall
a traumatic event or they are triggered, the brain regions
that process psychological distress overlap significantly with the brain regions
that process physical pain. And I want to say this
pain is not felt in the body. Pain is felt
(33:53):
like in your mind.
Speaker 2 (33:54):
If people who are.
Speaker 3 (33:56):
Paralyzed like and their nerves and their like their nerves
below their waist or below wherever they don't work, and
someone stabs them in the foot, someone drops a cinder
block on their foot, They're not going to feel it
because there's no like that message isn't being sent to
the brain. The brain is the home of pain, and
(34:17):
so these fMRI studies are like so revealing that essentially
all these receptors that we usually associate with physical pain
are also being triggered by emotional experiences as well. Like
the brain is literally processing this as a real physical threat.
(34:37):
The vital point is again pain is the pain is real.
It may have an emotional, mental, or psychological origin, but
the pain receptors are being triggered in a very real
way that will have us experiencing the sensation of pain.
It is not in someone's head. Just because you can't
point to a physical wound or a broken limb, I
(34:59):
think another huge barrier and acknowledging this and getting help
for this is shame. Shame, God, It is like a
plague on society. Shame just is like, oh my god,
I think it just keeps so many people miserable and
hurt when they don't have to be trauma, you know,
especially when it's dismissed when it's unseen. It really breeds
(35:23):
this feeling of if I talk about this, if people
know this about me, they will only see me as this.
They will see me differently, they will walk on eggshells
around me. They will cringe or be embarrassed at what
I've been through. Like there's always that voice that is saying,
this isn't that serious. Don't ruin your reputation, don't make
(35:45):
people uncomfortable, don't make too big of a deal of this.
And it has to be be silent, be quiet, deal
with it, and guess what, it never works. The dealing
with it is not actually dealing with it.
Speaker 2 (36:00):
It's just suppressing it.
Speaker 3 (36:01):
This shame, you know, it prevents people from seeking help
because they're terrified of being charged. They're terrified of being
seen as weak. They're terrified that they're going to speak
about their trauma and someone's going to say, oh, that's
not that big of a deal. Stop being so dramatic.
There's also the real kicker to trauma in that you
often have to retrigger it to get through it. You
(36:24):
have to talk about it, You have to expose yourself
to things that you've avoided in a manner that's safe
so that you can rewire that physiological and psychological reaction.
That's bloody heart. If all that we're saying is true
reliving trauma, reliving the memories brings about real pain, then
the path to healing is.
Speaker 2 (36:43):
Going to be painful.
Speaker 3 (36:44):
And sometimes people just don't want to go through that,
which is totally totally understandable. But I want to provide
the silver lining in this very heavy conversation. There are
some wonderful therapeutic techniques that minimize the pain as you
are healing and in the long term that don't necessarily
(37:09):
retrigger you and leave you in that retriggered space and
can really really help you. And I want to talk
about some of the ones that have been introduced recently
that maybe aren't spoken about that much, in which are
these new frontiers of how we manage mental pain as
physical pain. Now, I will say one of my criticisms
(37:31):
of the Body Keeps the Score is that it presents
these ideas and it kind of makes it seem that
you can just like, DII why this. You cannot you
cannot DIY this unless you have like gone through extensive training.
There are so many amazing people who are experts in
this who can guide you through these therapeutic techniques. We're
(37:51):
just going to discuss them from like a lens of
psycho education and from a lens of like knowledge and
just knowing they're out there, knowing they're available, knowing the
core premise, and knowing that they're not scary, so that
you can go and seek out someone who can help
you with this at a deeper level. So I just
have to put that little disclaimer in here, But to
(38:14):
dive in a lot of trauma therapy these days is
really about, thank gosh, really about integrating the mind and
the body. In a large part of that maybe talking
about what occurred in the past, but it's equally about
controlling how we respond physically and helping our nervous system
feel safe so that it can return to a state
(38:34):
of homeostasis and equilibrium. A really fantastic evidence based therapy
often recommended for people with PTSD or complex PTSD, is
called I movement desensitization and Reprocessing therapy or EMDR, which
you may.
Speaker 2 (38:52):
Have heard of more recently.
Speaker 3 (38:53):
I feel like it's having a little bit of a
moment because it is fantastic. This was actually developed by
Francie Shapiriir. The story of how she came up with
this therapeutic technique is actually, I like it. I think
it's quite beautiful. She came up with it or discovered it,
I guess, almost by accident. Like she was walking through
the park one day and she was reliving or thinking
(39:15):
about something that was deeply painful to her and traumatic
to her, and she was moving her eyes side to side,
like looking at birds and looking at plants and looking
at the trees, and as she was doing it, she
was like, Wow, this actually feels like the intensity of
this memory is going down, Like I'm really starting to
feel better about this. So she took that experience, she
(39:38):
did obviously a lot more research and put it into
a lot of clinical applications, and she came up with AMDR,
which uses the same principles. Specifically, it uses this method
known as bi lateral stimulation, which basically means both halves
of your brains of your brain are active at the
same time, like a therapist will guide your eyes from
(40:01):
side to side, or we'll tap you on each side
of your head as you are recalling a traumatic memory,
and it's thought to help the brain kind of reprocess
and reintegrate this memory by moving it from the part
of the brain that keeps it stuck and active, so
the amygdala, to the part that stores it as a
(40:21):
past event that can no longer hurt us, the hypocampus.
When we experience something really overwhelming, our amygdala takes over
and our prefrontal cortext the part of our brain that
is responsible for executive thinking rational thinking. It's basically demoted.
That means that when we are retriggered or something reminds
(40:43):
us of the past, it can feel like it's happening right.
Speaker 2 (40:47):
Now all over again, leading.
Speaker 3 (40:50):
The brain in the body to have that disproportionate response
because it genuinely thinks like this is really happening. It
doesn't recognize like, oh this is this is a memory,
This isn't real. So EDMR helps us reduce the intensity
of these memories by reducing activity in the brain's fear circuits.
Whilst we actively recall this event so that it loses
(41:13):
some of its sharpness, the memory doesn't disappear. It's not
like hypnosis. We're not trying to make you forget. It's
just that the emotional physiological charge is neutralized in a
way that allows us to recall it without the associated terror.
So this is one of the ways that we can
create psychological and physical safety for ourselves so that we
(41:35):
can integrate our experience. We are going to take a
short break, but then I want to talk about a
few others, including one of my own favorite techniques that
I have tried that I love, that I could talk
about for literal days. So stay with us. We will
be right back. So let's talk about a few other
(41:58):
ways that people have studied, examined, and are trying to
kind of help us integrate our trauma on an individual level.
Now I did acknowledge this before, but that is something
about trauma that is very frustrating for many people. Trauma
is often systemic. It happens within large systems, it happens
between two or multiple people. Yeah, it's annoying. We are
(42:22):
kind of forced to heal from it individually.
Speaker 2 (42:24):
It's very unfair. There are definitely.
Speaker 3 (42:27):
Collective methods for this that are I think a little
bit more underground, collective trauma therapy support groups, things like
yarning circles. In Australia, these are practiced by First Nations
people where a group of people sit in a circle
they share experiences, they share knowledge, advice, support, surrounded by
their community. But a lot of Western trauma therapy is
(42:51):
definitely focused on the individual. There is a book I
really want to read. It's on my bookshelf right now.
It's called Very Appropriate Appropriately Healing Collective Trauma. But we
are mainly going to talk about individual methods here, acknowledging
that there is like a huge gap in the mental
health and psychology and trauma space to try and help
(43:13):
people in a collective community way, hopefully and definitely without
retraumatizing them. It's definitely I think something that more research
and more funding needs to get to be put into,
Like we need to stop thinking about trauma is just
an individual issue and more as a community issue and
one that can be helped with community. But back to
(43:36):
these individual therapies, things like somatic therapies, for example, I
still think they are really, really effective. The goal of
these therapies isn't, you know, to retell the story of
the trauma. It isn't to like try and make it
make sense, because it never will. It's just to gently
guide the body to let go of its defensive response
and say this doesn't have to make sense. But I'm
(43:58):
still safe. Just because I don't have closure for this
doesn't mean that I'm not in a space where I
can let myself relax. One of these therapies is known
as smatic experiencing and it was founded by the psychologist
and the author, doctor Peter Levine. So within this process,
therapists use this thing called titration to guide a client
(44:21):
to just feel or re experience a really small, manageable
piece of the traumatic sensation in their body and then
let it go. So it's like slowly releasing the pressure
from a locked valve, tiny bits at the time, so
it doesn't all flood out, allowing the stored energy to
kind of discharge itself bit by bit without overwhelming the system.
(44:44):
Whilst Lavine, I think he's definitely come under similar criticisms
to Vanderkolk, sematic experiencing really demonstrates at least some use
in reconnecting with our bodies and understanding certain physical sensations
so that we can feel in control of something that
has often robbed of people who have repeatedly experienced or
(45:04):
been exposed to trauma. They didn't feel in control of
how their body reacts and their body responds because it's
operating on a different plane, as we know. When I
was also looking into the research behind further body based
practices for trauma, I also came across a lot of
evidence for yoga, which didn't surprise me. I have a
(45:25):
friend who, one friend in particular only thinking about who
has this like totally truly spiritual story about how yoga
has helped her overcome some pretty terrible childhood trauma stuff.
Every time she tells this story to me, like I
get chills and I get tears, Like every single time,
I think, I've got to ask you to come onto
the podcast and if she'd be willing to talk about it.
(45:46):
But it's just beyond brilliant yoga as a therapeutic technique.
It's just groundbreaking, you know. For example, there was a
twenty fourteen study based in the US that looked at
the effect of twelve sah of yoga on a group
of women with PTSD, and it compared their symptoms to
those of people who didn't take part. And what they
(46:09):
found was that those who completed the twelve sessions demonstrated
less anxiety, less hyper arousal, and they reported that they
had less pain and less mental discomfort. Or distress associated
with re experiencing their trauma on the day to day.
And if we think of the crucial elements of yoga,
(46:30):
it really makes sense, you know, the focused, controlled breathing,
moving our bodies alongside other people. Again, maybe that's pointing
to again a more collective way of managing trauma. Even
like the stretching and the release of muscular tension, the flexibility,
the sense of personal control and agency over our bodies,
(46:52):
it all comes together to combat the negative side effects
that stored trauma can cause. In a slightly different vein person,
I found that running and weight lifting has had a
similar effect for me. Could never get into yoga, But recently,
I feel like I've talked about this on our run
Club episode, I have just found like a new love
(47:12):
for like endurance running. I don't know where it came from.
It's not just the endorphins either. It's this sense of
strength and power that I get from pushing myself traumatic experiences.
I think they make us feel so weak sometimes and powerless.
That's literally their very nature. And when I run, I
(47:33):
feel so strong, I feel so capable.
Speaker 2 (47:35):
I feel a lot.
Speaker 3 (47:37):
Of the rage that I've been carrying kind of releasing
itself into something that I can feel proud of and
that I can see my body doing. I also trust
my body more. I feel like my stress and my
anxiety have lessened. There is this incredible podcast that I
actually listened to on this the other day. I'm literally
(47:58):
gonna get my phone up and I'm going to find it.
It was with this running influencer that I follow called
Maddie Runs, and she lives in Utah, and she sat
down and talked to this person. I'm literally trying to
find it.
Speaker 2 (48:11):
Here it is.
Speaker 3 (48:12):
It's from the Everyday Ultra podcast. It's called how to
Heal Through Running and Build Self Belief with Madeleine Wolfbauger.
And I listened to that podcast and I was like, oh,
this totally makes sense. This like physical connection that she's
had with her body has allowed her trauma to be
expressed in a way that she feels is manageable. When
(48:33):
she's running, she feels so capable and she feels so
in control that the negative thoughts can come up and
she's still she still is like again in control of
her body and so they're allowed to be released. Incredible podcasts.
Should absolutely listen to it. She is amazing as well.
She's just really really cool. But again, all this is
about connection. Breath work is another one that people talk
(48:54):
about a lot. We just did an episode on that
with our expert guests Jessica Dibb. There's so much neuroscience
to all of this. There's so much neuroscience to the
way that having a better physical relationship with our body
allows us to build self trust in the fact that
we can handle the physical manifestations of our trauma and
(49:14):
we can. We are in control, We are in charge,
even if the emotional side of it doesn't make us
feel that way. I think ultimately healing from trauma that
is trapped in the body is about helping the body
understand that the threat is over. That is like the
line we keep coming back to, It's about building a
sense of safety. Trauma is the disruption of safety, coming
(49:37):
back to your body, feeling safe in your body. Therefore,
I think just like undercuts all, like all the stories
that trauma is.
Speaker 4 (49:47):
Telling us that we are not safe. You know.
Speaker 3 (49:49):
Of course, we also have to give a shout out
to like our cognitive and like our talk therapies as
well for getting a lot of people to the point
where they can have this sematic and physical approach. But whatever,
whatever you can do, whatever practice you can find that
is going to allow you to realize that your mind
and your body are in unison, and that your emotional
(50:13):
experiences show up physically in a way that is completely
valid and completely real and completely felt. That is going
to help you. The body, like our body, this is
going to get kind of spiritual, is like, but it
is like it is such a gift and it is
(50:35):
such a vessel through which we can deepen our connection
with our sense of self psychologically, it is like this
domain and this tool that we have hopefully a lot
of power over and that we can use as I
don't even know how to explain this. It's just something
I've been really like, really feeling deeper and deeper recently,
(50:57):
Like the guys look at me going but like the
body is not us, but the body is like an
extension of us that by taking care of by understanding more,
by treating with respect, by treating as much like in
the same way we treat our mind, can really heal us.
(51:19):
I feel like psychology is it has done so much
for allowing us to understand the mental side of trauma.
Speaker 2 (51:27):
And how our.
Speaker 3 (51:29):
Sense of self and our sense of safety, and our
sense of peace, and our sense of harmony and our
sense of meaning is disrupted by trauma. We need to
like add this body peace into it and understand that again,
when these deep painful feelings cannot be expressed through the
mind and are not allowed to be expressed maybe verbally
(51:51):
or maybe mentally by thinking about them, they will find
other ways to come out. And the body is the
body is like kind of the sacrifice at that point.
So I hope that this episode has just allowed you
to understand the mechanisms behind that better and what people
mean when they say the body keeps a score or
trauma is stored in the body.
Speaker 4 (52:12):
Yeah, I don't know.
Speaker 3 (52:13):
I feel like once you understand this, you're just like
I see my life differently and I see my body differently.
And hopefully you go and check out some of those
other resources that I've shared and those other people who
talk about this a lot more excellently than I do,
and who have even more marvelous and incredible stories and
facts and insights to share. If you have made it
(52:35):
this far, leave a little emoji down below of what
represents peace for you. The opposite of trauma, the opposite
of pain. Where do you feel most at peace? Like
what symbolizes real contentment and safety for you? Thank you
for listening if you did make it this far as well.
I really appreciate when people make it all the way
to the end of the episodes, when you make it
(52:56):
all the way the end to my little rants.
Speaker 4 (52:59):
And my little brand poo and me going off script,
So thank you.
Speaker 3 (53:03):
Make sure as well that you are following us on
Instagram at that psychology podcast if you already follow us,
you know, we do like episode summaries. We sometimes ask
for episode suggestions, we announced tour dates, We do all
that stuff over there that we don't always do.
Speaker 2 (53:18):
On the podcast.
Speaker 4 (53:19):
Whoopsies, that's totally my fault.
Speaker 3 (53:21):
But follow me over there so that you can be
engaged with the community. Make sure that you are following
us as well on Spotify or Apple podcasts wherever you
are listening, and give us a five star review if
this episode resonated with you, if you feel called to
do so, make sure you take care of yourself. I
know this episode was rather heavy. It was a bit
of an info dump. It definitely was perhaps a little
(53:41):
bit retriggering if some of these concepts are ones that
you know, you don't always talk about and which are
very heavy for you, so I'm going to leave some
resources below as well, but please again be kind to yourself,
be gentle, take care of yourself, and we will of
course talk very very soon.
Speaker 2 (53:59):
See you later,
Host
Jemma Sbeghen
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