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Invisible Wounds: Healing From Trauma Episode 2 What is Trauma
Hey, it’s Kerri! Thank you for joining me on this episode of Invisible Wounds: Healing From Trauma!
Just a quick reminder, that I’m not a clinician, counselor, or physician, I’m a Certified Trauma Support Specialist and also someone with lots of lived experience with trauma, so let’s get to it!
So today, we’re going to look at “defining” trauma, hopefully in a real and relatable way that connects with you, and maybe your experiences with it.
So, just what IS Trauma? Well, there are different ways to define it, describe it, and explain it. What really matters is explaining it in a way that’s not too clinical, or full of “jargon” no one understands! In the mental health and physician’s world, they use something called the DSM 5 or the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Health Disorders. This is the “go to” for labeling different listed mental health issues. You meet with a mental health professional or doctor and according to their interpretation of the symptoms you describe to them, they “diagnose” you with one, or more “disorders” referred to in the DSM 5. They prescribe a treatment and send you on your way! You come in with a broken arm, they put a cast on it and you’re done. Patient, diagnosis, treatment, next! This can sometimes feel like a bit of a limited point of view, especially when looking at a person’s mental health. This thinking may also try to define trauma as “one big bad event” when often, many people have much more than one big bad event. So, when dealing with all of the different things that can affect us mentally, emotionally, and physically, and every other way, how do you fit that into a “neat little box?!” You’ll also hear some people describe trauma as “big T or little t.” This theory says that a Big T trauma would be some huge traumatic event, such as the death or a loved one. A little t trauma might be the loss of a pet, or the breakup of a relationship. I don’t agree with this description. Our experiences of any disturbing, stressful, threatening, or upsetting event and the importance we PERSONALLY place on that event, dictates how that event or “trauma” affects us. And it is VERY personal. I’ll give you an example of something that happened to me. My childhood was full of trauma, if you listened to my first episode, you’ll know! As a little kid, I was always afraid, so over time, I developed the thought process that everything was scary or overwhelming. I needed to be “perfect” which was my way of trying to have some control over my life. So, something seemingly small, like when I was little, say, someone would laugh at me, maybe for something I said. This was extremely traumatizing to me! I really had to work very hard just to try and fit in, that small bit of control that I thought I had! So, anything, even seemingly small things like that, can make little “ticks” in our brain. Visualize your brain, then visualize a checkmark in your brain, one for every event large or small that has had an effect on you. Got a lot of checkmarks on that visual? Yup, me too! So, I don’t agree with classifying traumatic events as large or small: really, they ALL affect us in our own way, and add to the difficulties that we face! That’s why it’s important to try and find a professional who knows, uses and treats you with a Trauma Informed Care approach. This view takes into account your mind, body, environment, history, everything that involves you as an individual seeking help!
What trauma is really, is any event large or small, where you feel that your personal safety or life, is in immediate danger! It is an “overwhelming” demand placed on our entire system. When something happens to you, there are many things that contribute to your experience of it, and in how your brain and body respond to it. One interesting and VERY important point is that how we learn, and experience things has more to do with our environment and history, rather than having someone “tell” us something, which is typically how we think we learn things! Particularly as children, we’re sponges, we soak up everything around us, our environment, what our senses tell us, our experiences, the people in it and the behavior they modeled for us, everything shapes how we not only see the world, but how we see OURSELVES and our place IN the world.
So, when we experience anything that we feel is threatening to us in any way, physically, our brain kicks things off!! It’s preparing the body to react for “survival.” So, bear with me here, the amygdala, or part of the brain that helps us control and process emotions, sends distress signals to the hypothalamus. This part of the brain communicates with the rest of the body by way of the autonomic nervous system. This system controls things like heart rate, breathing, and blood pressure. This autonomic nervous system is divided into 2 parts, the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system. So, when the brain sends the distress signal, the sympathetic nervous system is automatically activated through signals sent to the adrenal glands. These glands pump hormones, especially one more commonly known as adrenaline through the bloodstream. As the adrenaline floods our system, we feel physical changes. We breathe faster, we can feel our heartbeat speed up, we become more alert. Our brain and body are ready to respond to the threat.
This triggers something called “Fight, flight, or freeze” mode. What this means is that our body is ready to either fight back, run, or freeze in place, until our brain decides the threat is over. I’m a freezer! When something happens, I literally stop, I hold my breath, and I can feel my muscles tighten, my heartbeat is faster, and I feel this rush or flood sensation throughout my brain and body. It happens in an instant, I can describe it as feeling like my brain has “hijacked” my body! Have you ever experienced this feeling?
So, when our “sympathetic” nervous system, which is our ALERT and DANGER system, is running the show, it shuts down the front part of our brain the “thinking” part that helps us sort through things logically, organize, plan, and process. Our “survival” brain is activated and our body sends all of it’s energy towards only our basic functions. Our brain is doing what it’s supposed to do, protect us! Our brain and body are connected, what happens to one, happens to the other!
But when we experience many bad, distressing, upsetting, scary, “traumatizing” events in our lives, particularly when things happen to us in childhood, while our brains are still developing, that “fight, flight, or freeze” mode over time, may not shut off. Remember that our “thinking” brain shuts down. We can experience a constant state of “hypervigilance,” which means your brain is constantly on alert, scanning for danger. When lots of bad things happen to us, we’ve “learned” that a threat to us can come at anytime, anywhere, and from anyone. This kind of repeated stress is called “Toxic stress” and if we have a history of toxic stress and adversity, it can have long term affects on both our brain and body. As children while our brains are still developing, experiencing this kind of constant stress changes the way our brains make “connections.” Think of a road map, with all of the different connecting streets and highways. Our brains make connections like that called neural pathways. Under chronic or repeated stress however, the brain throws up “detours” and “roadblocks”. It wires itself for survival. We’ll really get into this much more in upcoming episodes! As time goes on, we can physically have issues with high blood pressure, heart issues, gut issues (that’s me) high blood sugar, inflammation anywhere in the brain or body, autoimmune disorders, the list goes on! This can also be a reason why we get “panic attacks” even when nothing is happening, out of the clear blue..BAM!! There it is! Our nervous system, in constant overdrive is doing its job TOO WELL!! It’s warning us of danger when danger doesn’t actually exist in that moment!
So, if our thinking brain is shut down, and we are in survival mode only, what happens to our behavior? How are our reactions, emotions, and basic functions affected? We can have trouble, thinking, focusing, and concentrating. We can feel “foggy” in our brain, we may feel that our reactions are slower. We may not be able to get started on tasks, or if we do, we might not stay on task, or follow through. We might have trouble making decisions. We can lose the ability to be “flexible” in handling even the little things that come up in our day. When things do come up, we can “catastrophize” which can feel like our minds going to the worst possible outcome we can imagine, like the world will end! Change can be very hard. We get overwhelmed easily; things are “too much” to handle. We may have trouble sleeping, be chronically tired, feel anxious, depressed, hopeless. We might not enjoy things the way we once did. We also might not feel anything at all, we feel “numb.” We can also experience something called “disassociation” which happens to me a lot! For me, it feels like I’m completely disconnected from my whole self, my body, brain, emotions, and the world. Nothing seems real, I feel like I’m having an “out of body” experience. We can have angry outbursts, fly off the handle. We can experience “all or nothing” thinking, meaning things are either one way or another, all good or all bad, either black or white, there are no shades of grey, no “in-between.” When we feel these things, we often direct our thoughts inward, are angry with ourselves. We can feel we’re stupid, not good enough, that somehow these things are a personal “fault” or “failure” on our part. The thought that something is inherently wrong or broken in us can be overwhelming. We constantly measure ourselves against what other people can do, their experiences, and what they can accomplish. That thought of “What they went through was worse than what I did, and they’re fine” is common thinking! We wonder why we can’t do the same things!
Does any of this sound familiar?
First, please practice not measuring your own personal traumatic experiences against anyone else’s. Your experiences are your OWN, they are REAL, and VALID, and affected you in the way they did. It’s your personal story. We also really never truly know what another person has been through or the work they may have done in order to be able to function, and to fit into however we see them as an example of “normal” behavior! What’s NORMAL anyway? There is no “cookie cutter” to carve out an exact shape of “normal.” Our views, environment, and experiences shape our vision of what that “perfect ideal” of normal is, so no one’s idea of normal will be the same. Society gives us a kind of template of what it feels is “expected of us” as human beings, but normalized behavior is different for everyone!
When we learn and think about it, our brains and bodies when in survival mode, are reacting in a biologically correct way! Live or die! Flight or flight! These examples are all biologically correct responses and reactions according to our sympathetic nervous system running the show! Remember, when the sympathetic nervous system is in charge, we are in survival mode ONLY! The thinking brain is off! So how can we expect ourselves to feel, act, behave, respond, and FUNCTION in a way that we feel others that DON’T have our history of toxic stress and adversity do? We can’t! It’s not possible. But once we arm ourselves with knowledge about trauma, what it is and what it does, we can begin to make small changes, one baby step at a time! Understanding, and being compassionate with yourself is the first baby step! So, If you have a day where doing your best is 20 or 30 percent, then you’ve done your best at 20 or 30 percent: No one can do more than their best, it’s not possible! Say that to yourself, “I’m doing the best that I can, I can’t do more than that!” If your best is a day where you stay in bed, drink something comforting like a cup of warm soothing tea in your jammies binge watching a show, IT’S OKAY!! It really is! It’s something that we felt we needed to do to care for ourselves which is VERY necessary!
So, think of one small, easy, thing you can do to care for yourself. Daily if possible. Something simple like drinking an 8 oz glass of water, taking some time to listen to your favorite kind of music. If you like to write, maybe think of just a short sentence, and come up with something kind you could say to yourself, or out loud. Use “I’m doing my best, and that’s okay” if that’s a good start for you!
So to close us out, I want to try a very simple exercise with you if that’s okay. You don’t have to do it if you don’t want to, but it’s something that helps me when I’m feeling stressed or anxious. So take your left hand and straighten it out, fingers extended. Cross your left arm over your chest, and place your hand, fingers extended, under your right arm pit. Relax your hand and fingers against your body and make sure the upper part of your right arm is against your left hand under it naturally. Your shoulders should be relaxed. Then cross your right arm over your left arm that is already across your chest and place your right hand on your upper left arm. This is a relaxed movement, so it should feel easy. You are giving yourself a purposeful hug. You can squeeze a little if that feels right to you. You can close your eyes while doing this if you choose to. You can take slow deep breathes in through your nose, then slowly exhale through your mouth if you’d like. You could breathe this way once, or you could do it five times if you’d like. You could also rub your right hand slowly over your left upper arm, feel the fabric of what you are wearing, or feel the skin of your arm it it’s bare. You could also move your right hand naturally and place it over your heart if you’d like. You can feel it beating if that’s comforting for you. The period of time, how often, and when you do this exercise is also completely up to you if you find it helpful. Also if you’d like, you could think of a word or a phrase to hold in your mind while you do this, maybe something kind, or meaningful to you. Maybe something kind, warm, loving, or reassuring that speaks your inner self, or inner child. Whatever feels right to you, do it! I hope this simple exercise helps in some way. It’s a small tool to add to your personal “healing toolbox” that we’ll begin to build together!
Thank you so much for listening! Your coming along on this journey with me, and your time, is so valuable and important to me. What you think matters to me too! Let me know your thoughts, comments, suggestions, whatever is on your mind! I’ve created a Facebook page for this podcast, so search for Invisible Wounds Healing From Trauma, like and follow me! I’m working on a website and a YouTube channel for this as well, so I’ll announce them once they’re up. You can also find me on Twitter at Kerriwalker 58 and my website enddvnow.com. If you are in a mental health crisis in the US, remember you can dial 988 to speak to someone for help, resources, or for someone to listen. Look for my new episodes dropping every Monday on your favorite streaming apps and platforms!
We’ll talk soon!
End DV Now
Invisible Wounds: Healing From Trauma
View all episodes
By Kerri Walker Certified Trauma and Resiliency Life CoachHey, it’s Kerri! Thank you for joining me on this episode of Invisible Wounds: Healing From Trauma!
Just a quick reminder, that I’m not a clinician, counselor, or physician, I’m a Certified Trauma Support Specialist and also someone with lots of lived experience with trauma, so let’s get to it!
So today, we’re going to look at “defining” trauma, hopefully in a real and relatable way that connects with you, and maybe your experiences with it.
So, just what IS Trauma? Well, there are different ways to define it, describe it, and explain it. What really matters is explaining it in a way that’s not too clinical, or full of “jargon” no one understands! In the mental health and physician’s world, they use something called the DSM 5 or the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Health Disorders. This is the “go to” for labeling different listed mental health issues. You meet with a mental health professional or doctor and according to their interpretation of the symptoms you describe to them, they “diagnose” you with one, or more “disorders” referred to in the DSM 5. They prescribe a treatment and send you on your way! You come in with a broken arm, they put a cast on it and you’re done. Patient, diagnosis, treatment, next! This can sometimes feel like a bit of a limited point of view, especially when looking at a person’s mental health. This thinking may also try to define trauma as “one big bad event” when often, many people have much more than one big bad event. So, when dealing with all of the different things that can affect us mentally, emotionally, and physically, and every other way, how do you fit that into a “neat little box?!” You’ll also hear some people describe trauma as “big T or little t.” This theory says that a Big T trauma would be some huge traumatic event, such as the death or a loved one. A little t trauma might be the loss of a pet, or the breakup of a relationship. I don’t agree with this description. Our experiences of any disturbing, stressful, threatening, or upsetting event and the importance we PERSONALLY place on that event, dictates how that event or “trauma” affects us. And it is VERY personal. I’ll give you an example of something that happened to me. My childhood was full of trauma, if you listened to my first episode, you’ll know! As a little kid, I was always afraid, so over time, I developed the thought process that everything was scary or overwhelming. I needed to be “perfect” which was my way of trying to have some control over my life. So, something seemingly small, like when I was little, say, someone would laugh at me, maybe for something I said. This was extremely traumatizing to me! I really had to work very hard just to try and fit in, that small bit of control that I thought I had! So, anything, even seemingly small things like that, can make little “ticks” in our brain. Visualize your brain, then visualize a checkmark in your brain, one for every event large or small that has had an effect on you. Got a lot of checkmarks on that visual? Yup, me too! So, I don’t agree with classifying traumatic events as large or small: really, they ALL affect us in our own way, and add to the difficulties that we face! That’s why it’s important to try and find a professional who knows, uses and treats you with a Trauma Informed Care approach. This view takes into account your mind, body, environment, history, everything that involves you as an individual seeking help!
What trauma is really, is any event large or small, where you feel that your personal safety or life, is in immediate danger! It is an “overwhelming” demand placed on our entire system. When something happens to you, there are many things that contribute to your experience of it, and in how your brain and body respond to it. One interesting and VERY important point is that how we learn, and experience things has more to do with our environment and history, rather than having someone “tell” us something, which is typically how we think we learn things! Particularly as children, we’re sponges, we soak up everything around us, our environment, what our senses tell us, our experiences, the people in it and the behavior they modeled for us, everything shapes how we not only see the world, but how we see OURSELVES and our place IN the world.
So, when we experience anything that we feel is threatening to us in any way, physically, our brain kicks things off!! It’s preparing the body to react for “survival.” So, bear with me here, the amygdala, or part of the brain that helps us control and process emotions, sends distress signals to the hypothalamus. This part of the brain communicates with the rest of the body by way of the autonomic nervous system. This system controls things like heart rate, breathing, and blood pressure. This autonomic nervous system is divided into 2 parts, the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system. So, when the brain sends the distress signal, the sympathetic nervous system is automatically activated through signals sent to the adrenal glands. These glands pump hormones, especially one more commonly known as adrenaline through the bloodstream. As the adrenaline floods our system, we feel physical changes. We breathe faster, we can feel our heartbeat speed up, we become more alert. Our brain and body are ready to respond to the threat.
This triggers something called “Fight, flight, or freeze” mode. What this means is that our body is ready to either fight back, run, or freeze in place, until our brain decides the threat is over. I’m a freezer! When something happens, I literally stop, I hold my breath, and I can feel my muscles tighten, my heartbeat is faster, and I feel this rush or flood sensation throughout my brain and body. It happens in an instant, I can describe it as feeling like my brain has “hijacked” my body! Have you ever experienced this feeling?
So, when our “sympathetic” nervous system, which is our ALERT and DANGER system, is running the show, it shuts down the front part of our brain the “thinking” part that helps us sort through things logically, organize, plan, and process. Our “survival” brain is activated and our body sends all of it’s energy towards only our basic functions. Our brain is doing what it’s supposed to do, protect us! Our brain and body are connected, what happens to one, happens to the other!
But when we experience many bad, distressing, upsetting, scary, “traumatizing” events in our lives, particularly when things happen to us in childhood, while our brains are still developing, that “fight, flight, or freeze” mode over time, may not shut off. Remember that our “thinking” brain shuts down. We can experience a constant state of “hypervigilance,” which means your brain is constantly on alert, scanning for danger. When lots of bad things happen to us, we’ve “learned” that a threat to us can come at anytime, anywhere, and from anyone. This kind of repeated stress is called “Toxic stress” and if we have a history of toxic stress and adversity, it can have long term affects on both our brain and body. As children while our brains are still developing, experiencing this kind of constant stress changes the way our brains make “connections.” Think of a road map, with all of the different connecting streets and highways. Our brains make connections like that called neural pathways. Under chronic or repeated stress however, the brain throws up “detours” and “roadblocks”. It wires itself for survival. We’ll really get into this much more in upcoming episodes! As time goes on, we can physically have issues with high blood pressure, heart issues, gut issues (that’s me) high blood sugar, inflammation anywhere in the brain or body, autoimmune disorders, the list goes on! This can also be a reason why we get “panic attacks” even when nothing is happening, out of the clear blue..BAM!! There it is! Our nervous system, in constant overdrive is doing its job TOO WELL!! It’s warning us of danger when danger doesn’t actually exist in that moment!
So, if our thinking brain is shut down, and we are in survival mode only, what happens to our behavior? How are our reactions, emotions, and basic functions affected? We can have trouble, thinking, focusing, and concentrating. We can feel “foggy” in our brain, we may feel that our reactions are slower. We may not be able to get started on tasks, or if we do, we might not stay on task, or follow through. We might have trouble making decisions. We can lose the ability to be “flexible” in handling even the little things that come up in our day. When things do come up, we can “catastrophize” which can feel like our minds going to the worst possible outcome we can imagine, like the world will end! Change can be very hard. We get overwhelmed easily; things are “too much” to handle. We may have trouble sleeping, be chronically tired, feel anxious, depressed, hopeless. We might not enjoy things the way we once did. We also might not feel anything at all, we feel “numb.” We can also experience something called “disassociation” which happens to me a lot! For me, it feels like I’m completely disconnected from my whole self, my body, brain, emotions, and the world. Nothing seems real, I feel like I’m having an “out of body” experience. We can have angry outbursts, fly off the handle. We can experience “all or nothing” thinking, meaning things are either one way or another, all good or all bad, either black or white, there are no shades of grey, no “in-between.” When we feel these things, we often direct our thoughts inward, are angry with ourselves. We can feel we’re stupid, not good enough, that somehow these things are a personal “fault” or “failure” on our part. The thought that something is inherently wrong or broken in us can be overwhelming. We constantly measure ourselves against what other people can do, their experiences, and what they can accomplish. That thought of “What they went through was worse than what I did, and they’re fine” is common thinking! We wonder why we can’t do the same things!
Does any of this sound familiar?
First, please practice not measuring your own personal traumatic experiences against anyone else’s. Your experiences are your OWN, they are REAL, and VALID, and affected you in the way they did. It’s your personal story. We also really never truly know what another person has been through or the work they may have done in order to be able to function, and to fit into however we see them as an example of “normal” behavior! What’s NORMAL anyway? There is no “cookie cutter” to carve out an exact shape of “normal.” Our views, environment, and experiences shape our vision of what that “perfect ideal” of normal is, so no one’s idea of normal will be the same. Society gives us a kind of template of what it feels is “expected of us” as human beings, but normalized behavior is different for everyone!
When we learn and think about it, our brains and bodies when in survival mode, are reacting in a biologically correct way! Live or die! Flight or flight! These examples are all biologically correct responses and reactions according to our sympathetic nervous system running the show! Remember, when the sympathetic nervous system is in charge, we are in survival mode ONLY! The thinking brain is off! So how can we expect ourselves to feel, act, behave, respond, and FUNCTION in a way that we feel others that DON’T have our history of toxic stress and adversity do? We can’t! It’s not possible. But once we arm ourselves with knowledge about trauma, what it is and what it does, we can begin to make small changes, one baby step at a time! Understanding, and being compassionate with yourself is the first baby step! So, If you have a day where doing your best is 20 or 30 percent, then you’ve done your best at 20 or 30 percent: No one can do more than their best, it’s not possible! Say that to yourself, “I’m doing the best that I can, I can’t do more than that!” If your best is a day where you stay in bed, drink something comforting like a cup of warm soothing tea in your jammies binge watching a show, IT’S OKAY!! It really is! It’s something that we felt we needed to do to care for ourselves which is VERY necessary!
So, think of one small, easy, thing you can do to care for yourself. Daily if possible. Something simple like drinking an 8 oz glass of water, taking some time to listen to your favorite kind of music. If you like to write, maybe think of just a short sentence, and come up with something kind you could say to yourself, or out loud. Use “I’m doing my best, and that’s okay” if that’s a good start for you!
So to close us out, I want to try a very simple exercise with you if that’s okay. You don’t have to do it if you don’t want to, but it’s something that helps me when I’m feeling stressed or anxious. So take your left hand and straighten it out, fingers extended. Cross your left arm over your chest, and place your hand, fingers extended, under your right arm pit. Relax your hand and fingers against your body and make sure the upper part of your right arm is against your left hand under it naturally. Your shoulders should be relaxed. Then cross your right arm over your left arm that is already across your chest and place your right hand on your upper left arm. This is a relaxed movement, so it should feel easy. You are giving yourself a purposeful hug. You can squeeze a little if that feels right to you. You can close your eyes while doing this if you choose to. You can take slow deep breathes in through your nose, then slowly exhale through your mouth if you’d like. You could breathe this way once, or you could do it five times if you’d like. You could also rub your right hand slowly over your left upper arm, feel the fabric of what you are wearing, or feel the skin of your arm it it’s bare. You could also move your right hand naturally and place it over your heart if you’d like. You can feel it beating if that’s comforting for you. The period of time, how often, and when you do this exercise is also completely up to you if you find it helpful. Also if you’d like, you could think of a word or a phrase to hold in your mind while you do this, maybe something kind, or meaningful to you. Maybe something kind, warm, loving, or reassuring that speaks your inner self, or inner child. Whatever feels right to you, do it! I hope this simple exercise helps in some way. It’s a small tool to add to your personal “healing toolbox” that we’ll begin to build together!
Thank you so much for listening! Your coming along on this journey with me, and your time, is so valuable and important to me. What you think matters to me too! Let me know your thoughts, comments, suggestions, whatever is on your mind! I’ve created a Facebook page for this podcast, so search for Invisible Wounds Healing From Trauma, like and follow me! I’m working on a website and a YouTube channel for this as well, so I’ll announce them once they’re up. You can also find me on Twitter at Kerriwalker 58 and my website enddvnow.com. If you are in a mental health crisis in the US, remember you can dial 988 to speak to someone for help, resources, or for someone to listen. Look for my new episodes dropping every Monday on your favorite streaming apps and platforms!
We’ll talk soon!
End DV Now
Invisible Wounds: Healing From Trauma