Trauma

He's so popular and so busy that he doesn't need to have a web presence of his own. That's, this is the sort of guy we're talking to here.

And one of the things that tends to pop up is this word trauma, and I think it's misunderstood. I think a lot of people use the word traumatic to mean anything that makes them feel anxious. Oh, it was quite traumatic how was late for my appointment and.

I mean, I know I don't wanna be a pendant language changes over time, but if, we are gonna use the word trauma for anything that makes us feel uncomfortable, we need another word for what we, in psychological worlds call trauma, would you be able to define trauma for our listeners?

We're dealing with trauma all the time, and it's only if you like excessive trauma and that I even dislike that word that means perhaps something needs to be done.

Physical event, a crash takes place, not a particularly nasty one, it can be a bump, but the fact that the thought went through the mind saying, I could die here will be enough to induce a certain amount of trauma that may need to be dealt with. In childhood, we are far more vulnerable and those of us with children or grandchildren can see it readily up to about the age of six, up to about the age of seven. There are some researchers believe that children are actually in a highly hypnotic state.

Their ability to take in information, their ability to learn, we, we've all watched them. Those that have children, you may not seen it with your siblings, how they can take in a second language, sometimes a third language without any effort at all, and this is, it's this incredible ability to focus. That's the upside as far as learning is concerned. The downside is they're also fairly vulnerable to be traumatized by particularly small things,

But it did have that heightened emotional charge as a child, whereas the adult mind can look at it and go, well, that didn't matter. That was nothing. And if the parents or other adults around at the time that the incident happened, treat it like that, of stop being silly, then that's going to make it even more so, isn't it?

Because what tends to happen as a child, we experience a relatively small traumatic event. Okay. But we carry it. And then it may impact us again in our formative years when we're 13, 14, 15, 16, and then it'll hit us again when we are perhaps a little bit older. And before I was a therapist and a psychotherapist and had even entered the psychological world. I remember seeing my daughter looking very closely at her face in a big mirror. And she was also quite upset. She was five.

and I sort of said to her, well, what are you doing? And she said, you know, almost tearfully. I, I've got a silly face.

Now, if could then imagine going into your formative years, you're 12, 13, 14, getting sensitive to boys as somebody turns around the Oi, big nose, Oi cookie face. Okay, and immediately it goes back to the trauma of the child that's being brought forward, and so it then comes into the adulthood and may represent a sort of body dysphoria, other issues around body image and so on. Uncomfortable.

Being seen in relationships, et cetera, and then eventually ends up in front of a therapist, and a therapist then says, okay, well let's find up going on. And then by using hypnosis and other techniques, you can go back quite easily to find a sensitizing event and they will go back to be five years old, being told off by the teacher. Then you know you've got to start the genesis of the problem that's sitting in front of you.

But in the States with the research going on they now acknowledge that many of their veterans were traumatized in their childhood, and they were already not psychologically strong when they came into the military. So when they were subsequently in battle and became traumatized by that, Then they say, well, hang on a minute this was set up by your toxic childhood.

And they're looking to reduce the amount of money they pay because they came in with the issue and it wasn't just about what they experienced in their lives. So it, it'll, and it'll come here. So, um, it's, it's quite interesting area of research..

Maybe we should all have a year of therapy before we go into the, into the adult world.

Look at the issues that we've got that could just be halved, if not almost eradicated, if we didn't pass on our misery to the next generation. If everybody was. Encouraged. Can't say forced, cuz that's not how therapy works. If everybody was encouraged, if therapy was normalized and it wasn't stigmatized, the world would be such a, well certainly our country would be in such a better position. It really, really would. I'm quite an advocate of therapy. Uh, I'd be a rubbish If I wasn't Yeah.

So the point you make it's a very good one and it it sort of needs to be addressed, but it's a difficult issue to address because of the sheer volume,

if you're like, they're sort of extreme forms of trauma, you know, Richard and Fiona, it's what people are experiencing in their daily lives that are of interest. Um, I don't, you've had a chance to read the papers this morning, but there's a documentary on BBC two, I think tonight on the cases of ADHD the huge burgeoning um, issues. And of course many of the symptoms of A D H D are caused by trauma. And it was being a trauma specialist.

Whenever I see anything, it's trauma, you know, so, A bit of hammer and a nail. So, um, but I do have to say that if you take trauma out and you will find it, I'm very much doubting. If anyone ever presents to a therapist, psychotherapist without some sort of trauma, and you find the trauma and take it out, you will always get a result. I'm not saying that you will get people fully better, but you'll get them a lot better. And our role is psychotherapists. Remember an early definition.

It whether it stands up, I don't really know that if you want to go to psycho analyzers, that makes you a better person. But if you want to go to psychotherapists, we tend to make our clients happier, we don't say we make them happy. We make them happier. And that's what trauma work will do. We take stuff out and people start to feel better and the symptoms come down. And that's what we need to engage in.

And your brain, your head grabs these Lego bricks and files them away in the right place. And we now talk about a memory being properly stored away. Okay, it's functionally stored. Now if you have a, a trauma, so go back to my little daughter. You know, the teachers shouting at her.

Instead of a Lego brick coming along to be processed, you get a house brick, and the house brick comes along and goes dunk into the side of the head, the side of the brain, and the memory manager says, you must be joking. And sends it off down a siding, and it goes down a siding with all the other unprocessed memories. It's now a dysfunctionally stored memory. And they sit there with their own power, that own sense of power.

And when you touch 'em, that's when you get the feeling of feeling upset, concerned enough to bring me to tears. But you don't know why. But you've touched something in your toxic dump of un unprocessed memory.

Now, I use that analogy because what goes into that toxic dump tends to be quite strong, whereas the stuff that we deal with every day, Fiona, you know, the, the unkind word being treated badly in a shop, having a, an awful online experience, whatever it is given time, we tend to process if we sleep on it and the main process is it during the night and then we, we wake up in the morning feeling better about it, so we don't need to sort of obsess on it.

But when you're looking at trauma that's affecting, people actually break down in the street crying and don't know why, then that's because there's stuff sitting in a toxic dump that needs to be processed. Their brain hasn't been able to cope with it. So, the, the question is asked, well, okay, then I recognize I, I have these memories.

Now, interestingly, I was on a course last year and being a trauma specialist and taking a point that Richard made, that we've all had to be in therapy whether we like it or not. And we've all had to do at least a year sorting out our stuff. So therefore, you tend to clear it all out. So when we go on these courses and we're working with each other, especially trauma, often people say, well, I've nothing left and I've had it all done. That never actually happens.

And on that course I was struggling a bit because I had to play the role of the client. And then one popped into my mind, my unconscious mind just gave it to me, and I went back to being four years old. I'm a twin, and so I'm used to sharing a bed with my twin brother and all that that means. Battling and fighting as well as always having a constant chum, et cetera, et cetera.

But this, this was the first time that my parents had found us out because they were off to a wedding and they put us to our uncle and aunt. They didn't live far away. They had a wonderful dog an Alsatian, that was absolutely delight to be with. They had no children of their own, and we knew them well. So all the conditions were right just to be farmed out and spend the night away while my parents went away. And we screamed the house down.

in the end my uncle had to get on the phone, call the hotel where the wedding was. He says, we can't put up with this, come and get them. So my parents left the wedding, came and got us in then, and took us home. And I remember my mother saying Dear, we'll never do that to you again.

And then here I am, 60 odd years later, I'm still being traumatized by the event, it's the sense of abandonment was still with me. But when people come to therapy, they generally, they, they won't particularly say I've got trauma for my, my early childhood, blah, blah, blah. They'll talk about not thriving. They'll talk about not seeming to be able to get on in life, not being able to form relationships.

They form relationships and they all break up and I've noticed there's a pattern, and this is my sixth one in eight years and this is going on. So they will tend to present with something else. And very early on I tend to ask the questions, you know, just, is there any trauma in your life? And they'll talk about maybe car crashes or someone died unexpectedly, et cetera, And that will take us into what it is that we perhaps need to deal with.

And all the techniques that are generally used by trauma specialists. Desensitize those unwanted memories. So if you like, we take them outta the toxic dump. We look at them closely, offer them back to the memory manager, the memory manager breaks the memory down files away in the right place. And the affecting trauma of that memory goes. Now you still remember about the event, you'll still feel sad about it, but it won't have the ability to overwhelm you and bring you to tears.

And the very popular one at the moment is emdr. When I say popular, that's the wrong word to use. The highly effective new, and I say new because in psychological terms it is new, but it's been around since 1975. It's coming into the nhs, it's quite expensive to train for, so it's much slower than it should be. But it has changed the whole face of trauma in the world. And that's not an exaggeration. It's a, it's an incredibly effective and helpful tool. So that's one.

And there are adjunct adjuncts are other therapies that have immerged as a result of the work of emdr. And so depending on who, who you're working with and what they want to do, then you will use these adjuncts to take the effect of the trauma out.

I think it's possible that therapists could do harm if all they do is talk about what happened. Even though they've been told all their life therapy is it's good to talk, you talk about what went wrong and it's gonna help you, but that's not always the case.

And, not to put down our colleagues who are, are doing their best, but the danger is that you can end up trying to help people to manage the trauma when you actually have the opportunity to take the trauma out. So issues like C B T, for example, cognitive behavioral therapy. Change the way you think about what happened to you will change the behaviors that you carry out as a result of it, and then you'll feel better. Yes, you will, because you are managing what you're feeling better.

But what it won't do is remove the need to have to manage that trauma. What we do now with EMDR and similar therapies, we take the effect of the trauma out. So you don't need to manage it. It's gone. Okay. Now it's, it's not magic. Okay. For some people it is. You do get magical results and they're unforgettable. Okay. But it does tend to need a bit of time and a bit of work. If you're into more, I was gonna say dangerous areas, sex abuse sex assault, Violence, knives, guns, and so on.

It will often take a little bit of work to do it. Simpler things can be dealt with. So our business people that are listening to this, they may have a fear of public speaking. Now, that's a perfectly natural fear you should be anxious. You know, it's not natural for us to get up in front of a big crowd unless you're a raging extravert and that's okay, but you'll still being nervous. Alright? But sometimes there is something pathological there that needs to be done with.

Lady I worked with the other day just couldn't function really well in her role that she wanted to. And when we went back to find out what it was, she was 11 years old and in a dolphin suit. At a school play that she felt so stupid and ridiculous that she was traumatized by it. Which meant that when she was in a business meeting and had to stand up and say something. In her mind, that's what she went back to. So in that, in that case, she did get a magical event.

So we'd up with one single event. And then her fears over about the space of two months, maybe six, seven meetings disappeared until she became the same as everybody else. So still a degree of nervousness,

Let them see what it feels like to be relaxed and then give them the sound recordings that they can use at home if they're highly anxious about perhaps worrying that they're going to have to talk about very unpleasant stuff. You can help them manage the anxiety again by using hypnotic tools. Some of them are not very long. Five or six minutes. You can have it on the phone. They can be at work feeling anxious, pop to the loo, listen to the, the recording, and it takes that anxiety down.

Doesn't make it go entirely away, but it pulls it right down. So we spend a fair bit of time doing that, giving them places of safety to go to in their mind. And then you start to gently touch the trauma and you start with the easy stuff. Get the confidence building, and then you can do the more difficult one. And if there was any listener saying, well, I know what happened to me and I'll never ever be able to talk to anybody ever in my life about this.

There is a technique which is called blind to therapist, so you know what you're dealing with. The therapist doesn't. And using EMDR, you could still process a traumatic memory and it, it can go to areas you may not suspect. I mean, some soldiers from Afghanistan and Iraq, they witnessed and saw things that maybe beyond the military experience, it could be moving into areas of atrocity. You, you'd never know. Things that they maybe feel they should have done something about or not, et cetera.

Therefore, you can then work with them blind to therapist. So you know what you're dealing with, I don't. Let's just carry on and, and get this work done. The people that have been sexually abused, to the extent they can't even bear to look at what happened to them, you can work with them in the same way.

They just, the, the content, the story stays with them, but the processing is done between you so that that can work very well.

When you are on a high, you feel okay, but when you're vulnerable, woomph!, the stuff comes outta that toxic dump and bites your bum, when you least want it. And the shadow that follows us is a way in. So as therapists we have to hold the hands of our clients and go into the dark with them. And go into these un unpleasant places and look and see what it is. So that which haunts will always find a way out. You won't get away with it. The wound will not heal unless it's given witness.

Talk to somebody about it, talk to yourself about it. And the shadow that follows us is a way in, I'm sorry, you have to look at the dark and go into the dark. And you may be surprised to find out that that was written in the 12th century by a Sufi poet called Rumi who is the most. Popular poet in the States, in the usa. Nothing new under the sun. He knew what we were trying to deal with in the pain of our lives.

And I think that's something for any therapist who are listening to be aware of if, whether you have any fear if there's something stopping you doing that, in which case that is something you need to look at because it is, as Gordon said, there're so important to be able to go with them. But yeah, we do hear some really awful stories that can then vicariously traumatize us.

So we then need to have the tools to deal with it, which goes back to the idea of having your own therapy so that you know how to.

I forget exactly what I said cuz obviously it's different with every, everything that everybody brings in. But the, the connection that we can make when somebody shares their story with another, with another person, especially if it's a therapist who knows how to handle it. And I think that's the important thing.

The therapist has to know how to handle it so that they don't, as you've, as we've said, cause further problems because they think they know it all and say, you've got to talk about this. If you don't talk about it, you're never gonna get better. Well, it could be that if they do talk about it, they're gonna get worse. They're gonna write off therapy and think, well, that only makes me feel worse. I'm never gonna see a therapist.

And then you get, well, it's funny you should say that, and that's how you, that's how you can get into it without the direct question. So the use of the anecdote and not just in area of trauma, but, but generally, you know, I, I work with someone once and we've got plenty of them. You don't need to make them up. Then generally they'll, you'll get a response of some, kind and allowing you to go down into the dark with them.

If you need us, you know where to find us. Take care everybody.