Part 1: What is Trauma?

In this episode, I explore what trauma is and isn't. One thing is certain: it's not a buzzword. It's an important conversation centered around real experiences that deeply change us. It's not a matter to be diminished, dismissed or shamed. Instead, what we need is validation, compassion, education, and hope for healing. 

Transcript

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This is a podcast hosted by me, Jen Vrolman, where we talk about all of life: the good, the difficult, and sometimes the traumatic. Oftentimes I wonder if other people experience what I experience. In other words, I ask, am I really the only one? This is a space where we can feel more human and less alone as we navigate the beauty, the complexity, and the tragedy that life often throws our way. We're all in this together, so we might as well get a little bit honest and help each other through. Hi everybody. Welcome to episode 12. Today's episode is one of three in a series. That's pretty exciting. That's not something I've done before, but I am really looking forward to doing it. Today is all about trauma. Next time will be all about story work, and the time after that will be abuse. Three heavy topics, deep, wide, important topics. These are three really important parts of my life. These are three incredibly important things that I am passionate about, not just in writing and in educating, but also in providing a space to heal and grow. If you didn't know, I'm a storywork coach. I work one-on-one with clients right now. I'll tell you a little bit more about what story work is next time. But in order for us to understand what I would be working with people for, we have to understand trauma. So each of these three episodes, I could probably have five episodes on each one, but I will do my very best to bring to you a condensed version that you can listen to as you're walking or as you're doing errands, or maybe you're cleaning your house, maybe you're outside cleaning up for the spring. I know that I have leaves that still need to be cleaned up, and I have some bushes that need trim to make space for the greenery that's coming through. Maybe you're on your way to spring break or in the airplane or on the road. Wherever you find yourself, I'm just glad that you're here. And I hope that these episodes inform where you've been, where you are now, and where you'll go from here. When it comes to trauma, when it comes to my work, working one-on-one with people in story work, we have to have an idea of what it means to be traumatized. I have heard it said over the last five years in various trainings, various books that I've read, various podcasts, that really each of us are born into a world of traumatizing things. There's really none of us who can walk away saying, I have never experienced trauma. If that's you, if you use those words, I would like you to reconsider. And I hope that this episode will invite you to reconsider the stories of your life. Now, it is true that not everything is traumatic. We can't use that word for everything, but when can we use that word? When does it apply? Here's something that I like to think about. Well, I don't love to think about it. I don't mean that I get enjoyment from thinking about it. What I mean is the way that I'm made, the way that I'm wired, is to think deeply and meaningfully about things. I don't tend to just see things on the surface. I tend to see things that are deep and wide. I tend to read between the lines. I tend to think about topics of conversation that go past the weather and past, well, how was your job today? And into the places of, well, how did you feel about that? How did it impact you? And, you know, do you feel supported? Do you feel seen? Do you feel known? Do you feel loved here? What makes you sad? What makes you angry? So that's what I mean is that I enjoy it. Is that this idea of taking our understanding of trauma and putting some meat on the bones of what it is, that's what I enjoy. But I do just want to start off by saying that if anything in this episode is distressing to you, please pause, go away from this episode, be good and kind to your body, and then return whenever you're able. Also, I would like to say that if there's anything in here that you don't resonate with, throw it out. You don't have to take what I have to say. There are hundreds of voices that you get to learn from every day. If mine can help in any little way, I'm happy to be here. But just know that it's never a have to. You get a choice. Take what you need and you can throw the rest out. I want to give you a picture of what trauma is like. Do you remember when 9-11 happened? I remember being a freshman in high school, maybe a sophomore, and I was watching on TV as destruction occurred, right? There was the morning before September 11th, and then there was the hours after September 11th. And nothing was ever the same. I remember watching news coverage of the first responders and the helpers that came to the site, and the buildings, right, had crumbled and things were burning, and people were trying to help rescue any survivors. And over time they had to clear away the debris. And if you go to New York now, you'll see a memorial and a new building in its place. But immediately after 9-11, it wasn't a peaceful place to be. It was a site of destruction. Here's another picture. When my kids were younger, we took them to a church that met in an old school. Eventually, we left that old school, and our church bought a building in a different place because the school system was going to demolish the old school and replace it with a brand new school that would be built somewhere else. And my kids and I remember driving past that area that had the church that we went to in the old school. They had all these memories there, and so did I. And little by little, that church started to be deconstructed and the walls came down, and then it was just rubble. And then we would drive by and it was just a pile of dirt. And that was a really uncomfortable feeling. I recognized that feeling as grief. You know, it made us feel sad that the memories that we had were now a pile of rubble. It's not the same. And now, present day, 10 years later, we drive by that same spot, and there's nothing there but a big, grassy field. The dirt had been smoothed out, new grass had been planted, and it was as if a building was never there in the first place. These pictures remind me of trauma and the impact of trauma in my life, but also in each of our lives. First, there's a before, and then there's the bomb, the destruction, the demolition, the ending, the breaking, the leaving, whatever words you want to use for the event or the series of events. It happens to us, or we witness it happen, which is something that still happens to you, by the way. It's your eyes, it's your ears, it's your heart, it's your soul, it's your mind, it's still your body, it still happens to you. There's the event, and there's the damage. There's the debris, there's the impact. It changes our mind, it changes our body, and it changes our soul. It changes our relationships with ourselves, with others, and with God. We are changed. Trauma, the word trauma, literally means a wound, an injury. There's an injury, an event or a series of events have happened, and we are injured. Can you relate to that? I want you to consider the difference between PTSD and CPTSD. PTSD is post-traumatic stress disorder. Stress is what shows up in your body when a destructive event is happening. Post-traumatic stress disorder is what you develop after the stress is gone, after the event is gone, you develop PTSD because the stress never really goes away. It's stuck in some ways inside of your body. Complex post-traumatic stress disorder is different, obviously, by one word, complex. What makes it complex post-traumatic stress versus regular post-traumatic stress if there is a regular to it? The difference between the two is how many times an event happens. So for instance, my husband developed PTSD. There was a before and an after. He was called to go to war and he left for a whole year and then he returned home. That whole year changed him. It changed his mind, it changed his body, and it changed his soul. And he lived with symptoms because of the event. I, on the other hand, have CPTSD, complex post-traumatic stress. And it is from a lifetime of destructive relationships rooted in my childhood home with my family of origin that I still have to navigate at 40 years old. But rather than me having a one event, like I left, went away for a year, and then came back to something, mine is more like it's the air I breathed for years. It was the water I swam in. It was the culture that surrounded me. There was no escaping until I did when I was 20. But rather than it being a one-time event or several events in a row, it was a prolonged period of destructive relationships over 20 years of my life. So using these examples, I want to normalize something right off the bat about trauma. It can take years or decades for you, or for anyone else around you to begin to wonder, or to begin to put the puzzle pieces together about how or why or that something impacted you. I want to repeat it. It can take years or decades for you, or for anyone else to begin to wonder, or to begin to put the puzzle pieces together about how or why or that something impacted you. It is rare that those kinds of connections and that that kind of awareness is made hours, days, or months after something has happened. It is more likely that as time goes on, the impact becomes clearer. It is also more likely that as time goes on, that sadness and anger will begin to show up in ways that they haven't before. Or it will show up again and again in different ways. And people around you might say something like, What? That happened 15 years ago. How can you not be over that by now? These people don't understand trauma. I repeat, these people don't understand trauma. Anyone who says to you, I can't believe you're not over that by now, or anyone who says, get over it, these people do not understand trauma at all. They are not helpful people. And it would be wise for you to get some distance from them, especially in terms of processing stories or events that are harmful or that produce some kind of an activation in your body. These are not going to be helpful people to you. They are going to add insult to your injury, right? Trauma is an injury. They are going to add suffering already on top of suffering. And you do not need that. It can take years or decades for you to begin to put puzzle pieces together. My husband began to experience symptoms of his PTSD shortly after he returned from Iraq. He was having trouble sleeping, he was feeling more panicked and anxious, and he was having nightmares. But he didn't realize the connection until 10 years later. He knew that he had the symptoms, but he was just kind of living with the symptoms. He was surviving them because he had just survived a year of something extremely stressful. And his body and his mind were still trying to come back into equilibrium, but they weren't able to do that. And of course, he had some core narratives that he believed, which were a part of his family history and their religious history, which is, you know, our family doesn't struggle. We don't need help. We can pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps. We've got this. We have prayer and the Bible, and that's all we need. That is not all of what my husband needed. He did have faith in God, but he needed connection with his friends and he needed therapy. And he needed to understand what was happening to him. He needed trauma education. And so 10 years later, he and all of his friends, his veteran friends, are sitting around and one by one, they're all going to therapy. One by one, they're getting medicine. One by one, they're all receiving support for all of these symptoms. My husband finally took his turn and was diagnosed with PTSD. And from then on, he has had to learn to manage these symptoms. And he's had to learn new tools and new resources to be able to manage the symptoms that he still experiences. For me, I told you that I have complex post-traumatic stress. I also had symptoms when I left the destructive relationships of my family and dating relationships that weren't helpful to me or to my life when I was 20 years old. I had symptoms that something had happened to me. I had depression and anxiety and an eating disorder. I had trouble trusting in relationship. I needed a lot of reassurance about whether or not people really loved me. I didn't believe that they did, right? These are some of the symptoms of what I had and what I had to navigate with, but I didn't start making the connections to where those symptoms came from until 10 or 15 years after I had left my childhood home. Do you hear the similarity? I had started to meet people who were using words like trauma and abuse. I had never used those words before, but I had the symptoms. Like my life showed evidence, my body showed evidence, just like a site of destruction will show evidence that something had happened there. My body was a site of evidence from the inside out that something had happened. And when I started to lean into the people and the professionals who were talking about trauma and abuse and teaching me what that was, I began to realize, oh no, I am also traumatized. And then a little at a time, I began to be with professionals and to be with safe friends and in environments where I could process the stories and the events that were specifically traumatic to me. Trauma, and this is really important, trauma isn't the event itself. The event itself is not trauma. You could be in a car accident or have a terrible year at school, and you could not develop symptoms of PTSD. You could not be traumatized by that car accident or that terrible year at school because maybe you felt supported by a friend or by adults in your life or by administrators at the school or by the first responders at the car accident. Maybe you did not feel alone. Was it a hard time? Absolutely. Is it still going to be a difficult memory? For sure. But it may not have been traumatic for you. It may not have massively changed your mind, your body, and your soul. So what makes something traumatic is what happens inside of you when you experience something, something stressful and overwhelming. What makes it traumatic is that you are pushed beyond your capacity. Like it is so stressful and so overwhelming, and you feel so powerless to have been able to do anything to stop it. And this is a big one. You are utterly alone in it. The way that you process the event is that you were alone and that you felt completely alone and isolated. This is what makes something trauma. This is the injury that you were pushed beyond your capacity and had to bear the weight of something extremely heavy by yourself. I want to take a moment and take a deep breath because everything that I've said so far is serious. It's hard, and it could potentially be stirring up some feelings inside of you. And I want to honor that. So I want to take a pause and ask you just to take a few deep breaths. You could even pause this podcast if you need. For me, I know that I am recording this podcast and I am in some ways holding my breath. And so I am practicing right now, taking deep breaths and recentering myself. Trauma changes us. I am not a neuroscientist, but I have spent the last 10 years learning about trauma. I have spent the last 10 years reading, listening, learning, watching, going to trauma therapy, receiving EMDR, going to the Allender Center and receiving their workshops and all three levels of their narrative-focused trauma care training program. I have been learning. What I can tell you from my professional experience and also from my personal experience as a survivor of trauma and abuse is that you are not the same. Your brain changes. Your body changes. Your nervous system changes. This is not a weakness. This is a result of an injury. It is not because of an identity issue or a character flaw. It is the natural consequence of difficult things in this life. This is how our brains and our bodies are made. And so I want to read a few outside voices, a few people that I have learned from. I want to read some excerpts from their book. And I just want you to hear some more about trauma, what it is, and the impact that it has. First, Judith Herman. Judith Herman wrote a book that I read several years ago. In fact, I believe that Judith Herman's book is the very first book that I read that was trauma-related. Her book is called Trauma and Recovery. I want to read a little bit from her, from her very wise voice. Traumatic events call into question basic human relationships. This is Judith Herman's words. They breach the attachments of family, friendship, love, and community. They shatter the construction of the self that is formed and sustained in relationship to others. They undermine the belief systems that give meaning to human experience. They violate the victim's faith in a natural or divine order, and they cast the victim into a state of existential crisis. The damage to relational life is not a secondary effect of trauma. Traumatic events have primary effects not only on your psychological structures of the self, but on the systems of attachment and meaning that link individual and community. Friends, here's Professional Voice Number One, Judith Herman, telling you that trauma shatters our sense of self, our relationships, and our sense of meaning and our faith. It shakes us to our core. It changes our minds' structures, our psychological structures, and it changes our bodies' structures, and it changes the way that we show up and the way that we show up in relationships. Relationship to other people and to ourselves. I want to give you another snippet from another book, Bessel Vanderkolk. His book is probably the second book that I read, The Body Keeps the Score, that greatly informed me about my brain, my body, and what happens in the event that I have experienced something traumatic. Here's what Bessel Vanderkolk has to say. The most common response to distress is to seek out people that we like and we trust to help us and give us the courage to go on. We may also calm down by engaging in physical activity, biking, or going to the gym. We start learning these ways of regulating our feelings from the first moment that someone feeds us when we're hungry, or covers us when we're cold, or rocks us to sleep when we're hurt. But if no one has ever looked at you with loving eyes or broken out in a smile when they see you, if no one has rushed to help you, but instead said, Stop crying, I'll give you something to cry about, then you have to discover other ways of taking care of yourself. In those moments, you are likely to experiment with anything drugs, alcohol, binge eating, cutting, anything that will offer you some kind of relief. Trauma can be an event, right? Like 9-11 or a car accident or any other moment, my husband being called to go to war. Those are big T traumas. Those are traumas that often we will look at other people and say, yeah, of course, that has impacted you. But there's also another category of trauma that are little T traumas. And the little T traumas, I would like to say, are many. These are moments that are yours, moments that you experienced. Moments where, much like what Bessel Vanderkock said, you were left without something that you should have received. Right? Maybe a group of friends made fun of you in school and nobody stuck up for you. And you were left in that moment utterly alone and overwhelmed with the power of the words spoken over you. And you carry the truth of those words with you for the rest of your life. That's trauma. Maybe you had a parent who very rarely, if ever, said, I love you or I'm proud of you. And maybe you have a sibling who says, Well, that's just not the way that dad is. He's just not lovey-dovey like that, right? And you go through your life thinking, oh yeah, well, I guess I needed too much. I guess, you know, I don't really need somebody to say I love you, or I guess I don't really need somebody to say I'm proud of you. But maybe as you get older, you realize that that left a core hole in your identity. And it left questions about your lovability and your worth and your talent. And maybe now you're 25, 30, 35, or 40, and you're still asking the question: am I lovable? Am I loved? Is someone proud of me? Am I talented? Does what I have to offer the world matter? This is trauma. I want to read one more from another voice that I deeply trust, Andi Kolber. This is from her book, Try Softer. She says, as a trauma-informed therapist, I don't consider stories to be abstract concepts or ideas, but instead, I consider stories to be the neurobiological framework through which we experience life, for better or worse. Simply put, stories, or the series of events, emotions, sensations, ideas, and relationships we've experienced are held in our minds and bodies, and they affect how we see the world. The templates that some of us live from confirm that we were relatively safe and loved, and though we are imperfect, we are still capable. But others of us have been hardwired through our experiences to believe that we are not enough or that we're shameful, unlovable, or any number of other untruths. Do you see what's happening here? Do you see that events change us? Do you see that, and I'm sorry that I keep coming back to a car accident, and I am equally as sorry if this is triggering to you. Again, please step away and take a deep breath if this is not helpful to you. But when I think about a car accident, I think about the event itself and the shattering that happens. And then when you get back into a car the next time, how panicked you might feel, how overwhelmed. And to that, I would say, of course. Of course, you just experienced something terrifying, no matter if it was a fender bender or a completely disastrous car accident. What matters is that you feel scared to be back in that car. And that makes so much sense because your brain and your body have been changed by that event. And now you are left with the consequences, right? And the impact of what happened. And so maybe you have had to get some help and support. Maybe you have had to get some medication to temper down the panic and the anxiety. Maybe you've had to reach out to a safe friend and say, I need you to be in the car with me. I don't think I can do this by myself. Of course, of course, you couldn't. You have to learn and grow and heal. And that makes sense that you would have to do that. And the same is true for traumatic events that are relationships, right? And now we're on the grounds of abuse. And that will come later in another episode. But what I want to say is that relationships that are deeply harmful to us are moments that are deeply harmful where we are traumatized, are the moments when we feel utterly alone and we are changed. And it makes it difficult for us to enter into the next relationship open and trusting, because now we see with the glass half empty, and now we struggle with trust, and now we struggle with being in a relationship and whether or not it's a good thing for us. This is complicated. This is complex. This is trauma. Sometimes we make life way too simple. There are some simple things about life: making coffee in the morning and watching a sunrise or a sunset, taking a walk, doing something that we love with somebody that we love. But life is way more complex than that. The way that we interact with each other has the power to heal or harm. And when we have been harmed, it is a complex process to heal from that harm. First, to be able to name the harm and then to be able to heal from that harm. This is not easy. Is there any hope? All of this talk about trauma and all of this talk about the fact that it could be 10 to 15 years before we start to put the puzzle pieces together. And it could potentially be 10 or 15 years later after that that we're healing and growing and using the tools and resources that we've picked up along the way. This is a really slow process and that can be very frustrating. Is there any hope? And the answer to that is absolutely. The answer to that is in the word neuroplasticity. That's a word that I've had to use and hang on to in the last five years. Our brains can change, our brains can heal, our brains can grow, our bodies can heal, our bodies can grow, our relationships can heal, our relationships can grow. They can and they do. And yes, it takes time, and yes, it takes effort. Time is not the only thing. Time does not heal all wounds. Time, coupled with safe people and good work and professional help will heal our wounds. If you grew up in a religious tradition that told you that Jesus is all you need and that prayer and the Bible is all you need, please let me be the first to tell you that I am a woman of faith. I believe in God. I believe in the love of Jesus, and the Bible and prayer is not all you need. Sometimes you need a good, safe friend. Sometimes you need a trauma therapist. Sometimes you need to go to the doctor. Sometimes you need medicine. Sometimes you need EMDR. Sometimes you need story work. Sometimes you need to go to yoga. Sometimes you need to exercise. Sometimes you need to eat healthier foods. Sometimes the Bible and prayer is not enough. Please hear me. Our brains and our bodies are beautiful and complex and mysterious. And there are good things that happen in our life that lead us to joy. And then there are things that happen to us that wound us, that injure us. And we need some help and we need some support. And it doesn't make us weak. It just makes us human. This is just what life does. And in the moments when there have been traumatic experiences and you are suffering the consequences, I would like to read Adam Young's words to you from his book, Make Sense of Your Story. This is what Adam Young says. Here's the really good news. When your nervous system is sufficiently supported by another settled, wise nervous system, which means another human being offering witness and presence, then your nervous system will heal. Your wounds will heal naturally when the environment is right. The right environment for healing is the empathetic presence of another person. Doesn't that make so much sense what Adam Young says? Doesn't that make so much sense what neuroscience has to say about our brains and our bodies? If trauma happens because we feel utterly alone and we are utterly alone, then healing happens when we realize we are not alone anymore. This, friends, is where I want to offer you the single most important gift that story work and healing from trauma has given to me. This is what all of this work has led me to. I turned toward myself and I was able to offer myself kindness and compassion and curiosity for all of the injuries that I have experienced in my life to my brain, to my body, to my mind, to my soul, to my identity, to my relationships. And I have learned how to turn toward those parts of myself and those stories and offer compassion and curiosity and understanding and love. And I have come to understand those stories as injuries and not as flaws in me. And as a result, the healing and the freedom that is in my life today is more than I have ever experienced in my entire life. Does that mean I've arrived? Does that mean that I am fully healed and I have nothing left to learn? The answer to that is hell no. The answer to that is no, a strong no. I am both healing and healed at the same time. It is an ongoing process. I will continue to have my heart and my mind and my soul open to learning, to growing, and to engaging stories. Because you know that life goes on. I can't escape difficulty. I can't escape trauma. There are certain things that I can do to try to set myself up to be in relationships that aren't traumatic. But at the end of the day, at the end of a month, at the end of a year, I don't have control over everything. And so the good things that come my way, I am learning to lean into them and to let them fill my life and to let that goodness heal me too. I'm also learning I have people, I have places, I have resources that I can lean into when life gets really difficult and really hard. And in the event that I experience something traumatic, again, I know where to turn. And I know especially not to turn on myself. I know to stay with myself, to offer kindness and compassion to myself, and to seek out places that will also offer kindness and compassion to my mind, my body, and my soul in whatever method is helpful. Friends, trauma does not get the last word. The injuries that we have suffered in our life do not get the last word. Our brains can change, our bodies can change, we can heal and grow. The Allender Center has coined a phrase, and they say that we believe healing from the deepest wounds is possible. And I do too. And I hope that that's what you hear at the end of this episode. And I hope that as you're able to learn and grow, and maybe even this episode has caused you to consider whether or not something is traumatic in your life, I would ask you to consider therapy, a local therapist. Ask your friends for ones that they recommend. I would ask you to consider EMDR. Not everything that worked for me will work for everybody else, but maybe it will. Maybe there is something from my path that will help you on your path. And also if story work is something that you are interested in, I can also point you to a directory full of story work professionals if I'm not the one for you. But what I want to say, and what I'm trying to say, is your brain and your body can heal. Trauma doesn't get the last word. And there are resources and people who are ready and waiting to be with you. You do not have to be alone one minute longer.