Something Scary Happened the Other Day, and I Wanted to Talk About It With You (and a PhD Trauma Researcher)
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Head to your nord stream rack store to score great brands, great Prices, the greatest gifts of all time. Hey, it's a friend belt, and welcome to the male Robin's podcast. I want to start the conversation today, but just thanking you for being here.

Today's show is going to be a little bit different, and the reason why is it's going to be a tough one. So I wanted to give you a little context before we get started. When I launched the male Robin's podcast less than a year ago, my promise to you was we would hear life together.

And I would use this show as a way for us to support one another through the good. And unfortunately, sometimes the band. And that brings me to what I want to talk to about today.

And that is, how do you support yourself when something bad happens? See, a few weeks ago, I was a witness to a horrible tragedy. And while I did not directly impact me or my family or anyone that I knew personally, it's still affected me.

Profound IT affected my family, and IT affected the community that were in. And I recorded my feelings in real time as I was processing the events that we're unfolding, because that's how I processed my emotions by talking about them. And when I shared what had happened with my teammates and with my extended family, what was really interesting is that almost every single person had their own story about having been a witness to another person or family's tragedy.

And the truth is, when you find yourself in that kind of situation, none of us had the tools really process how IT affects you, or how to deal with your complicated feelings of guilt and fear and sadness and grief. And these conversations with my friends and family IT history enforce the fact that this is a really important topic to discuss. How do you support yourself when you witness something horrible? And it's so important that that's what we're going to talk about today, even if it's hard or IT feels very uncomfortable to listen to parts of what we're gona talk about.

This is important. Now when all of this was happening, I had the benefit of speaking with doctor mary Catherine mcDonald d to his renowned researcher and expert and trauma. And what I learned from doctor mcDonald a couple of weeks ago, IT helped me process the traumatic experience and events that we're unfolding here.

And I hope, and I know it's gona help you, or someone that you love, do the same. So before we get started, I really want you to decide if this mayor may not be the right episode for you to listen to today. If it's not, I completely understand this will be here for a resource for you when you're ready.

And I do hope you will join me again when our next episode releases in a few days. And if this is the right episode for you, let's get started. I'm going to take you back a few weeks ago to a moment as these events were unfolding, where I was sitting in a chair in a bedroom and I decided to hit record and just start talking to you.

Couple nights ago we were cooking dinner was about six thirty at night and all the sudden I heard all of these horns talking and not like hong kong on, but like um you know like somebody lays on a horn and i'm thinking, what the hell is that? And IT had been a really windy, stormy day, the waves that day on the ocean here, where we rent this awesome little house. They were enormous, I mean, enormous.

We had been out of the beach, and it's a very shallow beach and their lifeguards there, but the flags were yellow, and I was only in up to, like my knees. These waves were crashing way over my head. And unlike five, eight, and so they were big monsters waves, there was a riptide warning.

And when IT comes to the ocean to screw around the second that red flag is up, we're out. The second they say those words rip tied or not screen around. So we had fun in the waves. We then came home or cooking dinner.

And now of us of these horns are hawkings like where? And so I put the no spoon down, i'm stir in the poster, and I go out to the front porch and I looked down to the right. And there are four cars.

There is a ten suburban that is going to be seared into my memory. There's a ten suburban, and I think that's the car where the horn was like her. And then all these other cars and more cars coming up, and there were people on the road because the road is right on the ocean.

IT goes road, and then all of this kind of brush and then tons of rocks. And then the ways were crashing, and everybody had their hands up in the air. They were trying to wave and flag down this police book that was out in the ocean, in these huge waves.

And i'm thinking, is there a boat and distress? Because that happened two summers ago. There was a boat that ran out of gas and kind of crashed up on these rocks.

Everybody was okay. So i'm looking around for a distress boats, and they keep flag in these boats and flag in these boats and flagging these boats and flag in these boats. And i'm like, what the heck is going on? And we are guessing with us.

And the dad of the couple staying with us quickly chat twitter and was like, IT looks like there's a missing schemer and am like, oh my god, I wonder if they have eyes on him. And the boats start turning around and heading away from the people that are hacking the horns and trying to get their attention. And I don't know what hit me, but I have this like first responder instinct.

I immediately picked up the phone. I called nine one one and the first attempt I didn't get through, and that's a scary thing. When you don't get through one nine one one, I hang up, I call again and IT sort of clicks through.

But no human being picked up. So I hang up again. And now i'm starting to get panic that there is a swimmer out there, that these people have eyes on him, that the ways are so big, the wind is so loud, the rocks are so big between them and the police boats.

The police boats are now way off in the distance. They've gone in a completely different direction. Holly smokes, holly smokes.

I call a third time. I get the dispatcher. what's? What's the reason calling me? I'm calling about the swimmer.

They're somebody in the water. Do advise on. no. However, there is a huge group of people on the shore.

There are hundred feet for me, and I say, you have to get through to the police boat. You have to tell them to turn around. They are driving away from the accident.

Turn around to around. I hear her to hold on. And then SHE clicks through.

Must have been the police match. So this is the third color we've had about a swimmer. Um, you're going in the wrong direction.

Turn the boats around. Turn the boats around. I climb up on the rAiling on the porch. I don't know how I baLanced. I'm standing on this ring.

I've got this huge red White well and I am waving IT back in fourth and it's weapon all over the place because of the wind. And i'm saying to the dispatch, look for the red White. Look for the red White now and then look before IT to left the people on the shore.

Go there, go there. Keep the surface on your left. Turn around, turn around.

And I hear her saying you're going in the wrong direction. Turn around, turn around. Look for the red tails. So she's talking directly to the police, but the police boat turns around and starts heading back in our direction. And then I started telling her, after the surfers look for the people on the road, look for the people on the world, theyve got eyes on something.

The boats pull up in front of war, that people I am like, oh my god, I give the phone to my daughter and i'm I can run down to those people, keep the one one or on the phone just like, but we're a loser I said, just try, get down, get down there. Get them on the phone with her so he can communicate with the people on the shore to the boat. So SHE goes running down.

Now the helicopter show up, search helicopters flying all over the place, and more information is coming in. And now my heart is thinking, and my daughter races down. There's more people down there.

The police boats have gathered kind of offshore because there are so many rocks you can come in. But here's a problem. It's so windy and the ways are so huge, nobody can communicate with one another.

And the call drops, the receptions terrible down here. And for three and a half hours, this searching rescue mission played out in front of the beach we run. I don't know you can hear that, but there's a helicopter going by.

And I hear my heart just racing, and I feel myself like getting emotional. And the helicopters were going back and forth, and the search spotlights and the dive teams and the share a sports and people on the road and IT was just horrible. And the weather got so bad that the dive teams couldn't do their job.

And at nine thirty at night, they called off the search and declared IT a recovery mission, not a searching rescue. And the next morning, when we woke up, there were people passing on the beach, and there were helicopters and dive teams. And Christina, I were leaving to go out of town for a wedding.

And I felt terrible that we leaving. And I climbed in the bed with our son and just tell them really tight. And I felt so much hard ache for this family.

And all weekend along, while we were gone, the search recovery was happening, and they were trying to find him. And I just think, what could I have done? What could I ve done? I should have run down there sooner.

I should have done something, and I keep thinking about IT over and over and over again. And part of me feels like, what do you feel so bad? You don't have a right to feel bad.

Now, I mean, it's not like this is your son. This is not somebody in your family or somebody that you even know. And yet I do. And so one of the things that I did is i've reached out to my therapist, have reached out to a trauma specialist.

And one of the things that trauma researchers say is that IT is incredibly important to process what happened, not by just thinking about IT, but by talking about IT, and that by talking about IT and making sense of the story and putting IT in context. You also allow yourself the ability to start to process all the feelings because it's not just the watching or witnessing or experiencing something that can be traumatizing. What I think has been really chAllenging for me is processing all of the conflicting feelings that i've come up over and over and over again, and also stopping my brain from just thinking about the family or reliving IT.

Over in my mind, we're thinking about how I might have been more effective or more helpful, feeling terrible and honestly torturing myself over IT and then feeling bad that I am because I don't even know this person personally. And I wanted to talk about IT because there is so much research about how your brain and nervous system process dramatic experiences, and there's a lot of misconceptions about this. And so in case you somebody that is trying to process something dramatic that you've either been a part of or that you've recently witnessed, I knew that this would be helpful to you.

And if you've experienced any kind of trauma in your life and you find that IT comes up and you get retrieved by the sound of a car pulling in the driveway or a beer can cracking open, or a certain song for me, I hear a helicopter and i'm right back there like phone. I hear the words riptide. I'm right back there.

I will always think about this when I step out of my deck and I looked down to the right, I still envision that turns suburban there. And there's a reason neurologically why this keeps happening. And there are things that you can do to take all of this experience and the feelings that have come up, whether it's happening right now or it's something from your past that you wish wouldn't keep coming up.

There are things that you can proactively do to help process IT in a healthy way, backed by research, so that IT finds its home in your brain and in the story of your life. And so that's what we're going to do today as you put your arms around me. We're going to walk and talk, and we're going to bring in doctor mary Catherine mcDonald to help us understand what's happening when something traumatic happens and more importantly, what do we do about IT. And we're going to welcome her to the walk and to this conversation when we come back, don't go anywhere.

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Welcome back. I'm melt Robins. And today I am so grateful that you're here. I just appreciate you being here with me. I can feel energetically you got your arms around me as we talk about this very traumatic experience that I had just a few days ago. Um so doctor mary Catherine mcDonald, thank you so much for being here with us. I was just telling everybody listening about this experience of watching a surge in rescue mission for a missing swimmer turn into a recovery mission that took place in front of the houses were running for literally the last four to five days.

I've had actually more than one client have that exact same situation um witnessing a rescue at the um gone that didn't ultimately result in a rescue. And so that is indeed very tomato. And I think we don't talk off and enough about the fact that witnessing a trauma is traumatic. It's not just going through at the first hand but um vicarious traumatizing is the thing is real and being a witness to something or hearing details, graphic details over and over even if you weren't a witness to that can be traumatic for sure.

Can you explain what happens in your brain when you witness something like that?

okay. So really quickly, for those who may not be well versed in what's going, the brain looks like what happens in a regular event and Normal event, how that gets filed away. And then we can talk about what happens when you have got something .

sufficiently overwhelming.

That sounds great. So if your brain was a video game, its goal would be homeostatic. And what that means is just equal blood flow, equal electrical activity across cortex. Now that rarely happens because your brain is constantly taking in information and filing IT away, both from inside the system, inside your body, and also from outside in the world.

So when you've got a Normal event till grid, the girls y store and something mildness funny happens between anywhere between four and twenty four hours after that event, your memories get filed away into a file room. This is primarily in an area of the brain called the hip campus. This is what I would love to film a pixar movie about whether you have this file room with all these multi color and file cabinets.

And then there's these little file room workers who are running around trying to put your memories away in an order that enables your brain to pull them out when IT needs IT and make sense of IT because your whole system is wired for safety. And the the Better we remember things, the more likely is that we are to survive. So when you have a Normal event going on, you've got relative homeostasis in your brain, meaning you have access to all of the the parts of your brain that are needed in order to complete that filing system.

What happens when you are in a situation where the memory gets properly filed away?

So between four and twenty four hours after event, IT gets filed away and then when he gets filed away properly and an an organized fashion, that means that you can reach for that later when you need IT, pull IT out, talk about IT, and then put IT away and continue on with your day. So let's say i'm like, oh, I wanted tell you about this funny thing that happened to the grocery store.

I can really easily reach for that file, tell you the narrative of content, feel some of the feelings, maybe I laughed again as if it's happening again um and then I can put IT away and we can continue on doing whatever we were doing. So that's the Normal event. That's what you're bring once and needs to happen.

That makes a lot of sense. Can you now explain what happens in a traumatic situation or even just a situation where the alarm or anxiety in your body just starts to go off when you've .

got something sufficiently overwhelming going on? You're the home, me this. Your brain goes totally out of wax on purpose.

This is an evolutionary adaptation that happens so that you can handle the threat or the danger that is in front of you. And so your brain, when is when the alarm system goes off? This is in your olympics system.

You're mida IT reprise tizer forty seven different functions in your brain and body to prepare you for what IT is. Sensing is a danger. One of the things that kind of goes off line, however, is the file room.

So if you can imagine all those file workers, they run out of the hippocampus because they are needed elsewhere to handle the thread. So instead of this neatly organized file fulgor that you get between four and twenty four hours after the event, you get instead of fragmented file fodder, and each file folder needs that narrative of contents. So I can tell you the story, the emotional contents, so I can feel a little about how he feels.

And then a tag that tells me in my brain what that means, how do I find IT? How the file room people go and find IT. So when you have an overwhelming event, this adaptation happens in the brain and in the system.

And what that then means is that the file room workers aren't there. See, you get this fragmented file. The file room workers come back into the room and they're like unknown.

We have a fragmented file. We don't like a fragmented file. We like everything to be in order. We don't order to put this. We don't know where IT goes.

So they kind of keep IT sort of in A Q so that I can go to the front of your mind whenever you experience anything that is similar to something in that fragmented file, which will give you the opportunity to organize IT. Oliver. And so this is the origin of the trauma trigger.

again. This is your brain trying to help you by telling you, oh okay so so let's say you have this dragging ted file IT has like posted notes in IT. Your brain doesn't what IT means.

It's just sitting there in the file room on top of one of the draws and um let's say the color red is in that file and then you come across the same exactly of red in the universe, right? Someone walks across your your preferred and they're wearing the same color your the file room do say, oh my god, here's here's a chance you need to org ize the file and so they throw that to the front of your mind to give your brain the opportunity to organize IT. Hey, we have a fragmented file.

We don't like that. Let's start to the front of mind, give you this opportunity. And then the problem is, your middle of a lymon s system also recognizes that color red, and IT has coded that red as moral danger. So IT goes and sets off the the alarm system all over again and then you're off and running even though you're sitting your desk at your office. So that's essentially what happens between when you're a regular event .

and then when you have a dramatic ament that makes total sense. And I love the explanation of a fragmented file because that's how I feel. I feel like i've got these little snippets of the whole experience, like the red White tell that I was waving the super windy breeze blow in the town, and how heavy at was the sound of the helicopters, the sound and the spotlights of them.

Once I got darker, the police boats, the horns, there are all these snipe's. And then twenty four hours later, when I heard that they had not found him yet, all of these little fragments feel like they're floating around in my brain. You said that this is how we're designed, and that is adaptive.

How is that adaptive? I mean, that sounds like male adaptive. I just kind of want this traumatic thing to go back in my brain in the filing cabinet and I don't want to think about IT again.

That's a great question. I think there's like a fine line between adaptation and male adaptation. And um I think it's really important that we understand.

So what i've just described as as essentially the origin of the trauma response, and I think it's critical that we understand that the trauma response is adaptive and it's designed to help keep you alive IT. Is that a born of a will to survive. And the reason that's important is because when we try to heal from trauma, we often go immediately to a shame place.

If I have trauma and am dealing with these symptoms, this means there's something wrong with me. I am broken. And so when we start by understanding that IT is an adaptive move, then I think I can help us heal because we can peel away that layer of shame.

But you're right, IT is IT is something that started out as adaptation that becomes, over time, my adaptive. And what you're describing is kind of like the trick when IT comes to treating trauma, which is integration. How do we take that file folder and figure out how to organize IT and put IT away so that IT looks more or less like the rest of your files without continuing to get triggered over and over and over again?

exactly. I mean, for me, that's the hundred billion dollar question. How do you integrate, as you say, these experiences so that you're not retrain matiz ed, because that's exactly what i've been doing to myself.

I mean, this is also just a few days old in terms of my experience, but I continue to go over and over and over in my mind, like, how are these for parents feeling in the family members? And oh my god, the anguish of them going back and forth on the beach know I saw that there was a go fun me page and I donated to IT, and I just keep feeling this heartbreak over and over and over again. And then, of course, I feel bad because I go, why am I torturing myself and why do I feel so gripped and devastated by this? I'm not even a member of their family.

I didn't know who died. And so, you know, I would love to talk about both why you feel conflicted when you have these sort of traumatic experiences, why are your emotions kind of unsettling? And I also think, for the sake of everybody listening, this is so fresh for me.

But every one of us has had a traumatic experience in our life, whether IT is a death when you were in high school of a classmates or maybe somebody in your family, or something that happened in your community. Every single one of us has either had an experience like this or will have one. And I would love to learn the specific steps, dr.

Mary Catherine, that we all can take, so that even after the fact, we can properly file these memory files of what we saw, how we feel, the emotions inside of us, into the right file cabinet, so that we can move on with our lives, we can stop being retrained. Matiz ed, by IT. And that's exactly where I want to go with you when we return to stay with us.

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Welcome back. I melt Robins and i'm here with doctor mary Catherine mcDonald, who a trauma specialist who has been researching trauma and working with people for decades. And we're talking about a very dramatic incident where swimmer went missing and the searching recovery mission took place right in front of the house that we were days.

So a dog, mary Catherine, let's talk about integration. How exactly do we integrate a dramatic incident into our life moving forward? This has been the thing that the .

sort of field neuroscience and psychology and psychiatric have been trying to figure out since the eighteen hundred is how do we circumvent the alarm system and organized the memory file? There are a lot of different modalities that can accomplish this. But basically, at a base level, what you're looking for when you're aiming at integration is a narrative of the event that doesn't any holes.

So that has a coherence at beginning, a middle in an end and you know some amount of emotional content. So if I tell you a funny story, i'm going to maybe laugh. I feel some of those emotions.

If I tell you a sad story, i'm going to maybe tear up and feel a little but sad. That's okay. Our memory files are supposed to have emotion and then a set of meaning tags.

What does this event mean in the in the larger story art of your life? So typically I think I am a huge advocate for multiple um modalities when IT comes to integration because we're always in IT for a quick fix and we want to say, K, I want to do five sessions of something and then get this integrated. But typically we need more things because your entire system is along for the ride.

It's not just a file problem. Your body is involved as well. So just to give you a quick run down E M D R I movement, decent citizen and reprieve. Zing is a modality that's designed to sort of short circuit the the fierce center from setting the alarm off. So what happens is is the clinic will um occupy your vision usually.

I mean the the first ways that they used to do this was just to wave a finger back and forth in front of your face to think like old school hip nosis was the little pocket watch. And when your visual cortex is occupied, when you're talking about the memory, what you're essentially doing is manually creating homeostasis in your brain. You're manually pushing blood flow and electrical activity to the parts of your brain that are trying to get disconnected by the alarm system. So E M D R S one modality narrative therapy is a great modality. Sometimes people use um alternative medicines um like sale Simon or M D M A both of which I thought to turn off the the fires center and enable you to talk through the memory, integrate IT without having that overactive alarm.

One thing that I keep thinking about is the fact that you know other people in my family and some friends of ours all witness this exact same thing. And our two friends were just as shaken up as I was, but some of our family members were not, at least on the surface, as triggered as I have been by this. Can you talk a little bit about why? That is why you can witness the exact same event or have the exact same traumatic experience. But two people, side by side, have a very different trauma response to IT. So one of the things is really .

interesting about these firehole ders. And this is something that has been interesting to track through the history of the study of trauma, is that since file folders can be fragmented in one of a billion different ways, this means that the symptoms that come after the event can also look very different, even for two people who went through the exact same event.

And the reason that's important historically is because we used to use that fact to shame people and say, okay, let's let's use um a combat veteran for example. You have two soldiers that fought in the same more in the same battle on having the same job. They witness ss the same thing one of them comes out and they have all of these overactive emotions.

The other person is totally shut down. So the person who's having the overactive emotions, there must be something wrong with them aside from combat, because this person, next time seems to be doing quite fine. And in reality, what's happening is that the fragmented files can be creating different emotions for some people that creates a whole lot of upset, distress, crying outward kind of feelings of anxiety for other people that causes total shut down.

And so they seem to be talking about an event and not having any emotional response to IT or they just don't feel anything at all. And in the media we use when we talk about somebody who has P T S D or someone who's dealing with trauma, we usually use an example of someone who's having over overly charge responsive too much. They're having, you know, the sort of quoting a historical response.

But from a clinical standpoint, if someone comes in and they're telling you the story, that is the most horrible thing they have ever seen and there is no emotional content. And we can see really clearly that, that part of the file fodder isn't there, right? So they have the story, they don't have the emotional content that still requires integration, right?

So are you saying that everyone who sees a traumatic event has some kind of trauma or fragmented file?

Good question. So that really depends on kind of what goes on immediately after the event. IT depends on whether or not the file gets consolidated between four and twenty hours after the event. For some people, they have the opportunity to consolidate that memory. Even if IT was really overwhelming in the moment, let's say, they get home and they are able to talk to their partner, their family about IT um a signs of meaning to IT um and put IT away, then that files going to start looking really quickly like the other files in their file cabinet.

So there was a study, I think he was in israel um and they took folks who had just been through a terrorist attack in the emergency room and they had one group go through um a narrative therapy exercise where they had to talk through the event kind of over and over a sign, meaning feel through some of the content with someone who was able to attune to them and then the other people just got started the standard of care in the emergency room. The people who went through that event and they were able to narrow and integrate the memory right away or something like eighty percent less likely to have P, T, S, D from going through the event. Then somebody who just went to the standard of care that you get in the emergency room.

So that really depends on kind of what goes on immediately after the event. We focus so often on the type of event and whether it's dramatic and not the person who went through IT and then what happens in the aftermath if someone is there to help you in the right way to integrate the memory is a lot less likely to become traumatic in my work. Um I kind of readopt the definitional trauma because this is the thing we've been out arguing about in the field of psychology one thousand eight hundred of which of ends or traumatic which are not and it's like, guys, this is not the point.

Um and the definition that I use is that any time you have something that gives you an unbearable emotional experience that lacks a relational home, you have a potential for a chronic trauma. So unbearable emotional experience plus a lack of a relational home means you know you potentially are going to have these symptoms and that means I love this term relational home. I got this from a clinton Robert stoller.

Um because IT can be a lot of different things, we what IT means to listen to someone and provide them with the space to help them seal through and organized what was too overwhelmed to organize in the moment can look like so many different things. And different people are going to require different amounts of a relational home based on the event. So you know if you're going through like a divorce or break up, you might need a relational home every day for six months. And what that relational home might look like might be really different depending on the day.

When I was researching this, I bumped into his work in this concept of a relational home. And so i'm glad you're talking about IT, because the way that I thought about a relational home is sort of this notion of where can I put this I mean, I just witness something, but i've got all these complicated feelings about what I witnessed and about what just happened. And it's the feelings that i'm trying to make sense of. And I know that wishing IT hadn't happened doesn't make IT go away, but how do we find a relational home for feelings that keep coming up? I mean, for example, is that Normal to feel guilty or conflicted that i'm so affected by this when I wasn't even someone that was part of the family or part of the search team, I was just watching this.

Yes, one hundred percent. I mean, I think the reason that that we feel guilt is because we've been defining trauma incorrectly four hundred and fifty years. And IT makes one of the reasons and one of the ways in which we've been defining IT incorrectly is that we create a false hierarchy where we say the trauma that I am going through, the experience that I am having is not legitimate for X Y res.

The reason the truth is your nervous system is telling you everything you need to know, which is that you're having a trauma response that requires intervention. If you had a pas satis, you wouldn't feel shame at having a pdc tis and you wouldn't go in the emergency room and say so. So is having this experience not a lot worse than might never broken color bone? And they are sitting right in front me, and I can see that.

And so they require care. N I don't like we don't do that with physical injury. Why would we do that with psychological injury?

That's true. That's a good point. How do you stop getting that incident to play out in your mind, like over and over and over again? That's what's really been haunting me.

Yeah that's a great question. So um one of the primary symptoms of trauma is intrusion and so this can be intrusive thought staring the day you're trying to go about your day and the thing just keeps popping up IT can be kind of this flashback memory where you start of lose track of the moment and you're thrown back into the past fully.

Um IT can happen in in memories and I can also be um people can end up repeating behaviors that um kind of put them back into traumatic situations is probably won't be the case in this situation. But this happens a lot when IT comes to relationship trauma. So how do you stop the intrusion? Basically that you know the short answer, which is also the long answer, is that you integrate the memory. And so um what that looks like depends on on the event.

Well, let me just share what's happened for me, like a big part of the process for me is peeling away this shame that i'm having a response that's outsized in some inappropriate way that I don't deserve to be having this response because I don't even know this person.

right? Let's put that down. And now lets look at what's coming up because I think shame is the biggest barrier for integration, and we never really think about that. The trauma response is happening for a reason, is something that's going on in your biology that you cannot stop. So let's stop shaming ourselves for IT and then turn to IT and see what that needs.

Then I think if you sit down with someone, you can kind of figure out what fragments are sticking out and what do those fragments mean? How am I going to fit them into this narrative of what happened? And then how am I going to fit this into a larger of my story? And I think, you know, you can see really directly where shame gets in the way. Because when you're talking about something that happened that you witness and you didn't even know the person, it's hard IT feels like, how am I going to fit this into my story? But the truth is that something really intense and meaningful happened to you as well.

And so how are you going to fit that into your larger story? What kind of meaning can you assign to that, right, doing a podcast, epo de, for example, using IT to talk about to your listeners about trauma and Normalize the response that a great way to assign meaning to this event that feels really out of control and meaningless once you'd do that and you may need to do that kind of a couple of times, typically what happens is that the intrusion starts to receive. You stop having those intense interest of memories. IT may come up right now and then when you have a reminder, but when IT does is .

a lot less intense. You know what? I know exactly what you're talking about because I have had an experience in my past that was extraordinary traumatic.

For those of you that listen to the mall Robin's podcast or read any of my books, you are very familiar with this past experience where fifteen years ago, my husband and I were about to lose everything. We were going bankrupt, I was drinking myself into the ground. We were fighting nonstop.

I could barely get out of bed. And when IT was happening, IT was trauma to zing. The anxiety was crushing.

The depression was crushing. The bills and the financial stress were crushing. The amount of stress in my marriage was crushing. And I couldn't talk about IT was like I was frozen. And even as we started to climb out of IT, dr.

AmErica thern, I couldn't talk about IT without getting choked up or feeling stressed out, but here's what I realized on hindsight. I have now told the story of that rock bottom moment, nearly losing everything, so many types. And i've allowed myself to feel the emotions of that moment so many times that I have integrated the story into my life.

I do talk about IT all the time, and I don't feel that traumatic trigger at all. I can access authentically what I felt like, but I don't feel the intensity of the emotions. So you're right, telling the story over and over and over again does help us process.

And there are a lot of you that have experiences that you have survived, that you have lived beyond, that you have moved through. But that emotional file and the ability to talk about IT and tell the story, there is a huge opportunity for you here. And I want you to really seriously consider what doctor mary Catherine is telling you.

So one of the thing that I loved is that you talked about this relational home, and how telling the story and feeling the emotion allow you to file those fractional files in the proper place. What are some things that people could do right now if this is resonant, if they want to lean in to the advice that you're offering and the expertise that are offering? Can you name some things that you would recommend that anyone listening could do right now?

Number one, take your shame and put IT visually closure ze visualized putting IT in a box and put IT on the highest shelf you can in your house. You can pick you up later. I am not going to try to take you away from you, but just try to put IT down for a couple of days because he is getting in the way IT will continue to get in the way in a way that will prevent healing.

The number one, take your shame, put IT in in a box far away. Number two, um I think that one of the the best things you can do here is try to make sure that that narrative part of the file fodder has all of the pieces have you talked about especially this is tRicky, especially when you when you go through an event with other people, you often don't narrow IT because IT happened and you all know what happened. But could you sit down and write out the events as if you were telling someone who wasn't there and had no idea what happened? Have you done that yet? Continue to do that if you've done that already.

Um you know maybe once a day, if you can stand IT just to get the narrative um straight because you're already having these interests es of thought, you might as well tell the story. The second thing is to try to connect the narrative with the feelings. What feelings come up, what feelings came up in the moment, what fragments seem to be sticking out? There will naturally be moments in the story where you feel something really intense.

And so what is that feeling? What is IT tied to in the rest of your life story? What kind of meaning does he Carry um and try to do that with someone else so you can feel through those things with someone who can be attuned to you and say things like, oh, I can imagine or I know you must have felt so helpless and I felt helpless before and that's that's terrible um then those those things can kind of help put the emotional fragments in the right place and then again, the last thing is just to you know what meaning are you're gonna sign this thing um what what importance does this have in your life? Did you give you some kind of message? What can you do with IT as you go on? Um how are you gonna ry that forward?

I could talk you forever and I feel like there's so much more to cover. Is there anything that top of mind free right now that you want to make sure everyone listening is taking away from this conversation with you?

Yes, if you're having a trauma response, um just know that you are not broken. The trauma response is an evolutionary adaptation and IT is there to keep us alive. Of course, IT causes distress and can become melted active over time, but its source is survival.

And so I think that's that's really critical. The second thing is that the trauma response is something we can work with. We have a lot more say over a nursie m.

We think so. We assume because we don't have control over that you know initial trauma response that we don't have control at all. But that's not true.

We can walk back some of these responses when they're getting in the way. And then the other things are about trigger one. I think we get the mistake that um that we are always conscious of our triggers.

We are not sometimes trigger, are um really kind of subterranean in the back of the brain and are not consciously connected. So it's really critical that we start, I think anyone, but especially if you're doing trauma aling treating your body as a bome ter, it's giving you data all the time. If you're feeling upset around a certain percent, that's something you should listen to because it's possible that there's kind of a buried trigger there.

As we talked about, trigger are a maybe a painful way, but a way that your brain is trying to get you to organize a memory that is not organize. So you know, we need to kind of look at them as opportunities rather than reasons to avoid something forever. And then the last thing is that not feeling is not a realistic goal.

Our memory folders have emotional content in them for a reason. If I wanted tell you about the most joyful day of my life, I would like to feel some of the joy. We don't question that when IT comes to happy memories. If I tell you about the morning that my father died, i'm going to feel some sadness because I pulled out a folder that has sad in IT. Our memory files are supposed to have emotion. And when we set as the goal, not feeling like we say, oh, I know that this is integrated when I don't feel anything, we've got that totally wrong, and we are asking our brain to do something that IT is not equipped do, nor what we wanted to.

One thing that I want to make sure that everybody heard, because I think this is so important and IT, would be easy to miss this nuance. And it's this you have set over and over that when you have one of these traumatic experiences, ces, these emotionally charged experiences, that your memory files get fractured. And when the files get fractured, they literally go into a queue in your brain, ready to be called fourth at any moment.

And one of the files isn't just your memory about what happened, it's your feelings and your emotions that you are feeling. And what i'm gathering, doctor mary Catherine, is that most people do not want to integrate the emotions around what happened, because that requires you to go back to the painful experience and allow all of those painful or scary emotions to come back up. And if i'm hearing you correctly, and I want you to confirm this, because I don't want anyone listening to miss this part, part of integration requires you to not only integrate the story of what happened, but to integrate and process all the feelings that came up for you.

And if you don't process all the feelings that came up for you, you cannot successfully integrate the term tic experience. And you will continue to have this retrimming and the retro matiz ation. I even know that's a work, but you're gona continue to have this be an issue in your life. Is that correct?

yes.

Did you hear that? Everybody, doctor mary Catherine said that. correct. Which means you're never going to be able to fully integrate traumatic experiences from your life unless you're willing to go there. And going there is going to require you to drop in to your body and your feelings and your emotions and to allow them to come up. Because right now, they're in q because they can be filed.

And if you do not do the work to drop into your emotions, you are going to continue to have this fragmented file and this past memory come up over and over and over again when you least expected. Ah you know, one of the things that I really love, not only about this conversation, but about this podcast in general, is that by sharing our stories with one another, I feel like you and I are walking each other home that we're helping each other heal. And so first of all, I just wanted thank you.

I so appreciate you being here with me today. Doctor mary Catherine mcdowell, thank you so much. Not only for your willingness to just jump on and help me process this and integrate what happened into the story of my life in a healthier way, and for also pulling away the shame and the conflict that I felt that I had this intense of an experience just watching something unfold. Yeah no.

I think I said at a couple times already, which is that the the trauma response is a proof of our survival. IT is not a sign of broken ess. We are not broken because we've been through trauma and have these symptoms. We are actually the unbroken that is the that the message of of the trauma response. And I think if we start there, then healing becomes possible.

So true. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you who and thank you for being on this metaphorical walk with me today. I can feel your arms around my shoulder. I can feel how much you're getting out of this.

And I cannot wait to hear how you put these very specific tools, research and science, to use in your own life and from the bottom of my heart. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you for being here and for listening to me and to doctor mary Katherine. As I proceed this, I hope that this not only helped you, but that this episode will be one that you share widely, so that IT helps people that you love to. And in case nobody else tells you, I wanted to be sure to tell you that I love you and I believe in you and your ability to create about life. Okay, i'll talk to in a few days.

I can't do bloopers on an episode like this, like I would be a first class as well if I were to do books. So here's what were going to do instead of blue bers. First of all, thank you.

I know you love the grouper. Thank you for listening all the way to the end. But in light of the topic, I want to just point you to another resource.

IT is a episode, episode thirty four. It's a, it's an episode entitled take control of your life, a tool kit for healing. And the episode goes even deeper and more in depth on the issue of trauma. I think that IT, I love you. I'll been in a few days.

Oh, and one more thing I know, this is not a, this is the legal language. You know what the lawyers, right? And what I need to read to you, this podcast is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes.

I'm just your friend. I am not a license therapies, and this pocket is not intended as a substitute for the advice of a physician, professional coach, psychotherapist or other qualified professional. Got IT good. I'll see in the next episode.

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