Latest / The Trauma Therapist / Episode 774: The Trauma Response is Never Wrong with MaryCatherine (MC) McDonald, PhD

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Episode 774: The Trauma Response is Never Wrong with MaryCatherine (MC) McDonald, PhD · The Trauma Therapist

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Or welcome back to the Trauma Therapist Podcast. My name is Gamiferson. My
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mission is to help trauma therapist be their incredible cells, to be human,
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to be real, not just a clinician. I'm a big believer in who
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we are is more important than what we know, and this requires cultivating authenticity,
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genuineness, and vulnerability, and that requires intention. Can learn more about
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my courses and workshops by going to the Trauma Therapist project dot com. That's
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the Trauma Therapist Project dot com. Let's get started, all right, So
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here we go. So five, four, three, two and one are
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folks, Welcome back to the podcast. I'm very excited to have as my
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guest today doctor mc McDonald mc welcome. Thank you so much for having me.
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I'm so excited to be here. Awesome. So mc is a trauma
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research, your author and certified life coach. She's spent over a decade researching
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trauma, reef and resilience, and she's written several scholarly articles and three books
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on trauma and mental illness. She says, if she could snap her fingers
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and change just one thing about the way we understand trauma, it would be
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this that at its core, the trauma response is a strength response, not
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a sign of weakness or disorder. When we begin there, healing from trauma
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is possible. Awesome, right, MC. Welcome to the podcast. Thank
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you, yay. Hello. So, before we get going, share with
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the listeners where you're from originally and where you are currently. I am from
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the East Coast from Massachusetts, and I am currently in California. I have
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moved made the move out west. When did you make the move? I
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did the same move. Oh did you? Oh that's so funny. Yeah,
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in so I had a research I was doing a research project in I'm
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trying to remember twenty nineteen, and I've been here since. I just stayed
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oh so recently. Yeah, yes, okay, awesome. How about you?
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Well, a long time ago, like twenty years ago, I left
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the East Coast and moved and moved west. So it seems like a natural
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transition for a lot of us. It does. And there's a particular like
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an East Coast person who stays east and then an East Coast person who moves
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west. Those are two different East Coast people. Uh, we'll have to
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talk about that in another episode. Yeah, So how did this interest start
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for you? Break it down. It was a really strange path. To
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be honest, I would love to say that it was this like linear path
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that made sense, and it really didn't. I was housed in a philosophy
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department. I was doing my degree in philosophy for my bachelor's and then I
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moved into I got really interested in psychoanalysis when I was doing my master's degree
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and started studying the psychoanalysis and the history of mourning, and that's what I
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ended up doing my research project on for my master's degree. And in the
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course of that time, both of my parents passed away really suddenly. They
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both had cancer that was undiagnosed, and so they both died in quick succession
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while I was studying mourning, which is wild. And then I moved on
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to my PhD program and I embarked on an interdisciplinary project, which some of
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your listeners will know is never looked kindly upon in academia, and I was
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looking at trauma from the perspective of philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience. And
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the goal was essentially to synthesize one hundred and fifty years of study and try
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to kind of set the course right so that when we're talking about trauma.
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We know what the history is and also what the science has brought us to
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now, because I think the societal definition hasn't really caught up yet with the
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science, and so it's been a very a winding path. Even saying it
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that way kind of makes it seem coherent in a way that it wasn't at
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the time. And I stress that because I think it's important to emphasize to
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people that the path isn't always linear, and that's okay. You don't always
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have to know what you're doing when you embark or even in the middle of
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the journey, to be honest, Well, it certainly was the case for
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me. Sorry about that. So you said you wanted to set the history
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straight, the core straight. At what point were you when you said something
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is off here? So when I was actually trying to do a project on
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identity and I was studying there was a debate at the time in the philosophy
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of mind about the extent to which, if at all, the self is
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constituted by a narrative. And I wanted to make an argument that the self
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is indeed constituted by a narrative at least an important part, and I reached
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for trauma as a case study because I kept hearing in these cases anyone who
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talked about trauma was also my own experience, said that the story they were
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telling, sometimes they didn't even realize they were telling it, shattered at the
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moment of trauma. And that seemed to me to be a good sort of
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a use case for a piece of proof that said we are constituted narratively,
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whether we recognize it or identify with that narrative or not. And so I
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reached into psychology to kind of honestly to grab the definition of trauma, and
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then I was going to be on my way and make a larger claim about
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the self and identity right exactly. And I realized really quickly that this was
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up for debate, that the field of psychology was still arguing about what kinds
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of events constituted trauma what didn't. And so I was able to go to
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some of the APA meetings where they were discussing the new criteria for trauma when
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the DSM five was about to come out, and I was shocked at how
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much debate there was. Is this an injury, is it a disorder?
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What kinds of things are trauma? What kinds of things aren't how do we
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make this list? And it just seemed to me like I had this thought,
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like, God, we got to be we have to be able to
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do this better. Like what We've been studying this for a long time,
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you know, not in a sustained way, but at least since the late
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eighteen hundreds, and so what is the deal? And that's when I started
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kind of reaching into different disciplines and putting things together, almost just for myself,
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like what is the scope here of the problem? Where did we where
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did this originate? And why are we here? And then I started realizing
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that this might be work that would be beneficial for other people to read.
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Wow, so lots there? Yeah, well, yeah, there was a
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lot there. Part of me just wants to say, what did you find
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in which work before you answer? This is very interesting because I've interviewed bazillion
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people on this podcast, and many have varying definitions of what trauma is.
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Of course, so what was your understanding of what trauma was when you dove
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into this That it was an event that shifted the timeline and potentially your personality.
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One of the first definitions of trauma in a psychological aspect versus a physical
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trauma. Had said that the trauma is something that is intense enough to change
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the nature of your personality, and that to me seemed pretty accurate. And
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then we had this whole history of trauma where we were saying that trauma only
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affects women, that it was a result of a wandering uterus, that note,
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just kidding, it only affects soldiers who have been exposed to percussive blasts
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to their brain and they have essentially a brain injury. Nope, wait,
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it applies to soldiers who haven't been, you know, exposed to these concussive
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blasts. And so okay, wait, just there's the issue of domestic violence.
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Like, there were these kind of moments as in the history where we
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tried to specify who is even struggling with trauma and what constitutes a traumatic event.
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And I think that when we look critically at a field, it's really
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important to take the context of the history into account because we often end up
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sort of importing other definitions into our belief system without realizing it. And so
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for example, yeah, for example, I think still even though we are
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very far from saying that trauma results from a wandering uterus. We still associate
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it with weakness and a kind of negative femininity, and this you can see
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this pop up in combat populations where veterans are dealing with PTSD and they're being
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told by other service members and sometimes honestly their clinicians that they just need to
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kind of buck up and become real men. And that is this the proof
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that we've imported this old, bad definition that was based in bad science that
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has been corrected. We now know from a biological perspective that the trauma response
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is automatic and adaptive and evolutionary. We come to this earth with fight,
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flight and freeze to help us cope with overwhelm. We have a stress response
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system that is designed to handle incredible amounts of stress. And then sometimes those
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adaptive mechanisms become overtime maladaptive, and that's when we have the distress that comes
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with something like PTSD. The science is very clear on that. It's not
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really up for debate. It's not rocket science. Of course, there's many
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more areas and layers that we will be able to discover, but I think
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there's still that disconnect and definition, which is a very long way to answer
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your question, so where are you now kind of in summation, how would
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you let me ask you this question? First? How would you say that
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the mental health establishment, the psychological establish defines trauma. So it kind of
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depends on who you ask, because I'm sure you know and everyone on your
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podcast has had a different definition. And then there are people who sort of
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use the clinical Bible, the DSM, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental
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Disorders, which your readers probably know about, which specifies that there are currently
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three things that can count as potentially traumatic. And then you have clinicians interpreting
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that Bible, and clinicians will either be will stay very close to that definition
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and say that if you don't have exposure to these three things, which is
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like death or threatened death, serious injury, sexual assault, those are I
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think the three things that count currently in the DSM as potentially traumatic. And
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you have clinicians who are going to interpret that very literally and clinicians who are
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going to be much more open about that and say that there are many things
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that could potentially be traumatic stressors. Let's look at the definition. I think
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that the psychological institution, the big machine, is broken, and that we
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need to start correcting that from the ground up, because that's the only way
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you can kind of fix a broken institution. That's not to say that there
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aren't amazing clinicians who are doing incredible work in the institution, But I think
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that the definition of trauma that makes more sense is you have a potential trauma
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when you have two things happen. One, you have an unbearable emotional experience
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and that can either be unbearable in the moment or become unbearable over time.
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And two that lacks a relational home. So anytime you have an unbearable emotional
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experience that lacks a relational home, you have a potential for trauma. And
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the reason I like that definition is because it raises the bar sufficiently high so
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that we don't get to say that anything is potentially traumatic, right, Like,
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you know, there was no more pumpkin spice syrup at Starbucks, and
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I have PTSD and campobacks at Starbucks. That's kind of a misuse of the
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term. Unbearability raises the bar sufficiently high, and a relational home provides sort
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of a roadmap for what we need when we are looking to heal from trauma.
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And I think one of the key things that we need to look at
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when we're looking at what are we doing when we're healing from trauma is integrating
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something that sort of defied integration in the first place, was too overwhelming to
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be integrated. And so in cases like that, we need other people to
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help us integrate what couldn't be integrated. And that's a relational home, which
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just a space you can have someone help you bear what was unbearable. It
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was that definition broad enough to include the differences, say between PTSD that might
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come arise from like a car accident compared to an interpersonal trauma. I think
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so, because I think that unbearability lies with the individual who experience the event.
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We don't get to decide from a you know, from on high this
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thing was traumatic and this thing was not. We can say, look,
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you know you worked in let's say, to give an example, you worked
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in a toxic work environment with a very controlling boss for five years who made
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you feel inadequate and like you were on the edge of being fired every single
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day. You were at that workplace for at least eight hours a day every
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day, and probably thinking about it a lot more that over time, like
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in any given day might not have seemed like a big trauma, right,
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but over time that wears a way at your sense of self and your sense
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of confidence and makes you constantly feel like you are in a very precarious situation
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in terms of your career and your finances. And so over time that would
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clearly be unbearable. And so that that's potentially traumatic. You're talking about kind
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of a broken machine. What can you feel it is broken in terms of
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they're the understanding of and or the definition of trauma. Yeah, I mean,
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so there's so many things I think that And this is like part of
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this is because the institution of psychology, like Capital P, is a huge,
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unwieldy institution. And anytime an unwieldy institution is trying to do something,
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they have to take into account five hundred thousand layers that the layperson isn't really
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thinking about when we're talking about like how would we personally define a traumatic event?
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And so I want to say that I'm not trying to slam the institution,
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but I think that the institution has become entangled with insurance companies in such
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a way that we have to define things very specifically and that includes like,
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okay, you have to have timelines for suffering and timelines for treatment, and
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things get parsed out in a way that is that us to do with finances
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rather than mental health, and so I think that that's one issue. I
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think that another issue is that when it comes to defining any mental disorder,
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but certainly trauma, the field of psychology is trying to say, Okay,
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we want to make sure we define this in a way that doesn't stretch the
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term to meaninglessness. We don't want to be able to say that anything is
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potentially traumatic. We don't necessarily want the patient or the client to always get
15:22
to decide what is trauma, just like a patient might not always be able
15:26
to determine what distress looks like for them, but we want to give them
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enough power so that they have input. And then we don't want to make
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the definition so narrow that we miss entire populations of people that are suffering and
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then misdiagnosed. So it's really a tricky problem, and I think the field
15:46
ends up kind of pendulating between those two extremes, where you stretch the word
15:48
to meaninglessness or you make it so narrow that it's kind of ridiculous instead of
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striking a balance, because what that balance requires is that you hold things to
16:00
be that are potentially contradictory to be true at the same time, and you
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give the patient some autonomy to decide what they're experiencing, but also you have
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some basis of what kinds of things are potentially traumatic. You know, it's
16:15
like they're trying to make a list out of something that is impossible to make
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a list out of. And how does this kind of ambiguity impact therapist potentially?
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I mean, I think people are really stuck right Like. It can
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come out in a number of ways. Number one, you know, as
16:33
you know, most clinicians don't really get a training in trauma, and part
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of that is because of the sort of staccato history of the study of trauma
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we haven't had. It hasn't been a thing that we have studied in a
16:48
sustained way. It has these like peaks and valleys, and so it hasn't
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really been a stable part of the curriculum when you get training, unless you
16:56
choose that as a research specialization or something like that. And that's improving a
17:00
lot, but I think that's one place that things can get really tricky is
17:04
that that clinicians can be out in the field, certainly now in twenty twenty
17:07
three, where we have just been going through a global traumatic event with little
17:14
to no training on how to recognize and treat trauma. So that's one thing
17:19
too, is I think, and this is true of other things in the
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DSM and other mental illnesses and things like that, clinicians are really left to
17:26
interpret based on not just what the DSM says and their training says, but
17:30
also what their practice says and their own personal experience, and so that can
17:34
go in one of any number of ways. And then I think the third
17:37
thing is that there's this hyper focus. I would love to see this change
17:42
in the field on choosing a singular modality of treatment. And so if you
17:48
do dialectical behavioral therapy, that's your specialization and you treat every client that you
17:52
see with dialectical behavioral therapy, which is wonderful if you're in a DBT you
17:57
know, practice and you're seeing folks who are known to be uh, you
18:04
know, have something that that DBT would be super helpful for. But if
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you only have one tool, then I think that's really tricky, and we
18:12
tend to blame clinicians for that. But but we need to blame the institution
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because it's the institution that is training clinicians to believe that one or two tools
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is enough. You know, It's like that adage, you know, if
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you have a hammer, exactly, yes, everything is nail. Yeah,
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right, right, right, pause here for one moment we're talking with mc
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McDonald. It's one of posit moment to thank our sponsors here, all right.
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So yeah, really interesting and yet at the same time, when we're
18:45
talking about treatment modalities, therapists already are stymied. What the hell do I
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do? Do I choose this modality and what I have to invest in another
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modality too? How so how do they become equipped to efficiently, effectively,
19:07
in a healthy way treat trauma? I mean, I think again, like
19:12
this is it's so tricky because we have the tendency to turn right to the
19:15
clinician and place the blame and then therefore the responsibility to change on the clinician.
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And I think the reality is that if we want to better treat folks
19:25
who are dealing with trauma, we need to change the education and we need
19:27
to change the frame that clinicians have and the access that they have to different
19:33
modalities and different certifications, and you know, continuing education credits and things like
19:38
that need to be more accessible. And also people need practices where they have
19:42
enough time to be able to pursue these other interests or if they realize that
19:48
there may be as a whole in their training, they need to be able
19:52
to take time to get a certification, which, as you know, at
19:56
the moment, is really difficult because everyone is so maxed out. I think
20:00
in the United States it's like there's six patients for every hour, every clinical
20:06
hour. That's that's a huge systemic problem, and so I think that the
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resolution can't really lie in the clinician's hands. That being said, if you're
20:17
a clinician right now and you're looking for more help, I think trauma is
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one of the areas where there's a lot of There are a lot of resources
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that you could access kind of on your own time to get some more understanding
20:30
about what trauma looks like and how to treat it in your practice. Bessel
20:33
Vanderkolk's book The Body Keeps the Score. Of course, Thomas Hugel's work Reisma
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menechem I think the book Unbroken can potentially help. That's my book that just
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came out in March, And I think, you know, just kind of
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getting clear about what you're looking at, is A is A is a realistic
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first step? When is a behavior potentially in response to trauma? How might
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you recognize that as a clinician? And then also how and where to refer
21:06
clients out when you realize, Okay, I don't have training in this,
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and so where can I send them? You know, I think another hopeful
21:14
area I don't want to be too like Debbie down or here. Another really
21:17
hopeful area is in the space of coaching and in group modalities, because you
21:22
know, there's some really exciting research and positive psychology that shows that when we're
21:26
helping other people, we also can sort of re remap the brain a little
21:32
bit away from the trauma response and the fear center. And so in a
21:36
group modality where you are witnessing other people's pain and more people are getting helped
21:41
at the same time, and maybe you're connecting with other group members around a
21:45
similar trauma, you're creating that space for a relational home in a non clinical
21:49
setting, but that still might be therapeutic so I think there's there's a lot
21:53
of hope. We just have to keep marching forward. And my big concern
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is that we will turn away from the study of trauma again, as we
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have, you know, four other times in the history of the study in
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the last one hundred and fifty years, and that I'm sure scares you as
22:07
well. So you mentioned the book Unbroken the Trauma The title rather is unbroken
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the trauma response is never wrong, and other things you need to know to
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take back your life. Why did you write this book and who is it
22:23
for? Great question? So I wrote the book because so again, you
22:27
know, going back to this idea of I had a very nonlinear path.
22:30
When I was in grad school, I started I got a coaching certification,
22:33
and part of the reason for that was because I want I wasn't sure I
22:37
was going to get an academic job, right being an interdisciplinary scholar, people
22:41
are like, you're unemployable. And then I was also I wanted to play
22:45
with the idea of practicing clinically. But I felt like if all of my
22:49
research was about criticizing the field, that it felt a little bit insincere to
22:55
go get a clinical license, and so I started coaching, and so I
23:00
have about eleven years of practice with folks who are dealing with trauma from a
23:06
coaching perspective. And so I had this academic career in trauma and looking at
23:10
trauma critically from these three disciplines, and I had my own personal experience,
23:14
and then I had these coaching clients that I was working with, and I
23:18
was doing research projects. I worked with previously incarcerated folks and veterans on reintegration,
23:23
post incarceration and combat, which obviously both of those things include a lot
23:29
of trauma. And so I thought, in twenty twenty, what if I
23:33
synthesized this and instead of writing academically, I wrote for a general audience.
23:38
And what would that look like? And so the book is split into client
23:41
stories, science and history, and then tools so that you can recognize your
23:48
own story, maybe other people's stories that you know, and then also be
23:53
empowered to understand what's going on in your nervous system and how to feel a
23:57
little bit more control over. Can you pick out maybe in an example in
24:03
the book of a particular Cayse study for example. Yeah, So one of
24:11
the things that I think is the biggest barriers to healing trauma currently is the
24:15
shame and stigma that we have around it. And this circles back to the
24:18
definition that we've been talking about. When we define trauma really narrowly, then
24:23
we dismiss our own traumatic events because we don't feel like they're enough to be
24:27
traumatic. And so there's a chapter where I talk about referred pain, you
24:33
know, which is this kind of strange biological experience where the most common example
24:37
is like you have a toothache and you go to the dentist thinking, Okay,
24:41
maybe I'm going to need a root canal or something really you know,
24:44
offensively expensive, and then they tell you to go to the emergency room because
24:48
there's nothing in your teeth. It's actually referred pain from your heart and that
24:52
that's presenting in such a way. So in that situation, the source of
24:56
the pain isn't what you think it is. And so there's a case study
25:02
in the book of a client who was a first responder and she was working
25:07
in disaster zones and so she was exposed to other people's trauma. And we
25:12
know that vicarious traumatization is a thing, and she had all the symptoms of
25:17
PTSD, but she loved her job, and whenever she talked about her job,
25:21
I just get the feeling like she's not there doesn't seem to be any
25:25
sign of distress here. She feels empowered when she goes to these places,
25:29
she feels connected, she feels there doesn't seem to be a sense of like
25:33
moral injury where she's starting to lose her faith in the structure of the world.
25:38
It just didn't seem like the source. And over the course of our
25:41
conversations, all of the stuff that I was talking about about the trauma response
25:45
resonated with her, but it didn't like seem to attach to the work stuff.
25:51
So we couldn't really figure out what was going on. And she had
25:52
mentioned a couple of times in passing that she had had this breakup, and
25:56
she's like, I don't want to talk about that. That's not traumatic.
25:57
It's just a dumb breakup. I only dated this guy for two years,
26:00
not a big deal. So she was issuing a lot of judgment and shame
26:04
about the role of this event in her life, given the exposure she was
26:08
having to all these other traumas. But when we when we dug into it
26:12
and sat with it for a minute, this was an incredibly traumatic breakup.
26:17
And she had thought, yes, she was only with this person for two
26:19
years, but they had been shopping for homes together, they were talking about
26:23
their future. He left in a very shocking sudden way. He had another
26:27
relationship. She had no sign that anything's wrong in the relationship, and all
26:32
of a sudden it was over. And so this was the thing that had
26:37
caused the traumatic symptoms. But we were looking at the wrong source. We
26:41
were looking it was like we were looking at the tooth and she was having
26:45
a heart attack. And I think the reason that I want to that I
26:48
want to talk about that example in particular in this conversation is that we've been
26:52
talking about the definition of trauma and why it's important to get it right.
26:55
And I think when we don't get it right, we missed the source of
26:57
pain. And when you meet the source of pain, you don't heal it.
27:00
Like she was going to quit her job because she thought that it was
27:06
contributing to all these symptoms, right, and so these have real, like
27:10
you know, measurable effects. When we're getting the definition wrong. It is
27:15
a really good point, you know, we it's so easy for us to
27:18
minimize our own experiences when we're talking about or looking at someone's sexual assault or
27:26
or combat experience. How totally no. But my breakup didn't traumatize me at
27:33
all. Right, Well, our life is in shambles right right. And
27:37
it's interesting too because I think we don't we don't draw the parallel. If
27:40
we both had appendicitis last night and we both went and had our appendices removed,
27:45
we wouldn't be comparing. I wouldn't be saying mine was inflamed to this
27:49
point and yours wasn't, and so mine's more important, or yours was more
27:52
inflamed than mine, or you know what I mean. Like, we wouldn't
27:56
draw that distinction in other medical spaces. So why are we doing it here?
28:00
Why are we making that hierarchy in the book and the description. Rather,
28:07
you say the trauma response is never wrong. What do you mean by
28:11
that? I think that again going back to this idea of shame. You
28:15
know, when we look from a neurobiological perspective at the trauma response, what
28:18
it is is a set of default responses that again we come programmed with,
28:22
that are designed to help us out in moments of extreme overwhelm. And so
28:29
to say that the trauma response is wrong, or that it's something that we
28:32
should be ashamed of, is like saying that being hungry is wrong or having
28:37
to go to sleep because you're tired is wrong. It's a biological reality that
28:41
is there to keep us alive. And when we understand that and can metabolize
28:47
that the trauma response is actually a strength response rather than a sign of weakness
28:51
or disorder, then I think we can peel away some of the shame that
28:55
gets in the way of healing. So, okay, so you have this
28:57
trauma response and it's it's adaptive, but over time it's become maladaptive. So
29:03
these alarms are going off in the wrong place. And so how do we
29:07
recalibrate the nervous system, how do we integrate what hasn't been integrated. That's
29:11
the work of trauma healing. None of that needs shame, right, We
29:18
don't need to be ashamed of any any piece of that, either the adaptation
29:21
or the adaptation moving into the space of maladaptation. So I think when we
29:26
start there, healing becomes a lot more possible. When we view the trauma
29:32
response as something that is broken about us or that is wrong, then we
29:37
start with shame. And that's like trying to climb up a mountain with a
29:41
car strapped to your ankle, Like you're making it so much harder for yourself,
29:45
right, I mean it's so easy. I can't handle this, you
29:49
know, I'm I'm being affect negatively impacted by this experience. A'm weak?
29:57
Right? Could I be so weak? And that person over there they didn't
30:02
have that response right, right? Or the last time I went through this,
30:06
I didn't have that response right, Because I think the other thing that
30:08
we don't take into account is that what is overwhelming for you today might look
30:12
very different than what was overwhelming for you ten years ago or ten years from
30:17
now. And so yeah, so the book is for, as you said,
30:23
not just academics, but for lay people as well. So the therapist
30:27
can definitely, yeah, take advantage of this. Yeah, I think for
30:33
therapists, especially for folks. It's one of the things that I intended it
30:36
to be. And I've heard a lot of positive feedback about this is that
30:37
it's an easy read. So one of the things that I think is tricky
30:42
about some of the other books that have come out is that they have much
30:47
more of a textbook style and so they're kind of a slog to get through.
30:51
Yes, there's tons of amazing information and all that, but for a
30:53
regular layperson or a therapist who doesn't have a training in the field at all,
30:57
it's a slog to get through a text book, and this is digestible
31:03
and easy to read, so it could be useful as starting point for anyone
31:06
a therapist who wants to brush up on their understanding of trauma and read some
31:10
case studies, for an individual who feels like they might be struggling with trauma
31:14
but they're not sure, and also for people who are surrounded by other folks
31:18
who are dealing with trauma, so families of veterans, people who have a
31:23
family member who's had an assault, or who's just struggling with you know,
31:29
life in twenty twenty three, which I can't emphasize enough is traumatic, you
31:34
know. So yeah, Or the therapists listening who are kind of bombarded with
31:42
all the different modalities out there, what are your thoughts initial thoughts on strong
31:51
modalities that are out there for treating trauma, ones that you would say,
31:55
ones that are on your radar as this looks really good, and of course
31:57
with the understanding people respond differently to different modalities. Yeah, so I think
32:04
before we even get to modalities, I think, to answer a question you
32:08
didn't ask, I think that if all therapists had a baseline understanding of the
32:15
trauma response and could normalize and contextualize symptoms for clients, that's an amazing starting
32:22
point. I think psycho education as a modality goes a really long way for
32:27
someone to realize, Okay, the symptom that I'm having this nightmare that I
32:30
keep having, or this hypervigilance that's getting in the way of my relationships and
32:32
turning into irritability with my family. If I can understand that that's normal and
32:37
expected and also something I can potentially intervene on and control, that is a
32:44
huge first step. That's a great foundation. And then in terms of other
32:47
modalities, I think that narrative therapy is very helpful when it comes to trauma
32:53
healing because a critical so if trauma is essentially like a wound of memory,
33:00
a critical part of the healing process is working with the fragment fragmented memory in
33:05
one way or another. And when you're in a therapist's office, who's who's
33:09
well versed in narrative therapy. You can kind of work with the story in
33:14
a way that gives your nervous system an immediate, immediate sense of peace in
33:22
a way. And I think that that modality gets uh kind of under It's
33:28
underutilized in my opinion, and I think I f S Internal Family Systems is
33:35
very useful. Sematic experiencing therapy is very useful when you work with trauma,
33:38
As with anything, you have to understand that the body is along for the
33:43
ride, and so whatever you're experiencing the psyche, you're experiencing in the body,
33:46
and so working on a somatic level I think is really helpful, especially
33:51
for folks who feel really stuck, like who feel like they've done a bunch
33:53
of therapy, they've done a bunch of work, They've tried some of these
33:57
modalities they work well. And then e m D is another modality that I
34:00
think is really really helpful. Again, it's none of these are a panacea.
34:06
And this is another thing I think that is broken about the sort of
34:07
single modality model is that we're like, Okay, everyone just needs to do
34:12
EMDR and then no one will be struggling. And it's EMDR is super super
34:15
helpful and that it's probably never going to be the case that you can do
34:21
like twelve sessions of anything. And then it's over the other space that I
34:24
see a ton of help of exciting research and is in the space of psychedelics
34:30
when it comes to PTSD in particular, and in PTSD that resists other treatment
34:35
modalities. I want to stress and emphasize intensely that it's important that this is
34:39
done in a setting where you have help, because the integration of the psychedelic
34:45
experience is as important as the psychedelic experience. And I've had some clients I
34:51
don't know if you've seen this too, who've had some really traumatic experiences in
34:57
using these medications in an unsupervised setting. Awesome. So you have written books,
35:07
several books? Are you you mentioned and you mentioned coaching. Are you
35:10
currently working with people and if so, how Yes? So I'm full at
35:16
the moment, but I am working with people one on one. I have
35:20
a coaching practice at Alchemy Coaching dot life. That's where people can find me,
35:23
and I'm also on TikTok and Instagram. It's the same handle. It's
35:28
just MC dot PhD. So if people want little bite size pieces of information.
35:32
I'm there and uh yeah, I hope to be opening my practice to
35:37
some group modalities in the next year, so stay tuned to that as well.
35:42
Okay, once again, the website is Alchemycoaching dot life, and we'll
35:47
have that linked up here at the show notes page at the Trauma Typists Podcast
35:51
dot com. Uh, the book is unbroken, the trauma Response is never
35:54
wrong. We'll also have that linked up MC. Fascinating, so inspiring.
36:00
My god, you're doing amazing work. Oh anytime, awesome, awesome,
36:07
thank you so much, Thank you. All right, we'll be in touch.