Did You Mislabel Your Trauma?

to be real clear about what this podcast is intended for it is intended for entertainment and informational purposes but not considered help if you actually need real help and you're in need of help please seek that out if you're in dire need of help you can go to your nearest emergency room or you can check into a rehab center or call a counselor like me and talk about your problems and work through them but don't rely on a podcast to be that form of help it's not it's just a podcast it's for

entertainment and information only so let's keep it in that light all right have a good time learn something and then get the real help that you need from a professional The word trauma gets overused today in our society. The woke community has gotten a hold of it and turned everything that they see as something they don't like as being traumatic.

And that's really unfortunate because the word trauma is very useful when you're describing something that's happened to you in the past that is upsetting to the point where it alters your behavior and perhaps even your personality a bit.

And it's really interesting as people talk to me in my clinical practice and I use the word trauma them and these are true trauma victims they have really suffered in the five forms of abuse they shy away from it they can't grasp the idea that they were traumatized because it's their childhood and it's all they had so they dismiss that and say well it just it was a thing and i have to really like work on them to get them to understand that no they really did suffer trauma and they just continue

to dismiss it and i think it's unfortunate because As I've said in these podcasts forever, trauma, it's really where all the addiction comes from because that is what you're coping with and you use because of it. So let's get back to actually being able to use that word the right way. So today I'm going to explore trauma and help you understand it better in your recovery path. As we work on our traumas, we work on recovery. Or the other way around.

You work on recovery, you're working on your traumas. They kind of go hand in hand. And I've been telling everybody for as long as I can. Remember, in my practice now for the years I've been doing it, that trauma is the root of really what you're dealing with. That trauma usually is at the base of the beginnings of everybody's addiction. And because they're dealing with their traumas, they are uncomfortable. And we use because we're uncomfortable. That's really what it's about.

And there are many different ways of coping and dealing with stuff. And your drug of choice, who knows, man? Gambling, shopping, food, sex, porn, internet, chemicals of all kinds. Any of it. All of it. Every person I've ever treated, trauma is really at the base of it. It's either ongoing trauma or it's past trauma. But either way, it's trauma. So I wanted to talk to addicts out there in the community to really help you understand that really what you're dealing with is trauma.

It's not your bad behavior. It's trauma. But what is trauma? And I know I've talked about this in the past, the past podcast about trauma. But really, what are, you know, trauma, five forms of abuse. You've got five forms of abuse. Physical abuse, emotional abuse, verbal abuse, sexual abuse, and abandonment. And that's pretty much it. So those forms of abuse, if you've been subjected to them, you're going to find them traumatic. And then you're going to feel uncomfortable.

But typically what I have experienced in my clinical practice is people that come in and they suffered trauma. And I'm talking about the adults that I treat, not the late teens that come into my office occasionally, but the adults. You have suffered trauma and you got through it and now you're an adult. And so now you're not quite sure what to make of it because perhaps you've kind of gotten your life together. You got married perhaps, you had children, you got a career, you got a life.

Things are working, except you're still uncomfortable. And so that discomfort causes you to continue to feel a need to escape and get away from the thing that you're feeling. So the feeling uncomfortable part is really kind of what's all about. So let's talk about those five forms of abuse. If you have been, as a child, you suffered abuse in the form of the five that I named, it's not something you could control or change or even that you caused.

Just because you are doesn't mean that you caused anything. Now, Some of us, and I'm going to include myself in that, we were not the greatest of kids. We did some things that we're not proud of, and it was difficult for us to get through our childhoods because of our own bad behavior.

But it's hard to kind of tease out your bad behavior because you're reacting to something in your familial environment or your school environment, or are you acting out because you have some issues, whatever they may be. I'm not talking about personality issues. disorders, but just issues of depression or anger. Maybe you're prone towards violence or anger.

But finding yourself in a place where you are reacting to things, and that is what I see a lot of with people who have addiction, is that they tend to act out as children because they're not being heard, they're not being felt, they're not being understood. And that's a huge issue. Because if you're not understood, you're not being heard, you will act out. The analogy or the, well, it's an analogy, is the three-year-old who has a temper tantrum.

Children who are two or three years old having temper tantrums, it's because they can't verbalize what they're feeling. And those feelings that they have, frustration or anger, resentment, whatever's going on, they will start kicking and screaming and throwing something. They become very oppositional. And parents who experience that, and we've all experienced a child who is throwing a temper tantrum, you can play into it or you can ignore it or you can yell at them or whatever.

But really what you need to do is figure out Like, what is it that they're not being heard? They're not feeling felt. And so what is it that they're not being heard or felt about? And, you know, in clinical terms, being felt, feeling felt, as Dan Siegel says, is the single most important thing that a client gets out of therapy. Feeling felt. And I strongly believe that.

So if you are in therapy, for example, if you have an addiction issue and you're in therapy and you're with a therapist and you don't feel like the therapist is connecting with you or you're connecting with them and you don't feel felt like you're not feeling that. you need to go to a different therapist. It's not necessarily the fault of the therapist, but it's just an issue that you're not connecting with them. And that's a problem because you're not feeling felt.

And if you're a trauma victim, you're used to not being felt, feeling felt. You're used to that. Nobody's listening. I've said this before, but one of the great examples of that is that TV show that was on the air. I'm not even sure it's still on the air. It might be in reruns. But here in the United States, we had a show called Intervention. For those of you who are listening from overseas, I don't know if you are aware of what that show is.

But basically, it's an hour-long show where they show... an addict who is spiraling out of control in a huge way, and they need to get into rehab. So the way to do it, if they're not voluntarily doing it, is to love them into it through a compassionate confrontation, a confronting in a very loving, compassionate way to get them into rehab.

So they have this show where they show that, and it's an hour long, and they show the addict... the first part is there you know all there were child and they had this you know they're wonderful numerous special magical whatever the kid was great and then uh... dad dies parents get divorced uh... you know mom gets in a car accident so something happens it's in their childhood usually and things are going wrong and they start hanging out with wrong kids and everything so you get through about a

half an hour of that explanation and then about three quarters of the way through or maybe a little bit less They show the addict in action. In other words, they're using their drugs of choice. And they've got a film crew of probably two people following this person around.

And there's always this scene in almost every single episode where there's a person sitting in their room, usually in the parents' basement uh or something like that it's hardly ever their own residence and they're in there and that's where they live because their life is spiraled out of control and if it's a guy he's probably doesn't have his shirt on if it's a woman she's running around you know in her underwear And they're high as a kite.

They're jumping up and down all over the place and screaming and yelling. And here comes the loved one. The loved one walks in the room, looks at the addict. And the addict is belligerent and yelling and maybe throwing stuff and telling him to leave, get out of here. And the loved one is going, what are you doing? You've got to stop doing this. You're killing yourself. And the addict is saying, yeah, yeah, yeah, I know, I know. Screw you.

And So at some point in that exchange back and forth, and it doesn't take very long, the loved one comes in and makes comments about the addict's usage and the behavior around usage. And you've got to stop this. You're killing yourself. And the response the addict gives to the loved one is, you don't understand. You don't understand what I've been going through. You don't understand.

which elicits a response from the loved one, which is something along the lines of, yeah, I know, but you have to stop this, you're killing yourself. And that exchange is the one that I use as the example of kind of the difference in the mindset of the person who understands trauma versus the person who doesn't understand trauma. And when an addict says, you don't know what I've been going through, you have to take that as words of truth.

Most people who have not experienced trauma, or at least the severity of the trauma the addict has, doesn't understand and they don't ask. See, that's the key. The loved one doesn't hear that and then say, tell me what it is I don't understand. They never say that. They just say, you have to stop doing this because you're causing problems and you're killing yourself. Period. End of conversation. It's not until the addict gets into a setting where somebody asks them, tell me about that.

And it's really odd because sitting in my office, there's the addict and they're saying, no, they're not saying you don't understand because they get that I understand. They start to sense that. They don't say you don't understand. But then when I say what happened, they're reluctant to say. It's really odd because they They're so used to not having anybody ask or even be concerned enough to connect with them in some way. But when somebody does, they really don't know what to do.

Or they go the other way and they say, nothing. It's kind of like I want to look at them and go, then why are you here? You're not going to let me in. So the idea of the trauma being there is there. It's just that it's never really been exposed. I mean, that's the first part of it. In therapy, it's exposure of that, not exposure of therapy, exposure of the trauma. That's vital. Get it out of the closet. Get it out of the dark. Stop hiding from it. It's there.

And people who suffer trauma, they don't feel comfortable with that at all. They don't feel comfortable exposing those traumas. So the response I get is minimizing, dismissing, and they'll stay with that. And Most people, I would imagine, when they hear, you don't understand what I've been going through, the response that, you know, okay, I don't. All right, but you've got to stop doing this. They're so used to just not even exposing it that they're not quite sure what to do.

But when they do, it starts bringing up the feelings. And this is the magic sauce in the therapeutic stew, right? Being honest. I don't know how many of these podcasts I've said that. Be honest. And when that honesty comes out, then you can do something with it. And it's reframing. It's restructuring. It's understanding. It's forgiveness. Those are the steps to get there. You can't make the memories go away. Of course you can't make the memories go away. They're always there.

Those things that are memories are indelibly imprinted on your brain. You can't make them go away. But what you can do is work towards healing. And that's kind of a weird thing because I've got some people that I've treated that have had these horrific, abusive, trauma-inducing experiences in situations of murder and just horrible molestations and things that are just unthinkable. And How are you going to not see that?

How are you going to not see something happen when it's happening right in front of you, especially with a kid, because they can't even emotionally process? So that sticks in the brain, but it's the understanding the situation, the reframing, and then ultimately the forgiveness. And so there's different ways of treating that, but understanding... This concept of trauma, and this is what bothers me so much about today's, you know, the 20-somethings and the teen-somethings, they're all victimized.

Everybody's a victim. Everybody's got something, you know, and it's just absurd. Because very few people suffer real legitimate trauma. You know, I don't use, you know, the right name for you. That's not traumatic. That's not traumatic. Being molested as a child, having your parent killed in front of you by being shot, or watching mom overdose in front of you, you know, when you're six years old, and dying. That's called... trauma.

And so separation of the idea of trauma from non-trauma is difficult for today's generation, the younger generation, which is sad because they're really not going to understand and they're not really equipped. Since everybody's a victim, they don't even know how to be a non-victim and to even use that as a baseline starting point of non-victim. So it's going to be difficult and it is becoming increasingly more difficult in a clinical arena to help tease out The understanding of real trauma.

But trauma and then the mislabeling of it. And by that I mean my least favorite phrase in the entire world. It is what it is. No, it's not. No, no. It is what it is. No, no, no, no. That's the ultimate in dismissing of what trauma is. But truly labeling it.

And that's why... feeling felt is so difficult in a therapeutic setting because many times people are afraid to expose it because they think they're going to be judged because of their past traumas even though they're really the victims of the trauma and they think they're going to be judged because they went through that or they're afraid that they're judging the traumatizers too harshly because that traumatizer was their parent um or a loved one, a brother, sister, or something, and they think

they're just being too harsh. And so really understanding how to grasp what that trauma is and that it is traumatic is difficult. The second part of that is What is trauma to me is not trauma to another person just because of something I have in my personality and how I view the world. So, for example, I served for many years in the first responder capacity. And so I was trained as an EMT. I was trained as a lifeguard and a beach lifeguard and CPR and first aid and AED and all that stuff.

So I've seen some pretty horrible experiences. you know people in some horrible physical conditions bleeding out you know broken bones heart you know heart stopping in front of you and you're you're doing cpr to try to keep their brain alive i've seen some pretty horrific things and to that end there have been people that i worked with who uh in the same capacity were severely traumatized by what they saw and for me it I didn't see it as traumatizing. Upsetting, maybe, but not traumatizing.

And it's not because of how I grew up or something I was exposed to earlier that hardened me to that. It's just that, to me, I accepted it a different way, that input of that information. Now, that's something you're exposed to, but something that happened to you is a different matter. So if your parent or neighbor or family cousin, brother, sister, somebody was molesting you, there's no way that that's not going to be traumatizing. There's no body that can handle that better than somebody else.

It's going to be traumatizing. And so because of that, you're going to find it difficult to recover without really effective trauma work. So the different types of trauma can be handled differently by different people. And As it presents, like for an example in my office, when a client comes in and they present in a way that is completely dysfunctional, I don't dismiss what they went through.

And so that idea of like, you don't understand what I've been through, you don't understand, that kind of thing you hear on intervention and you see, you're right, I don't. And so what I want you to do is I want you to tell me. Like, tell me about it. Tell me in detail. I'm going to walk through this with you. And it may take days, weeks, months, sometimes years of walking through that trauma and facing that trauma.

In the military, they use a common treatment methodology, at least with the VA, has been exposure therapy. therapy exposure as a trauma treatment. And so they will have the combat vet who is crippled with his PTSD. They'll have him repeat that story over and over and over and over and over and over again to kind of help minimize that trauma effect of that event. And that's one way. EMDR is another way. There's TMS therapy.

Transcranial magnetic stimulation treatment, another methodology that seems to be very promising in its outcomes. And so the idea of that trauma focus as a primary thing as opposed to feeling focus. You're feeling traumatized, yes, but the trauma focus. Because the feelings will change. And this is an important thing when you're going through a therapeutic process, that you really be there with somebody, a therapist, who you feel like you can be safely open with.

And it seems to be pulling things out of you that you didn't want to necessarily expose or talk about. And they're not afraid to be there with you. They have that strength to be able to do that. That's an important thing. Okay. But I guess first and foremost is understanding that you are not going to be able to walk through that trauma and heal from that trauma on your own. You really can't.

Because trying to do that is going to result in you having difficulty in the long term of really knowing whether or not you did all the steps that you need to do to recover from that trauma. The identification... and the drawing that out, and then the work towards being able to relabel, realign, reframe, and then ultimately walking you down the path of forgiveness, and that's the hardest one. You really can't do that yourself.

So if you are an addict and you're really suffering from this stuff, I implore you to find somebody that can help you with that. It's really, really important. that you be walked through that because you can't be in charge and be vulnerable at the same time. It's really hard to do that. So anyway, the idea of trauma and the concept of trauma is one that's difficult for people to embrace when they've been traumatized. They like to minimize. That didn't matter. It's not that big of a deal.

I got through it. They really do struggle with that. So in the true sense of the word of recovery, you have to really understand what are you recovering from. And that's key.

and that's it for this edition of doc shock your addiction lifeguard i hope you've enjoyed this podcast if you like it please leave me a review and if you have any suggestions on topics or comments about the podcast please reach out to me you can reach me through my website wellspringmindbody.com i am doc shock your addiction lifeguard if you are in need of help please go get it again this is a podcast it's not treatment.

But if it's helpful, listen again because that's the whole purpose of it is to help you get sane, stable, and sober in your journey towards recovery. And if you need further help, please contact me. Thanks for listening to Doc Shock. See you next time.