“It’s not the trauma that hurts us long-term, it’s the trauma defenses. These defenses hurt us over and over, again and again until we become aware of them.”
Trigger Warning: I’m talking about trauma today. If you aren’t in the headspace to talk about this at the time, ignore this email and don’t listen to this week’s podcast episode.
Most of us think trauma is only when we witness or experience a life-threatening event (like combat, rape, or domestic violence), but trauma is SO much more than that.
As Dr. Valerie Rein, author of “Patriarchy Stress Disorder” said so eloquently, “Trauma is any time we experience a moment that makes us feel unsafe from our fullest authentic expression that resulted in developing trauma adaptations to keep you safe (like an insult, glare, unwanted sexual attention….really any moment that makes you shrink inside thinking about it).”
Based on that definition (that I completely agree with), we experience trauma often and it shows in our emotional health. When we’re experiencing a “negative” emotional reaction of more than 7 seconds, that’s a sign there’s unresolved trauma inside of us to heal. (Crazy, right?)
OTHER SIGNS OF UNRESOLVED TRAUMA ARE…
- Not being in touch with your desires
- Feeling disconnected from your body
- Experiencing anxiety or depression
- Overthinking and doubting yourself
- Feeling like a victim
- Being reactive
- Not being in touch with your emotions or avoiding emotions all together
- People pleasing
- Wanting to control things you can’t control (ie: anything other than you)
- Having perfectionistic tendencies
- Feeling “blocked” or “stuck”
- Feeling disconnected from loved ones
- Feeling like you’re just going through the motions of life (vs. experiencing pleasure and deep fulfillment in life)
- Not being creative or imaginative
- Feeling dead inside
If you experience anything on this list, don’t worry. Healing trauma doesn’t necessarily require years of therapy, I help women heal trauma all the time in my coaching practice in just weeks.
Trauma is SEVERELY misunderstood (even in much of the psychology field) and that’s why many believe healing trauma is so hard or that trauma experience doesn’t apply to them.
In order for all of us to feel better, the understanding about trauma HAS to change. So, today I want to teach you all the ins and outs about trauma so you can understand what it is and how to heal it in order to show up in life feeling better than ever.
Listen now on the player at the top of this page.
RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:
→ Continue the conversation in my free online community
→PATRIARCHY STRESS DISORDER episode
→INTERGENERATIONAL TRAUMA episode
→“The Body Keeps Score” book on Amazon
Full Transcript
Unresolved Trauma
This is the Become an Unstoppable Woman podcast with Lindsay Preston Episode 103,
Understanding Trauma.
[music]
Welcome to the Become An Unstoppable Woman podcast, the show for goal-getting,
fear-facing women for kicking ass by creating change. I’m your host, Lindsay Preston.
I’m a wife, mom of two, and a multi-certified life coach to women all over the world.
I’ve lived through enough in life to know that easier doesn’t always equate to better.
We can’t fear the fire, we must learn to become it. On this show, I’ll teach you how to
do just that. Join me as I challenge you to become even more of the strong, resilient,
and powerful woman you were meant to be. Let’s do this.
[music]
Hey there Ms. Unstoppable. Today we are talking all about trauma. So if you’re not in a
headspace where you want to dig deeper into what trauma is and explore what trauma
you may have, then skip this episode because it’s likely going to be a trigger for many
of you. The way that I work with my clients with triggers is they just come up, we know
how to process them, great, we move on. But you may not be in a headspace to want to
handle triggers right now and that’s totally okay. Come back to this episode another
time.
So again, as I said, we’re talking about trauma. Last week on the show, I interviewed
author Byrdy Lynn, and she talked about overcoming trauma in her life and kind of
danced around on the episode some of the trauma she had. I talked about how she was
physically abused, sexually abused, she experienced racism often in her life. And I just
said go to her memoir to hear all the details and she really just talked about
overcoming all of those things in her life to be the woman she is today. It got me
thinking about how I wanted to spend an episode and talk about what trauma is.
Trauma is not something that is understood well in our society. Many times we think
trauma are these big life threatening events that happen to us like we go to war or
domestic violence or we experienced rape, but actually trauma is so much more than
that. Dr Valerie Rein wrote a book called Patriarchy Stress Disorder. You may know her,
she came on the show and talked so much about PTSD as she calls it or patriarchy
stress disorder. In her book she talks about trauma and how we have big T trauma,
which is the trauma I just explained, those life threatening events. And then we have a
little t trauma and little t trauma she defines as any experience that makes us feel
unsafe from our fullest authentic expression that resulted in developing trauma
adaptations to keep a safe. Anytime an insult, a glare, unwanted sexual attention, really
any time that we were shrinking. That is called Little t trauma. And I love that
definition. I am completely on board with that.
Many times in my coaching practice with my clients, I am helping them heal a lot of
little t trauma. Now we do have some big T trauma in there. Actually I just got off the
phone with a client talking about her top 10 worst memories. One of them was that she
was sexually molested, so obviously big T trauma there. But either way, we are carrying
around this trauma. It’s extremely important to just realize that, and to then know
“what do I do with this?” If you’re still not on board of like maybe I don’t have any
trauma or I’m not quite sure, here are some telltale signs that you have some sort of
trauma that you need to heal. First is not being in touch with your desires, feeling
disconnected from your body, experiencing anxiety or depression, overthinking and
doubting yourself, feeling like a victim, being reactive, not being in touch with your
emotions or having emotions altogether, like you’re just completely numbed out.
You’re people pleasing, wanting to control things you can’t control, ie. anything other than you because as you
may know the only thing we can control is ourselves. Having perfectionistic tendencies
feeling what feels like blocked or stuck, is the way you would describe it, feeling
disconnected from loved ones, even if you’re physically present with them, you’re just
not able to connect on an emotional level, feeling like you’re going through the
motions of life versus experiencing pleasure and deep fulfillment and excitement in
life, not being creative or imaginative, and just feeling dead inside. If you experience
any of that, then you likely have some trauma to heal. Pretty crazy right?
Today I want to dig deeper into this and allow you to fully understand what trauma is
and how to overcome this. I’m going to be leaning on the Patriarchy Stress Disorder
book from Dr. Valerie Rein often because again I think she defined it so well in her
book. Now in her book she’s obviously taking trauma and putting it under the lens of
the patriarchy. But it’s a broad definition that you can take what she defines trauma as.
Then I’m also going to be referencing the book that I read I think it was in 2019, called
The Body Keeps Score. Again an amazing book about understanding trauma.
I know it’s not always the most comfortable topic to talk about trauma, I must admit,
even myself I’m like “oh great. Today’s the day I recorded the episode on trauma.” Our
brains hate that stuff. Just know if you feel uncomfortable just listening to this stuff,
just know that the brain doesn’t like to feel these “negative uncomfortable emotions.” It
would rather avoid it. But if you’re experiencing some of those signs that I just
mentioned, that long list, you have unresolved trauma. A lot of times we think, “Oh my
gosh, I’m gonna have to go through months or years of therapy and it’s going to be so
painful and so such a drag.” It doesn’t have to be that way. With my coaching clients we
have that one call. Sometimes it goes into two depending on how many memories they
have, but we’re talking about their top 10 worst memories, and then we move on. And
what happens is, then the coaching process itself, how it’s designed is teaching them
how to heal that stuff naturally. So they don’t have to sit there and just, talk about
these stories over and over and over again. And they don’t feel the same feelings over
and over and over again. We expose it, and then they start to heal it. Then within a few
weeks, they’ve moved on and they feel healed by it. Now of course it’s an ongoing
process, especially for the brain to soak up all that work, but it happens pretty quickly.
So, you know, I’m somebody who does not like a slow painful process at all. And so, I
don’t know where I’d be without the coaching process that I teach because I just cannot
stand talking about things and then re talking and talking and talking and talking again
about it. And again, I didn’t have this horrible childhood. But I experienced trauma a lot.
And part of that is because so many of us, myself included, have a really sensitive brain.
There has been research that’s come out that says there are two types of brains in
essence. One brain, they compare it to flowers and I forget the flowers they compare it
to but one brain in essence is more sensitive than the other. And so some of us just
have sensitive brains, more along the lines of saying sensitive nervous systems.
If you’re somebody who’s ever heard the term “empath” or highly sensitive person,
these are the people I’m talking about. If you haven’t heard of those terms, maybe
you’ve done an assessment like CliftonStrengths, formerly known as Strengths Finder.
And if you have you likely have strengths of empathy really high or connectedness
really high. Those are the ones that tend to have more sensitive brains, and I just
happen to be someone who is like that.
So, you know, my husband and I, because my husband doesn’t have a sensitive brain we
can go and experience something, for example we can go watch a movie, and he can
handle all that war stuff and violence and it’s no big deal to him, but to me, I’m very
very, very sensitive to it. For example, here in Texas recently we had a really bad
snowstorm. And if you’re aware Texas doesn’t really get that kind of weather. And we
had a 100 plus car pile up on one of the roads. And my husband, he’s watching (I guess
an onlooker is videotaping this pile up) and he’s watching this video, and he’s like “you
got to come here you got to see this.” Someone recorded this pile up. And I walked to
him and I said, “Is this going to be triggering to me?” and he’s like “no no I don’t think
so.” He didn’t even say anything. Let me backtrack. He didn’t even say anything and
starts showing me the video. And I’m like, “I can’t watch this. This is traumatizing to
me.” And so again, I’m super sensitive to trauma.
Again, if we’re just looking at that definition of experiencing a life threatening event,
even if I’m not in it, because I’m so sensitive it’s like I’m feeling forever who’s in that
event. and then too is just any moment that makes me feel unsafe. My brain highly
wires around that. Many of my clients are like that. We just have sensitive brains so
regardless again if you have a sensitive brain or not, you likely just have some trauma
to heal.
Let’s dig deeper into what trauma is. We talked about big T trauma and little t trauma.
But anytime you are experiencing emotional trigger, so emotional triggers are any
“negative emotion” of more than seven seconds. Yes, seven seconds, my friend. Then
you have some unresolved trauma. Your body then it’s going to go into fight, flight or
freeze when you experience this. That’s how many times something will happen to us,
say we get cut off while we’re driving. Maybe we get cut off, we’re angered for a few
seconds, we move on. But if we’re angered for more than those seven seconds, and we
start like really getting fired up about it, we might get into fight mode. And then we
want to go cut them off and give them the finger or whatever. You make go into freeze
mode when we get cut off and experience that trigger. We may go into flight of like “let
me get out of here.” That’s usually how I happen if someone cuts me off. I feel it and
then I’m like “I’m getting away from this person they seem a little crazy.”
What happens is that a threat enters the brain, there’s a siren that goes off in essence
of like “threat threat threat,” our nervous system goes into drive and then it decides,
“am I gonna fight, flight or freeze” in that moment. Again, a lot of people they just
think, “Oh I got reactive because XYZ thing happened to me and it was their fault that I
got cut off” or “they said this thing to me or this thing happened. And that’s why I got
reactive.” If you listen avidly to the show and especially if you’re a client of mine, you
know circumstances do not create our feelings. It’s our thoughts that create our
feelings. So there’s some sort of thought that’s popping up in your brain to make you
feel whatever feeling you’re feeling and hold on to that for more than seven seconds.
Just keep that in mind anytime you’re experiencing something you know again
“negative” for seven seconds, that says “hey I have something deeper here.”
With my clients what I teach them is when that happens, is to look, “okay what could be
deeper here?” Recently, my husband was just bothering me about something. In Texas,
I mentioned the snowstorm, and last week we didn’t have power and it was a little
crazy. And there were just moments he was just really bothering me. And I’m sitting
there and I’m thinking, “why is he bothering you?” and “why are you so wound up about
this?” And then I had to dig deeper of “okay what’s really going on here?” And it really
isn’t most of the time that we’re mad or upset at the person in front of us. It’s from
something so much deeper than that and typically it’s from childhood. According to the
brain research, childhood really goes into our mid to late 20s, because that’s when our
brain is highly emotional, and it doesn’t really regulate out until that those late 20s in
our life. So we’re programming in all of these things that have happened to us in a
highly emotional way. Of course we’re gonna have trauma right? Think about it. All
these highly emotional things are programmed in that brain. Nine times out of 10 it
goes back to something so much deeper, and that is typically the case. You want to
start to explore that when you are charged of what could be something deeper here.
The other thing I want to touch on is there are lots of different types of trauma. We did
talk about big T and little t trauma, but there’s also conscious trauma, so trauma you
know that you have and you need to heal. For example, if you were sexually abused, it’s
like, “I know that was trauma. I know that this is something that I need to heal in my
life because it was a very scary moment for me.” But there’s also subconscious trauma.
A lot of times, this is trauma our brain has blocked out, especially if it happened to us
very early on in life, or it was very highly traumatic, or if it goes back to that big t little t
trauma definition of just any time you were shrinking. Those aren’t big sirens to the
brain, per se, and our society doesn’t look at trauma in that light and so we may not
even think that that’s trauma.
Also it may not be these big moments but just these little moments, over and over and
over and over again. Like for me in my childhood, my mom was just highly reactive. And
I just grew up. I knew it was a little weird and off, because I didn’t see other people’s
parents like that. But I grew up with it so much that I was just used to at any moment
she would go off. It was like walking on eggshells around her. I just adapted to that and
I didn’t think much of it. It wasn’t until I looked deeper into that of like, “wow, this is
definitely some trauma in my life,” but it was definitely in my subconscious brain for a
long time.
Another kind of trauma is intergenerational trauma. We talked about this on an episode
where I interviewed Johanna Lynn, many many weeks ago, months ago now. On this
show she talked about how the research now shows that we, in essence, pass down
trauma in our DNA. They’ve done studies with rats about cherry blossoms and they
have exposed them to the smell of cherry blossoms and then they have shocked them.
And then when they have rat babies the rat babies will automatically get nervous just
smelling cherry blossoms because they pass that by DNA.
They’ve been able to study this with humans as well with Holocaust survivors, and
they’re finding that the lineage of Holocaust survivors, they have the same trauma
adaptations as people like their parents and grandparents and so on, even though they
didn’t experience that incident themselves. So, we also have that at play and I am
looking at that with my clients as well. We do a whole week where we’re looking at
family patterns, and they’re telling me about their parents and what their parents went
through. And their grandparents and things of that sort. So we’re able to open that lens
a little bit more.
And then of course if you are somebody here in the states and you are Black, you likely
have intergenerational trauma from slavery. And a lot of different immigrants, I just got
off the phone with a client. Her parents are from a Latin American country and so you
know what was going on when her parents were there for them to leave and immigrate
here to the US, we’ve got to look at that. So there’s that piece of trauma.
Then there is just widely accepted cultural trauma. This goes into the lens of what Dr.
Valerie Rein talks about in her Patriarchy Stress Disorder book where she’s saying we
just widely accept to treat women in these ways, so we don’t question it because
society has just said “hey this is appropriate.” For example, we’re walking down the
street we get catcalled. As women we’re just supposed to be like “okay this is just like
what we do and how we handle it and no big deal” right? Or as women we go out by
ourselves, we know “is some dude gonna come around the corner and attack me?”
That’s why many of us carry pepper spray or take self defense classes or just have that
overall nervousness because we just kind of widely accept “Oh, that’s just part of
society.”
We’re talking about this more and more with people of color and these little micro
aggressions that they’re getting all the time and how they are held back in their lives
because of racism, be it covert or overt racism. And how we’re just widely accepted to
go up to somebody and say “well, where are you from?” and “oh, your hair is not
appropriate here,” or all these things that are just constantly these moments of little t
trauma, of them not being able to fully express their authenticity because they feel
unsafe. So there’s that.
Then there’s individual trauma which kind of goes in this whole bucket, most of what
we talked about those are things you’ve individually experienced. And then there’s
collective trauma. For example, 911 is collective trauma. If you show a picture of those
planes hitting the Twin Towers, most people will describe it as scary, unsafe, fear is
what’s running through their body. In that moment, we experience collective trauma.
Here with Coronavirus, many people are experiencing collective trauma of feeling
unsafe, because of Coronavirus. Here in Texas this past week, I keep bringing up, we
have what we’re now referring to as Snowmageddon, and many of us didn’t have power
for days, my husband and I were included in that. We were fending for ourselves, then
we didn’t have water and then our food went bad from the freezer. And we’re just
trying to figure out things to eat because you can’t really drive anywhere. It’s those
kinds of moments are things we tend to experience with other people and that
becomes collective trauma.
Again, I just want to show all this to you so you get a better understanding of what
trauma is because as I keep saying it’s so misunderstood. How in the heck are we ever
going to heal our own trauma if we’re not aware of what trauma really is? As I keep
saying many many times on the show, awareness is always the first step to change.
We’ve got to bring awareness to this stuff.
Let’s talk about trauma adaptations. If we go back to Dr. Valerie Rein’s definition of
little t trauma, she talks about how anytime we feel unsafe and we’re not able to
authentically express ourselves, we develop trauma adaptations from that. That is
considered little t trauma. Trauma adaptations really go back to what I call inner Mean
Girls. In the psych world they call it the voice of the ego. There’s many, many names for
it, but basically this is the part of your brain that is highly emotional, it’s called the
amygdala, and this is where all your trauma is stored.
These inner Mean Girls are developed to, what they think, keep you safe and secure because you experience these
things and it’s like, based on this thing we experienced, here’s what we’re going to
believe about ourselves and the world so that we don’t continue to go out and
experience these things and so we can stay alive. Remember the brain only wants to
keep you alive, it does not want to keep you happy. So then what happens is you start
getting perfectionistic tendencies of “well that one time I did this one thing and I
messed up, and then I felt really unsafe. And so next time I’m going to really look at all
the details of everything.” And then you start getting anxiety when you’re looking at all
the details of things and then you spin in that.
Or maybe you let somebody down or somebody gets hurt and so then you develop
people pleasing tendencies. Or maybe somebody was just always bashing on you
growing up, a parent or a caregiver or bully or whoever. So you develop this inner
doubter who’s like, “what’s the point I’m not even going to go after my goals and
dreams. I’m just gonna sit here and doubt myself and spin in my own drama, because it
just feels way too hard to go out there and do that stuff.”
For me, I’ll give you a personal example of how this came about was I had a parent who
I mentioned earlier as my mom, and she would explode a lot. And so sometimes she
would be there for me and be kind. Then other times, it’d be like, Whoa, what happened
to you and she would be set off by that. She was also very critical. I felt like I just
couldn’t be myself and so from that I developed these adaptations of being super
critical to myself, because if other people are criticizing me, including my mom, then
I’m just going to criticize myself because then I’ll see whatever they’re seeing before
they see it. Then I won’t have to experience the pain of them telling me it. I’ll just tell it
to myself. And then too these people pleasing tendencies of I’m just gonna be whoever
they want me to be so that I don’t have to experience feeling things like rejection or
disappointment or discomfort because we have a tiff or whatever. So I’m going to
people please.
And then I developed this part of me that was vacillating of like, “Oh, I love this but I
hate this and I’m in but I’m out.” Really what that was was from my mom being in and
out. Anytime I’d experience disappoinment, it just felt so hard that I would be the one
to quit first, so that they couldn’t quit on me later, and then me experience that
disappointment.
We could go on to a whole other episode about all those things. I did talk on the show
once about your inner mean girl voices and I encourage you to listen to that one If you
haven’t yet because I go a little bit deeper into this stuff, but those are your
adaptations. Dr. Valerie Rein calls them your prison guards. I love that because she’s
saying these guards in essence, are trying to keep you safe and keep you in this little
prison in essence of these are the behaviors and things you have to do in order to
“survive.” If you step out of line, in any way, like you don’t people please, or you’re not
perfectionistic or you don’t criticize yourself, those prison guards are like “No no, we’ve
got to do XYZ because otherwise you’re gonna get hurt. So we need to criticize you and
we need to people please” and all the things.
This is why a lot of us are just feeling anxiety often, even having these moods, I’ll call
them, what I refer to often with my clients is like a roller coaster ride of high highs low
lows, depression and even if it’s not a clinical depression or just feeling funky, “I just
wish I could be how I was when I was a kid, or I just wish I could be like XYZ person
who just seems so happy. Why can I get that pep in my step?” kind of thing. And really,
if we look at anxiety and depression, anxiety is just constantly anticipating danger.
Your Inner Mean Girls, in essence are like, I’m just going to sit here and be anxious
because then I’ll be one step ahead of the danger. Then maybe I can plan for whatever
danger is going to come my way, which, as we know, doesn’t work. It only makes the
present really really uncomfortable.
Then we have depression, which really is saying let’s just numb the pain, and let’s just
have apathy, because I don’t really want to feel sad because that’s what I mean to feel
but I don’t know how to process that, because, let’s face it, we’re not taught how to
process our emotions. Then you just spin in one of those things. Trauma at the end of
the day, unplugs us from our life force, which our life force is really our authentic self,
and our authentic self, if you’re a spiritual person, can be viewed as the Holy Spirit or
whatever you want to call that if that’s the divine living in you that’s connecting us
from having this bigger purpose and living this bigger life. It turns off our emotions and
desires and it says, let’s just disconnect because life just feels uncomfortable, and I
have these feelings that I don’t really want to feel. So the way that I’m going to get
endorphin hits in life to make me feel better is turning to things like distractions of,
alcohol or food or shopping or sex, or working too much, you know, whatever. Basically
just doing the things that you don’t want to do but you’re doing them anyway, and
they’re kind of taking you away from the bigger goals and dreams that you want.
It’s really not that trauma hurts us, it’s the trauma defenses that hurt us. Now granted
in the moment, does trauma hurt us? Yes, but that’s one moment and then it passes.
Then these defenses come up, and that’s the thing that just keeps hurting us over and
over and over and over again, and again. Our Inner Mean Girls, the one that’s doing all
these trauma defenses, thinks she’s doing a great job. She’s giving herself first place
medals all the time like “look at us! Another day that we kept her alive. Great job. Here
we go.” That’s why we’ve got to do work like I do in coaching of, we’ve got to tell inner
mean girl to slow it down like she’s in the driver’s seat of your brain, we need to get her
in the backseat because she does have a purpose.
We do want her showing us things that are unsafe so we do stay alive, but she’s way
over the line. She needs to calm it down. In my coaching practice and in my process, we
are shifting that voice. That’s where a lot of clients say, “Oh, I just feel so free and I feel
so energetic and I feel so in touch with myself and I feel like me again.” It’s like, Yeah,
because we went in and we were able to shift that inner mean girl voice. And too, I was
teaching them how to process those emotions from these traumas, you know, big or
small, so that they can finally just let it go, because the inner mean girl too is just
spinning in those feelings, and then repeating the same things over and over again in
the subconscious mind. We’ve got to tell her, “Hey, we don’t need it any more.”
The last thing I want to say here about trauma is, I said this earlier, but if you find
yourself really disconnecting from your body. And I know this is very common,
especially for enneagram fives which I am an enneagram five, you disconnect from your
body and you’re in your head a lot, just know that’s a trauma defense mechanism.
I encounter this with a lot of women. It’s not just enneagram fives. I see a lot with
enneagram ones even of just wanting to be in their head all the time. That’s why I said
earlier, not being connected your body and even overthinking or trauma defenses. Just
be aware of that. And that’s why it’s so important to do not only mindset work to see
what’s going on in your mind but body work, and here on the show in a couple
episodes, I’m going to bring somebody on who I’m actually working with. I’ve actually
brought her into my coaching practice. Her name is Kaycee Joy and she does body work.
And so we’re going to talk together about how we’re able to help heal people from
doing what’s considered top down work, which is what I do with mindset work.
Basically taking your head down to your body and then bottom up work which is her
body work. Look forward to that.
There’s more resources and help coming your way. As I said, the two books that I have
referred to often here in this episode for resources and guidance is Patriarchy Stress
Disorder, and The Body Keeps Score. Both of those will be in the show notes. But
overall I hope this episode opened your eyes and allowed you to start to understand
trauma more so that you can be aware of what’s going on inside of you, and know it’s
not this horrible thing and the hard thing to overcome, but you can start taking steps to
feeling better. I gave you some of those little basic steps of how you can start to move
forward in your life. So that’s it for this episode, my friend, I’ll see you in the next one.
Bye.
[music]
Hey there, Miss Unstoppable. Thanks so much for tuning into this episode. If you
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me.
In my nine-month simple success coaching system, I am going to walk you every single
step of the way to ensure that you get the goals and dreams that you want. The first
step is to apply for a free 60-minute consult call. Just go to LindsayEpreston.com/apply
to get started. As always, my friend, remember, you’re only as unstoppable as you
believe you can be, so believe in yourself. You got this.
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