¶ Resilience and Trauma Recovery
Hello and welcome to Notes on Resilience . I'm your Manya Chylinski , and my guest today is Joy Turner . She's a mental health therapist and she recognizes that there is no one size fits all form of therapy and works to build strong relationships with her clients .
Today we talked about resiliency and how it's not a linear process , how we all have our own timeline to recover from a trauma . We discussed the ways that traumatic memories are different than non-traumatic memories and the importance of early intervention in helping individuals overcome traumatic experiences . I think you're really gonna love this conversation .
Find Notes on Resilience on Apple Podcasts , subscribe and , if you like the show , leave us a review . Thanks , hello , joy . I'm so excited that you and I are talking today .
Me too .
Thank you for having me . Well , before we get into , who are you and why are we talking today , I would love to know if you could have a superpower . What would that be ?
I would heal all chronic pain . That would be my superpower , oh I love that . Yes , I have personally experienced seeing a lot of chronic pain and professionally and that was my absolute number one thing superpower , I would have .
Wow . I know of a few people who would benefit from you having that superpower . So let's bring down all the forces of the universe that maybe we can get you that superpower . I would love that , yes . So since we at this moment can't give you that superpower , let's talk about what is really happening . So , who are you and what do you do ?
So I am a licensed professional counselor and I work in the state of Oregon . I recently started my own private practice that has now grown into a group practice about six months ago , and I work with a variety of different clients , mostly with trauma , and I do a lot of work with couples communication skills . I've worked with a variety of the population .
I have a lot of experience with trauma , so that is my go to .
Okay , and I'm guessing that if you deal with a lot of trauma , the subject of resiliency comes up . So what do you think about that word and that concept , resilience ?
So resilience is developing . Resilience is tricky and it's not a linear process . It's all over the board . I feel like resilience can be developed a lot of the times with people that have sustained trauma in their life .
It builds character and it doesn't necessarily mean right then and there , but they look back and there's always a golden nugget in terms of I went through this , this is who I am now and how can I use this to better who I am and others around me ?
I like that concept of the golden nugget . That might not be something you recognize in the moment , but you can look back and see what you've learned .
Right , right , exactly . So again , it takes years and years to get to that point , but a lot of clients that I've had have used some of their trauma and their pain to do better things in their life , to create an emotional space for their children or do something job related .
That has to do with what they went through and that's partially how I got into a career as a mental health therapist was I have a history of trauma and I had at a young age . I knew that that's what I wanted to do . I wanted to help people create a better life for themselves .
Based on my experiences , oh wow , and thank you for that . As someone who has experienced a trauma and has worked with counselors , I so appreciate the work that you and your colleagues do . I imagine it can be quite difficult to work closely with someone who has been traumatized to help them work on the trauma and overcoming the trauma .
Right , right and specifically in terms of sexual abuse , that tends to be an area that I focus on . The typical disclosure age of sexual abuse is 35 . So there's decades that have gone by of holding that . Oftentimes they feel shame and embarrassment and it's manifesting in some way in their body .
It causes all sorts of symptoms physical , emotional and so you're dealing with decades of trauma . They come to see you and it's going to take a long time to help them build that resiliency , to help them overcome what they have been through .
Yes , and I would imagine that , sitting with a trauma like that for a long time and not dealing with it , it could be possible that that person doesn't even really understand the source of their struggles .
Right . Oftentimes they will come in and they will have lots of anxiety , lots of depression . It's affecting their life day to day . They don't understand where this is coming from , how it has manifested into these different symptoms of hypervigilance or maybe even disassociation .
And oftentimes I will do a really thorough history and figure out okay , childhood , adolescent , all throughout the years what has happened . And people who have experienced trauma have a lot of dissociation , so they don't necessarily remember the trauma . They may remember bits and pieces and then suddenly they may remember things all at once . So it's very tricky .
It's really really very individual , specific . There's not a one size fits all , and that can be the tricky part too . People have their own way and their own timeline to be able to disclose the trauma . It's been helped within so long or they have been told over the years oh , that didn't happen , or you're over exaggerating .
And they feel shame and guilt and they carry that with them .
Yes , it is a very complicated and , depending on what happened and who the person is , I can imagine it can be quite complicated and packing those bits . And I wanted to just quickly go back to a word that you use that I've always thought I understood , but now I'm not sure if I do . You use the term dissociated . What does that refer to ?
What does that mean ?
So when children experience trauma , they don't have the brain capacity to understand what's going on . Their brain is not formed yet and they're very egocentric . They take things very personally . Everything is my fault . So in order to cope with whatever trauma they're going through , they will oftentimes they can't physically leave , so they leave in their minds .
Oh , okay .
And what happens with that is some people . Some clients that I've worked with will have the experience that they're hovering over their body . Some will experience just going somewhere else and being in that other state . So , this association occurs as a coping skill to deal with some of these traumatic things that are happening with them as children .
Yes , it really helped when you said they can't physically leave . So one is then kind of leaving in your mind to try to not be where . Whatever is happening is happening Right , wow , okay .
Well , you know , that is a lot to think of all of the things you just talked about , that is a lot to unpack with somebody , and I imagine that getting to the point where you realize what the underlying trauma is is both an exciting and very upsetting moment in a client's life .
Right . I always tell clients when they come into the office that this is not an easy experience . You will not like this process , but you have to trust the process . It will get easier . It may take you years . I tell them think about the years that you have lived with this traumatic experience .
Or in some cases in my , with my practice it's cumulative trauma that has occurred over , you know , several years of their childhood or young adult life . So it's very complex , complex PTSD , and I let them know that it's a process and you work through . You have to work through that hard , hard stuff . You have to go through it and not around it .
But once you get to that other spot , then you just feel lighter . You will see an improvement with not only your health but your relationships . Just your overall health and wellbeing is going to be significantly better .
Yes , and I know someone who uses the phrase you can't connect the dots going forward , you can only connect them looking backwards . And I bet I mean I know in my own experience , kind of after my trauma and recovering , being able to look back and connect the dots and see the places where I was tapping into my own resiliency .
But in the moment that it's happening , as a person who's recovering from trauma , you don't think or at least I wasn't thinking on that level of , oh , this thing I'm doing is helping me recover . I just was doing what I felt like I needed to do in every moment to make it to the next moment .
Right , absolutely , and everybody is very different , so your trauma recovery is going to look different than mine or somebody else's , and that's another thing that is really complicated , because sometimes clients don't know where to begin . There is so much that has happened and all they feel is anxious or depressed , or they can't function in relationships .
Where do you start ? And so they have developed some of these maladaptive coping skills , and that's typically what I focus in on . First is what is not working in your life today . How will you know things are better ? So that is a really key question that I ask people .
Yeah , that's a great question . How will you know when things are better ?
Right , right . So again , it's not a linear process . There's a lot that needs to be unpacked . The one thing that I have found really effective is EMDR . I'm not sure if you're familiar with EMDR .
So I am personally familiar with it . It was part of my recovery journey , but I'm not sure all our listeners know . I'd love it if you could explain that .
Yeah . So it's eye movement , desensitization , reprocessing . So in my personal experience I went through a lot of talk therapy over my trauma and I was still experiencing some of the symptoms of anxiety . I had a therapist that used EMDR on me and it was very powerful .
I went through three to four sessions and decided I need to learn this technique as a clinician . Years of talk therapy , a few sessions of EMDR . What it does is it so the brain stores normal and traumatic memories different .
So it's like when you burn your hand , you take your hand away and you think , oh gosh , I'm never going to do that again , not going to touch the stove , it hurts . So that's similar to a traumatic memory in your mind . Oh , I don't want to go through that again , I'm just going to store it away and tuck it away and not have to deal with it .
But that's not how the human brain works . We have to feel it to heal it . So what EMDR does is it accesses both the left and the right side of the brain , bringing some of those traumatic memories into more of your prefrontal cortex , your logical thought , as opposed to the emotional part of it .
So people who've gone through EMDR will say , yes , I will never forget what happened , but I'm able to see it in a logical sense . I'm able to look at it almost from an outside perspective .
I have said almost those exact same words after I went through EMDR , and I typically preface that with I don't know how it works , but I know that it works .
Yeah , yes , it does . It's very tricky , but it's the stimulation between the right and left brain with the movements .
Yes , I agree , in my case I'd had talk therapy . I mean , I have also had talk therapy since , but I think I had just five or six sessions of EMDR and felt a significant change in how I was thinking about the trauma and the way that I was feeling about it .
So I wanna ask we've been talking about your work as a therapist and I think the underlying theme there is personal resiliency , the things that you were doing to help clients tap into their own personal resiliency .
But I'm curious what you think about the role of our systems and institutions in either actually being a cause of trauma or in helping people heal from trauma .
Yes . So thankfully we have grown and we have learned about trauma . It's not so stigmatized as you are just a bad person , something's wrong with you , we're gonna throw you in a mental institute and hide you away . So trauma has become much more embraced . We've done a lot more research about it . There's a lot more programs out there that help with trauma .
Specifically , I'm gonna talk a little bit about sexual abuse we have . What is key with the resiliency is , once the trauma occurs , either they witness the trauma or they've been involved with a trauma . It's called Kids First and we've worked with that organization on a . I'm a part of a family foundation that donates to nonprofit organizations and
¶ Challenges With Trauma-Informed Systems and Institutions
this organization . What they do is they provide intervention and advocacy for children who are victims or witness to a crime .
Okay , wow .
And so that is going with that early intervention . That is what helps resiliency . So having that supportive space , having the emotional space and the safe place to be able to disclose what happened , with trained professionals Now teaching parents how to be observant , how to understand the behaviors that their children might be displaying as a red flag .
Children aren't necessarily going to articulate and verbalize what has happened . You're gonna see it in behaviors .
Okay .
And so I think as a system we have improved . But the part that we have yet to improve on is , once these children have this the Kids First programs or the interventions where they have the forensic interviews , the medical interviews they have that support . What's the next level ?
They have to be able to somehow link up with a trained therapist that really works with children that have been exposed to trauma in maybe a play therapy capacity typically play therapy , but that intervention is key .
Otherwise what happens is you have the early intervention with systems in place like a Kids First , or here's what happened you have that exposure , you have the help , but then it's dropped . You have to wait six months to see a mental health professional .
Right , and I think it's about teaching people to be trauma informed , teaching parents and teachers and just the whole system of how to handle kids who have been through these traumatic experiences and what they need .
Right , right , you know I think a lot about how to help people and organizations be trauma informed . What do you think is a challenge to help people get to that point ?
I mean , are people just embracing the concept or are there some barriers to getting people to understand that we are dealing with a lot of trauma , whether it's in our kids or just generally in our society ?
So that's a really good question and I think that we have a lot of information out there , but in terms of implementing the actual programs , it's underfunded . We're dealing with systems that don't have the capacity for the funding or the people or the knowledge and the resources in terms of really implementing .
We all have these great ideas , but it's really putting them into practice . Yes , I think that's where we fail . I think that teachers have a really difficult role because their hands are tied to some extent . There's a lot of red tape , so to speak .
I think that people don't like thinking about trauma because it's uncomfortable and whether it's something we've gone through ourselves and we don't want to admit it , or we just don't want to think about it in people around us . I feel like sometimes that is a barrier is just getting people to accept that people are traumatized .
Do you see that ? Yes , absolutely , especially around sexual trauma . So there is 90% of abusers are people that children know . 30 to 40% of victims are abused by a family member and 50% are abused by someone outside the family that they know and trust . So that's a big deal . I mean . These perpetrators are grooming the victims right .
So there's a lot of shame about disclosing Again . The children are egocentric . They think this is my fault , I did something wrong , and oftentimes I've had a lot of clients that will disclose the sexual abuse to a caregiver or a parent and they just sweep it under the rug oh , don't say anything . That didn't happen and it's very dismissive .
So if you can't trust your parent , how can you trust anybody else as you grow older ?
Right . Where do you think that comes from , whether it's with children or adults , when somebody dismisses , oh that didn't really happen , or it happened , but it wasn't so bad . What is that impulse in the caregiver or the person that we're talking to to dismiss something like that ?
So oftentimes it's a form of denial and it's a coping skill , like if that didn't happen . In my mind , I don't have to deal with the severity of what my child is going through . We have normalized this a little bit more as we've gotten older . Thankfully , mental health overall has become a lot more accepted . Yes , so I feel like that is changing .
It's a real thing . People are understanding that it does happen , but there's still this stigma around sex . Overall , people are uncomfortable with that topic . So then you pair that with trauma and that's a double-edged sword .
Yes , because now you're talking about two things that people don't want to talk about .
Exactly yeah .
Now , is that an issue particular to this country , or is this something do you know that we see worldwide ? Or are there places where people have different attitudes towards sex , for example , where maybe it's not as stigmatized to talk about sexual violence ?
Yes , it's very stigmatized here in the United States . I can't speak too much about other countries . I do know that there are some that are a lot more open and willing to have conversations surrounding it . We in the United States , we tend to be the opposite direction .
I have had so many clients that have said I have learned these different theories on sex that are so . They're untrue . So they've lived their adolescence and teenage years with these false understandings of what sex is and what that means . And they just know that if something happened to them it doesn't feel right .
But how can I be supported when my caregiver isn't supporting or doesn't have the knowledge behind it , right ? So again , I think it falls back to educating parents on how to have conversations with their children , how to provide that emotional safe space for them . You know how to allow them to feel . We all have feelings . It's okay to show them .
It's okay to be angry , it's okay to be sad and really normalizing that as you grow up . And again , educating people on these are the things that children do . These are , if they're off their baseline , there's something that's going on .
Yes , yes , I was just reading about . During the pandemic I became mildly addicted
¶ Supporting Trauma Survivors and Educating Parents
to advice columns , so I now read them , all sorts of different advice columns , but one of them was talking about you know that children , their world is very small , especially young children . It's very small , it's the family , it's the parents .
So if they're behaving in a certain way , it's more important to think about what , what have they seen , what have they witnessed , what have they been exposed to , versus punishing the child for having these emotions Because they don't know what else to do with them .
Right , right and people were asking , they would say you know what is wrong with this child , instead of saying what has happened to this child . There's a reason why these behaviors are happening and we need to get to the bottom of that instead of using punitive measures to scold them or dismiss them , because that perpetuates the problem .
Yes , so you're not getting to the root .
Right , and I think you said it earlier . You know there's a lot of denial for , I'm sure , a variety of reasons , but at its base just not wanting to have to deal with something awful that has happened .
Right , right . I mean 80% of people in jail have had some sort of trauma . I mean that's , that's huge . So that's , that's another part of the broken system . I mean , if we can fix this with early interventions , we don't have the criminal activity . So it's . It's about preventative instead of trying to put a bandaid over what's really going on .
Yes , sometimes it feels easier to just pull out that bandaid , but it's quite often , I think , that makes can make the problem last for longer because you're not actually dealing with it . What would you say is an important lesson that you have learned about resilience or about compassion because of the work that you do ?
I would say that resilience is not linear . There are a lot of forms that resilience does take , but I do . I do believe that in order to heal and become more resilient , you have to go through some of that pain and you have to address it , you have to go through it and that allows again for the compassion . I have a lot of compassion for certain traumas .
Clients have had trauma because I've personally experienced it . So I will often use a little bit of self-disclosure to help work with clients who have had trauma and they feel validated in that way . Here's my journey . Things can get better . I use , you know , the mind is a very powerful thing .
I talk about how we create our reality through our mind and if you believe you can get better , you can get better . So it's having that really strong belief system that I want to change . I'm going to do this .
Yes , I like that . You said two things that I've written down and I want to always remember . You have to feel it , to heal it , and if you believe you can get better , you will get better . I like those . Now there's a lot of work and there can be a lot of pain behind both of those things , but I think they're important to remember .
Now , as we're getting ready to wrap up , I'm curious what do you think is the most important action or policy that maybe we could enact as a society to be more supportive of trauma survivors even more than we are now ?
That's a tough one and I have thought a lot about that . Luckily we have implemented school counselors . That tends to be a really safe place for children to go . I've had a lot of clients who their children have gone to the school counselor and been able to have a safe place to open up .
But again , I think the key to that is prevention , education , timeliness when it comes to trauma , if there is an event , we need to get in there right away and really focus in on that and have the support team around us . That's huge . What can we rely on ? What can that child rely on ? Or adult social supports ? What is your meaning ?
The meaning behind the trauma ? You find meaning and purpose behind the trauma . Helping facilitate that . The mental health system , though . I think making mental health services more available . We just were underfunded . There's not enough mental health providers out there . Insurance can be a tricky thing . I don't even want to go into that .
If we start that conversation , we're never ending , right .
So I think it's a multitude of things , but I think it's making mental health more accessible to people . It is a big one Providing those early intervention services and really having that education around what does trauma look like , Instead of throwing them in jail . How can we rehabilitate ?
Yeah , you've touched on just a few of the threads of the impact of trauma in our society . There are even more , and they're also intertwined with other things that at times it can feel really overwhelming of how are we going to solve this problem .
Then I meet individuals like yourself and my other guests on the podcast and other experts who are just working on one piece of it and just focused on I'm going to help my community this little slice of the problem and maybe , working together , we're all going to get there .
Yes .
I hope Soon . I hope yes .
Well , and working on the generational trauma . It's a real thing , so it's stopping some of these traumas that have been carried down through the generations .
Yes , I'm glad you brought that up , because that is another one of those pieces that can make it difficult to unpack a trauma . As we're getting close to the end here , is there one question that you wish I had asked you , and how would you answer it ?
I would love to have some sort of I don't want to say union , but program that we can all form an alliance as mental health therapists and really get some of these laws and regulations changed so we have more flexibility to work with people , to access people , and what that would look like , I don't know , but I know that something needs to happen .
Yes , All right , well , listeners , we need to get working on that . Let's figure that one out . Yes , so what is giving you hope right now ?
What's giving me hope is a lot of people are seeking mental health therapy . We are aligning with doctors out there . It has become more of an integrated care system and it has become normalized . So that is huge . It's not seen as this monster in the room . Let's just sweep it under and hope that it disappears , because that never happens .
If you don't address some of these things that are hurting you or harming you , they will come out in a multitude of maladaptive ways as you get older Addictions , chronic pain , all sorts of things that happen to your body , depression , all of those . If you don't address those , it's going to turn into a monster .
So we have become a lot better as a society as a whole to really incorporate mental health programs in schools and just normalize it , make it more accessible . But we still need a lot of work . There's still a lot of work to be done .
Yes , Well , I agree , that is giving me hope as well . I'm glad that , amidst talking about the things we wish were better , we recognize that there are some things that are working right now , so that's a good thing . So how can our listeners reach you if they want to find out about your work or just touch base with you ?
Yeah , so we have a website . Excuse me , it's called joyful living , bh . So the BH is health com . That's the best way to reach me . And yeah , that's about it . Just through the website .
Okay , great . Well , we'll put that in the show notes and anybody who wants to chat with Joy or learn more about her work , please do get in touch . And , joy , thank you so much . This was a lovely conversation .
Thank you , I appreciate you having me Thanks .
All right , bye everyone . See you soon . Thank you for listening . I hope you got as much out of this conversation as I did , so if you'd like to learn more about me , , I work with organizations to help understand how to create environments where people can thrive after difficult life experiences , and I do this through talks and consulting .
I'm a survivor of mass violence and I use my experience to help leaders learn about resiliency , compassion and trauma-sensitive leadership To build strategies to enable teams to thrive and be engaged amidst difficulty and turmoil . If this is something you want to learn more about , visit my www . manyachylinski .
com , or email me at Manya Chylinski or stop by my social media on LinkedIn and Twitter . Thanks so much .