Latest / Surviving-ISH Podcast / Embracing the Path to Recovery: A Therapist's Insights on the Impacts of Trauma and the Power of Healing

Transcript

Embracing the Path to Recovery: A Therapist's Insights on the Impacts of Trauma and the Power of Healing · Surviving-ISH Podcast

• 0:01
  Speaker 1: In every dark tunnel, there's a glimmer of hope.
• 0:03
  Speaker 1: In every painful moment, there's a strength to heal.
• 0:32
  Speaker 2: My name is Caleb.
• 0:33
  Speaker 2: I work as a therapist here in Des Moines, Iowa.
• 0:35
  Speaker 2: My passion is education around sexual and domestic violence.
• 0:40
  Speaker 2: I created a website, WeAreNotPowerlesscom in response to a video that went viral where I talked about my own sexual assault, and through the many years, the many moons that have passed, my mission has changed from advocacy to much more of education, which is what I really enjoy about David's podcast is that we can have real conversations and, at the same time, still pass along education.
• 1:15
  Speaker 2: It's a neat opportunity and I'm thankful to be here.
• 1:19
  Speaker 1: In the episode that you did with us, you went into your own personal trauma and the ongoing conversation that you and I have had, and what you have become such an ally for, is mental health and how trauma affects the body.
• 1:36
  Speaker 2: So, as I said earlier, I'm huge on education, so I'm just going to start off with some statistics.
• 1:43
  Speaker 2: People who experience trauma are three times more likely to use antidepressants, four times more likely to inject drugs.
• 1:53
  Speaker 2: Three times more likely to be absent or experience problems at work.
• 1:59
  Speaker 2: 15 times more likely to commit suicide or complete suicide I don't like the word commit, that's very stigmatizing Four times more likely to become an alcoholic, or four times more likely to develop STDs, two and a half times more likely to smoke tobacco and three times more likely to experience depression.
• 2:18
  Speaker 2: That's a lot.
• 2:19
  Speaker 1: No one wakes up and chooses that.
• 2:21
  Speaker 1: No one wakes up and says I want to be an addict, I want to lose everything.
• 2:26
  Speaker 1: There's some kind of trauma that's happened and you become obsessed with trying to numb the sting.
• 2:35
  Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely, and one thing in the work that I do that I often find fascinating is that trauma is subjective, it's different for everyone, and there are times where I meet with people and I'm like is there any history of abuse or trauma that we should be aware of?
• 2:52
  Speaker 2: They're like no, you either don't want to talk about it, which is fine, or you have no insight into it.
• 2:59
  Speaker 2: And the longer I do the work that I do, the more I recognize just how important having insight into our trauma is, because it affects us in so many different ways that we don't realize or recognize until we have conversations like this, which is definitely the first hour and a half of our conversation earlier today.
• 3:25
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I was saying things for the first time out loud, and hearing it changed things, and so it.
• 3:32
  Speaker 1: I guess the point of me saying that is I think I realized how much I miss therapy and how important therapy is to me, and that I've gotten so caught up in trying to build platforms and podcasts and my own advocacy that sometimes I'm forgetting to put my own mask on and taking care of myself first, and that it needs to be a priority to me to have that David time set aside to go to my therapist.
• 3:59
  Speaker 1: If there's anything I'm taking away from today, it's that I'm calling my therapist One thing that you mentioned when you're one through your stats that I do find common of people saying no, I had a normal life going up, there wasn't any trauma.
• 4:17
  Speaker 1: Yeah, my dad drank a lot, or my mom and dad would fight a lot, or my parents were divorced, or my mom did battle depression.
• 4:24
  Speaker 1: We have found a way to brainwash ourselves into thinking that those don't have repercussions.
• 4:33
  Speaker 2: Yeah, we rationalize it.
• 4:36
  Speaker 2: When somebody experiences trauma, we are so just regulated emotionally and logically that it's just not there because that part of our brain is shut down.
• 4:49
  Speaker 2: Like we are able to rationalize these things emotionally when, if we took a minute and step back and actually thought about it with an ounce of logic or rational thought and be like what the fuck?
• 5:02
  Speaker 2: That makes no sense.
• 5:02
  Speaker 2: And our emotional lizard brains for lack of a better way to put it it doesn't make sense because at the end of the day, it's about survival.
• 5:11
  Speaker 1: Do you find it more common, with men being in and I don't necessarily want to use the word denial because I've had, for example, when Johnny Depp and what he went through was so public that really opened the door for so many men to reach out to me to say I didn't know a man could be abused.
• 5:30
  Speaker 1: I didn't know a man could be sexually assaulted.
• 5:33
  Speaker 1: I didn't know even a female could abuse a man.
• 5:36
  Speaker 1: I didn't know that I was in.
• 5:39
  Speaker 1: I might have known I was in an unhealthy relationship but I didn't know that I was being abused.
• 5:46
  Speaker 1: Do you find like men having a hard time accepting the fact that a man can be abused?
• 5:56
  Speaker 2: Oh, absolutely Probably seven out of the 10 people that I hear say no to a question of abuse or trauma or men.
• 6:05
  Speaker 2: I think a lot of that hails back to I see, people from the age of six.
• 6:12
  Speaker 2: I think the oldest person I've met with at my current location is like pushing 80, 85, so a huge age range.
• 6:21
  Speaker 2: Historically, people didn't talk about trauma.
• 6:26
  Speaker 2: We just swept it under the rug, so to speak.
• 6:28
  Speaker 2: I have met with some chariatric clients, patients, clients there we go that have experienced horrific abuse.
• 6:38
  Speaker 2: Actually, I just met with a 70 year old male within the last month who was sexually abused by his mother and experienced a bunch of physical abuse, was abandoned, just had trauma history, and here he is at age 70, and he's just starting to realize the full impact that is abuse and just the trauma experience as a child affected him.
• 7:13
  Speaker 1: So, being that age, in the golden years of your life, when I would think, coming to that realization and then flashing it out and breaking it down, I would think that he would end up blaming himself for maybe what is class abider as generational abuse now, as well as so much of his life that he messed out on because of the fears that developed.
• 7:35
  Speaker 1: Maybe he didn't get up in karaoke that song that he wanted to do so bad.
• 7:38
  Speaker 1: Maybe he didn't go on a certain trip or something Like.
• 7:42
  Speaker 1: There's so many things that would have been stolen from him because of that.
• 7:46
  Speaker 1: I know that just in the nine years of my trauma, looking back on those nine years, there are so many things I didn't do because of fear.
• 7:55
  Speaker 1: But to have 70, 60 years of that, that's a lifetime of missing out, which again has repercussions which I know I'm asking a lot out there.
• 8:08
  Speaker 1: So break it down however you want, but I feel like that also leads us into the topics we're going to talk today is how trauma affects the body.
• 8:18
  Speaker 2: Yes, absolutely yeah.
• 8:20
  Speaker 2: Trauma is like a virus.
• 8:22
  Speaker 2: If you picture the brain as a computer, trauma causes file corruptions, reduces our ability to process, if you think of malware.
• 8:31
  Speaker 2: We develop maladaptive coping skills, so coping skills that aren't healthy for us, such as being four times more likely to use IV drugs or drink alcohol.
• 8:43
  Speaker 2: Oftentimes those coping skills are ways that we turn the brain off just to stop the emotion.
• 8:52
  Speaker 2: That is the traumatic experience.
• 8:55
  Speaker 2: That's all it is.
• 8:56
  Speaker 2: It's just like a freight train of emotion and it's a lot, and when we are in a state of trauma, we aren't able to process any of that and it's just overwhelming.
• 9:10
  Speaker 2: So we shut down, which in itself is maladaptive, but that's a whole, nother change entirely.
• 9:17
  Speaker 2: There was one thing that I really wanted to touch on, and that's the idea of trauma corrupting and deleting files.
• 9:25
  Speaker 2: So oftentimes people in the aftermath of trauma either aren't able to remember details of it or falsely recall details of it, of trauma, because those files were corrupted, they were only processed half ways, half fast, and what do you get when you have fast processing?
• 9:47
  Speaker 2: You get a failing grade.
• 9:47
  Speaker 2: Trauma left untreated is a failing grade.
• 9:52
  Speaker 1: I think that there's so much stigma that goes behind the word abuse or trauma and even the word survivor, which is something that you and I really talked about a lot on the first episode.
• 10:06
  Speaker 1: People hear the word abuse or trauma and it's immediately associated with, I guess the word that comes to my mind is weakness.
• 10:18
  Speaker 1: If you have been abused or weak, if you have trauma, you're weak, and so it's all these negative words surrounding it to where people don't want to touch it.
• 10:32
  Speaker 1: And what are we going to do to break that?
• 10:35
  Speaker 1: What are we going to do to change that?
• 10:37
  Speaker 2: That's a billion dollar question right there.
• 10:40
  Speaker 1: I would think what we're doing now.
• 10:41
  Speaker 2: You just got to keep talking about it, talking about it, normalizing it, educating about it.
• 10:47
  Speaker 2: Because if what we know is all we know until we perceive new information to change our perspective of what we know, we're going to continue in that vein of this is all I know.
• 11:02
  Speaker 1: Let's start breaking down what it is you mean by the physical impact of trauma, because we I can't say we, I can only speak for myself.
• 11:12
  Speaker 1: I immediately go to the drugs and abuse or the self harm.
• 11:18
  Speaker 1: But it's also more than that.
• 11:21
  Speaker 2: Oh, absolutely Like there's changes in, like brain structure and neurotransmitter levels, our body's ability to regulate toxins.
• 11:30
  Speaker 2: Like trauma affects literally every single system, like whether it be from mental health all the way down to taking a piss.
• 11:40
  Speaker 2: Like it impacts everything.
• 11:43
  Speaker 2: People who experience trauma are more likely to experience heart disease, have a heart attack or stroke, more likely to experience high blood pressure.
• 11:51
  Speaker 2: It affects everything and we, for some reason, don't want to talk about it.
• 11:58
  Speaker 1: I feel like things are changing.
• 11:59
  Speaker 1: I'm sure even with the earl on a word, things are changing.
• 12:02
  Speaker 1: People are starting to be more vocal about it, but there's still so much work that has to go into it.
• 12:10
  Speaker 1: It's not just saying the words.
• 12:14
  Speaker 2: I think that's probably a barrier to many.
• 12:17
  Speaker 2: It's a lot of work to process and overcome trauma a lot of hard work and it's scary.
• 12:24
  Speaker 2: Honestly, I can say that from my own personal experience.
• 12:28
  Speaker 2: We touched briefly on EMDR, which is a trauma based therapy, and you mentioned that, like when you were doing it yourself, and brought some other things up from your past that you hadn't thought about in years.
• 12:45
  Speaker 2: It's always interesting to me to see how interconnected trauma is.
• 12:50
  Speaker 2: Now that I am a decade or so removed from my own assault, I'm finally in a healthy enough place to where I'm able to reflect on my life experiences thus far all 31 years, and I see that there were experiences and situations in my childhood that didn't necessarily cause me to experience the trauma I did, but they primed me to be more vulnerable, at risk and yeah, I unfortunately perpetrators pick up on that.
• 13:26
  Speaker 2: I don't know if it's some sort of sixth sense or sixth sense Ha, but yeah, after the last cast episode aired, my mom called me and she was honestly a little upset about some of the stuff that I said in the podcast and she took it personally and the message you receive was not the message I was trying to communicate.
• 13:51
  Speaker 2: There's a lot of miscommunication around what trauma is Like.
• 13:57
  Speaker 2: It's hard to talk about it.
• 13:59
  Speaker 2: It's scary to talk about hearing parts of David's story.
• 14:02
  Speaker 2: There's this small part of me.
• 14:04
  Speaker 2: I know it's irrational, but I just compare my own experience to David's and I'm like God.
• 14:09
  Speaker 2: What I went through wasn't shit and yet it impacted me so deeply and continues to impact me so deeply.
• 14:17
  Speaker 2: I can't imagine myself having gone through what David experienced and even doing what he is today.
• 14:26
  Speaker 2: That's remarkable.
• 14:28
  Speaker 1: I appreciate you saying that, but it's almost like angel devil right on your shoulders because I know that.
• 14:35
  Speaker 1: You know that we cannot compare traumas.
• 14:38
  Speaker 1: What I went through was absolutely the hardest thing I have been through, but what you've went through is the hardest thing you have been through and we can't compare who's was bigger.
• 14:47
  Speaker 1: There is no greater than or less than, even though our minds want to tell us that.
• 14:52
  Speaker 1: Do you think that's part of the coping mechanism that we want to say?
• 14:55
  Speaker 1: Why am I making such a big deal about this?
• 14:56
  Speaker 1: Because I could have been this bad.
• 14:59
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I absolutely think it's a Maladaptive coping mechanism.
• 15:04
  Speaker 2: For sure that there are there.
• 15:06
  Speaker 2: There's a therapy modality called cognitive behavioral therapy, fairly well known.
• 15:11
  Speaker 2: It's a very simple model, but it's a simple model that is easy to apply, which I like about it, and one of the things and CBT that they talk about our cognitive distortions, and one of those distortions being minimization or magnification, so like minimizing the impact that something had on us as a person, or magnifying oh hey, I said this.
• 15:37
  Speaker 2: Now everybody's going to think that when it's just completely irrational, but our brain has wired itself in a way that predisposes it to Minimizing or magnifying different aspects of our lives.
• 15:51
  Speaker 1: When you were describing the impact that trauma can have on someone, like now that I'm as bad as I hate to say it and I may bleed this out, who knows.
• 16:02
  Speaker 1: Now I'm getting older I'm finding different elements, like I'm finding things that I can't do or my blood pressure being high, but it just seems like there's this snowball effect and the middle of it is my trauma.
• 16:22
  Speaker 1: Where a battle is, sometimes I want, it's so easy for me to just hate, hand-beam out of hand, blame it on the trauma, but at some point I've got to own it and now I can control the outcome of it and I can let this continue to affect me to my detriment or I can do the work to gain that control.
• 16:52
  Speaker 1: And that's one thing that keeps me going, as I keep reminding myself I want control, I can be in control.
• 16:59
  Speaker 2: I think you hit the nail on the head.
• 17:02
  Speaker 2: There are, I guess.
• 17:03
  Speaker 2: If you dive into the more dusty corners of the DSM, you'll find personality disorders.
• 17:11
  Speaker 2: And there is one personality disorder that seems to be a buzzword and that's borderline personality disorder.
• 17:20
  Speaker 2: And I hear so many people saying, oh, I was diagnosed with BPD and yes, there are other people that I've met that are like fit the criteria to a T.
• 17:33
  Speaker 2: They also tend to have really significant trauma histories and that whatever need that was not met in childhood or you know, most often childhood manifests itself and so deeply that becomes part of our personality.
• 17:51
  Speaker 2: That's how wide-ranging and all-encompassing trauma can be left untreated.
• 17:59
  Speaker 2: I guess I just think of a sponge and trauma being a water.
• 18:03
  Speaker 2: We just soak it up until we can't soak up anymore.
• 18:06
  Speaker 1: I find myself becoming obsessive about things and I find that common in the survivor world where, like I, have to hit the ground running and I can't take a break is that somehow a control thing?
• 18:20
  Speaker 2: Yeah, so I can only speak for myself, but throwing myself into the work that I do was absolutely a way for me to regain a sense of power and control by and.
• 18:32
  Speaker 2: But at the same time, while it was met healthily, it can become to our own detriment, to where and it has, and I'll be very honest, it's damn near put me in the psych ward before just.
• 18:46
  Speaker 2: I want to do all these things and I'm just neglecting myself and I.
• 18:54
  Speaker 2: Today, when I meet with people, oftentimes I will remind them hey, do something that fills you back up, because we can't give from an empty cup, and that that is, quite honestly, part of the reason why I have been less involved and like social media presence and what not I'm.
• 19:22
  Speaker 2: There's been a lot of changes this year not bad changes, but changes I didn't expect, and so I've had to process them and accept that, hey, I did contribute to whatever that was, whether or not I want to admit it.
• 19:39
  Speaker 2: Yeah, of course we always want to say, oh, always the other person, we had nothing to do with it.
• 19:45
  Speaker 2: That's not the case.
• 19:46
  Speaker 2: Know, there's two sides to every story and the truth is somewhere in the middle.
• 19:50
  Speaker 2: Yeah, wow, we have gotten so off topic from what I really want to talk about, I know, but I still like.
• 20:02
  Speaker 1: I like where this went, I like where it's going, but and of course I can enter this part out but if there's something that you have in your notes that'll get us by, brilliant it, but get us back, okay yeah, trauma impacts, like I mentioned earlier, like brain architecture, so like it will cause the shrinkage in the prefrontal cortex, which is the area of our brain that processes things rationally and with logic.
• 20:30
  Speaker 2: So it reduces our ability or hinders our ability to rationally process future events.
• 20:37
  Speaker 2: Trauma also and decreases the size of the corpus colosum.
• 20:42
  Speaker 2: So if you picture the brain without the skull, there's this line down the middle that is called the corpus colosum and the right hand side of the brain controls left side of the body and vice versa.
• 20:54
  Speaker 2: And when that middle ground shrinks then our neural pathways, you know, on each side of the body, also reduce.
• 21:05
  Speaker 2: Means that impacts a lot of things.
• 21:09
  Speaker 2: It also impacts some more hind hind brain areas, so specifically the like hippocampus which is responsible for converting, like incoming stimuli into memory, and also the HPA access, the hippocampal pituitary access, which is a fancy way of saying our body's trauma response system.
• 21:45
  Speaker 2: So the HPA, you know, releases cortisol, which is the stress hormone.
• 21:51
  Speaker 2: To be alive is to experience stress like that, that's how we grow.
• 21:54
  Speaker 2: But we can have over activation of the HPA and Ultimately that is where your increased risk of heart attack, blood pressure, stroke, all of those things ultimately ties back to that overactivation of HPA.
• 22:13
  Speaker 1: Yeah, so I'm assuming there's not a way to physically repair the shrinkage but to prevent it from continuing to shrink is by getting that trauma under control for yourself, right?
• 22:31
  Speaker 1: Yes, am I thinking correctly?
• 22:33
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and so, yes, that is correct and also incorrect in a way.
• 22:42
  Speaker 2: So the brain is so, yes, it is true, because once we lose something, it's pretty unlikely that we're going to bring everything back, but that it's not doom and gloom and, oh hey, we're never going to repair any of that.
• 22:57
  Speaker 2: The brain is very plastic and different neural pathways can emerge, and so you regain some of that activity between both hemispheres of the brain, which, coincidentally, you're right hemisphere is more the emotional processing, and then the left is logical, which is where the bilateral stimulation that we see in EM comes into play.
• 23:16
  Speaker 2: So, reprocessing of a memory and by engaging both sides of our brain, like it, forces us to process that both emotionally and with logic.
• 23:27
  Speaker 2: Yeah, another way that trauma impacts, like brain architecture specifically, is by enlarging the amygdala, causing it to be more reactive.
• 23:37
  Speaker 2: The amygdala is like this little lizard piece in the back of our head that is responsible for your survival.
• 23:47
  Speaker 2: Emotions like fear, sadness, just anger, these very base emotions that's where they come from is the amygdala.
• 23:55
  Speaker 2: So when our amygdala becomes more reactive, that's where you see the emotional volatility, and people have experienced trauma, so they're very, and they can be very irritable, lose their cool with the drop of a pen, or just have troubles regulating their own emotions, maybe going from just normal to just sobbing hysterically, seemingly out of nowhere.
• 24:20
  Speaker 1: The line that comes to mind is when people say I'm always waiting for the other shoe to drop.
• 24:24
  Speaker 1: It's their trauma focus for maybe lack of better words.
• 24:28
  Speaker 1: They think that everything is just going to be bad, that they deserve no good.
• 24:32
  Speaker 1: Everything is going to be trauma-based.
• 24:37
  Speaker 1: Is that part of this too?
• 24:39
  Speaker 1: Is there just wires crossed between what is just a bad day versus what is trauma and categorizing that?
• 24:48
  Speaker 2: No, you hit it right on the head.
• 24:49
  Speaker 2: So when we experience trauma, because our brain's prefrontal cortex shuts down, we aren't able to sort through oncoming stimuli and we're not able to view them objectively.
• 25:03
  Speaker 2: Somebody who might say something to me very neutrally when I'm in a state of trauma, I take that neutral tone and then we'll often put a negative spin on it.
• 25:16
  Speaker 2: They're really pestoffing me or they're being disingenuine.
• 25:20
  Speaker 2: That comes back to again our brain's ability to process and since we're struggling with our own emotional regulation when that is going on, we struggle to also read the emotions of others.
• 25:34
  Speaker 1: It took me a little while to realize when I was being triggered and what a trigger was, and I think that when the word trigger became an important, meaningful word to me, it was also during the time that it started being used lightly.
• 25:49
  Speaker 1: Everything became a trigger to somebody in almost a laughable kind of way, and so then I battled with that word, like it just lost the true meaning to it, and I have a film through therapy that I can now point out.
• 26:08
  Speaker 1: Like I, for example, I found myself in an email with work and the word due diligence was used twice, and every time I would read a sentence that had that word the due diligence in it, I could feel my temperature change, I can feel my mood change and I was like, oh, I think I'm being triggered.
• 26:31
  Speaker 1: And so I took a few minutes and was like, what is about this work?
• 26:37
  Speaker 1: Because this is not their intent.
• 26:39
  Speaker 1: It was nothing bad about me, but so I started writing down like what are my thoughts?
• 26:45
  Speaker 1: And because of them, using the word due diligence, I was taking it and creating this narrative in my head that they're telling me that I didn't do my job in all the steps before I took it to the next level to pass it off.
• 27:00
  Speaker 1: That's not what they were saying.
• 27:02
  Speaker 1: But because I was triggered, that's what I was hearing, and had I not realized that I was being triggered, who knows what my response email would have been.
• 27:12
  Speaker 1: That could have been bad in a work environment.
• 27:17
  Speaker 2: I think right before we hit record, you were talking about your work being very health-focused and that every morning there's like a yoga or mindfulness meditation class that employees can participate in.
• 27:31
  Speaker 2: I mean, arguably the best thing that you can do for yourself when you are triggered is stop, take a minute and just breathe, because when we become triggered, our cortisol levels increase and that starts the fight or flight.
• 27:49
  Speaker 2: So, like my, ability to process things rationally or read them rationally is reduced and then, when we're mindful, we're in the present.
• 27:59
  Speaker 2: When we are triggered, we are living somewhat in the past and preparing for the future simultaneously.
• 28:06
  Speaker 2: So when we stop and breathe and just focus on that, that basically just tricks our body into calming back down.
• 28:14
  Speaker 2: Then we're able to look at something rational again, or more rationally as rationally as one can.
• 28:23
  Speaker 1: It's crazy, because I guess it's.
• 28:23
  Speaker 1: You know how you know things, but you pay no attention to it until that information is useful to you.
• 28:31
  Speaker 1: It's what I'm about to tell you.
• 28:32
  Speaker 1: I guess I've just always known but didn't realize it.
• 28:34
  Speaker 1: But I find that I will stop breathing at certain because of certain situations or certain emails, certain triggers or whatever the case may be right, and part of what's getting me hyped up or into that survivor mode is that I'm not breathing.
• 29:02
  Speaker 1: So my body is reacting to the fact that it needs air, but two things are happening at one time.
• 29:10
  Speaker 1: I'm feeling a certain top of way because of this, but then my body is acting this way because of lack of oxygen.
• 29:17
  Speaker 1: Then I'm associating the two, which is causing a big storm.
• 29:25
  Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, no, it's like a feedback loop.
• 29:27
  Speaker 2: So when you stop breathing and your body is simultaneously reacting like they, not breathing impacts how our body reacts, and how our body reacts impacts our breathing.
• 29:40
  Speaker 1: So yeah, this is why you're so amazing.
• 29:43
  Speaker 1: I went through this whole thing moving my hands, like trying to find words.
• 29:48
  Speaker 1: You're like, oh, a feedback loop, like you.
• 29:51
  Speaker 1: And then, as soon as you said that, I'll never forget feedback loop, now Like how cool is that?
• 29:57
  Speaker 1: But I just think it's so funny how I was have to spend all this time trying to think that you had no idea what I was talking about.
• 30:02
  Speaker 1: You're like David, it's a thing.
• 30:05
  Speaker 2: Yeah, no, and it's funny that you mentioned that because there are absolutely times when I'm meeting with a client in session where maybe something that they've said has triggered something in me, or maybe it's like more of a feeling.
• 30:21
  Speaker 2: Typically it comes back to not feeling safe for some sort of reason.
• 30:26
  Speaker 2: Whether or not that reason is rational is entirely different thing.
• 30:30
  Speaker 2: But I will catch myself like either not breathing or taking a really short, rapid breath, and then I tense up like, and then it's like when I start to notice that muscle tension, that I'm like, oh shit, I need to Take a minute and just bring myself back down because when we're heightened like that, like the information that's being said to us, like we're not able to retain it because again that prefrontal cortex is shut down.
• 31:01
  Speaker 1: I know that everyone gets affected differently.
• 31:03
  Speaker 1: Some people may hear that there's a medical term to something, or hear that there's some kind of word or phrase to identify something, and sometimes they may have a bad reaction to that.
• 31:15
  Speaker 1: I actually have a positive reaction to it and I even noticed myself.
• 31:21
  Speaker 1: When you said feedback loop, I noticed myself take this sovereign leaf and I sat back like it.
• 31:27
  Speaker 1: I felt validated because it's this is something that I'm noticing with myself and of course, you can get in your head of I'm fucked up, there's something wrong with me.
• 31:38
  Speaker 1: Do I need to increase my antidepressants?
• 31:40
  Speaker 1: Do I need to be on FMLA and not allowed to be out in public until I get myself?
• 31:45
  Speaker 1: And you can get into this whole like rabbit hole about yourself.
• 31:48
  Speaker 1: But the fact that you knew what it was, that there is some kind of an identifying term for it, just changed me.
• 32:00
  Speaker 2: The first time that I ever saw fight flight or freeze used in the scientific research, it was April 2016.
• 32:11
  Speaker 2: I was sitting and building on campus, I was in the middle of conducting an experiment it was like my cap some project for undergrad and at that time I was just obsessively consuming any information about trauma that I could.
• 32:27
  Speaker 2: And then I came across this article that mentioned freeze, which is what I did and it was so fucking validating.
• 32:35
  Speaker 2: I was just like, oh my God, there's a reason why I acted the way I did and to have that recognized by the world of science.
• 32:44
  Speaker 2: For someone that values education as much as I do, it's super, super validating and encouraging.
• 32:50
  Speaker 2: Like makes me feel less shitty about myself.
• 32:53
  Speaker 2: I'm not so stuck into that, but that spiral, yeah.
• 32:58
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and that on some kind of island, by yourself and alone is pretty cool.
• 33:06
  Speaker 2: So another thing that trauma impacts is I mentioned it earlier but our hormones.
• 33:14
  Speaker 2: When our stress hormone is increased, it causes our body to be more reactive to stress.
• 33:22
  Speaker 2: So it can just be a very neutral situation.
• 33:27
  Speaker 2: Say, at work, everybody comes in to have a conversation and because we're heightened, like we perceive that situation differently than it actually is in reality.
• 33:37
  Speaker 2: But that also goes down to a cellular level and that the more reactive we are like, the more stress that we put on our cells and just over time that will damage different structures and our hormone glands.
• 33:55
  Speaker 2: So that leads me to the next thing, which is like reduction of toxins or toxin elimination.
• 34:05
  Speaker 2: So trauma and being heightened like shuts down, like most of the non-essential functions, and it's like when we're heightened, our body's not going to stop and take a piss.
• 34:22
  Speaker 2: There's more important things to be done survive, same thing with like, just like digestion and elimination of food toxins from our body.
• 34:33
  Speaker 2: Because we're up here like our body doesn't eliminate these things and it just causes internal damage because of it.
• 34:42
  Speaker 2: So Wow, Wild.
• 34:47
  Speaker 1: Isn't it Easy?
• 34:48
  Speaker 1: Because, like, I keep thinking how there's a phrase that gets used a lot but I think like it came from somewhere and there's truth behind it.
• 34:58
  Speaker 1: But people will talk about eating their emotions.
• 35:02
  Speaker 1: And then I know there's been times that I'll be at work, I have a desktop and I'll be stressed and I've got a bag of popcorn.
• 35:09
  Speaker 1: But when I come off of that, when I get myself back to a centered place, I then feel sick, like I've ate too much, and I didn't notice it then, but I'm noticing it now that I'm back to the breathing and the regulating.
• 35:27
  Speaker 1: Is that what kind of what you're referring to?
• 35:30
  Speaker 1: Yes, absolutely.
• 35:32
  Speaker 2: Yep, yep, seemingly innocuous situations become big fucking deals.
• 35:37
  Speaker 2: Yeah, talking about this makes me look back to, like that, my time at Menards.
• 35:43
  Speaker 2: I had a pretty stressful position in deliveries and I started the position about a year after my own assault and so I was pretty reactive, most definitely self-mitigating with alcohol to bring down that reactivity or to try to and like some of the things I just got so stressed out and worked up over.
• 36:11
  Speaker 2: It's really not that big of a deal.
• 36:13
  Speaker 2: At the time I didn't even recognize it or even know what it was, yeah.
• 36:20
  Speaker 1: I find that, like in those moments where when I look back on things and I realize they're not big deals, I try to think of what I was feeling.
• 36:34
  Speaker 1: And what I find common is I find that anytime there's a situation, even if the person isn't meaning it the way that I'm taking it, I find that they're looking to blame me, they're looking to, which means I'm not good enough, which means I have felt at something.
• 36:58
  Speaker 1: And when I take that to my trauma, it makes me think about when my attack became very public and people were like oh, he was probably hitting on a straight man, so we got what he deserved.
• 37:10
  Speaker 1: It was the blaming the victim to.
• 37:12
  Speaker 1: Where I was like maybe they're right, Maybe I shouldn't have been in a straight bar, since I'm gay.
• 37:19
  Speaker 1: So I fell in line with blaming myself and where I have to go from zero to 100 with things.
• 37:28
  Speaker 1: A trigger for me now is I'm not.
• 37:31
  Speaker 1: It takes me a minute to be okay, to say that it's not an attack on me and my performance.
• 37:39
  Speaker 1: It's just sometimes things sometimes just don't go right and it doesn't mean someone's at fault.
• 37:45
  Speaker 1: But I feel like there's always going to be a finger pointed.
• 37:48
  Speaker 1: And when the fingers pointed at me.
• 37:50
  Speaker 1: I don't like that and part of me thinks it's because I think the aftermath is you want to hurt me and I don't know that I can survive.
• 38:01
  Speaker 1: Another hurt and it takes me a minute to get off that ledge.
• 38:06
  Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely that's deep.
• 38:09
  Speaker 1: But to lighten that up a little bit, though, is I will say that once I realize that pattern, I now recognize when it's happening, and it doesn't prevent it from happening.
• 38:23
  Speaker 1: But I feel good because I immediately gain the control of it and I'm like, okay, david, step back First, this person is not going to come and try to murder you and I know this sounds dramatic, but that's the way that my brain works, right Is this person's not going to come and try to murder you because this eye was not dotted?
• 38:44
  Speaker 1: They're just bringing to attention that, hey, let's run a spell check.
• 38:48
  Speaker 1: You know what I mean Just throwing something minor out there for perspective, and how I can control this is how I react to it.
• 38:58
  Speaker 1: But it's something that is so tiny that I have created this mountain that didn't fucking exist.
• 39:07
  Speaker 2: Yeah, that also hits home.
• 39:09
  Speaker 2: I think most therapists feel like an imposter.
• 39:14
  Speaker 2: Imposter syndrome is real, and so there are times where I go into a room and meet with the client and I walk out and I'm the worst fucking therapist in the world.
• 39:26
  Speaker 2: I did nothing to help them, and then maybe I'll get some feedback from that person that they submitted online oh, the therapist was great.
• 39:36
  Speaker 2: I didn't feel rushed or whatever.
• 39:37
  Speaker 2: I'm like.
• 39:38
  Speaker 2: Oh hey, I am doing a good job.
• 39:42
  Speaker 2: I'm just overly critical of my own performance.
• 39:47
  Speaker 1: How would you have reacted?
• 39:49
  Speaker 1: Nothing, I'm trying to play therapist, but just because I'm wanting to learn right.
• 39:54
  Speaker 1: So how do you think if you walked out of there feeling maybe a little defeated or an imposter, and then you read a review that someone put that was like you know what, I don't know that, I'll go back to him, our personalities didn't mesh and I didn't feel comfortable or whatever but a comment that you maybe would have taken negative, that would have fed into the reaction you were already having of the imposter syndrome.
• 40:22
  Speaker 1: How would you have handled that, do you think?
• 40:27
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I would have gone to either another therapist in my office and just talk through it or pick up the phone, called my brother or my supervisor and just be like, hey, I need to run this by you.
• 40:41
  Speaker 2: And then, as I talk to things, the less reactive I become and the more I can realize, hey, it's irrational of me to think that every person is going to sit my personality.
• 40:58
  Speaker 1: And I feel like the answer that you just gave is the healthy, educated you've done the work answer.
• 41:04
  Speaker 1: But what about when someone is not that place yet?
• 41:08
  Speaker 1: What is the difference that you have found in yourself with the reaction to the way you would have reacted before you?
• 41:15
  Speaker 2: did the work.
• 41:16
  Speaker 2: I would have taken that criticism, that feedback See, my brain just labeled it as criticism.
• 41:23
  Speaker 2: It's feedback and I would have taken it to heart, gotten into a spiral and shut down.
• 41:32
  Speaker 1: The reason I wanted to have both answers is because I want us to see, and be able to put it in perspective, how the snowball effect is with this.
• 41:41
  Speaker 1: Feedback might not have been what you wanted, but your reaction to it could have caused everyone else to have maybe the same kind of feedback versus you've done the work and that I've got my brother who's a soundboard for me, I can go to a colleague, I can maybe go up to the hill and take a walk around the track and breathe and realize that my brain went to criticism.
• 42:09
  Speaker 1: But that's not what it is.
• 42:10
  Speaker 1: It's just feedback, which I thought it was cool because we just saw that happen in real time too.
• 42:16
  Speaker 1: Right, like you immediately said, and you're like oh wait, no, we saw that in real time, which was very interesting to see.
• 42:24
  Speaker 2: Yeah, like I.
• 42:25
  Speaker 2: Honestly, until even probably in the last year or two, I wasn't able to check myself like that.
• 42:34
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it's also cool for me to see Self-awareness.
• 42:41
  Speaker 2: That is something that trauma just destroys.
• 42:45
  Speaker 2: I think I said it earlier like we're simultaneously living in the past and preparing for the future, and self-awareness happens in the present, and the present is not the past or the future.
• 42:58
  Speaker 2: That's something that I have become an ironic choice of words more mindful of since starting to work in my actual field.
• 43:09
  Speaker 2: Yeah, which actually ties into the last thing that I wanted to mention, which is trauma's impact on judgment.
• 43:20
  Speaker 2: So trauma impacts our ability to have insight, to take a different perspective, to see and weigh different consequences.
• 43:30
  Speaker 2: Okay, if I act this way, this or this will probably happen.
• 43:35
  Speaker 2: Instead, we just balls the wall, run with it like fuck it, let's do it.
• 43:41
  Speaker 2: It's very impulsive.
• 43:43
  Speaker 2: Impacts our ability to set boundaries, which, in turn, that failure in setting boundaries primes us for further trauma.
• 43:54
  Speaker 1: When you mentioned the word judgment, like I immediately felt like my chest kind of start getting tight.
• 44:04
  Speaker 1: There was so much judgment that came with it and everything became people having an opinion.
• 44:11
  Speaker 1: When you see celebrity stuff on social media, it's so easy to respond to me like she looks fat in that dress or he's got a dad bod and it's not cute.
• 44:21
  Speaker 1: After my attack, especially where people locally didn't know me but they knew so much about what was released, whether it was right or wrong, that people would come back with some ugly comments and reading those, I was like is this how people really see me?
• 44:43
  Speaker 1: And to this day, when I walk out of the house, I have to remind myself that, David, it doesn't matter their opinions, it doesn't matter.
• 44:53
  Speaker 2: Yeah, we're able to dehumanize them, and when you were saying that, it made me giggle to myself, because there I call them keyboard warriors.
• 45:02
  Speaker 2: There are people that will, let's say, really cruel shit Online that they would never say in person.
• 45:10
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it's strange how we're able to rationalize it.
• 45:13
  Speaker 2: There's this barrier via electronic communication and and Probably comes down to the fact that, hey, we don't have to look that person in the face and then say the same thing.
• 45:23
  Speaker 2: It, electronic communication often impacts people's Judgment about their messages and their insight into the fact that, hey, maybe I shouldn't say that.
• 45:36
  Speaker 1: Had a conversation with somebody, an acquaintance, that Would love to put on anything with Taylor Swift.
• 45:44
  Speaker 1: I've oh, she can't sing.
• 45:46
  Speaker 1: I don't know why people worship her, just all this negative stuff and Then he would want to put on that like a.
• 45:54
  Speaker 1: There was a thing on Shania twain that he wanted to put she's 60 years old and run around half-naked, she looks like a GD slot and I was just like Okay, dude, what if someone said that about your daughter, like what you just talked about is rape culture like we, over, sexualize, victim blame.
• 46:16
  Speaker 2: It's the worst, in my opinion, with sexual trauma because it is such a deep violation, an intimate violation of you as a person, because we are sexual creatures like we.
• 46:29
  Speaker 2: We are born to procreate not even to procreate yes, that's one aspect of sex but Just there's such connection and intimacy that can be had via sex that to just violate and rip away those boundaries and, for many people, the ability to have that again like it's very damaging.
• 46:52
  Speaker 2: Trauma impacts our ability to compartmentalize and Throughout the day we wear many different masks or hats, if you will.
• 47:04
  Speaker 2: Caleb as a therapist is a fair amount different than Caleb that is there at my brother's house both my nephew and my niece or hanging out with a friend or my significant other.
• 47:18
  Speaker 2: If trauma impacts everything about us, yeah, we can choose to have the space for it and then go about the rest of our daily lives like that.
• 47:28
  Speaker 2: That is the healthy thing to do, because If all we're doing is just moping that's the only word that comes in my mind that's not healthy, that's not productive.
• 47:38
  Speaker 2: Again, there's a time and a place for it.
• 47:40
  Speaker 2: That that leads me back to like my early work with we're not powerless.
• 47:45
  Speaker 2: Calm that.
• 47:46
  Speaker 2: I Did not set boundaries, I let it completely and utterly consume me, and I Paid for it more than once.
• 47:56
  Speaker 2: Not everyone's a safe space, so thanks for being a safe space for me too.
• 48:00
  Speaker 2: 100% man.
• 48:02
  Speaker 1: So tell us, as we're closing off, are you still active on tiktok?
• 48:07
  Speaker 1: Are you still active with your website?
• 48:08
  Speaker 1: Like, where can we find you?
• 48:10
  Speaker 1: And Keep the relationship going.
• 48:13
  Speaker 2: Yes, so right now I have been on a hiatus of sorts from tiktok, just working on my own stuff, and that doesn't mean I'm done, I will come back.
• 48:25
  Speaker 2: I just need to work on myself a little bit, as I can't get from an empty cup, I have to fill my cup back up too.
• 48:32
  Speaker 2: With that said, you can always find me online.
• 48:35
  Speaker 2: That we are not powerless.
• 48:37
  Speaker 2: Calm.
• 48:37
  Speaker 2: There's a contact us session, which is ironic.
• 48:41
  Speaker 2: It's just me.
• 48:42
  Speaker 2: Yes, if you have questions, comments, feedback, whatever, please feel free to send them my way.
• 48:48
  Speaker 2: I'm Love to hear it.
• 48:51
  Speaker 1: I want to extend my deepest gratitude to our incredible guests for sharing their transformative journey with us today.
• 48:56
  Speaker 1: Join us next week as we dive into the healing process and share more incredible stories of triumph and resilience.
• 49:27
  Speaker 2: And.