Latest / No Shrinking Violets Podcast for Women / Somatic Therapies: Trauma, Attachment and Family Systems

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Somatic Therapies: Trauma, Attachment and Family Systems · No Shrinking Violets Podcast for Women

• 0:00
  Carolyn: We think of confrontation as its only negative, it can only end poorly, but when confrontation is done well, it helps and it builds.
• 0:14
  Mary: Welcome to No Shrinking Violets.
• 0:16
  Mary: I'm your host, Mary Rothwell, licensed therapist and certified integrative mental health practitioner.
• 0:22
  Mary: I've created a space where we celebrate the intuition and power of women who want to break free from limiting narratives.
• 0:29
  Mary: We'll explore all realms of wellness, what it means to take up space unapologetically, and how your essential nature is key to living life on your terms.
• 0:39
  Mary: It's time to own your space, trust your nature, and flourish.
• 0:43
  Mary: Let's dive in.
• 0:44
  Mary: As many of you know, I've spent 35 years in the mental health field.
• 0:54
  Mary: When I was trained, it was rare to find someone in my program who had actually undergone their own therapy journey.
• 1:01
  Mary: In other countries, training requires the clinician to have a certain number of sessions with a licensed provider.
• 1:07
  Mary: To my knowledge, an individual therapy experience still isn't part of training today in the United States.
• 1:13
  Mary: I would go so far as to say that in the early 90s, counselors and therapists were believed to be trained as, quote, experts who did not have mental health concerns themselves, or certainly not serious ones.
• 1:25
  Mary: Of course, that was far from true.
• 1:28
  Mary: But we certainly didn't feel we could admit it.
• 1:30
  Mary: And at the time, there was a much more significant stigma attached to deciding to go to a quote head doctor.
• 1:37
  Mary: Probably because I spent most of my career working with young people, I've seen a huge shift in acceptance of mental health concerns as well as in embracing of counseling and therapy.
• 1:47
  Mary: A story I love to tell.
• 1:49
  Mary: One day I was walking across campus and I heard a student yell from quite a distance away, hey, that's my counselor.
• 1:55
  Mary: Turns out her boyfriend was visiting and she wanted to introduce me.
• 2:00
  Mary: Anyway, anytime we have increased awareness or more open discussion of a topic, we also tend to have more misleading or even blatantly false information.
• 2:09
  Mary: In this age of TikTok and AI, the information on topics like trauma and treatment can be overwhelming and at worst, dangerous.
• 2:17
  Mary: That's why I love hosting fellow therapists on my show.
• 2:20
  Mary: We speak a shared language and we tend to be united in wanting to give clear and understandable informational mental wellness.
• 2:27
  Mary: Plus, I nearly always learn something or shift my perspective on an issue.
• 2:32
  Mary: Today's guest is Carolyn Kobolinsky, a trauma therapist who's built her entire career on one core belief.
• 2:39
  Mary: Therapy should actually help you feel different, not just talk in circles.
• 2:43
  Mary: Carolyn grew up in emotional chaos, battling depression and substance use, and spent months in residential treatment after high school.
• 2:51
  Mary: Later diagnosed with bipolar two, she fought her way through eating disorder recovery, toxic relationships, and ultimately became a caregiver for her sister-in-law during a devastating battle with stage four cancer, grief that reshaped her life and her work.
• 3:07
  Mary: Now a licensed professional counselor supervisor and trauma specialist, Carolyn runs CWK Counseling, where she helps clients untangle the toughest knots complex trauma, addiction, eating disorders, caregiver burnout, and grief.
• 3:22
  Mary: Known for her humor and grounded approach, she's as real as therapy gets, combining clinical expertise with lived experience to help people finally feel different.
• 3:32
  Mary: Welcome to No Shrinking Violets, Carolyn.
• 3:35
  Mary: Hi, I hear that and I'm like, yeah, I'm a who's that girl.
• 3:40
  Carolyn: She sounds great.
• 3:42
  Mary: When I read it initially and now was reading it, and I all of those things after 35 years, I'm like, holy crap, girl, like that's a lot.
• 3:51
  Mary: So those are the toughest things.
• 3:53
  Mary: And I can't wait to sort of like pull them apart a little bit because I think there's so much misinformation, and I think we can have some really interesting topics to talk about.
• 4:03
  Mary: But I would love to start with you telling us just some of the key highlights.
• 4:08
  Mary: It sounds like you had a pretty rough road yourself.
• 4:11
  Mary: And that's what a lot of my a lot of my guests have been through the stuff that they now help other people with.
• 4:17
  Mary: So absolutely.
• 4:18
  Mary: Yeah, tell us a little bit about your story and kind of how you ended up being a therapist.
• 4:25
  Carolyn: Okay.
• 4:25
  Carolyn: So I grew up, I've had bipolar two disorder my whole life.
• 4:31
  Carolyn: And so as a kiddo, I was very emotionally dysregulated.
• 4:35
  Carolyn: And there's four kids in my family, and my mom just kind of she was overwhelmed.
• 4:40
  Carolyn: My dad's an anesthesiologist, and he was building his practice, and um, she homeschooled us, and it was just kind of it was I had a lovely childhood.
• 4:52
  Carolyn: My parents, I think, are the best.
• 4:55
  Carolyn: Um, but it just was kind of rough starting out.
• 4:58
  Carolyn: So I um experienced something in high school, a traumatic experience, and it really derailed me for about a decade.
• 5:08
  Carolyn: During that time, I was seeing a therapist who completely betrayed my trust and kind of verbatim told my parents everything that I have been telling her.
• 5:19
  Carolyn: And um, that taught me what I did not want to be like.
• 5:23
  Carolyn: When I work with my young guns now, um, that's one of the things that I always talk about in the beginning of like, I'm your therapist.
• 5:31
  Carolyn: This is what we're here to do.
• 5:33
  Carolyn: Um, if there's something that comes up that we're gonna have to tell your parents, we're gonna talk about it.
• 5:38
  Carolyn: You can tell them, we can tell them together, I can tell them, like, this is your show.
• 5:42
  Carolyn: I also am very honest with parents of saying, if you're here for somebody to rat your kid out, I'm not the therapist for you.
• 5:51
  Carolyn: Um, and there's a lot of people that think that their kiddo is the problem, and really it's a systemic problem.
• 5:59
  Carolyn: And so that is that's something that really shaped me.
• 6:04
  Carolyn: I got diagnosed with bipolar two disorder when I was 25, and that was life-changing.
• 6:11
  Carolyn: I think a lot of times people um get a diagnosis and it's devastating.
• 6:17
  Carolyn: For me, it was the answer to so many things.
• 6:20
  Carolyn: And so I got on meds and I've been stable for the last 15 years.
• 6:26
  Carolyn: So that's not to say that there haven't been some kind of humps, um, but that was life-changing for me.
• 6:33
  Carolyn: And so through what happened when I was in high school, I really lost my faith.
• 6:39
  Carolyn: And it took me really about a decade to get back to a place where I wanted to be in relationship with God.
• 6:47
  Carolyn: And through some kind of happenstance stuff, I really found my way back to my faith and had that kind of deconstruction, but also reconstruction.
• 6:59
  Carolyn: I think there's a lot of deconstruction that goes on at this point in life, but the reconstruction part of it gets left out a lot.
• 7:07
  Carolyn: And that's kind of what we were talking about in the beginning of you know, the whole baby bathwater situation.
• 7:15
  Carolyn: And we live in a society that has that so much now.
• 7:19
  Carolyn: And so I think it's really important to not just deconstruct, but to reconstruct.
• 7:25
  Carolyn: And so that was my mid-20s.
• 7:29
  Carolyn: I really kind of came back to my faith and developed that.
• 7:33
  Carolyn: I got married in 2018 and um my husband is the best.
• 7:39
  Carolyn: He's been sober, it'll be 19 years in December, and um he is just, I think he hung the moon.
• 7:48
  Carolyn: He's so I can be a little high strung.
• 7:51
  Carolyn: I don't know if you can tell that about me, um, but he is just steady Eddie.
• 7:55
  Carolyn: I mean, he is just he's real tuned into my mental health, and so a lot of times um, you know, he'll realize something before I do, say, hey, you know, I'm kind of seeing this.
• 8:07
  Carolyn: And so that has been a game changer.
• 8:10
  Carolyn: Um, he is a trophy husband, and so he does all of the things he makes our household run.
• 8:17
  Carolyn: And this morning he asked me, he was like, Should I get a job?
• 8:20
  Carolyn: And I was like, No, please do not get a job.
• 8:22
  Carolyn: Like, neither of us like it when you have a job.
• 8:25
  Carolyn: So um life is just really pretty great.
• 8:30
  Carolyn: Um, my sister-in-law, his sister was diagnosed with triple negative breast cancer in 2019 and um died in 2024.
• 8:41
  Carolyn: And yeah, 2024, we are coming up on the one-year anniversary of that, and um it's been a journey.
• 8:51
  Carolyn: We were her caretakers for the last two and a half or three years, and um, it was really, really intense.
• 8:58
  Carolyn: It started in her breast, it metastasized to her lungs and then into her brain.
• 9:03
  Carolyn: And so by the time she passed away, she was really immobile.
• 9:08
  Carolyn: And so one of the things that has been really a big thing for me kind of through this year, and then even just for the last month, two or three weeks, has been really processing the trauma of being there at night.
• 9:24
  Carolyn: My husband would be there during the day and I would be there at night, and because we lived there, and so and we were talking about this a little bit before of the body keeps the score, and so really tuning into okay, it's nighttime, I'm starting to have some anxiety, what's going on?
• 9:41
  Carolyn: And I want to come back to that later, just talking about trauma modalities that I do, trauma treatment modalities that I do.
• 9:49
  Carolyn: And it 2025, after I don't have a lot of memories really from the end of 2024, um, because it was just so much, but then I kind of fell into this identity free fall, and I just didn't know who I was anymore.
• 10:06
  Carolyn: And I was really afraid of who that person was gonna be, and I knew that I didn't want to be bitter and I didn't want to be cynical.
• 10:14
  Carolyn: Having your identity become a caregiver and then having that experience end, that was something that was really um, I wouldn't say that it was difficult, but it was really scary.
• 10:27
  Carolyn: And so that is how I came to work with, like you were saying, you know, our life experience gives us compassion and empathy for our clients that we would never have otherwise.
• 10:40
  Carolyn: So um that's how I got into kind of where I am.
• 10:44
  Carolyn: I've been in recovery from a lifelong eating disorder since 2020.
• 10:48
  Carolyn: It almost ruined my marriage, and um my husband was like, hey, you got to do something.
• 10:53
  Carolyn: And so I decided that I wanted to stay married.
• 10:57
  Carolyn: So I got into recovery.
• 10:59
  Carolyn: Um, and that's how I ended up working with eating disorders.
• 11:02
  Carolyn: I love ED work, it is not for the faint at heart, but I think that that's another thing that we're trying really hard to destigmatize and help people understand.
• 11:14
  Carolyn: I think that education is so important when it comes to mental health.
• 11:18
  Carolyn: And one of the things that I'm really passionate about is explaining what trauma does to our bodies and physiologically what is happening, because it can make you feel like you're crazy.
• 11:31
  Carolyn: And if you don't know what's happening, that your body is doing to protect you, you feel really out of control.
• 11:38
  Carolyn: And so I think normalizing that is really, really important and something that I'm really passionate about.
• 11:44
  Mary: Okay, so we have a lot of things to tease apart because there are about there are about 15 things in there I want to talk about.
• 11:49
  Mary: All right.
• 11:50
  Mary: So one of the things that I would like to do a little clarification on, because again, when you work with teenagers through like 22, they pick up some lingo.
• 12:02
  Mary: And now this is from a few years ago.
• 12:05
  Mary: And and one of the one of the things that I would hear people say at least once a week, it used to be, oh, like if somebody would have like a drama queen, strong reactions, it would be like, oh, they are manic depressive.
• 12:20
  Mary: And then it started to be, oh, they're bipolar.
• 12:22
  Mary: So it started to be like this catch-all.
• 12:24
  Mary: So could you give us a little bit of an idea, just so everyone is clearly understanding, when you say bipolar two, tell us just a little snapshot of what that means.
• 12:37
  Carolyn: Okay, so bipolar one has equal depressive and manic episodes, and bipolar two is more depressive episodes and has hypomanic episodes.
• 12:50
  Carolyn: So mania is not sleeping, it's buying seven cars, it's ruining your credit, it's like swinging from the chandeliers, like worth of crazy.
• 13:00
  Carolyn: And that is typically what we think of when we think of bipolar.
• 13:04
  Carolyn: I think that a lot of times, especially now, if people have mood anything, it's like, oh, well, you're bipolar.
• 13:12
  Carolyn: It's like, no, you're not.
• 13:13
  Carolyn: You're just dysregulated because you're stressed out or like whatever the thing is.
• 13:17
  Carolyn: But then bipolar too has more depressive episodes.
• 13:22
  Carolyn: And hypomania to me looks like a really good mood with a really hard edge.
• 13:29
  Carolyn: It's like I'm just a little more elevated, a little more amped.
• 13:32
  Carolyn: I'm really productive when I'm hypomanic.
• 13:35
  Carolyn: Trying to think of what else.
• 13:37
  Carolyn: I also move really fast in hypomania.
• 13:41
  Carolyn: And so that can be really helpful until it's not.
• 13:45
  Carolyn: And so I have what are called mixed episodes.
• 13:49
  Carolyn: And so, and this can happen with bipolar one as well.
• 13:53
  Carolyn: That when I am depressed, I am also, I don't want to get out of bed, but I'm having racing thoughts and I can't concentrate.
• 14:02
  Carolyn: For me, it feels I feel so scattered that it feels like really bad ADHD.
• 14:07
  Carolyn: Like I just kind of walk around and I can't stay on task.
• 14:11
  Carolyn: And I have figured out, I have an excellent psychiatrist that I have been seeing for I guess almost 15 years now, and um, pretty soon after I got diagnosed.
• 14:22
  Carolyn: And we have figured out a cocktail that when it starts coming, I typically cycle, I cycle in July and usually sometime in October.
• 14:34
  Carolyn: And so during those times, I'm just paying way more attention.
• 14:38
  Carolyn: I have PRN meds.
• 14:39
  Carolyn: I go up on my depression and my anxiety meds during that time.
• 14:45
  Carolyn: And it just, I think that that's a really important part of mental health is knowing yourself and knowing what your symptomology looks like so that you can in those times that you can advocate for yourself.
• 14:58
  Carolyn: And so you have to know what it looks like for you.
• 15:01
  Carolyn: And mental health looks different for everybody, and you know, a lot of functional depression and functional freeze are two really prevalent things that happen that people are walking through.
• 15:14
  Carolyn: And to everybody else, it looks like that they're, you know, blowing and going and getting it done.
• 15:19
  Carolyn: But they're using every bit of energy that they have to keep it between the ditches during the day.
• 15:25
  Carolyn: And I think that that's another one that we're starting to understand more about of kind of what does functional mental health look like?
• 15:34
  Carolyn: And how do we balance that and communicate with the people that are around us and just have those conversations?
• 15:42
  Carolyn: So that is my bipolar two is really well controlled with my meds because I hate to feel crazy and at the first sign of something feeling off, I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa.
• 15:54
  Carolyn: Yeah, I got a lot of stuff to do here.
• 15:56
  Carolyn: And so typically, bipolar one people, it's harder to get them to stay compliant with their medications because a lot of people really like manic episodes.
• 16:08
  Carolyn: They're fun, they you know, until they're not.
• 16:12
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 16:12
  Carolyn: Um, but that's why it's really hard to get people to stay med compliant, I guess, with a lot of things really is because the up part of it can be really fun.
• 16:22
  Carolyn: And um so yeah, does that answer your question?
• 16:26
  Mary: Yeah, I think that's well.
• 16:27
  Mary: Okay, yeah, that's helpful.
• 16:28
  Mary: And I think the other thing that is so important about your story is that you share that things have not only not been easy for you, but you've struggled with some of the hardest things.
• 16:41
  Mary: And I know, as I alluded to in my intro, when I was trained, we didn't talk about this as clinicians.
• 16:49
  Mary: If you had serious issues at some point with your mental health, that was almost something that you shouldn't say.
• 16:56
  Mary: It was really this idea of we're supposed to be an expert.
• 17:00
  Mary: And I'm so glad we're getting away from that because it's not that we don't have expertise, but I think when I think about 30 years ago, there is no one that would have been on a podcast.
• 17:11
  Mary: And even for me, it was really an adjustment.
• 17:15
  Mary: Because when you're a podcast host, you're driving the conversation.
• 17:19
  Mary: And when you're a therapist, you start by taking in information and then deciding where do we go.
• 17:25
  Mary: So I love this shift and I love that you're really talking about it.
• 17:29
  Mary: So you mentioned that you had a therapist along the way that betrayed trust.
• 17:35
  Mary: And I it's not the first time I've heard it.
• 17:37
  Mary: It's especially not the first time I've heard it happen to someone when they were younger.
• 17:42
  Mary: And what that does is poison the well, I think, going forward.
• 17:46
  Mary: Absolutely.
• 17:47
  Mary: Yes.
• 17:48
  Mary: Yeah.
• 17:48
  Mary: So I really want people to hear that when you go to therapy, you're not talking to a magician that is the first person that is going to magically fix you.
• 18:01
  Mary: Sometimes there are different experiences you need to have.
• 18:06
  Mary: And I I always want people to feel empowered to say, this isn't a good fit.
• 18:12
  Mary: But unfortunately, it's way more complex because many people still do feel there's that power differential.
• 18:19
  Mary: It's hard for them.
• 18:20
  Mary: So, do you remember having one, two, whatever therapists that were so empowering to you that that helped you decide this is what you want to do?
• 18:31
  Carolyn: Yes.
• 18:32
  Carolyn: So I graduated from high school thinking that I wanted to be a therapist.
• 18:37
  Carolyn: And my mom was like, You're not going to be one of 50,000 kids that graduates from college with a degree that you can't do anything with, and you can't do anything with a degree in psychology.
• 18:46
  Carolyn: You can get like a basic job, but you have to get a master's degree to do something else.
• 18:51
  Mary: Yeah.
• 18:52
  Carolyn: So that experience kind of soured me on therapist for quite some time.
• 18:59
  Carolyn: I um I went to nursing school for a semester and something really traumatic happened before I started.
• 19:08
  Carolyn: And so I was seeing the school therapist um and she was not helpful.
• 19:12
  Carolyn: And then I went to see a psychiatrist that was in Dallas, which is where I live, um, and before I found my psychiatrist that I have now that I love.
• 19:24
  Carolyn: Um, and she the whole time kept trying to catch me and lying to her.
• 19:29
  Carolyn: And I was like, I'm here and I'm paying a bunch of money, like I'm not lying.
• 19:33
  Carolyn: And I think that's one of the things that hopefully is changing about our field, is that we see our clients and we believe our clients.
• 19:44
  Carolyn: You know, you always want to take stuff with a grain of salt.
• 19:46
  Carolyn: And I think the longer you're in this profession, the more seasoned you get, more you can kind of see things.
• 19:52
  Carolyn: I approach things from a family systems lens.
• 19:54
  Carolyn: What that means is I am always looking at the family constellation of how this fits.
• 20:00
  Carolyn: And so my client is my client, but I'm also thinking through the whole time, okay, how does that fit in with her relationship with her mom?
• 20:09
  Carolyn: Like, how does all of this fit together?
• 20:11
  Carolyn: Because it all counts.
• 20:14
  Carolyn: And so um I hope that we are moving towards a system where we believe our clients instead of trying to bamboozle them.
• 20:23
  Carolyn: So in 2014, I got into a pretty significant car wreck, and because of my bipolar two, developed really bad post-concussive syndrome.
• 20:33
  Carolyn: And um people that have mood disorders, concussions are just a lot more detrimental than they are to the regular person.
• 20:41
  Carolyn: And so for about six months, I was just pissed.
• 20:47
  Carolyn: I mean, I was just angry at everybody.
• 20:50
  Carolyn: I had a really bad whiplash.
• 20:51
  Carolyn: I mean, it was just horrible.
• 20:52
  Carolyn: And so I can't remember what happened, but my mom was finally like, I think you should see somebody.
• 20:58
  Carolyn: And so I started seeing her name is Lisa, started seeing Lisa in 2014, and I literally said to her on the first day, I said, My aunt says that you're a really great therapist, and I'll let you know at the end if I think that's true.
• 21:12
  Carolyn: I mean, who says that's just so funny?
• 21:16
  Carolyn: Um, and so we did some really great work together from 2014 until I kept seeing her after I started working on my eating disorder, but that eventually um just I wasn't needing to be in therapy every week.
• 21:34
  Carolyn: And it just my needs kind of change.
• 21:37
  Carolyn: And I think that's what a little bit of what you were alluding to that just because you have a therapist doesn't mean that they're gonna be your therapist for the rest of your life.
• 21:46
  Carolyn: You know, as things kind of grow and change, and as we have moved into more of a mentor role, we collaborate on cases and you know, still we're in very close contact.
• 21:59
  Carolyn: But the therapist that I started seeing in 2020 for my eating disorder, um, I still see her and love her, love her, love her.
• 22:07
  Carolyn: She has just been um completely life-changing for me.
• 22:12
  Carolyn: Um, she also does EMDR, and so that was really big for me and starting to work on my eating disorder of what that looked like.
• 22:20
  Carolyn: And um, she could not be any more different from me.
• 22:24
  Carolyn: Um, because we're both therapists, like we're around in the same world, and we do some kind of other, we both do a lot of Enneagram work, and so I know her extended family, and um so I mean, that also is kind of weird about the therapy world.
• 22:42
  Carolyn: So they have both been really, really helpful to me.
• 22:46
  Carolyn: And again, because I'm a therapist, there are some of our sessions that we really do kind of consultation sort of stuff of like, hey, this is she treats eating disorders, she's treated eating disorders for almost 20 years, and I'm pretty new to the field.
• 23:03
  Carolyn: I've only been doing it for like three or four years, and so those two have been really life-changing in two different time points in my life, and I think that it's important to meet a therapist and you know, do a couple of sessions.
• 23:22
  Carolyn: You can't know if somebody's gonna work for you in one session, like you just can't, and so meeting with somebody, you know, two or three or four times and seeing like, does this track, does this fit, do we jive with each other?
• 23:34
  Carolyn: I think that's a really important part of finding the right therapist.
• 23:38
  Carolyn: Um, because everybody's different, you know, on different dates.
• 23:42
  Carolyn: Like they're different, like they may have stubbed their toe, you may have gotten in a wreck, like you just don't know.
• 23:48
  Carolyn: And so I think it's really important when you're trying therapists out to look at it through that lens.
• 23:54
  Carolyn: I also would never see a therapist that I cannot get a personal reference for.
• 23:59
  Carolyn: Um, there are a lot of crazy therapists in this world, and um, they can do a whole lot of damage, like we were just talking about.
• 24:08
  Carolyn: So, my personal advice is always, you know, find somebody, get a referral by word of mouth, even if you don't know this person, you know, hear through them from another person, just to really find somebody that is sound, that is ethical, that is well versed in what we do.
• 24:30
  Mary: Yeah.
• 24:31
  Mary: And it's, I would say to follow your instinct.
• 24:34
  Mary: I mean, if you are feeling like there's not a connection or something feels off, clarify, and it's fine to say, I don't think this is working.
• 24:43
  Mary: So again, being empowered.
• 24:45
  Carolyn: Absolutely.
• 24:46
  Mary: Yeah.
• 24:47
  Mary: So I want to dig a little bit into trauma.
• 24:49
  Mary: So when I was trained decades ago, if you took the stance of kind of exploring someone's childhood, you were quote, Freudian.
• 25:00
  Mary: And now that's really, I think, developed in a different way.
• 25:04
  Mary: And I feel like so many of our ways of reacting were created childhood, teen years because of environmental things.
• 25:16
  Mary: And sometimes those are healthy responses, and sometimes they started because they worked, even if it was unhealthy, and they end up in our office because it doesn't work anymore.
• 25:28
  Mary: So you mentioned The Body Keeps the Score, which is one of the most excellent books.
• 25:34
  Mary: I think not only as a professional it helped me, but it is something that the typical person can read.
• 25:40
  Mary: It was written by Bessel Vanderkoek, and it's really about how the things, and this is just a huge broad paintbrush, but how the things that we've experienced impact our ability to be in the world and to cope.
• 25:54
  Mary: So again, this is like trying to be really clear about what a word means.
• 26:01
  Mary: So we've started to use this word trauma for the entire continuum of issues that impact us.
• 26:10
  Mary: So when you talk about being a trauma therapist, tell us how you mean that.
• 26:17
  Mary: What does that mean?
• 26:18
  Mary: How do you conceptualize trauma and the impact it has on people?
• 26:23
  Carolyn: Yeah, so I think that defining the term is really important.
• 26:27
  Carolyn: And Gabor Matei, who I love, love, love, talks about that trauma is not what happens to us, it's what happens inside of us as a response.
• 26:36
  Carolyn: And so I think trauma gets thrown around a lot.
• 26:41
  Carolyn: And like, no, it wasn't trauma.
• 26:43
  Carolyn: It was somebody asking you to like do what you were supposed to do, to like be a person.
• 26:47
  Carolyn: Um, and I think that so much in life these days, if anything makes us unhappy, we classify that as trauma.
• 26:57
  Carolyn: That is not trauma.
• 26:59
  Carolyn: And um trauma is very subjective and it depends on, you know, attachment style.
• 27:07
  Carolyn: It depends on so attachment style is secure.
• 27:10
  Carolyn: Attachment says I'm okay, you're okay.
• 27:13
  Carolyn: Anxious attachment style says I'm not okay, you're okay.
• 27:17
  Carolyn: Avoidant attachment style says I'm okay, you're not okay.
• 27:21
  Carolyn: And disorganized is ain't nobody okay, and I'm too tired to care.
• 27:25
  Carolyn: So um that plays a huge part into how we navigate the world.
• 27:32
  Carolyn: And I think that you are dead on that coping skills, you know, there's no bad part.
• 27:37
  Carolyn: Everything starts out as helpful, and at some point it's not helpful anymore.
• 27:42
  Carolyn: And but it's all about getting our needs met.
• 27:45
  Carolyn: And so we really use our personalities from a young age to get what we need to feel safe out of life.
• 27:52
  Carolyn: And so whether that's compliance or defiance or whatever that looks like for people, that's what they're doing to get their needs met.
• 28:01
  Carolyn: And so I think when it comes to trauma, at this point in time, I think it's overly used because if anything makes us uncomfortable, then it's trauma.
• 28:14
  Carolyn: And that's just not true.
• 28:15
  Carolyn: I think that you know, growth is about being uncomfortable.
• 28:19
  Carolyn: And if we stay uncomfortable, or if we only stay comfortable, we're never gonna grow.
• 28:25
  Carolyn: And at some point, the pain of staying the same has to be outweighed by the pain of changing.
• 28:32
  Carolyn: And so, um when I think of trauma and how I treat it, I think that a lot of times there is comparison that goes on with trauma.
• 28:42
  Carolyn: And you know, you'll ask somebody about their childhood, and they're like, I had a great childhood.
• 28:47
  Carolyn: And then when you start kind of piecing through it, you're like that doesn't really track, and that doesn't really track.
• 28:55
  Carolyn: But for kids, they think that their home is the normal home.
• 28:59
  Carolyn: And so it's not until people get older and start experiencing different families that they start to realize that maybe their home wasn't normal.
• 29:08
  Carolyn: So piecing back through kind of what was your relationship like with your mom?
• 29:14
  Carolyn: What was her relationship like with your dad?
• 29:16
  Carolyn: Like what was her relationship like with her mom?
• 29:19
  Carolyn: And through that family constellation piece of putting those things together and understanding um where the strains are, where the missing pieces are.
• 29:30
  Carolyn: And again, coming back to that attachment piece, you know, there is if I could bottle up resiliency, I would be like a millionaire and it would be amazing.
• 29:40
  Carolyn: Um, but some people are just more resilient than others, and things can happen.
• 29:47
  Carolyn: You know, people can grow up homeless and they, you know, have every adverse life experience that you could ever have, and they end up going to Harvard and becoming like some wild PhD or MD or someone.
• 29:59
  Carolyn: But and then there's other people that grow up in a home that like you shouldn't be struggling at all.
• 30:06
  Carolyn: And it's that resiliency piece.
• 30:08
  Carolyn: And so I think that the reason that trauma is so subjective is because what is traumatic to one person is not to another.
• 30:18
  Carolyn: And I think that's so dependent on personality.
• 30:21
  Carolyn: I am big into the Enneagram.
• 30:24
  Carolyn: And eights on the Enneagram are the challenger and they like move through life, like steamrolling everything that could ever happen.
• 30:32
  Carolyn: My mom has always said since we were little, if somebody didn't like my sister, she'd be like, What is wrong with you?
• 30:39
  Carolyn: And if somebody didn't like me, I would be like, What is wrong with me?
• 30:42
  Carolyn: And that we came out of the womb that way.
• 30:46
  Carolyn: And so the things that I have experienced, and my sister knows about some of them, and she's like, I don't get why you can't just let it go.
• 30:54
  Carolyn: And I'm like, I don't get why I can't let it go either, but my heart is punctured and I'm gonna need some help.
• 30:59
  Carolyn: So I think that having a therapist that understands the spectrum of trauma, but doesn't overemphasize one or the other, I think is really important.
• 31:10
  Carolyn: And I think that all therapists see trauma, not all therapists are trauma therapists.
• 31:16
  Carolyn: And I think when you are dealing with a therapist that is not trauma informed and trained and all of that, there ends up to be a lot of blame that happens and like you need to take responsibility for this and da-da-da-da-da.
• 31:30
  Carolyn: And there's not kind of that two-way street happening of you know, there's some things that we have no part in, like you were transgressed as a child, like you like something happened that you had no, you were assaulted, like that you had no part in.
• 31:48
  Carolyn: Yes, this happened, you're not responsible for this, but you are responsible for the way that you have behaved afterwards.
• 32:06
  Carolyn: And so I think coming back to that empowerment piece of you know, you're not just this thing that happened to you, you are so much bigger than that.
• 32:15
  Carolyn: Like, let's piece this apart and let's figure out who that person is.
• 32:18
  Carolyn: Um, and so I think that that was a really long way to explain trauma.
• 32:24
  Mary: Although, no, I think it's great.
• 32:27
  Mary: And, you know, it's funny because we can have a traumatic event, and that's different than trauma that is defined in PTSD diagnosis.
• 32:37
  Mary: Yes, you know, diagnoses are for people that don't know, they're very defined.
• 32:42
  Mary: It'll say these, how many of these symptoms, and for this amount of time, and you know, we can be a little subjective, we all do that, right?
• 32:49
  Mary: But yeah, trauma in the PTSD or post-traumatic stress disorder diagnosis is big trauma, big traumatic events.
• 33:00
  Mary: But to your point, sometimes a smaller thing can happen.
• 33:04
  Mary: It's a flashballed moment, something that a parent said or affects us deeply for a very long time.
• 33:10
  Mary: So I think the dance that we need to do is we confront certain things as therapists.
• 33:17
  Mary: We can't be pushovers, but it is really that line of like we talked about before I hit record, we talked about capacity, the idea of being able to live in the world without having to put a boundary around every little thing that causes pain.
• 33:36
  Mary: We have to be able to tolerate some pain.
• 33:40
  Mary: Life is all over the place for all of us.
• 33:43
  Mary: So protecting your peace, doing that too much means you don't know how to grow in the world.
• 33:51
  Mary: And so I think that's where the finesse of an excellent therapist comes in because you help people see that what they did as a kid was actually a strength, and now it's not helping them because they survived whatever it was.
• 34:06
  Mary: And now they have to figure out okay, how am I gonna live in the world without saying if there's anybody that reminds me of my fill in the blank, my dad, my mom, my grandma, my first boyfriend that's exactly I have to avoid that person.
• 34:20
  Mary: So that is where I think the hard work is for us too, right?
• 34:25
  Mary: Like you're saying, you can't just blame the client, but at the same time, confronting is actually part of the therapeutic process to help them test that for themselves.
• 34:37
  Carolyn: Yeah.
• 34:38
  Carolyn: And I love that about confronting that.
• 34:41
  Carolyn: That's one thing that I think we have such a negative connotation about confrontation.
• 34:47
  Carolyn: But confrontation is not negative when done well.
• 34:50
  Carolyn: It's collaborative, it's clarifying, it's uniting.
• 34:54
  Carolyn: Um, it helps people figure out what do I really believe about this.
• 34:58
  Carolyn: And I think that so often we think of confrontation as it's only negative, it can only end poorly.
• 35:04
  Carolyn: But when confrontation is done well, it helps and it builds.
• 35:10
  Mary: Yeah.
• 35:10
  Carolyn: And I think that as I'm thinking through, I think that the word that I use instead of capacity is bandwidth.
• 35:18
  Carolyn: And um we have to know our bandwidth, and our bandwidth looks different on different days.
• 35:26
  Carolyn: And you know, because again, it depends on how did I sleep, what's going on behind the scenes.
• 35:32
  Carolyn: And but we have to be aware of what our bandwidth is and keeping a tab on that because we can't, it's approaching life through that family systems lens.
• 35:46
  Carolyn: Like people are there, people are out there.
• 35:49
  Carolyn: You're never gonna do anything.
• 35:50
  Carolyn: I mean, Tom Hanks even he needed a person, so he made a volleyball a person.
• 35:55
  Carolyn: Like, we need people, and so we have to figure out how do we move through these triggers.
• 36:05
  Carolyn: That's another word that makes me crazy.
• 36:08
  Carolyn: Um, how do we move through these things that do remind us?
• 36:13
  Carolyn: And I think that that's where tracing back to where did this start, where did the beginning of this trauma start?
• 36:20
  Carolyn: And it probably sometimes it started out as something horrific, but a lot of times it started out as like a look somebody gave you.
• 36:28
  Carolyn: Um, one of the things that I love about EMDR is it goes back to the touchstone of what was the lie.
• 36:36
  Carolyn: And one of the stories that I love of a girl that I was in training with, um, we all had to think back to we did this exercise.
• 36:44
  Carolyn: So hers was she has always been afraid of public speaking and she didn't know where that came from.
• 36:50
  Carolyn: And I mean, that's so common.
• 36:52
  Carolyn: And um, she traced it back to when she was in kindergarten, they were sitting at tables or desks where they were facing each other, and she got called out for cheating.
• 37:05
  Carolyn: And really, she was like this boy that was across the table from her.
• 37:10
  Carolyn: And that's that's where this lie started for her.
• 37:13
  Carolyn: I mean, that's like no, you know, who thinks that that's gonna like dictate something in your life?
• 37:20
  Carolyn: People have, you know, I'm a horrible person or I'm dumb, or you know, these things that their parents gave them a look when they gave them, you know, their paper that they made a B on.
• 37:30
  Carolyn: And they took that as an absolute truth of something that changed their lives when really like maybe the parent wasn't paying attention, maybe they were having a bad day, like maybe they had a headache.
• 37:42
  Carolyn: Yeah.
• 37:43
  Carolyn: And but we take these individual things that shape who we are.
• 37:48
  Carolyn: And I think that based on how those things get shaped, I think that that makes us more susceptible to trauma.
• 37:56
  Mary: Yeah.
• 37:56
  Mary: And I think thinking what else could be true.
• 37:58
  Mary: You know, when you talk about the lie, we are interpreting it through whatever that lens is at the time.
• 38:04
  Mary: And later we have to say, okay, I'm that look is familiar, I'm getting this reaction, but what else could be true?
• 38:11
  Mary: They might be thinking about a million other things.
• 38:13
  Mary: So that I think is a powerful thing to sort of fall back on.
• 38:17
  Mary: And I love the idea of bandwidth because if you think about a singer, right, who has a vocal range, if you can only sing two or three notes in your life, that's limiting you.
• 38:29
  Mary: So thinking about how to flex that muscle and react to different situations with a different script or being able to increase that bandwidth so that when you run into something that gives you that sinking feeling in your gut, and you're like, oh, that was grandma coming back to tell me whatever it was that she said at the time.
• 38:52
  Mary: It's like, well, that's there's the lie.
• 38:54
  Mary: That's not true anymore.
• 38:56
  Mary: And now you can flex that muscle and increase that bandwidth because that's not true anymore.
• 39:02
  Mary: This is a different person.
• 39:04
  Mary: You can rewrite that story.
• 39:06
  Carolyn: Yeah.
• 39:06
  Carolyn: Well, I think that's the whole purpose of therapy is to heal.
• 39:09
  Carolyn: Yeah.
• 39:10
  Carolyn: And, you know, I don't know if you're a believer, I don't know what that looks like for different people.
• 39:15
  Carolyn: Um, but like God is the ultimate healer.
• 39:17
  Carolyn: And we as therapists are hoping to embody some of that to convey to our clients like you are okay here, you are safe here.
• 39:29
  Carolyn: And this is a haven where you can get honest and you can heal.
• 39:33
  Carolyn: And I think that you know, therapy is not about just coming in and complaining for 50 minutes.
• 39:40
  Carolyn: Like, that's not what it, and if that's what you do, I don't think you probably have a very good therapy because they're not challenging you.
• 39:46
  Carolyn: You know, thinking through like therapy is about healing, it's about solution and not solution in a way of like, oh, this isn't working, let's just figure it out and move on.
• 39:58
  Carolyn: Because I think that's a whole other thing that happens with people, especially in families.
• 40:03
  Carolyn: You know, when you talk about what was trauma like, you know, something happened.
• 40:08
  Carolyn: And like I remember that my mom, my best friend's grandmother died when I was, I think we were about 10.
• 40:14
  Carolyn: And I was really, really close to her.
• 40:16
  Carolyn: And so my mom told me before we went over there, she said, she's already upset.
• 40:21
  Carolyn: And if you're gonna go over there and cry, I'm not taking you over there.
• 40:24
  Carolyn: Oh wow.
• 40:25
  Carolyn: Oh, that's I think you have that now.
• 40:28
  Carolyn: And I was like, oh my gosh, who says that to a 10-year-old?
• 40:32
  Carolyn: Yeah, um, but I mean, it really has affected like it.
• 40:38
  Carolyn: I I approach life with nobody really cares what is happening to you.
• 40:42
  Carolyn: Like they want you to come and they want you to do your job, and like that's just kind of the end of it.
• 40:48
  Carolyn: And when I get too far in that lane, my compassion and my empathy goes way down.
• 40:55
  Carolyn: You know, that random thing that my mom was trying to be helpful with that has been very life-shaping for me.
• 41:04
  Mary: Yeah.
• 41:04
  Mary: Well, and a lot of times it's not parents being abusive.
• 41:07
  Mary: We hear that a lot.
• 41:09
  Mary: It's it's not necessarily intentional abuse, it's just an offhand comment coming from a generation like my parents would be 98 if they were still living, the silent generation.
• 41:19
  Mary: Wow.
• 41:20
  Mary: So we were like, I mean, they said we were raised on like hosed water and I don't know, a stray carrot, whatever.
• 41:28
  Mary: But you know, it was really hands-off.
• 41:31
  Mary: And they just didn't have the capacity to understand that or to know they were just and they came from poverty, you know.
• 41:40
  Mary: So I think also understanding intergenerational, but we are pretty much almost out of time.
• 41:45
  Mary: But I want to circle around we're real quick because we talked about the body keeping the score.
• 41:51
  Mary: And, you know, you also mentioned a higher power.
• 41:55
  Mary: And I think spirituality for whatever that is for someone is part of healing, but we also tend to think that everything that's happening for us that feels emotional is in our head.
• 42:07
  Mary: We need to, and that's why I said a head doctor in in my intro or a track.
• 42:11
  Mary: It's that your body is going to tell you, because your body recognizes it first, it stores it.
• 42:17
  Mary: And so I work mostly with women in midlife.
• 42:20
  Mary: So what's happening to many of them now is they're starting to get a lot of physical things.
• 42:26
  Mary: And they've stored these little traumatic events, all of the things, all of the little losses, all be raising kids, trying to have a career, all the things were happening.
• 42:36
  Mary: So you put that somewhere in your little compartment.
• 42:40
  Mary: And then later your body is like, wait a minute, I'm tired of holding all this shit.
• 42:45
  Mary: So now I'm let's let's everything break down.
• 42:48
  Mary: So, real quick, give us a little synopsis, how you kind of work with the somatic or the body part of trauma with people.
• 42:56
  Carolyn: So I am EMDR trained and I am also accelerated resolution certified.
• 43:02
  Carolyn: And so um, both of those are all about body sensations.
• 43:06
  Carolyn: I had a client that was um sexually assaulted, she was targeted by this guy.
• 43:12
  Carolyn: Um, and after it happened the second time, she developed all these gut issues, and it was kind of like ruining her life.
• 43:19
  Carolyn: And we did some EMDR and then ultimately some ART on it, and it cleared.
• 43:24
  Carolyn: Like she doesn't have any more gut issues whatsoever.
• 43:28
  Carolyn: And so, you know, Richard Rohr talks about nothing really gets stuffed.
• 43:34
  Carolyn: So much of autoimmune stuff can be traced back to trauma.
• 43:38
  Carolyn: So, working with that piece, I mean, first you have to bring awareness to it.
• 43:42
  Carolyn: And we do not live in a society where we are aware of our bodies.
• 43:47
  Carolyn: Like we might want to be thin and we might know when we're hungry, but like other than that, like we're not tuning into okay, I feel anxious.
• 43:55
  Carolyn: Where do I feel that physically?
• 43:56
  Carolyn: The way that I work somatically is really having people slow down and getting not just the deep breaths, but really visualizing, you know, this deep breath from the top of my head to the bottom of my feet and really checking in and doing a body scan of um of what's going on.
• 44:20
  Carolyn: And so I do that a lot in session.
• 44:22
  Carolyn: If people are starting to kind of get dysregulated, I'll say, Okay, I want you to just close your eyes.
• 44:26
  Carolyn: Let's figure out like what are you feeling?
• 44:28
  Carolyn: And they'll say anxious.
• 44:29
  Carolyn: And I'll say, Okay, I want you to close your eyes.
• 44:31
  Carolyn: I want you to tune in.
• 44:32
  Carolyn: Where do you feel that anxiety in your body?
• 44:35
  Carolyn: And I am big into bilateral stimulation buzzers, and so I keep them out in my whether I'm doing trauma therapy or not.
• 44:44
  Carolyn: Um, I use the bilateral stimulation, um, which is like connecting both sides of your brain, and just it's like therapy on steroids.
• 44:55
  Carolyn: So having people just slow down and like, where do you feel that anxiety and allowing them to say, I'll say, okay, I wonder when's the first time you felt that way?
• 45:06
  Carolyn: And allowing them to kind of move back to, and it's this really powerful, non-intrusive way to find like where did this start?
• 45:17
  Carolyn: Because, like you said, we tune into familiar feelings.
• 45:20
  Carolyn: Like when we smell something, when we hear something, like we're back to it before our brain even knows what's happening.
• 45:28
  Carolyn: And so really tuning into what is our body trying to tell us, I think that's the that's the key.
• 45:36
  Carolyn: And so it really takes slowing down and tuning into okay, what am I feeling?
• 45:43
  Carolyn: You know, I love a feelings wheel, I have one on my wall.
• 45:46
  Carolyn: My 70-year-old client is always like, Where is that on there?
• 45:49
  Carolyn: He's not big, he's not big into his feelings, but thinking of that, am I sad?
• 45:55
  Carolyn: Am I angry?
• 45:56
  Carolyn: Am I lonely?
• 45:57
  Carolyn: Um, am I happy?
• 45:58
  Carolyn: Am I peaceful?
• 46:00
  Carolyn: And thinking through, like dropping it down to I feel, you know, I feel agitated.
• 46:07
  Carolyn: And so then, okay, what does that mean?
• 46:09
  Carolyn: Okay, then what does that mean?
• 46:10
  Carolyn: And I that's one of my favorite questions is so if that's true, then what does that mean?
• 46:15
  Carolyn: And I think that that's a question that we can ask ourselves, just kind of doing our own work, is if that's true, then what does that mean?
• 46:24
  Carolyn: And really breaking it down to where did this come from and what's this lie that I believe about myself?
• 46:30
  Carolyn: And I think that that's how we get to the bottom of trauma is we have to figure out what the lie is.
• 46:38
  Carolyn: And for a lot of people, that takes a relationship with a higher power to really get them into a place where they're able to hear that and feel safe enough to hear that.
• 46:47
  Mary: Yeah.
• 46:48
  Mary: My gosh, Carolyn, we could talk another hour.
• 46:51
  Mary: It'd be so easy to keep going.
• 46:53
  Mary: But I'm gonna end now, but I would like you to share where people can find you, and I will link your website in the show notes.
• 47:03
  Carolyn: Perfect.
• 47:04
  Carolyn: So my website is CWK Counseling.
• 47:08
  Carolyn: I am licensed in Texas, Louisiana, Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, and Colorado, and I'm working on Georgia.
• 47:15
  Carolyn: Um, so I do a ton of telehealth.
• 47:17
  Carolyn: My Instagram and TikTok are bruised banana counseling.
• 47:22
  Carolyn: That's just kind of how I go through life.
• 47:25
  Carolyn: You know, stuff that happens and you bang a banana and it's like, oh, that was a big thing.
• 47:28
  Carolyn: We're gonna have to like cut that out.
• 47:30
  Carolyn: Um, but so much of the time we're just kind of going through life, and then you look in the mirror and you're like, I feel kind of like a bruised banana, like nothing huge has happened.
• 47:40
  Carolyn: So that's where that comes from.
• 47:41
  Carolyn: It's bruised banana.
• 47:43
  Mary: I love that.
• 47:44
  Mary: Yeah.
• 47:44
  Mary: So I will link all of that.
• 47:46
  Mary: And for people that don't know, when a therapist um is licensed, they're licensed typically in one state, not six or seven, Carolyn.
• 47:57
  Mary: But so I can only work with clients in Pennsylvania.
• 48:00
  Mary: And I can be anywhere, right?
• 48:02
  Mary: I can be in Costa Rica, but clients only in Pennsylvania.
• 48:05
  Mary: So by getting your additional licenses, that increases your ability to work with more people, which is really great.
• 48:12
  Mary: Yes, absolutely.
• 48:14
  Mary: So I love that.
• 48:15
  Mary: So thank you so much for being here and talking about.
• 48:18
  Mary: Thanks for having me.
• 48:19
  Mary: I have loved this.
• 48:20
  Mary: I'm taking away good stuff from you.
• 48:22
  Mary: Yeah, same, same.
• 48:24
  Mary: Like I said in the beginning, I always learn something.
• 48:26
  Mary: So I also want to thank everyone for listening.
• 48:28
  Mary: If you'd like the topics on my podcast and recognize the wisdom of nature, and we talked about nature and nurture today, you will probably love my upcoming book, Nature Knows.
• 48:38
  Mary: I would love, love to have you on my launch team.
• 48:41
  Mary: You'll get exclusive behind-the-scenes info plus early access to the book.
• 48:45
  Mary: You can click the link in the show notes, maryrothwell.net forward slash launch team.
• 48:50
  Mary: And until next time, go out into the world and be the amazing, resilient, vibrant violet that you are.