February 5, 2025 • 22 mins
In this episode, we will be discussing trauma and the hidden (and not so hidden) ways that it affects us day to day. I'm joined by author and CEO Alex Howard, who has spent decades making a positive impact on the world of mental health. His insight helps guide our discussion of trauma and its' effects on the nervous system, development, and how to heal from it. You can check out more of his work on his website, www.alexhoward.com.
My name is Ethan Jewell, and welcome back to Feel Your Feelings.
My website: www.ethanjewell.com
My IG: @jewellboi_
Music out on all platforms by Ethan Jewell
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Trauma. It's a word we hear a lot, but
so many of us don't fully understand what it means or how
it affects us. When we think of trauma, we
picture something extreme, something obvious, something
that qualifies as traumatic. But the truth is, trauma isn't
just about what happened to us. It's also about how it shaped
(00:20):
us. It's about the ways it lingers
and our thoughts, our behaviors,our relationships, even when we
don't realize it. And for so many of us, that
trauma starts early on in childhood.
But here's the thing, healing from trauma isn't about
minimizing our experiences, comparing them to others, or
pretending that we're fine. It's about understanding,
(00:40):
processing, and learning how to move forward.
And that's exactly what we're talking about today.
And to help me in talking about this topic, I am really excited
to be joined by Alex Howard. Alex is an author of three
books, CEO of the Alex Howard Group, an international group of
organizations focused on making physical and emotional healing
(01:02):
accessible to everyone. Alex is a leader not only in the
world of mental health, but alsoin the world of trauma recovery.
This is someone who has not onlypersonally done the work, but
also guides others in doing the same.
And I'm so excited to have him on to give his own insight into
the world of trauma and recovering from it.
Just a reminder, I'm not a doctor, a psychiatrist, or
(01:25):
professional in the mental health industry whatsoever.
I'm just somebody who is very passionate about mental health,
has felt some very big feelings,feelings and has talked to a lot
of other people who have felt some very big feelings.
And today I want to talk about trauma.
My name is Ethan Jewell and welcome back to Feel Your
Feelings Alex. Let's start plain and simple.
(01:49):
How are you doing today? I'm doing very well, Ethan.
I'm very happy to be here, happyto have this conversation.
And it's an area that I'm super passionate about.
Often people hear trauma and it means lots of different things.
So yeah, I'm just happy to be here to unpack it together.
Let's just start off simple by defining what trauma is because
I do think it's kind of a buzzword that's thrown around in
(02:10):
the mental health community. We always start talking about,
yeah, our traumas. And many people hear the word
trauma and think of something extreme, you know, an abuse, a
life threatening event. And although it can be that, it
can also be a little more quiet.Trauma can take a lot of
different forms. So can you break that down for
us, elaborate a little bit on how trauma can appear in our
lives, how it can be more dramatic or it can be more
(02:33):
subtle? One of the distinctions that I
make is between overt traumas and covert traumas.
Overt traumas would be what would be classified as adverse
childhood experiences. So things like physical abuse,
sexual abuse, emotional neglect,the things that I think most of
us would recognize that those experiences are trauma.
(02:54):
Covert traumas can be traumas which are much less obvious,
they're more subtle. It can sometimes be as simple as
not getting our core emotional needs met.
You know how we all have physical needs, like as
particularly, you know, in childhood, we're dependent upon
our caregivers to meet needs forfood, for water, to have
(03:18):
physical safety. The same is true of our
emotional needs, the need to feel emotionally safe, the need
to feel love. And when those needs are not met
in the ways that we need them tobe met, then that has impacts
that shapes us. And one of the things that
particularly happens just to make a bridge between what
(03:40):
happens in childhood and what happens in adulthood is often
our nervous system becomes dysregulated.
Like we feel a sense of unsafetyinside of ourselves.
And we can get so normalized to that state that 10:20 40-50
years later, we have this state of dysregulation in our nervous
(04:01):
system. And that's really how these
events in childhood, they reallyecho through our lives when we
don't get these core needs met. So even if it doesn't feel as
big, even though it doesn't seemlife changing, it can be and it
can stick with us for decades and decades and kind of just
(04:21):
hover there under the surface, just quietly stabbing at us.
And sometimes it's because thoseexperiences are so normalized in
the environment that we're in that we just don't see them.
I just came out of teaching a session on embracing
neurodiversity and talking aboutthings like autism and ADHD and
(04:41):
dyslexia and how when we grow upin a neurotypical world as a
neuro diverse person, that has all kinds of impacts, right?
And so let's say that we are hypersensitive to large crowds
or to being around a lot of people.
So being at school may be like super challenging in that
situation. But if we grew up in an
(05:01):
environment where everyone just expects that we should be
neurotypical, we can suppress, we can mask, we can hide the
experiences that we're having. We may do that for many, many,
many years. We don't see that as a trauma.
We often the conclusion we come to something wrong with us or
something broken with us, but weget so normalized that we don't
recognize the things that are happening inside of us.
(05:24):
In response to that. A lot of the work that I do as
people is helping them understand how things that
happened in childhood that may not have been optimum, may not
have been because the people around them didn't care or
didn't love them, but it may be that they didn't meet those core
emotional needs. And one's nervous system, one's
(05:46):
emotional body have to respond to that.
And often the suffering we have is not just what happened, but
it's the defensive strategies weput in place to help us survive
what happened. Fascinating, I'm so glad you
said that. I hardly ever think about that.
Traumatic experiences or or stresses on that nervous system
could literally just come from what everyone else views as
(06:08):
normal but is incredibly difficult for you.
And in that way, not having youremotional needs met and always
feeling perhaps overwhelmed in asituation equation that's normal
for others. That could almost be a result of
other people just simply not knowing, not realizing that hey,
this might be a incredibly stressful experience.
I think that's why we have to have conversations like this.
(06:31):
Something I hear a lot, I've received DMS, I've heard it in
my own personal life. I've even had these thoughts
myself. Is this idea of, well, my
childhood wasn't that bad, kind of piggybacking off of the
normal experiences that can cause trauma?
My childhood wasn't that bad. So I don't think I should be
struggling. I don't think I ever had like a
traumatic event. And there's a lot of comparison
(06:54):
in the world of trauma. It's almost like this trauma
Olympics that's going on. So what do you say to people who
minimize their own trauma because they think others have
had it much worse because they are comparing their own trauma
and their own experience to whatother people have possibly
experienced? Yeah, it's a great question.
Part of what we have to recognize is that just because
(07:17):
someone has experienced greater pain than us, it doesn't mean
that our pain isn't painful, right?
It's like, it's a bit of a tripeexample.
But let's say, you know, you whack your thumb accidentally
with a hammer and it really, really hurts.
And then someone says that doesn't hurt because I lost my
thumb. It's like, well, losing your
thumb hurts a lot more, but thisstill really hurts right now,
(07:37):
right? And in a way, often those
narratives are really used to diminish and squash and shut
down feelings and emotions because a lot of us have grown
up in society. The is much more comfortable
with reason, logic, and intellect than it is with the
(07:58):
heart and feelings and emotions.And so there's this kind of
hyper rational world where you can explain away and you can
rationalize away one's feelings,one's heart, but that doesn't
mean that that experience isn't important or isn't valid.
One of the examples I used in mylast book was this guy that came
(08:20):
to see me in his 20s suffering from debilitating fatigue
issues. And part of what we traced it
back to was being 8-9 years old and sent off to boarding school.
He was a very kind of artistic, musical, creative kid that kind
of needed a certain amount of ofspace and freedom to move with
it and was sent to a very rigid,strict British boarding school.
(08:42):
And was also a kid that I think probably it's true of most kids
at that age, but certainly true for him that really needed that
holding and comfort from mom anddad.
Now, mom and dad didn't send himto boarding school because they
didn't love him or because they were trying to send him away.
Actually, they weren't a particularly wealthy family.
It was quite a big financial sacrifice to be able to pay the
(09:03):
school fees and to facilitate this, but they believed that
this was the best opportunity they could give their child.
So it was an act of love to sendhim away, even though it was not
an easy thing to do. So he gets to boarding school
and this next bit of the story is something I've heard a number
of times over the years, just basically that he, you know, was
(09:23):
totally devastated, desperate togo back home again and back in
those days particularly, no mobile phones or anything like
that. So the first contact that with
home is a couple of weeks in where you can write your first
letter. He's I've just got to get
through the first couple of weeks, then I can write to my
mom and tell her how desperate Iam.
And of course then she's going to come and come and rescue me.
So he writes the letter and thenthe next day his housemaster
(09:44):
comes into the dormitory and says, you know, we can't send
that letter to your mother because it'll be far too
distressing for her. You need to write another
letter. And he basically learns that if
he stays in his heart and he stays in his feelings, he's
going to be destroyed. So the only way to survive is to
cut down the feelings. And he does that so successfully
that by the time he goes home for Christmas at the end of the
(10:06):
first term, apparently, supposedly he's thriving.
He's doing great in sports and he's doing well in class.
And it's only decade, couple decades later that it becomes
clear that he's basically completely shut his heart and
his feelings. And that's now having real big
impacts in his life. But what's part of the point I
want to make here? This is not an act of cruelty.
(10:26):
Often what's true in life is 2 things can be true.
Our parents can have deep, deeply cared or a caregivers
kind of deeply cared and loved us, and they can also deeply
have hurt us and wounded us. It's not always bad people that
hurt you, this distinction that only something bad must have
happened from somebody bad in order to have bad things in your
(10:47):
life. I really appreciate you sharing
that story because I think some people might find that really
impactful. There can be good intentions and
there can be good situations andthere can still be bad outcomes.
And I think understanding what that trauma can look like in our
childhood is important towards understanding and healing that
side of us, but also understanding what it looks like
as we grow up past those situations is equally important.
(11:11):
So are there any common themes in ways that childhood trauma
shows up in adulthood? Or is it more different for
everybody? Like are there potential
symptoms or patterns that we canrecognize in adulthood in order
to recognize, hey, maybe something bad happened to my
childhood and I didn't even realize it?
(11:32):
Yeah. And actually, I'm just going to
have one more piece that Ethan that sometimes it's things that
happened, but other times it's things that didn't happen.
Things can happen to us that canhurt us, but things kind of not
happen that we really needed. To answer your question, there's
lots of individual differences of how childhood experiences
echo through our lives. But the piece that for me is is
(11:54):
the kind of universal glue that holds a lot of this together is
what's happened in our nervous system.
Our nervous system is basically designed to activate when the
world doesn't feel or we don't feel in the world safe.
And so, you know, if you and I were walking down the street
here, here in London and you know, we have electric buses
(12:15):
now, so you don't hear the busescoming the way that you used to.
That's so we're walking down thestreet by big red buses coming.
We haven't seen it. And then suddenly last minute we
see the bus and like we got a leap out of the way.
It's the same thing, you know, thousands of years ago with a
Saber toothed tiger. In that moment, we get a big hit
of adrenaline, of cortisol, effectively our stress hormones
to help us either fight. But obviously fighting a bus is
(12:37):
nice. It's a bit of a pointless
exercise to flight, like to run away or to freeze and stay where
we are. So then it doesn't then hit us.
So that response in our nervous system to fight flight or freeze
is sort of survival response that's designed for immediate
physical threat in danger. But what often has happened in
(12:59):
trauma is that response has activated and then it's stayed
activated. That's what I call a maladaptive
stress response. So a healthy response to stress
that has now become effectively our default, the homeostasis,
the balance of our nervous system has shifted.
And this is how trauma often presents in our adult lives
(13:21):
because there's a number of different symptoms of that.
It could be anxiety. It could be that we just always
feel anxious and unsafe because of that dysregulation in our
nervous system. It could be depression.
It's almost like our nervous system has become so overwhelmed
that it started to shut down. People often think about
depression as feeling sad all the time, but actually that's
(13:42):
not my observation, my experience, it's more an absence
of feeling and a sense of pointlessness and hopelessness,
which often comes from this kindof shutdown as a response to
this over activation. Addictions is another example.
I think the misconception of addiction is that people that
are addicted to alcohol and drugs, for example, are doing it
(14:02):
to get high or to feel lots of wonderful things.
But typically what they're just trying to do is get to baseline.
They're actually trying to self regulate trauma, emotions that
are unprocessed. So a lot of the, the symptoms
that people struggle with, a lotof the things that people go and
see mental health professionals,doctors about anxiety,
depression, you know, also self esteem issues, attachment issues
(14:25):
to me are often symptoms of a dysregulated nervous system,
which is the outcome of these experiences in childhood.
Wow. OK, Sorry, I just got to sit
with that for a second. I mean, that was that was
excellent. Obviously, healing this trauma
is incredibly important. And from my understanding, your
approach is not just about understanding that trauma, but
(14:48):
also healing it. I mean, that's why you've done
all the amazing things for mental health that you've done
within your group, within the books on this podcast.
I'm all about action. I'm all about taking real steps
towards healing. I'm always encouraging my
listeners to take those first steps because they are, of
course, the hardest. If we're climbing this mental
health ladder, those first rungscan feel miles apart, and that
(15:13):
can really impact our ability toheal.
What would you say are some general first steps that people
can take if they recognized thatsome unresolved trauma is
affecting them? A couple of things to start
with. The first thing is really just
recognizing what's happening. A lot of mental health
intervention, Often what happens, one goes and sees a
(15:36):
sort of physician with some of the things that we've been
talking about. It's sort of saying like
something's broken, like something's wrong and it needs
to be fixed by, you know, a sortof drug or intervention or
whatever. How I look at it is often the
things that people are struggling with are intelligent
responses from their system to try to navigate may not be the
(15:58):
best response, but there's an intelligence behind their
response. So if we can just recognize and
understand that actually maybe the reason why we have anxiety
is because our nervous system doesn't feel safe, or the reason
why we're struggling with addictions is because we're
trying to regulate our system, or we feel depressed because our
system feels overloaded, we can start to have a different
(16:20):
relationship to what's happening.
We're not broken and there's notsomething that's fundamentally
wrong with us. We have an adaptive response
that if we can have better options, then a lot of this can
change. And this brings us to the second
point, which I think is often a really good starting point,
which is if we're recognizing that part of the issue here is a
dysregulated nervous system, then we can't just talk our way
(16:44):
to feeling different, to feelingbetter.
And I think this is one of the limitations of certain talking
therapies. And I think particularly, you
know, there's two men having a conversation about trauma.
There is an enormous crisis of men's mental health and
particularly suicide around young men.
And my observation is often for young men, trying to just get
(17:04):
them to talk about their feelings isn't necessarily the
thing that's most helpful. That often we need to have some
practical solutions and tactics and strategies and things we can
actually learn to do to change our experience.
To me, some of those things would include practices where we
learn to regulate our nervous system.
(17:25):
You know, if we're going back tothe point that we've been been
exploring around, we have these experiences, we develop this
maladaptive stress response, ournervous system becomes
dysregulated. If we can learn practices to
start to better regulate our nervous system, I'm not saying
it's the only piece, it often isn't the only piece, but it's a
very helpful piece. It's also a piece that often
(17:45):
helps the other things we may need to do to be more effective
and to be easier. So even something as simple as a
daily meditation practice, or ifsitting to meditate feels
particularly difficult, a movingmeditative practice, something
like yoga or chi gong or Tai chior something like that, where we
are practicing conditioning our nervous system into a calmer
(18:10):
state. That alone can really start to
change the impacts of the past. I'm so glad that you brought up
meditation or just sitting with those feelings.
The whole reason I started this podcast was to encourage people
to make those first steps even on bad days.
And this whole idea of, you know, feel your feelings.
(18:31):
It isn't just a clever little title that kind of sounds nice.
It's something that I urge my listeners to do all the time.
I mean, if if anyone listening now has has been with me through
all 70 episodes, I'm sure you'regetting a little sick of hearing
this, but I'm so glad it came upagain.
Truly believe that just feeling those feelings, just sitting
with them is a powerful and crucial part of healing that a
(18:54):
lot of people overlook because it feels too simple.
It doesn't feel like a large enough action when in reality,
just sitting and acknowledging those feelings and letting them
come and go and really learning about yourself and being
comfortable with that can be a incredible way to learn more
about yourself, an incredible way to become more comfortable
(19:15):
with those feelings. And maybe in a way, a excellent
way to help regulate the nervoussystem response that we have.
And it could be walking, it could be lifting weights, it
could be anything where we are just allowing our minds to sit
with any feelings we have, any turbulence we have inside of our
minds. I think that is so important.
(19:37):
There's a level of self trust that is built there, and I think
that self trust is crucial on this healing journey.
If somebody right now listening to this episode is just now
realizing, wow, my childhood experiences really did shape me
more than I thought, So much of this is resonating.
What is one final thing that youwould like them to take away
(19:58):
from this conversation? Something to help them moving
forward that you would really like to stick with them.
The healing is possible, right? The same wisdom inside of us
that maybe shut some things down, that maybe our nervous
system did activate because that's how our system is trying
to keep us safe. There is enormous wisdom in
(20:21):
that, you know, to think, you know, six months old or three
years old or 10 years old, that our system has these adaptive
responses, that it just figures out how to respond.
That same wisdom that was there then is there now.
The difference is an adult is asa child, we are utterly
(20:41):
dependent upon our caregivers tomeet our needs for US.
One of the great blessings of being an adult is we can learn.
We can practically learn to meetthose needs for ourselves.
And that's really what a lot of the work of trauma healing comes
down to is learning how to buildinner safety, learning how to
(21:01):
cultivate self love, learning how to put in healthy
boundaries. And we can all take big steps on
the journey to do that. And where we focus is where we
progress, right? And what often happens is we
spend a lot of time being aware of the suffering or the problems
or maybe to trying to deny the suffering in the problems.
(21:24):
But if we can put our energy into practical things to help us
move forwards, it is incredible the healing that can become
possible. Absolutely.
People are more capable than they think.
And you, the listener, you are more capable than you think.
You are able to make a change inyour life anytime.
(21:45):
You are able to adjust the way that you feel these feelings,
the way that you deal with any traumas, the way that you heal.
And you are capable and you are more than enough.
Alex, thank you so much for being here.
Thank you for giving me this insight and for helping us learn
a little bit more about our traumas.
(22:05):
My pleasure Ethan, thank you forhaving me.
I enjoyed the conversation. That's going to wrap it up for
today's episode. Thank you so much for joining
me. If you need help feeling your
feelings, please check out my music on all platforms under the
name of Ethan Jewell. And I almost guarantee it'll
make you cry. Also, please shoot me a message
on my Instagram at Jewel Boy with an I under score and let me
(22:27):
know what you thought about today's episode.
So thank you so much for being here.
Thank you for understanding thatyou are more than your trauma
and that healing is always possible.
And thank you again to Alex Howard for joining me.
And as always, thank you for feeling your feelings.
I'll see you next time.
Trauma. It's a word we hear a lot, but
so many of us don't fully understand what it means or how
it affects us. When we think of trauma, we
picture something extreme, something obvious, something
that qualifies as traumatic. But the truth is, trauma isn't
just about what happened to us. It's also about how it shaped
(00:20):
us. It's about the ways it lingers
and our thoughts, our behaviors,our relationships, even when we
don't realize it. And for so many of us, that
trauma starts early on in childhood.
But here's the thing, healing from trauma isn't about
minimizing our experiences, comparing them to others, or
pretending that we're fine. It's about understanding,
(00:40):
processing, and learning how to move forward.
And that's exactly what we're talking about today.
And to help me in talking about this topic, I am really excited
to be joined by Alex Howard. Alex is an author of three
books, CEO of the Alex Howard Group, an international group of
organizations focused on making physical and emotional healing
(01:02):
accessible to everyone. Alex is a leader not only in the
world of mental health, but alsoin the world of trauma recovery.
This is someone who has not onlypersonally done the work, but
also guides others in doing the same.
And I'm so excited to have him on to give his own insight into
the world of trauma and recovering from it.
Just a reminder, I'm not a doctor, a psychiatrist, or
(01:25):
professional in the mental health industry whatsoever.
I'm just somebody who is very passionate about mental health,
has felt some very big feelings,feelings and has talked to a lot
of other people who have felt some very big feelings.
And today I want to talk about trauma.
My name is Ethan Jewell and welcome back to Feel Your
Feelings Alex. Let's start plain and simple.
(01:49):
How are you doing today? I'm doing very well, Ethan.
I'm very happy to be here, happyto have this conversation.
And it's an area that I'm super passionate about.
Often people hear trauma and it means lots of different things.
So yeah, I'm just happy to be here to unpack it together.
Let's just start off simple by defining what trauma is because
I do think it's kind of a buzzword that's thrown around in
(02:10):
the mental health community. We always start talking about,
yeah, our traumas. And many people hear the word
trauma and think of something extreme, you know, an abuse, a
life threatening event. And although it can be that, it
can also be a little more quiet.Trauma can take a lot of
different forms. So can you break that down for
us, elaborate a little bit on how trauma can appear in our
lives, how it can be more dramatic or it can be more
(02:33):
subtle? One of the distinctions that I
make is between overt traumas and covert traumas.
Overt traumas would be what would be classified as adverse
childhood experiences. So things like physical abuse,
sexual abuse, emotional neglect,the things that I think most of
us would recognize that those experiences are trauma.
(02:54):
Covert traumas can be traumas which are much less obvious,
they're more subtle. It can sometimes be as simple as
not getting our core emotional needs met.
You know how we all have physical needs, like as
particularly, you know, in childhood, we're dependent upon
our caregivers to meet needs forfood, for water, to have
(03:18):
physical safety. The same is true of our
emotional needs, the need to feel emotionally safe, the need
to feel love. And when those needs are not met
in the ways that we need them tobe met, then that has impacts
that shapes us. And one of the things that
particularly happens just to make a bridge between what
(03:40):
happens in childhood and what happens in adulthood is often
our nervous system becomes dysregulated.
Like we feel a sense of unsafetyinside of ourselves.
And we can get so normalized to that state that 10:20 40-50
years later, we have this state of dysregulation in our nervous
(04:01):
system. And that's really how these
events in childhood, they reallyecho through our lives when we
don't get these core needs met. So even if it doesn't feel as
big, even though it doesn't seemlife changing, it can be and it
can stick with us for decades and decades and kind of just
(04:21):
hover there under the surface, just quietly stabbing at us.
And sometimes it's because thoseexperiences are so normalized in
the environment that we're in that we just don't see them.
I just came out of teaching a session on embracing
neurodiversity and talking aboutthings like autism and ADHD and
(04:41):
dyslexia and how when we grow upin a neurotypical world as a
neuro diverse person, that has all kinds of impacts, right?
And so let's say that we are hypersensitive to large crowds
or to being around a lot of people.
So being at school may be like super challenging in that
situation. But if we grew up in an
(05:01):
environment where everyone just expects that we should be
neurotypical, we can suppress, we can mask, we can hide the
experiences that we're having. We may do that for many, many,
many years. We don't see that as a trauma.
We often the conclusion we come to something wrong with us or
something broken with us, but weget so normalized that we don't
recognize the things that are happening inside of us.
(05:24):
In response to that. A lot of the work that I do as
people is helping them understand how things that
happened in childhood that may not have been optimum, may not
have been because the people around them didn't care or
didn't love them, but it may be that they didn't meet those core
emotional needs. And one's nervous system, one's
(05:46):
emotional body have to respond to that.
And often the suffering we have is not just what happened, but
it's the defensive strategies weput in place to help us survive
what happened. Fascinating, I'm so glad you
said that. I hardly ever think about that.
Traumatic experiences or or stresses on that nervous system
could literally just come from what everyone else views as
(06:08):
normal but is incredibly difficult for you.
And in that way, not having youremotional needs met and always
feeling perhaps overwhelmed in asituation equation that's normal
for others. That could almost be a result of
other people just simply not knowing, not realizing that hey,
this might be a incredibly stressful experience.
I think that's why we have to have conversations like this.
(06:31):
Something I hear a lot, I've received DMS, I've heard it in
my own personal life. I've even had these thoughts
myself. Is this idea of, well, my
childhood wasn't that bad, kind of piggybacking off of the
normal experiences that can cause trauma?
My childhood wasn't that bad. So I don't think I should be
struggling. I don't think I ever had like a
traumatic event. And there's a lot of comparison
(06:54):
in the world of trauma. It's almost like this trauma
Olympics that's going on. So what do you say to people who
minimize their own trauma because they think others have
had it much worse because they are comparing their own trauma
and their own experience to whatother people have possibly
experienced? Yeah, it's a great question.
Part of what we have to recognize is that just because
(07:17):
someone has experienced greater pain than us, it doesn't mean
that our pain isn't painful, right?
It's like, it's a bit of a tripeexample.
But let's say, you know, you whack your thumb accidentally
with a hammer and it really, really hurts.
And then someone says that doesn't hurt because I lost my
thumb. It's like, well, losing your
thumb hurts a lot more, but thisstill really hurts right now,
(07:37):
right? And in a way, often those
narratives are really used to diminish and squash and shut
down feelings and emotions because a lot of us have grown
up in society. The is much more comfortable
with reason, logic, and intellect than it is with the
(07:58):
heart and feelings and emotions.And so there's this kind of
hyper rational world where you can explain away and you can
rationalize away one's feelings,one's heart, but that doesn't
mean that that experience isn't important or isn't valid.
One of the examples I used in mylast book was this guy that came
(08:20):
to see me in his 20s suffering from debilitating fatigue
issues. And part of what we traced it
back to was being 8-9 years old and sent off to boarding school.
He was a very kind of artistic, musical, creative kid that kind
of needed a certain amount of ofspace and freedom to move with
it and was sent to a very rigid,strict British boarding school.
(08:42):
And was also a kid that I think probably it's true of most kids
at that age, but certainly true for him that really needed that
holding and comfort from mom anddad.
Now, mom and dad didn't send himto boarding school because they
didn't love him or because they were trying to send him away.
Actually, they weren't a particularly wealthy family.
It was quite a big financial sacrifice to be able to pay the
(09:03):
school fees and to facilitate this, but they believed that
this was the best opportunity they could give their child.
So it was an act of love to sendhim away, even though it was not
an easy thing to do. So he gets to boarding school
and this next bit of the story is something I've heard a number
of times over the years, just basically that he, you know, was
(09:23):
totally devastated, desperate togo back home again and back in
those days particularly, no mobile phones or anything like
that. So the first contact that with
home is a couple of weeks in where you can write your first
letter. He's I've just got to get
through the first couple of weeks, then I can write to my
mom and tell her how desperate Iam.
And of course then she's going to come and come and rescue me.
So he writes the letter and thenthe next day his housemaster
(09:44):
comes into the dormitory and says, you know, we can't send
that letter to your mother because it'll be far too
distressing for her. You need to write another
letter. And he basically learns that if
he stays in his heart and he stays in his feelings, he's
going to be destroyed. So the only way to survive is to
cut down the feelings. And he does that so successfully
that by the time he goes home for Christmas at the end of the
(10:06):
first term, apparently, supposedly he's thriving.
He's doing great in sports and he's doing well in class.
And it's only decade, couple decades later that it becomes
clear that he's basically completely shut his heart and
his feelings. And that's now having real big
impacts in his life. But what's part of the point I
want to make here? This is not an act of cruelty.
(10:26):
Often what's true in life is 2 things can be true.
Our parents can have deep, deeply cared or a caregivers
kind of deeply cared and loved us, and they can also deeply
have hurt us and wounded us. It's not always bad people that
hurt you, this distinction that only something bad must have
happened from somebody bad in order to have bad things in your
(10:47):
life. I really appreciate you sharing
that story because I think some people might find that really
impactful. There can be good intentions and
there can be good situations andthere can still be bad outcomes.
And I think understanding what that trauma can look like in our
childhood is important towards understanding and healing that
side of us, but also understanding what it looks like
as we grow up past those situations is equally important.
(11:11):
So are there any common themes in ways that childhood trauma
shows up in adulthood? Or is it more different for
everybody? Like are there potential
symptoms or patterns that we canrecognize in adulthood in order
to recognize, hey, maybe something bad happened to my
childhood and I didn't even realize it?
(11:32):
Yeah. And actually, I'm just going to
have one more piece that Ethan that sometimes it's things that
happened, but other times it's things that didn't happen.
Things can happen to us that canhurt us, but things kind of not
happen that we really needed. To answer your question, there's
lots of individual differences of how childhood experiences
echo through our lives. But the piece that for me is is
(11:54):
the kind of universal glue that holds a lot of this together is
what's happened in our nervous system.
Our nervous system is basically designed to activate when the
world doesn't feel or we don't feel in the world safe.
And so, you know, if you and I were walking down the street
here, here in London and you know, we have electric buses
(12:15):
now, so you don't hear the busescoming the way that you used to.
That's so we're walking down thestreet by big red buses coming.
We haven't seen it. And then suddenly last minute we
see the bus and like we got a leap out of the way.
It's the same thing, you know, thousands of years ago with a
Saber toothed tiger. In that moment, we get a big hit
of adrenaline, of cortisol, effectively our stress hormones
to help us either fight. But obviously fighting a bus is
(12:37):
nice. It's a bit of a pointless
exercise to flight, like to run away or to freeze and stay where
we are. So then it doesn't then hit us.
So that response in our nervous system to fight flight or freeze
is sort of survival response that's designed for immediate
physical threat in danger. But what often has happened in
(12:59):
trauma is that response has activated and then it's stayed
activated. That's what I call a maladaptive
stress response. So a healthy response to stress
that has now become effectively our default, the homeostasis,
the balance of our nervous system has shifted.
And this is how trauma often presents in our adult lives
(13:21):
because there's a number of different symptoms of that.
It could be anxiety. It could be that we just always
feel anxious and unsafe because of that dysregulation in our
nervous system. It could be depression.
It's almost like our nervous system has become so overwhelmed
that it started to shut down. People often think about
depression as feeling sad all the time, but actually that's
(13:42):
not my observation, my experience, it's more an absence
of feeling and a sense of pointlessness and hopelessness,
which often comes from this kindof shutdown as a response to
this over activation. Addictions is another example.
I think the misconception of addiction is that people that
are addicted to alcohol and drugs, for example, are doing it
(14:02):
to get high or to feel lots of wonderful things.
But typically what they're just trying to do is get to baseline.
They're actually trying to self regulate trauma, emotions that
are unprocessed. So a lot of the, the symptoms
that people struggle with, a lotof the things that people go and
see mental health professionals,doctors about anxiety,
depression, you know, also self esteem issues, attachment issues
(14:25):
to me are often symptoms of a dysregulated nervous system,
which is the outcome of these experiences in childhood.
Wow. OK, Sorry, I just got to sit
with that for a second. I mean, that was that was
excellent. Obviously, healing this trauma
is incredibly important. And from my understanding, your
approach is not just about understanding that trauma, but
(14:48):
also healing it. I mean, that's why you've done
all the amazing things for mental health that you've done
within your group, within the books on this podcast.
I'm all about action. I'm all about taking real steps
towards healing. I'm always encouraging my
listeners to take those first steps because they are, of
course, the hardest. If we're climbing this mental
health ladder, those first rungscan feel miles apart, and that
(15:13):
can really impact our ability toheal.
What would you say are some general first steps that people
can take if they recognized thatsome unresolved trauma is
affecting them? A couple of things to start
with. The first thing is really just
recognizing what's happening. A lot of mental health
intervention, Often what happens, one goes and sees a
(15:36):
sort of physician with some of the things that we've been
talking about. It's sort of saying like
something's broken, like something's wrong and it needs
to be fixed by, you know, a sortof drug or intervention or
whatever. How I look at it is often the
things that people are struggling with are intelligent
responses from their system to try to navigate may not be the
(15:58):
best response, but there's an intelligence behind their
response. So if we can just recognize and
understand that actually maybe the reason why we have anxiety
is because our nervous system doesn't feel safe, or the reason
why we're struggling with addictions is because we're
trying to regulate our system, or we feel depressed because our
system feels overloaded, we can start to have a different
(16:20):
relationship to what's happening.
We're not broken and there's notsomething that's fundamentally
wrong with us. We have an adaptive response
that if we can have better options, then a lot of this can
change. And this brings us to the second
point, which I think is often a really good starting point,
which is if we're recognizing that part of the issue here is a
dysregulated nervous system, then we can't just talk our way
(16:44):
to feeling different, to feelingbetter.
And I think this is one of the limitations of certain talking
therapies. And I think particularly, you
know, there's two men having a conversation about trauma.
There is an enormous crisis of men's mental health and
particularly suicide around young men.
And my observation is often for young men, trying to just get
(17:04):
them to talk about their feelings isn't necessarily the
thing that's most helpful. That often we need to have some
practical solutions and tactics and strategies and things we can
actually learn to do to change our experience.
To me, some of those things would include practices where we
learn to regulate our nervous system.
(17:25):
You know, if we're going back tothe point that we've been been
exploring around, we have these experiences, we develop this
maladaptive stress response, ournervous system becomes
dysregulated. If we can learn practices to
start to better regulate our nervous system, I'm not saying
it's the only piece, it often isn't the only piece, but it's a
very helpful piece. It's also a piece that often
(17:45):
helps the other things we may need to do to be more effective
and to be easier. So even something as simple as a
daily meditation practice, or ifsitting to meditate feels
particularly difficult, a movingmeditative practice, something
like yoga or chi gong or Tai chior something like that, where we
are practicing conditioning our nervous system into a calmer
(18:10):
state. That alone can really start to
change the impacts of the past. I'm so glad that you brought up
meditation or just sitting with those feelings.
The whole reason I started this podcast was to encourage people
to make those first steps even on bad days.
And this whole idea of, you know, feel your feelings.
(18:31):
It isn't just a clever little title that kind of sounds nice.
It's something that I urge my listeners to do all the time.
I mean, if if anyone listening now has has been with me through
all 70 episodes, I'm sure you'regetting a little sick of hearing
this, but I'm so glad it came upagain.
Truly believe that just feeling those feelings, just sitting
with them is a powerful and crucial part of healing that a
(18:54):
lot of people overlook because it feels too simple.
It doesn't feel like a large enough action when in reality,
just sitting and acknowledging those feelings and letting them
come and go and really learning about yourself and being
comfortable with that can be a incredible way to learn more
about yourself, an incredible way to become more comfortable
(19:15):
with those feelings. And maybe in a way, a excellent
way to help regulate the nervoussystem response that we have.
And it could be walking, it could be lifting weights, it
could be anything where we are just allowing our minds to sit
with any feelings we have, any turbulence we have inside of our
minds. I think that is so important.
(19:37):
There's a level of self trust that is built there, and I think
that self trust is crucial on this healing journey.
If somebody right now listening to this episode is just now
realizing, wow, my childhood experiences really did shape me
more than I thought, So much of this is resonating.
What is one final thing that youwould like them to take away
(19:58):
from this conversation? Something to help them moving
forward that you would really like to stick with them.
The healing is possible, right? The same wisdom inside of us
that maybe shut some things down, that maybe our nervous
system did activate because that's how our system is trying
to keep us safe. There is enormous wisdom in
(20:21):
that, you know, to think, you know, six months old or three
years old or 10 years old, that our system has these adaptive
responses, that it just figures out how to respond.
That same wisdom that was there then is there now.
The difference is an adult is asa child, we are utterly
(20:41):
dependent upon our caregivers tomeet our needs for US.
One of the great blessings of being an adult is we can learn.
We can practically learn to meetthose needs for ourselves.
And that's really what a lot of the work of trauma healing comes
down to is learning how to buildinner safety, learning how to
(21:01):
cultivate self love, learning how to put in healthy
boundaries. And we can all take big steps on
the journey to do that. And where we focus is where we
progress, right? And what often happens is we
spend a lot of time being aware of the suffering or the problems
or maybe to trying to deny the suffering in the problems.
(21:24):
But if we can put our energy into practical things to help us
move forwards, it is incredible the healing that can become
possible. Absolutely.
People are more capable than they think.
And you, the listener, you are more capable than you think.
You are able to make a change inyour life anytime.
(21:45):
You are able to adjust the way that you feel these feelings,
the way that you deal with any traumas, the way that you heal.
And you are capable and you are more than enough.
Alex, thank you so much for being here.
Thank you for giving me this insight and for helping us learn
a little bit more about our traumas.
(22:05):
My pleasure Ethan, thank you forhaving me.
I enjoyed the conversation. That's going to wrap it up for
today's episode. Thank you so much for joining
me. If you need help feeling your
feelings, please check out my music on all platforms under the
name of Ethan Jewell. And I almost guarantee it'll
make you cry. Also, please shoot me a message
on my Instagram at Jewel Boy with an I under score and let me
(22:27):
know what you thought about today's episode.
So thank you so much for being here.
Thank you for understanding thatyou are more than your trauma
and that healing is always possible.
And thank you again to Alex Howard for joining me.
And as always, thank you for feeling your feelings.
I'll see you next time.
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