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Hello everybody and welcome back to the psychology of your 20s.
The podcast where we talk through some of the big life changes and transitions of our 20s and what they mean for our psychology.
Hello everybody, welcome back to the show, 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 20s.
Today we are talking about a word, we are talking about a topic, a concept that carries a whole lot of weight but is also used pretty flippantly in conversation and is very misunderstood.
We are talking about trauma.
Specifically, I really want to talk about how trauma is not just emotional, not just psychological or cognitive trauma.
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 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 tension, all of these like 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 kind of appreciate how you know it's not just psychological.
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 effects.
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.
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 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 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 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 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 trauma response or the long-term impacts of trauma actually are.
Because we often think about it purely as this, like emotional response, but it is deeply, deeply physical.
It shows up in tension, 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.
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 at the time, and how we kind of get stuck in a chronic arousal or chronic stress mode that we don't even realize.
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 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 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 mean that actually you have and you've acknowledged its impact on you.
So a lot 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 at this stage.
So 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 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-time life-threatening event like a natural disaster, a car accident, a near-death experience.
This is what we call type 1 trauma.
These moments, they just flip life on its head.
They're 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, and they cause us to really have to rethink our lives and 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.
Smaller, repeated traumatic events over time or prolonged exposure to traumatic situations are another type of trauma we call type two trauma.
Type two trauma includes things like having maybe a violent childhood home or experiencing domestic violence.
But even things like 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 2019.
I don't think 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.
It was so loud.
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 And 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 this smaller, repeated situation that made me feel a lot more unsafe day to day than the big natural disaster that I lived through.
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 is encoded into our DNA.
A lot of the 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 um, of how we rank trauma.
And if we're not at the top of the pyramid, experiencing the very worst of what humanity and life can throw at us, then we 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 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.
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, 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 threatened your physical safety to be traumatic, you know, as 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, and when you're looking for a questionnaire or 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 than one person not receive the acknowledgement 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 on the wrong thing.
Why are we focusing on excluding people from the trauma definition now?
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 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 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 skin after you've experienced a blunt force trauma injury.
This is known as delayed trauma onset, 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 our brain catches up later on.
Also, 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 of that situation that they are able to appreciate the Like hey, that was really messed up.
Like, that really 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' roof.
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 you.
One of those being a complete dismissal of your circumstances.
A 2020 paper out of Australia actually found that A lot of people have this experience.
A lot of people report this delayed trauma onset.
And they also say that the signs that they've been through something really difficult only became more noticeable at a certain stage or phase in their life.
They didn't realize how their childhood had impacted them until they got into their first serious adult relationship.
And suddenly it was like, wow, I am a deeply wounded human being.
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 30s and you weren't invited on like the bachelorette trip.
And suddenly you're 13 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, you suppress all of this stuff emotionally and psychologically and the only outlet it has is physically.
And so it starts to kind of like trickle out through tension, through fatigue, through pain.
This is the somatic impact of trauma, the somatic response to trauma.
And, of course, we 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's sold like 3 million copies worldwide.
It was written by a very famous Dutch psychiatrist, Dr. Bessel van der Kolk.
I don't speak Dutch, but I think that's right.
I think it's been on the New York Times bestseller list for like six years now.
Everyone knows this book.
You have seen it before.
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 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 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, doesn't so much acknowledge the body as part of this and and this work, this book really shifted the paradigm from the 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 their chronic pain, the way their body was responding to certain environmental cues, their stomach issues, their nausea, their 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 talk about this book, but I always talk about it kind of with a little bit of skepticism.
It definitely got some things not wrong, but maybe a little bit misconstrued.
You know there was an editorial published in 2023 in the research on social work practice that highlighted that for many people with PTSD, the body keeps.
The score is deeply revealing for them, but it doesn't always give them confidence, 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 like you can kind of DIY it, that you can DIY some of the therapeutic techniques that are introduced in this book.
And that's not the case.
This stuff needs to be performed or introduced through a trained practitioner.
And we don't want people to read this book, or what this article says is they don't want people 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 than 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 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 these shape trauma the book really focuses on how you as an individual can heal through somatic practices.
And throughout the book.
If you've read it, This may have given you the ick as well, but the author portrays 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 it was caused by a system and a context that hasn't taken accountability itself and that continues to re-traumatize 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 do that alone.
And if you aren't able to do that, that is a personal failing.
And that means that you weren't disciplined 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 a long time to overcome.
Some people never overcome it.
Sometimes it's just something you live with.
But if you're 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.
I just think that 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 Herman is a great one.
The book by Stephanie Fu, What My Bones Know, also amazing.
If you get a lot, if you 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 like entry points to this discussion.
So The Body Keeps the Score an amazing introduction to this concept.
It has, 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 in explaining why exactly that is the case and how to manage it, perhaps in a more collective space as well.
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.
Hello my lovely listeners.
By now you know, the more knowledge we have about ourselves and the way our bodies work, the more empowered and in control we are.
And this is also true when it comes to our sexual health and what to do after unprotected sex.
That's where Plan B comes in.
It's emergency contraception with no age requirement that helps prevent pregnancy before it starts.
And because it works by only temporarily delaying ovulation, it won't impact your ability to get pregnant in the future.
We love a backup plan that puts us in control because the more we know, the more power we have.
Learn more at planb1step.com, users directed.
This is Gemma Spegg from the psychology of your 20s.
So...
We'll see you next time.
You will save hundreds or even thousands of dollars.
You could even travel for free.
Learn more at efultimatebreak.com.
That's efultimatebreak.com and turn the group chat into a group trip.
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Have you ever brought your magic to Walt Disney World like, hey, we came to play?
Did you tip your tiara to a Creole princess or get goofy officially, step up like a boss and save the day, or see what life's like under the tree of life?
Did you?
If you could, would you?
When we come through, it's true magic because we came to play.
Bring the magic at Walt Disney World Resort.
So we know that trauma is felt in the body.
We know that it's stored there.
How exactly does that happen?
How is this the case?
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.
It was developed by the American psychologist Stephan Porges.
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 carnivals or fairs, where you 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.
Like...
I'm hoping that you're getting what I'm saying.
I, for some reason, I cannot give any more words as to how to explain this.
Imagining it as 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 vagal 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, 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.
This is where we experience a sense of tension.
It's where all of our survival 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, 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 in this state.
This is like where you are having a an intense stress response.
That's not the top of the ladder, though.
At the top of the ladder you have the dorsal vagal 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.
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.
A healthy nervous system will rarely encounter the dorsal vagal state, if not hopefully ever.
And instead, it typically jumps between the sympathetic state and the ventral vagal state.
But it spends most of its time in the ventral vagal 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 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 re-triggered through memories, through environmental cues, 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 a lot when we talk about trauma and it's 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 have 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.
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 are states that we do not want to be in.
We want to be relaxed.
We want to feel alert.
We want to feel content.
But the vagus nerve here, it is the key player.
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 vagal nerve.
It doesn't just stay in our mind.
The vagal nerve is the longest, 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 happens to that highway.
If you want to get to anywhere else in the body and you can't take that highway and 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 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 are physical responses or the physical manifestations of dysregulation trauma.
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 state stress response 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 like there is this terrible thing that is happening to it.
So let's talk about the the pain component of this and the fact that a lot of people who've 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 experiencing chronic pain, the level of ptsd within those groups was significantly higher than in the general population.
Up to 80 of people who reported chronic pain, who came to their GP or their doctor for chronic pain, had a previous personal history of PTSD or something that was deeply traumatic happening to them.
Now, 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 I was.
I fell out of a plane.
A lot of these people had deeply interpersonal and emotional trauma that left no physical scars but was obviously leaving real physical pain.
A 2018 study published in the Canadian Journal of Pain Management looked into the physical symptoms of PTSD in 166 participants, and what they found was that almost half of the sample actually experienced pain flashbacks 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 their body.
And they would say, oh, I can feel this here.
And 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 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 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.
They are two separate entities.
If a physical symptom couldn't be explained by a clear organic cause, like a gaping hole in your arm, a broken bone, something of the sort it was often dismissed as being in your head.
But with the 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.
It is real.
Research using fMRI scans have shown that when people recall a traumatic event or they are triggered, the brain regions that process psychological distress react, 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 like in your mind.
If people who are paralyzed like, and 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 that message isn't being sent to the brain.
The brain is the home of pain.
And 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.
The vital point is, again, the pain is real.
It may have an emotional, a mental, a 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 think another huge barrier in 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 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.
There's always that voice that is saying, this isn't that serious.
Don't ruin your reputation.
Don't make 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, it's just suppressing it.
The shame, you know.
It prevents people from seeking help because they're terrified of being judged, 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 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 re-trigger it to get through it.
You 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 hard.
If all that we're saying is true reliving trauma, reliving the memories, brings about real pain then the path to healing is going to be painful.
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 that minimize the pain as you are healing and, in the long term, that don't necessarily re-trigger you and leave you in that re-triggered 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 and which are these like new frontiers of how we manage mental pain as physical pain.
Now I will say one of my criticisms of The Body Keeps The Score is that it presents these ideas and it kind of makes it seem like you can just DIY this.
You cannot.
You cannot DIY this unless you have 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 just going to discuss them from a from like a lens of psychoeducation 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 deeper level.
So I just have to put that little disclaimer in here.
But to dive in a lot of trauma therapy these days is really about thank gosh, really about integrating the mind and the body.
And a large part of that may be 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 of homeostasis and equilibrium.
A really fantastic evidence-based therapy, often recommended for people with PTSD or complex PTSD, is called Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing Therapy, or EMDR, which you may have heard of more recently.
I feel like it's having a little bit of a moment. because it is fantastic.
This was actually developed by Francine Shapiro.
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 And she was reliving or thinking 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 did obviously a lot more research and put it into a lot of clinical applications.
And she came up with EMDR, which uses the same principles.
Specifically, it uses this method known as bilateral stimulation, which basically means both halves of your brain are active at the same time.
Like a therapist, will guide your eyes from side to side or will 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 past event that can no longer hurt us, the hippocampus.
When we experience something really overwhelming, our amygdala takes over, and our prefrontal cortex, the part of our brain that is responsible for executive thinking, rational thinking, it's basically demoted.
That means that when we are re-triggered or something reminds us of the past, it can feel like it's happening right now, all over again, leading the brain and the body to have that disproportionate response, because it genuinely thinks like this is really happening.
It doesn't recognize like, oh, 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 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 and 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 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.
Hello, my lovely listeners.
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So let's talk about a few other 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 individually.
Yet, it's annoying.
We are kind of forced to heal from it individually.
It's very unfair.
There are definitely 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 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 Appropriately Healing Collective Trauma.
But we are mainly going to talk about individual methods individually here, acknowledging that there is like a huge gap in the mental health and psychology and trauma space to try and help people in a collective, community way, hopefully and definitely without re-traumatizing them.
It's definitely, I think, something that more research and more funding needs to get to be put into.
We need to stop thinking about trauma as just an individual issue and more as a community issue and one that can be helped with community.
But back to these individual therapies, things like somatic therapies, for example.
I still think they are really, really effective.
The goal of these therapies isn't to retell the story of the trauma.
It isn't to 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 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 somatic experiencing, and it was founded by the psychologist and the author Dr Peter Levine.
So within this process, therapists use this thing called titration to guide a client 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.
Whilst Levine, I think he's definitely come under similar criticisms to van der Kolk.
Somatic experiencing really demonstrates at least some use in reconnecting with our bodies and understanding certain physical sensations and So that we can feel in control of them, something that is often robbed of people who have repeatedly experienced or been exposed to trauma.
They don'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 friend who one friend in particular I'm really 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 her to come on to the podcast and if she'd be willing to talk about it.
But it's just beyond brilliant.
Yoga as a therapeutic technique, it's just groundbreaking.
You know, for example, there was a 2014 study based in the US that looked at the effect of 12 sessions 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 found was that those who completed the 12 sessions demonstrated less anxiety, less hyper arousal, and they reported that they had less anxiety, 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, 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.
It all comes together to combat the negative side effects that stored trauma can cause.
In a slightly different vein.
Personally, I found that running and weightlifting has had a similar effect for me.
Could never get into yoga, but recently I feel like I talked about this on our Run Club episode I have just found like a new love 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 feel so strong.
I feel so capable.
I feel a lot 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 going to 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.
Here it is.
It's from the Everyday Ultra podcast.
It's called How to Heal Through Running and Build Self-Belief with Madeline Wolfberger.
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 she's running, she feels so capable and she feels so in control that the negative thoughts can come up and she still is, like again, in control of her body.
And so they're allowed to be released.
Incredible podcast 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 about a lot.
We just did an episode on that with our expert guest, 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 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, and It's about building a sense of safety.
Trauma is the disruption of safety, coming back to your body, feeling safe in your body.
You know, 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 the somatic and physical approach.
But 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 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, but it is such a gift and it is 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.
It's just something I've been really, like really feeling deeper and deeper recently.
Like the, oh my God, guys, look at me go.
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 in the same way we treat our mind, can really heal us.
I feel like psychology has done so much for allowing us to understand the mental side of trauma and how our 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 piece 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 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.
Yeah, I don't know.
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 shared even more marvelous and incredible stories and facts and insights to share.
If you have made it 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?
What, 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 all the way at the end to my little rants and my little rambles and me going off script.
So thank you.
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 announce tour dates.
We do all that stuff over there that we don't always do on the podcast.
Whoopsies.
That's totally my fault.
But follow me over there so that you can be engaged with the community, and 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 bit re-triggering 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.
See you later.
Hello, my lovely listeners.
By now you know, the more knowledge we have about ourselves and the way our bodies work, the more empowered and in control we are.
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This is Amy Brown from Feeling Things with Amy and Kat.
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