Episode #110- Trauma and Post Traumatic Growth

In this episode I define trauma in nervous system terms, so you can have a more compassionate view about the survival states and why you go into them.

Your nervous system is always trying to keep you safe and can get stuck in survival states from all different types of trauma.  

All of us have had things that are more than our nervous system can handle, but some have not been able to process it because they have not had a compassionate witness.

Trauma can be processed and there can actually be more growth than would have been otherwise possible (post traumatic growth).

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Transcript- Automatically Generated:

This is Betsy Jensen, and you are listening to Unstoppable Body and Mind, episode 110, Trauma and Post Traumatic Growth. In this podcast, we learn to upgrade our brain and understand the power of our thoughts, to heal and to create the results we want in our life. Become the person in control of your healing and make peace with your life.
Become Unstoppable Body and Mind. Hello, my loves. Today, I want to talk about a term you might have heard a lot about, trauma, and maybe one that you haven't heard about, post-traumatic growth.
Now, I want to just keep this really simple and give you a few facts, not dive too much into depth into the world of trauma. There's obviously so much with trauma and healing, and really what we know about how trauma affects the body. But I don't want to get into all of that today.
I just want to give you a basic, basic concept of what we even mean by the word trauma. So if you think of the nervous system's capacity to tolerate a situation, trauma is more than what the nervous system can handle. So there are certain things that tend to be traumatic for everyone, but it is possible that something could be traumatic for one person and not for another, because it's more than what their nervous system can handle.
When you think of going into a trauma response, that's the same as going into a survival state. So when you go into fight or flight, freeze or fawn, again, just keeping it simple, there are more nuances to the nervous system. But the main four states that we talk about are fight or flight, freeze or fawn, and those are survival states, or what you might hear called trauma responses.
So if you, for example, didn't get a lot of attention, a trauma response, a survival state that you might have gone into could have been flight, where you tried to be the best at everything you could and be a high achiever and be a perfectionist and always be doing things so that you can get that sense of safety that you want. And your nervous system develops as you are a child and adapts to going into these states without your conscious awareness. So again, thinking of just as a child growing up, your nervous system was doing its best to survive, to help you survive.
And so you may have gone into some of these survival states, inevitably, you did, and even not process some of what happened because you were in these survival states. Now, we are made to go into and out of these survival states, right? We might react with fight or flight and then come back to neutral.
But what often happens is the trauma, the traumatic incident is not processed. And so that can lead us to stay stuck in these survival states. Peter Levine, who is an expert in somatic healing of trauma, somatic experiencing, says that trauma is what happens in absence of a compassionate witness.
So there could be an event that has been traumatic, but was processed with someone and doesn't stay stuck as trauma in the system. When we talk about things staying stuck, that can also be a little confusing. So the best explanation I've heard of that is by Dr. Amy Apigan.
You can look at my podcast number 99 to hear the full explanation. But basically, the nervous system controls the muscle tension, the gut, blood flow to different areas. So there can be a nervous system response, a trauma response that has a certain effect on your body.
She gives an example of when you're pre-verbal, so under six months, and you don't have another way to calm down your nervous system. If your needs aren't met, that you may start to try to decrease the discomfort by raising up your shoulders and activating those shoulder and neck muscles, ears up by the shoulders. That's a common sign of stress and where people carry a lot of their stress.
And as well in the hip flexors, there might be a muscle tension that's produced in the hip flexors to try to get into that fetal tucked up position. So trauma in our nervous system can present in different ways in the body. As adults, that's why somatics can be so important in releasing these trauma response patterns.
So there can be what we call capital T traumas or little t traumas. So basically, there are some things that are generally traumatic to all of the human population. You know, abuse, neglect, and little t traumas could be things like falling off your bicycle, hearing bad news, witnessing violence.
There can be these things that still overwhelm your nervous system, and if they're not processed, lead to some of these protective patterns in the body. There was one time I met someone new, and he was talking about when he was in elementary school, that's when the Challenger space shuttle exploded. And I remember that.
I think I was in fifth grade, and I remember it being sad. I remember it being traumatic. But the way he was describing it in his present adult life, that was still something that was unsettled for him.
It was still something that caused him fear. It was something that changed the course of his life. It was never processed for him.
So when we got into conversation, that was something that he brought up as still affecting him. For me personally, I did not have a lot of capital T trauma growing up in my life. I didn't even have anyone close to me die until a couple of years ago.
And I was in a really good home with a loving family. What did end up being traumatizing for me was the trauma response that I went to being raised in a religious culture where I felt like I needed to always be better. And this wasn't necessarily, I'm just realizing, as an adult, I just started to realize my parents really did love me for who I was.
But I think I took on this feeling of, I'm not good enough, shame, I need to be better, perfectionism. So I would alternate between flight and freeze, feeling hopeless, not good enough, discouraged. And those were the main trauma responses that my nervous system, I think my nervous system was just maybe a little more sensitive than some.
And so things that could have been less traumatic for other people ended up being more than what my nervous system could handle, putting me into these survival states, basically living in survival states. And that's when I finally got diagnosed with ulcerative colitis, because years and years of not having proper blood flow to my digestion or proper functioning of my digestive system, because I was never really in that parasympathetic, calm rest and repair state, I was mainly living in survival states. It took its toll on my body.
And I mean, fortunately, in a way, I'm actually really grateful for it because it brought me to this mind-body approach and to the information about healing and about really changing the way I was putting pressure on myself and keeping myself in survival states. So I often use the analogy, being in a survival state can feel really physiologically to your body like you're being chased by a tiger. And even when the environment around me was not dangerous, I kept that feeling going of being chased by a tiger because I was never satisfied with doing enough.
I thought I needed to do more. I was perfectionistic, which is just impossible to be perfect at things. I was a people pleaser.
Oh yeah, I went into faun a lot too. Oh, lived most of my life in faun actually. So faun is another version of shutting down the nervous system in order to make other people happy, in order to hope that everyone's gonna like you.
A common thing my family would say is, what would the neighbors think? And so that is representative of living in faun. What are people gonna think?
I need to act a certain way. I should be different than I am. And really just starting to shut down part of myself in hopes that more people would like me if I wasn't me.
So those survival responses can be helpful in the short term. But when we're living in survival states, that's where it really starts to affect our body, our relationships, our health, all areas of our life. Often we talk about the trauma that happens to us in our childhood, while our nervous system is developing.
But of course, trauma can happen at any point in someone's life, and that traumatic response can affect their nervous system at any point. And we also know that there is intergenerational trauma. So meaning if your parents or grandparents or your long line of ancestors have generally been stressed or had certain reactions to certain things, that can actually be inherited.
There is a study that they did with mice where they shocked the feet of the mice while they were smelling cherry blossoms. And then later, when those mice had babies, their babies produced cortisol when they smelled that same smell of cherry blossoms that had been associated with that stressful event of their parents. So even though the babies never received the shock to their feet, they had a stress response just from that smell in the environment.
So being in a survival state doesn't mean that you're doing it wrong or that anything has gone wrong. It's actually a sign that your nervous system is working. It's maybe even a little hypervigilant.
But being in a survival state in itself doesn't mean that anything has gone wrong. It is just a sign to you. It is a sign that you're in some kind of fear.
You're believing that you're at some level in danger. So it could be from chronic pain and you're feeling pain, and then you go into the flight mode of, I really wanna fix this and I wanna figure it out. And you start Googling and you start asking a lot of people and that survival state of flight, which may have been very helpful when you were trying to find out other information and trying to solve a problem, becomes less and less helpful and even promotes more of the pain that you're feeling because when you're living in survival states, again, it's affecting the muscle tone in the body, the oxygenation, the inflammation even, and your immunity.
You just set yourself up for things to happen in the body when you're living in a stressed out survival state or going between them or getting stuck in them most of the time. Now, what we also know about trauma is that there can be what's called post-traumatic growth. And that means that because of the experience that the person has gone through, they are able to reach higher levels of growth, of expanding their window of tolerance, of being able to cope with more and more because they've had the trauma and then processed through it.
So it can be very scary for people. Sometimes they'll hear about trauma or they'll read the book, The Body Keeps the Score, and they're reminded of the trauma that they had. And it can feel very overwhelming, and very hopeless, but the person who's gone through trauma, there's actually so much more that they have learned than a person who hasn't gone through those experiences.
You see examples all of the time of people who have had horrible childhoods, and sometimes they end up really repeating those patterns and staying stuck in those behaviors and perpetuating abuse. But there are other people that have had horrible childhoods and who have risen above, who become motivational speakers, who help millions of people because they have gone through those trials. They've been through some of the toughest experiences, and so they can effectively teach people where they would not have had those resources to draw on if they hadn't gone through that.
It's like when there's a forest fire and then the ground becomes even richer and more dense with nutrients and has this place now for fertile growth because of the loss that it had gone through. So this is not to try to minimize anyone's trauma or to be Pollyanna about it and say, yeah, it's great that happened to you, and just be thankful for that, whatever. If that does not resonate with you, that's not the main message I'm trying to portray here.
But there is that other side of trauma that allows for more growth than would be possible if that wasn't there. Now, getting out of survival states requires a lot of compassion for yourself, a lot of understanding. So what I really want you to hear from this episode is that your nervous system is doing its best to try to protect you.
And if there was something that was scary, it came up with ways that it figured were the best ways for you to adapt, either by activating your nervous system, to fight or to run away flight, or to go into a freeze response, to shut down, to fawn, and pretend to be someone you're not. The more you can see your nervous system as trying its best to protect you, and it may be hypervigilant, and it may be overly fearful. And the best way to work with it is to understand it, to work with your nervous system, and not fight it, and not expect it to just be different because you've practiced regulating a couple of times.
These neural pathways, again, since it's subconscious, since it's immediate, since it's been going on for years and maybe decades, those neural pathways are strong. And so just understanding that you start to be this observer of your nervous system, observer of what's going on, allowing it, accepting it, and understanding it. And then from there, you can work to regulate your nervous system more and change it in a loving way.
As Deb Dana says, the nervous system is good at detecting the subtle difference between an invitation and a demand. If this talk about trauma and post-traumatic growth has piqued your interest into delving a little more into the nervous system, finding out more about how the nervous system affects your body, how to get out of these survival states if you notice that you're going into them, then please download my free nervous system modules. I'll have a link in the show notes, and you can start to watch these videos.
There are four videos about your nervous system and how it affects your body, how to regulate it. I will send them to you, and you can start integrating this work into your life, and they're completely free. So go ahead and check out the show notes.
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