The Surprising Connection Between Adverse Childhood Experiences and Intergenerational Trauma

Foreign. I'd like to welcome everybody to today's workshop on intergenerational trauma. What is it? What are the effects and how do we break the cycle? I'm your host, Dr. Donnelly Snipes. I will start out by saying that we are talking about trauma. This is not going to be intensely processing trauma, but if you start feeling triggered in any sort of way, then it's important to reach out for help to a crisis. This is not counseling. This is simply an educational activity as we learn more about what intergenerational trauma is, whether you might have it, and what you might be able to do to start addressing it. So the focus for today is intergenerational trauma. We're going to talk about what trauma is. For those of you who haven't been with me for some of my other trauma presentations, we will go over that because I think it bears repeating, even if you've heard it before. What are the effects of trauma? What is attachment? How does trauma impact attachment? What is intergenerational trauma? And how do we break the cycle? Intergenerational trauma is trauma. So let's start out with what is trauma? Trauma can occur in all pieces of life. And it's important that we recognize that trauma is anything that happens that leaves us feeling unsafe and powerless. We can experience traumas and resolve our traumas and move on. We call that traumatic growth. Or we can experience traumas and get stuck. And when we get stuck, then we continue to feel unsafe and powerless in one or more areas of our life. Physical traumas. If you develop a physical health condition or an illness, if you have a heart attack, if you fall and break your leg, if something happens to you physically, that can be traumatic because it can dramatically change the trajectory of your life. And I encourage you, as we're going through these, if you've got paper handy to write down, what do you think you've experienced as far as traumas in these areas and have you resolved them? If so, great. That's awesome. Just put a little check mark by it. My daughter developed pots Postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome. Gosh, a few years ago, and she went from running a six and a half minute mile, running multiple miles per day, being in fabulous shape and enjoying exercise and life and hanging out with their donkeys, to being bedridden. And it took a long time before we got the right diagnosis and even longer. We're still trying to figure out what the best medication regime is for her and what the best treatment plan is for her. Because they still don't really know how treat pots. For her and for us as. As caregivers, that was traumatic. We didn't know what was wrong with her. She was passing out. She was. You know, her energy went into the crapper. There was a lot of stuff. And it was heartbreaking to see her struggle through this and feel completely powerless. We felt unsafe in some ways because we didn't know what was going on, and we didn't know what was going on with our little girl. And, you know, again, once we figured out what it was, we still felt powerless because they don't really know how to treat it yet. And that's just an example of a physical trauma. When, as. As I got older, I've developed rheumatoid arthri, rheumatoid arthritis, or osteoarthritis. I'm not sure which one it is. Probably osteo. Doesn't matter. My hands hurt. And things I used to love to do, like crocheting and playing the piano and gardening, can really cause problems. My grandfather developed Parkinson's disease as he got older, and he used to make the most amazing miniature dollhouse furniture. And the little drawers worked and it had little hinges. And I. It was just. The detail was amazing. But once the Parkinson's set in and he had the shakes, too bad he wasn't able to continue doing that. And that was his main hobby. He grew up in the early 1900s, or he was born in the early 1900s and ended up, because of the. The Great Depression, he wasn't able to continue school. So he dropped out of school at eighth grade. I believe his reading was never wonderful. He got by. He ended up becoming a lieutenant in the police force in the sixt. But as a result, he didn't have a lot of hobbies. He didn't enjoy reading. And again, as he got older, his vision went, and that was traumatic because it was like his body was working against him and he felt unsafe and powerless. These are things I want us to consider as we get older. We may experience some traumas, and they may not be catastrophic, like a heart attack, but they may be. Suddenly we realize we can't do things we used to love. And that can be a grieving process. Generally with trauma, there is a grieving process once you realize whatever happened when there's a trauma. And I think you can think about most any trauma, when you experience it, you lose something, whether it's a sense of safety, whether it's hopes, whether it's faith in other people, whether it's dreams that you had or something you really enjoyed. Interpersonal trauma. Now this is the one we typically think about that it's somebody does something to you or doesn't do something for you and you start to feel unsafe around other people. It may not be a physical assault. It could be they are being very passive aggressive and bad mouthing you and destroying your reputation. There's a lot of ways that people can be hurtful and hateful and cause us pain, cause us to feel unsafe. If you're constantly being trolled by somebody on social media, you can start to feel unsafe. If you get my point. In the workplace, you can experience trauma if somebody is being, if it's a hostile workplace, you can feel unsafe and powerless. You can also experience trauma if somebody that you're working with suddenly dies or gets fired. That can be traumatic. Or they come through and all of a sudden they're handing out pink slips and laying half the staff off. That's traumatic. And it makes people start to be suspect of other people. So every time we have a trauma, it impacts our perceptions of ourselves and the world. And, and we need to start developing an understanding of how that trauma impacted us as individuals. Cognitive trauma, when the way you think doesn't seem to work anymore, it's like this is the way it's always been. And I don't, you know, now you're telling me that that's not right at all. I don't know what to do with that. Environmental trauma is akin to natural disasters, house fires, something where your environment just radically changes, can be traumatic. And then spiritual trauma, and this is a little more esoteric, spirituality always is. But most of the time we talk about this as referring to our belief in a higher power, a governing energy that helps make sense of the universe, our connection to other people and the universe. If that shattered, then we may start feeling like we are very isolated and alone. So again, thinking about what types of traumas you've experienced, what types of traumas did your parents or your grandparents experience? And we'll. I'm jumping ahead a little bit, but kind of start thinking about that a little bit. I mentioned my grandfather and my grandmother and my husband's grandparents went through the Great Depression as well as the war and other things. They experienced a lot of traumatic events and, and they didn't come through that without having their beliefs about themselves and others. And the world changed some. And so we'll talk about that as we go through. Trauma impacts all pieces of life. And if you've been with me before you all know what I'm talking about here, think about a trauma that you've had. How did it impact you physically? Did it make it harder to sleep when you feel unsafe and powerless? Guess what? You're not going to get good quality sleep. How does your trauma. And it can be different for different traumas, but how does that impact you? When I found out that my mother had kidney cancer, that was traumatic. And obviously, you know, again, recognize that I was going to lose her, there was grief associated with it. It was traumatic. Did it impact my sleep? Well, no, not really. Did it impact my appetite? Yeah. Did it impact my energy levels? Oh, yeah, you know, because when I was awake, I was thinking about it or stressing about it cognitively or. Sorry, I missed interpersonally. When we experience trauma, when we're not sleeping well, when we don't have energy, we don't have a lot to give to interpersonal relationships. And we have typically have more difficulty being patient with others. Now. Some people will become irritable, other people become withdrawn, and they just, they don't have the energy, the care, the whatever to stand up for themselves. And so after a trauma, they sort of become very passive. And that is. Has its own repercussions cognitively. After a trauma, it changes how you think about yourself and the world and others based on what happened afterwards, what happened to you. And in this whatever the trauma was, were you safe? Did you have power? Did other people lose their safety and their power? A lot of times trauma promotes thinking in all or nothing terms. I'm either safe or I'm not. Trauma can also promote confusion. Again, questioning, quote, all the things that you've ever known environmentally, after we have a trauma, there are triggers associated with that trauma. There are triggers associated with wonderful things in our lives. But there are also now triggers associated with that trauma and being aware of those. So, you know, when you're in an environment that might be triggering your brain to go, okay, it's kind of reminding me of that bad time in my family. We are not super close. When, when my parents were alive, we would talk on holidays and stuff, but we weren't the family and we never were that talked, you know, multiple times a week or let alone multiple times a day. So whenever we got a phone call, it generally, when our phone rings, it's generally bad news. And I still have that stress reaction when the phone rings, it's like, oh, crap, what happened? What shoe dropped. And that is my schema saying based on prior experiences, this could be bad. And I have to tell myself there are a lot of other reasons the phone could be ringing, but it does. That's a trigger for me, for trauma. And spiritually, when you feel out of control, when you feel like things are unfair, when you feel like nothing you do, quote, unquote, using those extreme words, matters, it can promote or continue that feeling of hopeless, hopelessness and helplessness. So tell me a little bit if you want to share about how trauma impacts your life and not, you know, not a dissertation, just how does it impact you physically and how does it continue to impact you? How does it impact your relationships until it is resolved? Once we've resolved trauma, we come out theoretically stronger. It can be helpful to remember as we go through life that our trauma shaped our beliefs, shaped our feelings, shaped our experiences henceforth. And it doesn't mean it needs to continue to shape it shape our lives in a negative way. But we do need to be compassionate with ourselves. When we notice something that is causes us distress, we need to recognize, is this actually distressful? Or am I getting upset because of loud noises and surprises irrationally? Or does it have, does it come from something? And generally it comes from something. I'm the same way. Loud noises. Still, to this day, I tend to have a much stronger startle response as a result of my past and understanding that and being compassionate with myself instead of saying, oh, you're just, you shouldn't be getting upset over that, just why are you still doing this and getting angry about it? I have to accept that, all right, that's my nervous system trying to protect me, but no big deal. And I've gotten to the point where I still may startle easily, but I'm able to down regulate. I've strengthened that vagal tone so I can downregulate a lot more, correct quickly. And part of it's strengthening that vagal tone. And part of it is also feeling in my heart and knowing in my mind that I'm safe in my environment, which goes a long way to helping me quickly dispel those thoughts. So we've talked about what trauma is. Trauma is any event that leaves you feeling unsafe and powerless. And generally when that happens, there's also a loss that goes with it, whether it's a loss of stuff or dreams or hopes or whatever. So there's going to be an element of, of needing to grieve the world that you once knew as safe and, and change that schema in terms of attachment. Secure attachment develops when a caregiver shows consistency, attention, responsiveness, encouragement, and safety to their children. And we can develop secure attachment if we know how, if we developed it in childhood, or we learned somewhere along the way. We develop secure attachment in our adult relationships as well as with ourself. But it all starts with that caregiver. And when our primary caregiver or caregivers are unable to provide that for us, then we feel, guess what? Unsafe and powerless. And attachment and abandonment trauma is really at the core of a lot of different mental health and behavioral health issues. Secure attachment teaches us emotional intelligence. Kids don't know how to identify emotions. They don't know what they're feeling. If you ask a 3 year old, how do you feel? They're going to probably look at you like you've got three heads. Unless you've started to work with them on those feeling words or if they've seen it on TV or something. They may know some words, but they may not really know what's going on with them. And a, a consistently attentive, responsive caregiver is going to notice those feelings and notice the early warning signs. I've told you before about my son where there were certain behaviors that he would do. He'd become very. His attention span would get even shorter than normal and he'd bounce around from things and just become kind of restless. And that was an indication that, that he was getting ready to melt down. He was overwhelmed. There were other indications when he was sleepy or, you know, angry or, or whatever. But I had to help him. And caregivers have to help children learn. What is this feeling? I don't like it. But what is it? Is it fear? Is it anger? Is it grief? You know, there's a lot of words that they have to use, and we're not born knowing what, what they mean. Excitement, that's another one. So helping children develop these, this awareness of what is this feeling. A lot of people who go on to develop more difficult emotional disturbances in adolescence and adulthood, one of the things they never developed was any sort of emotional vocabulary. They don't know how they feel. They just feel ick or they feel fat, or they feel something that's not a feeling. And we see, you know, feeling fat is a common thing that people say when they have people who have eating disorders. And fat is not a feeling, it's a sensation, but it's not an emotion. So then we need to drill down and figure out what that means. The awareness of those feelings is the first step so it doesn't feel overwhelming. When I feel like this, I want to make it go away. But before we can make it go away, we got to know what it is. Okay? So that's fine. Children insecure attachment learn this. They also learn boundaries. Your child can be anxious and you're not. You've had 20 years of experiences, they've had two. So you have a lot more data with which to base your emotional reactions. And based on your data, you can help the child feel safer, but recognizing that they're anxious based on their perceptions, based on their knowledge, and that's where that boundary comes in, where we start teaching people and children. You can feel however you feel. If you feel afraid, I am here to help you feel safe. It doesn't mean that I feel afraid and. Or just because I'm angry and in a bad mood doesn't mean it's your fault and doesn't mean you need to be angry and in a bad mood. We have those boundaries, and it's okay to set boundaries. And in a lot of families where there's intergenerational trauma, the caregivers aren't aware of their own feelings, and they often are unable to identify and respect boundaries. It's not that they're trying to be aggressive or enmeshed or detached. They just don't have the skills. We'll get to why that is in a minute. Emotional intelligence teaches distress tolerance. I think we've all. If you've been around kids, we've seen times when they've gotten really overwhelmed or upset about something and they felt like they were spiraling and the caregiver was able to say, okay. Some caregivers, some kids prefer having a hug. Others, let's take some deep breaths. Others, let's go on a walk. Depending on the child's needs helps them learn skills that can help them tolerate the distress in a way that is responsive to that child. Not every child is going to want a hug when they're feeling out of control. That's. That's just not the way it is. And it's important for the caregiver to be responsive to that child's needs so they can learn what they need in order to feel like they can get through the feeling. They don't have to escape it. They don't have to shut it down. They can tolerate it. It sucks, but they can tolerate it. Emotional intelligence teaches communication skills because throughout this process, the caregiver is talking to the child, saying, it seems like you're starting to feel angry, or I get the sense that you're anxious about this. Do you want to talk about it? Let what can we do? Or what would help you feel safer so you don't feel as anxious right now? And the child responds most of the time to the caregiver and says, yes, this is how I feel or this is what I need. So it promotes that back and forth communication and it promotes problem solving. All of these help develop interpersonal skills where the child feels safe and recognizes boundaries. The difference between your feelings, your thoughts, your behaviors and mine. You know, I can have my boundaries, I can respect your boundaries. And how to communicate their thoughts, wants and needs. All that being said, how do you think caregiver trauma impacts their ability to form attachments with their children? Thinking about how trauma impacts the individual, somebody who is not sleeping well, somebody who has muscle tension, somebody who's hyper vigilant, somebody who is feeling like they can't trust or count on anybody, somebody who is exhausted, somebody who is again feeling unsafe and powerless. How does that impact their ability to be consistent, attentive, responsive, encouraging and safe for their child? It's a big deal. It significantly impacts their ability to be emotionally available. And we say emotionally available, but intrapsychically or whatever you want to say, these things impact the person's ability to be available to the child, to empathize with the child. If they're so overwhelmed with their own stuff, they may not notice or be able to empathize with what the child is going through. And I'm not criticizing, I'm just saying that's the way the body works. And until that caregiver can feel safe and empowered, they are going to be in fight or flee. When they're in fight or flee, they are not using their wise mind. They're acting out of their emotional mind. They're trying desperately to feel safe, which, you know, sort of precludes tea parties and playing Matchbox cars with kids because they're just too distracted. And denial is a big thing because caregivers who have attachment trauma, and again, I'm not dissing them, because caregivers, most of the time in intergenerational trauma, nobody realized that they were traumatized. It's just this is the way our family's always been. So how do I know that there's anything different? And that's important. A lot of people deny their impact on the child. They deny how much their stress, their grief, their depression, their whatever impacts their children. Does that mean we can't feel unhappy around our kids? Of course not. But it's important that we recognize that children, because they are dependent on us, they can't go to the grocery store, they can't take care of themselves. You know, live independent adult lives when they're children because they are physically dependent on us, they tend to be more hyper aware or more aware, intuitive, whatever word you want to use of how we feel. And when we are communicating, we're unsafe and we, we feel unsafe and powerless. Then the child goes, oh, crap. If adult caregiver can't even handle that, then I must too be unsafe and powerless. Intergenerational trauma is indirect trauma. It happened, you know, it could have happened with, you know, grandparents to parents who then pass it down to children. Okay, but it could have happened with your great, great, great, great, great grandparents and then got passed down Each generation. The in initial trauma often leads to abandonment fears in future generations. The initial trauma causes the person to feel unsafe and powerless. They raise the child in an environment. Communicating to the child. These things make you unsafe and powerless. They, because they feel unsafe and powerless, they are often less emotionally available to the child because they are just in their own distress. And the children, children pick up on this and they're like, I don't know, this is overwhelming. I don't know how to deal with it. And clearly caregiver doesn't either. Intergenerational trauma may not have the exact same behavioral manifestation throughout the generations. For example, if your great grandparent was an angry alcoholic, I mean, they were just when they drank, they were mean. Then your grandparents learned the phrase or learned the idea. Don't talk, don't trust, don't feel. Whatever we do, it's based on what the person with alcoholism, we'll just say alcoholic. It's not person first, but whatever it is, we're going to do what the alcoholic wants because that's the only safe thing. If we take them off, all hell's going to break loose. Okay, so grandparents grew up in that environment. Well, that may have caused them to develop complex post traumatic stress. They felt unsafe, they felt powerless. And with complex post traumatic stress, they felt an inability to escape from the dangerous or threatening situation. Which makes sense. I mean, kids can't escape most of the time. They're, they're not like, hey, I'm gonna go move in with auntie down the street. The grandparents develop that complex post traumatic stress, which I believe may manifest itself as codependency. If a co, a person who's codependent, is going to do whatever they need to do to try to fix the alcoholic, to try to stay safe and prevent fallout, to protect their siblings from it, they are going to learn that if this is going to stay in control, I've got to control it because caregiver isn't in control of anything right now. And codependency really manifests itself that way where there's fear of abandonment, a need for control, desire to try to fix the person. You know, they want to fix their caregiver because they don't want to have that responsibility, even if they're not thinking that way. An eight year old probably isn't articulating that all their mind, but they start developing codependent traits. Why do I have bpd? There again, you all know that I feel that complex post traumatic stress is generally a better diagnosis than borderline personality. Borderline personality is thinking in all or nothing terms. Well, that's how kids think. So yeah, it makes sense that the kid is going to think in all or nothing terms. But because of the trauma, because they felt unsafe and powerless and they were constantly in fight or flight, guess what? They didn't progress cognitively the same way that their peers did. They didn't have that luxury. So as adults, they often still respond especially to situation similar to the caregiver relationship with all or nothing thinking with extremes. You love me or you hate me. That's how the child perceived the alcoholic, you love me. Okay, we're safe. You hate me. And it probably isn't until much, much later that the child's able to see you love me. But when you drink, you're nasty. It's not that you hate me. And maybe with some therapy they can recognize that the alcoholic probably hates themselves, but that's a whole nother Freudian issue. So you have great grandparent, who's an angry alcoholic, teaches grandparent, don't talk, don't trust, don't feel you're in control because I'm not doing it. Okay? So the grandparent develops codependent or borderline behaviors that often manifest in all or none extremes splitting, you love me, you hate me. So then when grandparent has children, your parents, they learn that they need to walk on eggshells because if we tick off grandparent, it's, it's all or nothing. They're still responding in that fight or flight, all or nothing, love me, hate me dimension. They're still personalizing. Their inner child is really still in charge because their inner adult never had a chance to mature. As a result, your parent develops generalized anxiety and abandonment fears. They're walking on eggshells because one minute you love me, the next minute you may be telling me that I Need to move out if I don't like it or something. And so your parent starts perceiving people as unsafe and experiencing abandonment fears. So then they have you. And as a result, none of these caregivers in this scenario were able to be emotionally available, were able to form secure attachments. So now you have a child who is being raised by somebody who is insecurely attached to, who has abandonment fears, who is traumatized. They feel, they felt, since they were an infant, unsafe and powerless. How does that manifest in how they parent you? Are they dismissive? Are they enmeshed? Are they hypercritical? They may have picked up some of the codependent behaviors of grandparents. They may have picked up some of the addictive behaviors of alcoholism. There's a lot of different ways people cope with this anxiety and feel, feeling of unsafe, unsafeness and powerlessness. Think about yourself, think about your, your family. I know my, my grandparents and my husband's grandparents both lived through the Great Depression. And so for them growing up, food was always portioned, even once we were past that Great Depression, food was always portioned and there was always saving. There were behaviors that they learned based on that trauma that helped them survive then that they continue doing, even though they were unnecessary in the present context. So that gives you a little bit of an example of how even environmental things can alter what was going, what's going on. Think about what traumas your parents, grandparents and great grandparents had that have shaped your beliefs about the government, about other people, about yourself, about your ability to succeed. I can keep going, you know, but we learned our beliefs from our caregivers and our caregivers learned their, their beliefs from their caregivers and so on and so forth back through the generations. And that's helpful in some ways. We take the wisdom of old, as they say, but we need to be able to recognize that that was a different context, a different time, and check, validate whether it's still accurate in the current context. If you grew up in a chaotic family where there was mental illness or addiction, that alters your belief about what is safe a child. Thinking about children who grow up in these environments, they don't know who they can count on. The adults are. The people who are chronologically, adults may be acting more like 8 year olds and the children may be acting more like adults. So that teaches them really odd boundaries, teaches them codependent behaviors and may make it feel like because this has been going on for so many generations, that this is normal. I look at my husband's family and I look at my family, very, very, very different families, and, and his grandparents, and my grandparents both went through the Great Depression. They've had similar, somewhat similar experiences, but the way that they dealt with them altered things. And I. I guess I'll share some of my stuff. My grandfather was that angry alcoholic. He was in the war. He got injured, but I think there was more to it than that. Even before the war and, and after the war, he bounced around between jobs and stuff. Now, he always provided for the family. He usually had two or three jobs, but he had difficulty dealing with the stress. And I think a lot of his work was actually workaholism. He couldn't deal with sitting quietly. He couldn't deal with being with himself and his own thoughts. So he stayed busy. And when he wasn't busy, he was numbing it with alcohol. And that created an environment in which my grandmother was constantly trying to walk on eggshells and keep a lid on everything. And my mother and her brother were always wondering when the next shoe was going to drop, when was it going to get loud? My grandfather was never abusive physically, but he was. He was loud and he was angry, and apparently he was very scary when he'd get loud and angry. I never saw that he was past that. By the time I came into the picture, when my mother grew up and started dating, when people would get loud, my stepfather, when he would raise his, he would get upset about something and he would start ranting about it loudly. And it wasn't at her, it was just, you know, something the credit card company did or something, whatever. But that would trigger that response in her. And she would go in, her inner child would just come right back out and she would feel like that terrified child again when. And. And she felt that way in a lot of her relationships. So she was always struggling with abandonment anxiety. She never had that secure attachment. Their relationship was based on, you know, some conditions of worth and all those things. But I believe she never felt securely attached. And as a result, she struggled to model secure attachment and develop that in me. So then I developed my own issues with insecure attachment. But it's important to recognize that most of the time, caregivers are doing the best they can. And a lot of the time with intergenerational trauma is not overtly abusive. It could be communicating messages about how unsafe the world is. It may not even be attachment related. But they don't recognize that as traumatizing or dysfunctional because that's how they were raised. And that's where that intergenerational thing happens. We need to step back and go, what is it that we want to teach our kids and how is it that we can help them feel safe and empowered? And when we get down to treating it, I guess we'll be talking a little bit about healing yourself. Because children are super perceptive. If you don't feel safe, if you don't feel lovable, if you don't feel okay, and they pick up on that and then they start feeling unsafe, they feel like they need to fix you. They feel like they need to help you feel better because they need you to stay around. Poverty can be, as I, as I mentioned, can shape how people believe about what people believe about things. I've met people in the past who've said, you know, we're all one medical bill away from being homeless. I'm like, oh my gosh, that's kind of catastrophic thinking there. But that's what how they were raised. And maybe they experienced something similar. My husband's grant, one of my husband's grandparents had a heart attack and he was a plumber and he ended up losing his business because of the medical bills as a result of his heart attack because he didn't know how to manage the billing and all that stuff. He didn't realize there were things he could have done. But so they grew up recognizing how devastating just one medical bill or one severe medical incident could be. And it shaped how they thought about savings, how they thought about insurance, how they thought about whatever. My grandparents have had long term care insurance for decades now because of that. And long term care insurance is not cheap, but they've had that because of the fears that developed when my mother in law's father lost everything because of a heart attack. Parental and community beliefs that communicate a sense of helplessness and unsafeness. Now, I'm not saying it was traumatizing to me, but I remember growing up in the 70s and early 80s, which was right around the time that Adam Walsh was kidnapped and murdered. And that was the big thing. His father became the Unsolved Mysteries guy or whatever or some other show. Anyway, one of those. But that taught my mother it didn't even happen to her, but they saw it on the news and that was so terrifying and so scary that it radically shifted how she interacted with me when we were in the store, when we were in grocery stores, when we were, you know, out in public. And I mean, it traumatized the entire country, I think, and, and rightly so, I'm not saying it didn't. And that impacted how my husband and I dealt with our kids or treated our kids when we were in public, when we were in public and they were little before they were old enough to make good choices. And that's one of those messages that is passed down that's actually, you know, a good one, that our behavior and our thoughts were changed. Now, does that mean that all strangers are bad? Heck no. Does it mean that all people we know are safe? Heck no. And so it's important that we also recognize the context of what we're talking about and the big scheme of things. For some people, Native Americans were ripped from their families and sent to boarding schools way back when. And that has dramatically impacted their perception, and. And again, rightly so, of our government. Now, has our government evolved since then? And do they do the same things and are they as dangerous? Only you can make that decision for yourself based on your experiences and, you know, your family's experiences and your environment. But we do recognize that when little Johnny, who is, you know, was born in 2000, go. Goes to visit great great grandma who experienced those boarding schools, Little Johnny's going to hear the stories about that, and he's probably going to go say what? And it will alter how he thinks about the government to a certain extent. And it's important that we recognize and even reading history books can promote trauma. And, and I'm not saying reading history books is traumatizing, but when we read history books about some of the atrocities that have happened throughout different periods in. In history, we recognize how terrifying that must have been and how horrible people can be to each other. And it makes us step back and go wonder if that could happen today. Most kids don't give it a second thought. They're like, okay, this happened. It's in the past, moving on. But some children are in families that are still feeling unsafe and powerless as a result of the past and maybe even the present and getting a different message. So when they see that, they're like, yeah, I could see that happening. Yeah, that, that's. I could see it. Where the rest of the. The class may not being con. Cognizant and talking with our children. That's. That whole consistency and responsiveness is really important to figure out what messages they're getting. Since the original trauma alters all pieces of a person's life, it think back to great grandma physically during the war, Great grandpa was gone, you know, off fighting. So that was stressful and traumatic. She didn't know if he was going to come back or what, you know, like all military families. And prior to that, there was the Great Depression and the famine. So my grandparents and great grandparents went through a lot of things, went through a lot of stuff. And as a result, they may have had difficulty feeling safe and empowered and which made it difficult for them to have the energy to be present, that if they're in fight or flight, they're going to have difficulty being present. If they don't know how to turn that fight or flight off, which comes by being safe, then it's going to be important to help them figure this out. The interpersonal. Great grandparents interact with others in a certain way and teach grandparents, you know, this is how you interact with other people and grandparents interact with others in a similar way and teach parents, this is how you interact with others. Now, since children typically go to school and have a lot more access to media and social media than they did back in the 20s, there is a lot of buffering of that where they may. Current generations have had the experience, whether you call it benefit or not, whatever, they've had the experience of getting different inputs about how we should interact with one another. And that's helped them kind of form. Form their own independence. But there are still some of those messages in their, in their brains that they got when they were growing up about this is what we need to do. The traumatized person is consistently stressed as a result of the changes in all pieces of their life. Remember, if you're not sleeping well, you're going to have brain fog. You're going to have low energy. You're going to have difficulty managing and preventing unwanted thoughts. You're going to be more alert because you feel unsafe and powerless. You're going to be more alert to threats in the environment, and you're going to not notice, or at least not notice as much. The good things, the bunny rabbits and the rainbows and the flowers, you're going to notice the rabid dogs and the snakes and the whatever. That's your brain trying to keep you safe. And, and again, I know I've said it like 15 times. People have to feel safe. This impacts the child. When you have a caregiver. You know, I've already talked about how cognitively it impacts the child when you have a caregiver, or we'll say birth parent, because there can be, you know, the other parent, maybe male, maybe female, whatever, but the birth parent, whoever's got the kid in their uterus, even if they're not the traumatized one, it can affect the baby. If the birth parent is the One that's traumatized, then we know that their HPA axis, their stress response is already hyperactive, dysregulated. Well, so when they have an experience of stress, instead of being, you know, fine to being irritated, they go from being flat to being furious. The amount of neurotransmitters is also proportional. Hormone release is also proportional to produce that stronger reaction. Well, you've got this little peanut inside them that's getting flooded with these stress chemicals. So that little peanuts brain that is still just beginning to form already starts getting short circuited when the birth parent is not getting enough sleep or even if they're eating a good diet, if their body's not absorbing it because they're too stressed, that's going to impact their body's ability to create this little peanut and it's going to add additional stress. It's going to ramp up that stress response, that HPA axis more and it's going to ramp up the fetuses HPA axis more. We've actually seen that children who are born to caregivers who were stressed, chronically stressed throughout, or traumatized during their pregnancy tend to be more irritable, tend to have more high needs, tend to be fussier, if you will, and be more difficult to soothe when they get upset. Sound familiar? Okay, but if the person who's traumatized is not the birth parent, is not the one who has the little peanut in their uterus. Okay, well, how does that impact the child? Well, if I'm living with somebody who is hypervigilant, who's stressed out all the time, who's negative, who's constantly in this doom state, or who is not supportive because they're just so for clumped with their own stuff, I may feel unsupported. I may feel not necessarily in danger from the other person, but may not feel like I have the support that I need, which can increase my stress level and we see that there's a correlation. You know, trauma aside, in postpartum depression, the birth parent may develop postpartum depression as a result of hormone changes. But the non birth parent or caregiver also experiences hormone changes and experiences a lack of sleep, experiences increased stress, and has many of the same risk factors for postpartum depression. So it's important to recognize that anybody in the proximal environment, but especially the person that you're supposed to be able to count on or rely on, if they are feeling unsafe and powerless, it may impact you. And I say may because you may be able to reach out to other people. But it is important to recognize their impact once the child is born. During that initial stage of trust versus mistrust, it's important to recognize that the child, the infant, I mean, at this point, they can't even really control their own limbs. They can't feed themselves, they can't move. They're relying on you to keep them safe. And when they cry, they rely on you to meet their needs. When the caregiver meets their needs, wonderful. The child feels safe. When the caregiver does not meet their needs because the caregiver is overwhelmed with their own stuff, then the child starts perceiving the world as painful and dangerous and scary. Caregivers who have trauma often tend to have more issues or bouts with anger, anxiety, and even detachment, which when we talk about the stress response, we have fight, flee, fawn, freeze and forget about it. Or the other F word that YouTube won't let me say. But for some caregivers, they get to that point where they're just like, I, I can't, I can't even just put the kid in the, in the crib, let them cry it out, because I just can't. Again, the infant doesn't understand why. They're just like, I'm cold and nobody's given me a blankie. What gives? Which causes the child to not be able to develop that secure attachment, Their very first psychosocial milestone. Trust. Not so much as a older child, toddler, elementary school and on. They develop insecure attachment because that caregiver is emotionally and or physically unavailable. The caregiver may be physically present, but they're drunk, they're passed out, they are completely immersed in social media or gambling or something else where, you know, a bomb could go off behind them and they probably wouldn't notice, let alone the child needing something. And this is one of those things that we call adverse childhood experiences. When caregivers are unable to meet the needs of ch of the child and develop that secure attachment, it results in trauma and all of the aces. Adverse childhood experiences. When you look at them, they all represent a caregiver's inability to meet the child's needs and help the child feel safe and empowered. Mental illness in the family, in the household, addiction in the household, divorce or separation. That, and I'm not saying. And again with all of those, I'm not saying that people can, cannot grow up health healthy in an environment when that where that exists. Absolutely not. What I'm saying is that if those things are not controlled, if the caregivers mental illnesses and addictions are control. If the divorce is particularly nasty, then the child may fear abandonment. If the caregiver is abusive or neglectful, again, the kid's going, well, this isn't safe. I can't trust anybody and I can't trust the one person who brought me into this world. So what gives? The child starts developing threat schema. They start recognizing, hey, I'm not safe and I'm not powerless anywhere I go. The caregiver, based on their own traumas, teach the child, you're right, you're not safe and you're powerless. You can't control me, you can't control you and you can't control the world. Whatever caused my, my world to be so bleak? Some caregivers will go the opposite direction and become completely immeshed with their children. Helicopter parenting. The child is told what to think, what to do, what to feel. Constantly. The child doesn't have the ability to make their own choices. The caregivers so trying to, trying so hard to help the child stay safe, to help the child have the childhood that they wanted that the child kind of gets lost in the mix and recognizing, you know, what is it that your kid really wants to do, what is it that your kid can do and how disempowering it is when we're in mesh enmeshed with our children, when we don't give them the opportunity, opportunity to try and that those are the next two stages of Erickson's stages of development where the child needs to be able to take risks, to try new things and sometimes fail. But that's where safety is. They can come back to that safe, secure home base. The child perceives the world through the lens of the traumatized parent, at least until they can get older and into school and get some other perspectives. That's all they know. They're seeing, they're hearing their caregivers and their caregivers may not even be telling them these are the bad things, but they perceive their caregiver stress. They hear their caregivers talking, they hear what's on the news and all those other things. Kids can't, especially young children, can't differentiate what's going on on TV versus and what's going on right outside their door. They can't differentiate what's going on on TV and being repeated 17 million times versus something that, versus something that actually is ongoing. I remember after the 9, 11, you know, they kept showing the Twin Towers and I remember even watching it a couple of times, walking in, going again. And then I'M like, oh, no, that's just a replay. So imagine what a child is thinking when they walk in and they keep seeing this over and over again. It feels like, oh, my gosh, I better stay in the house because it's not safe out there. It's important for us to help the child process what they're seeing. Not to guard them from it and keep them, you know, in a bubble, but help them recognize this happened. It's awful. This is, you know, this happened 3,000 miles from where we live. For whatever it is, this did not happen next door. You are safe, you are empowered. Now let's talk about what you can do to stay safe and empowered. And that can open up a lot of discussions for people or for families to have about. All right, well, the landscape of the country or. Or the community has changed as a result of this. So what do we need to do after tornadoes come through or hurricanes come through, we step back and go, okay, well, what lessons can we learn from that so we can stay safer and be more empowered to endure these storms in the future? And generally, that means changing a lot of building codes. But the principle is still the same. Whether we're talking about how you interact with other people or how you interact with the weather. How do we break the cycle? Being mindful of all pieces of your life. The. In order to break the cycle, you need to know what's going on with you, because until you know that, it's going to be hard to fix anything else. You can try to communicate to your child. You're safe, you're powerful, you're loved, all these things. But if you don't feel it yourself, they may be like, well, okay, you tell me I am, but I'm just not getting it. I'm not feeling. I'm not feeling it. And it is possible to recover from while you are parenting. But that means being mindful, acknowledging, hey, I got upset when grandpa started yelling because it reminded me of something in the past when somebody else was yelling and scared me. It. You're not unsafe. Grandpa is not unsafe, but it just reminded me of something from my past, and that can be really helpful to a child to help them understand why you got upset without, you know, they don't need all the nitty gritty details, but to help them recognize, okay, you got upset, but there's no reason to feel unsafe. All right? For most kids, they're like, okay, fine, and they go off and do their thing. But being mindful of how you're feeling physically, whether you're getting enough sleep, whether you're feeling tense, whether you're hyper vigilant, all of these things are important. And if you are taking steps to address it, until you can recalibrate your stress response system, it's going to be hard to heal. Being mindful of your physical health is the first step. Being mindful of your relationships with yourself as well as others is important. Taking inventory of the things, the people in your life that are healthy, healthy relationships and the people in your life that may not be such healthy relationships. Recognizing that even healthy relationships typically aren't perfect. Identifying in your relationships behaviors that may trigger your past trauma. If somebody does this, fill in the blank, whatever that blank is for you. It reminds me of when this happened in the past and I get angry or I just, I had one cloth person I worked with that when they got triggered by their significant other, they would just leave. They're like, fine, whatever. And they, they'd get up, they'd leave, dinner, they'd walk out, they would. It was a very chaotic relationship, but that's how they grew up. And instead of engaging or even exploring why their reaction was so strong, they just got out of there, they fled. And that was a safe response when they were a child. Emotionally, recognizing how you feel, anger, anxiety, guilt, grief, you know, all of those unpleasant emotions, recognizing them and saying, okay, just like a smoke alarm tells me there might be a problem. This feeling is telling me there might be something going on, there might be a threat. But is there in this context at this time, acknowledging how you feel and accepting it non judgmentally, okay, I jumped out of my skin when that happened or I got all stressed out about that, okay, that's how you felt. And Hayes talks about, and we've talked about in other videos, dirty discomfort. When you start getting angry with yourself and rejecting yourself because or rejecting your feelings, then you're just creating a whole quagmire, radically accepting you feel how you feel because of all of your past experiences. Now what do I do with that feeling? Is it accurate in the present context? If so, what do I need to do to get safe? And if not, then how can I use my energy to best move toward my rich and meaningful life cognitively? And I've already talked about this some today, but the mnemonic I usually use is fitkat Facts. In this context at this time, it can be really helpful when you normally engage. Remember, the person who's experienced trauma, who's never felt safe, typically uses emotional reasoning. That's the reasoning children use. It's the reasoning that they use because they didn't learn how to get into their wise mind, tolerate distress, do all those things. So if you find yourself feeling anxious and then looking around to find some reason to be anxious, all right, I feel anxious. So there must be something fixing bad to happen. That is emotional reasoning. FitKat says, Let me look around. Well, nope, I don't see any evidence based on the facts in this context at this time that anything bad is going to happen. Now I'm probably going to get curious about what triggered my anxiety. You know, what did this remind me of? Why did I get stressed about this? Jumping to conclusions is another one that fitcat can be very helpful with. If you assume that you are going to, you know, bomb this job interview, that's jumping to conclusions. What are the facts in this context at this time? Are you prepared for the interview? Do have you rehearsed for the interview? Are. Is there any evidence that saying, yeah, you're gonna screw this up and the availability heuristic. And that's because trauma is so poignant. When we have things that remind us of times in our life that we felt really scared or really angry, those are going to be more prominent. Even if they only happen once or twice, they're going to be more prominent. So our brain is going to remind us when similar things happen in the present. Remember, 20 years ago when this happened, it was bad. FitKat says, let's look and see, based on the facts in this context at this time, is this, what's going on? Are my assumptions? Are my beliefs accurate? If I believe that flying on an airplane is dangerous? Okay, well, I've seen stories about an airplane crashing, so that's. That's scary, that's traumatic. In this context at this time, what are the facts? Let's look at the whole situation. Let's get the information about how many planes fly each day and don't crash. Let's get the information about how many people get into relationships that don't become abusive. Let's get information about the number of people who drink alcohol that don't become alcoholics. It happens. Finding alternate explanations is another way of dealing with things. In childhood, children personalize. Children take things and they say, you're angry. It must be my fault this bad thing happened. It must be my fault. And. Or you're angry, it's my responsibility to fix it. Well, in adulthood, a lot of people who grew up in chaotic environments, that's pretty much what they were taught the entire time until they moved out because the traumatized caregiver didn't know how to teach anything else. And as adults now, it's important to look back and look for alternate explanations. You're unhappy. Is it my job to. My. My first thought is it's my job to fix it, but are there alternate explanations Besides, it's my job. Is it your job when you're unhappy to address your feelings? Well, yeah. Is it somebody else's job to help you feel better? What are some other thoughts I could have besides it's my fault or it's my responsibility? And exceptions. If you start thinking in all or nothing terms, you love me or you hate me? All right, well, let's look at some middle area. Can I love you and hate you at the same time? Well, that's kind of difficult. I can love you and hate your behaviors. Okay, that's one. When we start talking about people who are unsafe, every time Tom drinks, he becomes enraged and unsafe. All right, well, is that true? All or nothing. Is it true that Tom, whenever he drinks, becomes, you know, a rageaholic? If so, then maybe Tom shouldn't be drinking. But are there exceptions? Maybe there was one time he got drunk and he got really loud and boisterous and nasty. That doesn't excuse his behavior. But we need to look and see based on the facts. Does this actually happen every single time? Or is it only some of the time? Or maybe only once, but it was bad, and it scared the snot out of me. Environmentally, we need to be aware. Well, and going back to cognitions, always tying our reactions and our beliefs back to what we've learned in the past and modifying those to be accurate in the present, as an adult, you have more power, you have more skills, you have more knowledge than you. You have more money than you did when you were eight. So the same situation, or seemingly the same situation that felt out of control and terrifying when you were 8 because dad was in a rage or mom was completely passed out or whatever that might. That. That was terrifying back then. Now that you're 28, you don't like it, but you do have the ability to take care of yourself, and it's recognizing and modifying our schema to. To not only reflect the present moment, but also reflect who we are with our skills and tools and knowledge that we've gained growing through trauma. Environmentally, being aware of your environment. And I know that sounds like I'm telling you to be hypervigilant, and I'm not, But being aware when there are things, Things in your environment that are going to make you more Vulnerable to stress. What we're talking about is eliminating triggers for of. Of your prior traumas. You know, let's, let's not just have those front and center, okay, that can be one of them. But also adding triggers in your environment that help you feel safe, that help you feel empowered, that help you remember what's important. And thinking about that, you can do that as a family, where you're creating basic, basically your own little sanctuary. Everybody has their little space that they can decorate or create so they feel safe. And then spiritually healing your sense of connection to the world. If you feel like you are the odd man out, nobody gets you, you're completely isolated. That can feel really scary for a lot of people. And your impact on others. Recognizing as you start to come out of that fight or flight haze, starting to recognize and become sensitive to the impact that you have on others and others have on you. So you can acknowledge, when you are building people up, you can also acknowledge, hey, you know, my attitude right now, my energy is really, you know, not good in this environment. Maybe I need to go take a time out, whatever it is. But understanding how that works and when you build other people up, they will build you up. Then heal the inner child. Once you kind of know you as an adult, start becoming aware of the beliefs of your inner child when you get triggered in the present and you do what you consider overreacting. All right, let's look at why that reaction was so strong. Probably coming from your inner child who didn't know how to manage those feelings. That's how they felt when something similar happened 20 years ago as an adult. Now you may be going, okay, that was a little excessive. But for that child, that reaction, that level of reaction was right on point, you know, that that kid was going, hello, something really bad. Somebody needs to fix this. Whereas an adult, you may be able to say, I can, I can step up and fix this. The child's terrified. You're anxious, scared. But it's important not to shut that down. It's important to recognize and kind of almost remember that child and what they looked like, what they felt like at that very moment, and provide to them what they didn't get. That sense of safety and security and empowerment. Letting that inner child know, nobody's going to hurt you anymore. It's safe, you're safe now. I've got you. That's what you wanted to hear from your caregivers, and they didn't provide it. Help the inner child feel safe and empowered by creating a secure attachment with Them consistently paying attention if they're. If you're feeling irritable, all right, it could be an adult thing that you're feeling irritable about, or it could be that inner child is feeling anxious that they're going to be abandoned, or something's triggering that past trauma. But being consistent in checking in with that inner child, maybe even developing a relationship with them, which is where we go down to attention. Spend time reconnecting with your younger self. What did you used to like to do? I know my daddy and I used to go out fishing all the time, so. And I haven't fished since he died. But paying attention to those parts of you that you started neglecting once you became an adult. Being responsive to that inner child, when that inner child is feeling anxious, when you're remembering stuff from childhood, instead of shutting it down, going, that's. You know, that's the past. Ignore the past. Put it on a shelf. Eventually you got to process it, or you're gonna have just, like, winter clothes end up piling up over the years, and you don't have any room in the closet. You ain't gonna have room in your closet. Being responsive, being encouraging. Responding to that child. And I know it's. It's very esoteric, but responding to that child that you see in the way that you wish your parents or caregivers would have responded is important. And accepting other people's unwillingness to change is really important. Your caregivers who went through that trauma may still not recognize the impact of trauma on their behaviors and their impact of their behaviors on you. Is it your job to get them to notice this? And in most cases, I. I feel pretty comfortable saying no, not really. You can assertively communicate to them how their behaviors have affected you if. If it's important in your therapeutic process. But they may not be willing to consider that trauma impacted them or that their behaviors impacted you. And if they're not willing to consider it, okay, that's their right. Boundaries. They have the right to their thoughts, their feelings, their. Their beliefs. It is important for us to heal ourselves, to forgive those who have caused the trauma. And before you, like, get all fired up, remember the way I use forgiveness doesn't mean saying it's okay. It means saying it happened. It can't be changed. And I've been using a lot of energy to hold on to this for years. I want to use my energy for something else. So I'm going to use my energy to figure out, okay, how do I stay safe and prevent it from Happening again. And any energy that's left over I can use towards my rich and meaningful life with my clients that I work with in group. We'll do a group on forgiveness and resentment. And I have them. I get a bunch of different landscaping rocks, the polished ones or whatever, the ones that have the soft edges and they're different sizes and I have them fill a bag with landscaping rocks. The bigger the resentment, the bigger the rock. Once they're finished doing that, I tell them, okay, now put it in the backpack that I've am providing you and you're going to carry it around and we're going to go on a walk. And granted that's only like a 20 minute experience, but it kind of drives it home that these resentments we're holding on to each one is like a weight that we're carrying with us and it takes energy to keep carrying it. Secure attachment with self and others is the next step. Developing that consistent awareness of yourself, being attentive and responsive, encouraging and safe in your interactions with yourself. That inner critic, you need to get on good terms with them sometimes they may have something good to say. But it's important that we start being treating ourselves as we need to be treated and then starting to try to do this with other people. Starting to try to be consistent and positive, attention and responsive to those around us, not excluding ourselves, but in addition to ourselves. Start learning how to take care of ourselves so we can be there for other people. Trauma causes a sense of unsafeness and powerlessness. Unresolved trauma means those feelings continue and are communicated to children. Breaking the cycle means increasing awareness of the patterns, healing the trauma, and developing a sense of personal power based on the facts. In this context, at this time, are there questions. It is necessary to remind yourself of? Things change. You can hear something and it sounds like a great idea. But change takes mindful attention and effort. Even learning a new skill like how to do motivational interviewing. I remember going to conferences thinking, oh my gosh, that will just do so well in treatment and looking forward to using it and then not doing it. So it is important to review things. Just like you review your notes in school. When something's important, review it, make sure you're doing it. In addiction recovery, we have relapse prevention plans. And one of those, one aspect of relapse prevention plans is reviewing that plan on a regular basis to make sure that you're doing the things that you need to do. Because a lot of times they represent a different way of thinking and reacting than what you've been doing for the past 20 years. So it's important to check in with yourself to make sure that you catch early warning signs of backsliding. If you start letting a little go here and a little go there, it's not long before you're sliding headlong down that slippery slope. Anxious attachment is a type of insecure attachment. Maria. You have anxious, avoidant and disorganized. Insecure attachment means the child doesn't believe or the person isn't believing that that other person is going to consistently be there. The anxious response is the fawning response, the child that cries, the child that tries to do whatever they need to do to prevent abandonment. The avoidant response is the child that's just plum given up. And they're like, you know what? I. I can't. Whenever I do something, it's the wrong thing. And it just, it doesn't seem like anything I do makes a difference. You're not safe. So I'm just gonna back away. How far back do we need to go to heal? Well, the first thing is recognizing your own trauma and where you learned that. But answering the questions of, you know, where did this come from? May require going back multiple generations. But just understanding how your parents thoughts, feelings, behaviors, the environment you grew up in, how that impacted you and how you're carrying that on. And I mean, obviously there are some things we get from our family that we want to pass on. They were good things. But also recognizing the ways that the. Your family of origin impaired your ability to be present and attentive for your, for your caregivers and how it shaped what you think, and then starting to check those beliefs that you were taught and you can break the cycle right there. You don't have to. Well, you're. If your parents don't want to fix themselves, if your grandparents don't want to fix your themselves, you know, that's okay, that's, that's their choice. But understanding where it came from and how it didn't just come from out of the blue, how you didn't just suddenly become. Whatever. And remember that a lot of people that are diagnosed in the US with personality disorders, I tend to think we over diagnose personality disorders in the US Often have complex post traumatic stress personality disorders by their very definition have to start. The behaviors have to start occurring when the person is a child or adolescent. So you know, think about why those behaviors might develop in childhood or adolescence. And a lot of times it's reaction to trauma. And then we need to go back and say, okay, well, is this trauma because of something that happened to the child? Trauma because of the caregivers being having an addiction or something else that started with that generation? Or is it, you know, trauma that's been passed down? But ultimately where you need to start is healing yourself and future generations and recognizing the impact of the past. Rejection sensitivity is an abandonment reaction. We are hypervigilant to indications that someone is going to abandon us. And that can occur when ch. Especially in children who've gotten a lot of, who've been abandoned or who've gotten a lot of criticism from other people and they felt rejected even if they had their physical needs met. Recognizing what rejection sensitivity is and that it's a symptom of insecure attachment. Working on, and, and I know it sounds trite, but working on your self esteem so you don't require other people's validation. Asking yourself, when somebody appears to be rejecting you, number one, are they rejecting me or are they rejecting my behaviors or my thoughts? Maybe they didn't like my opinion or we just don't have similar interests or something. And it's not that they're rejecting me as a human being, it's just, it's not a good match or they don't agree with me. So that's the first thing. Regardless if you are being rejected, you get, you don't get a job, somebody says they're not going to date you, you break up, whatever. Where there's actually an actual rejection out there, it's important to look at the relationship and look at that person person and ask yourself, you know, why is this person's acceptance and validation so freaking important to me? Why is it, you know, yeah, it hurts when you, when you break up, it sucks. It hurts when a friend, you lose a friend. But also recognizing that a lot of times when there's been rejection, at least 50% of it is their stuff and not taking the responsibility for everything. Like the child growing up in a chaotic environment where they were taught, you will be loved if you do all these things right. They became hyper vigilant because they were told they were only lovable if and, and starting to recognize that I'm lovable. And if you don't want to be part of my life, your loss. Much easier said than done. Much, much easier said than done. Don't get me wrong, I struggle with rejection rejection sensitivity myself. And I've had to work really hard over the years to be able to cope with different things. You know, not everybody is a good fit for me as Being their therapist and understanding that. Understanding that sometimes it doesn't mesh. Not everybody. I'm not everybody's cup of tea to be a friend with. You know, we have different interests or we're oil and water. Okay? You know, that doesn't mean they're a bad person or I'm a bad person. It means we just don't mix too well. So those are some of the things. And I've got a couple videos on rejection sensitivity that I would suggest. Releasing guilt and shame. Shame is a belief, and I've got videos on those, too. Adriana or Chuck, can you put the Ask doc Snipes the AI in the. In the notes, please? Releasing guilt. Guilt is anger at yourself. You're angry at yourself for something you are telling yourself you should have done or shouldn't have done. Just like forgiving other people, forgiving resentments. It's important to forgive yourself. Which means, again, we're not saying it's okay. We're saying, yeah, I screwed that up, and you feel bad about it. Okay? What can you learn from it so you don't do it again? When I. I remember one time. I'm really bad with dates. And I remember one time I called my father on the 25th of June, and I'm like, happy birthday, Daddy. And he's like, thanks, but it's not my birthday. I was off by a month. His birthday was May 25, and I knew that, but I just lost track of time. I felt horrible. I felt so guilty for not calling him on his birthday. What did I do? I made a note in my calendar. This was back before we had smartphones and all that sort of stuff in. In the dark ages. But I went through. And I started making sure that I noted it on my. On my daily planner so I wouldn't forget it again. And that's where we need to recognize. Is it doing me any good to use my energy to continue being angry and beating myself up for this mistake I made, or am I going to learn from it and move forward? People who are in recovery from addiction, they often have a lot of guilt about a lot of stuff that they did when they were in active addiction. And, yeah, they've got some amends to make. They need to learn how to not go into active addiction again. They need to use their energy to do that. But if they continue to hold on to their anger at themselves for their addiction, it often serves as a relapse trap because there's a voice in the back of their head going, you're a Screw up, Letting go of that. Saying, I made a bad decision, I'm going to make better decisions now, can be helpful. Shame is a sense of feeling unworthy and unlovable and examining where that comes from. A lot of times it's conditions of worth that you were raised with as a child. Exploring those, and I can't tell anybody what they should or should not be ashamed about, but exploring whether they are defective to their core, you know, that and. And that that's where that shame comes in. Or maybe they did a behavior that they feel guilty about and what do they need to do to address that? And then giving themselves credit when they start making positive changes instead of continuing to beat themselves up over it. Moving forward and recognizing the growth. Is it possible to overcome all of our triggers? No. You can learn how to deal with your triggers. You can become desensitized. You can reduce your sensitivity to a lot of your triggers, but they're still going to be there. I experienced a trauma when I was a child, a significant trauma. And over the years, I have recognized a lot of triggers in my environment that reminded me of that trauma. And I have processed them in a way that I recognize that these triggers in the present are not necessarily harmful. But there was one trigger that I experienced when we were trying to help my son find an apartment, and we drove through this apartment complex that looked just like the apartment that I lived in when this bad thing happened. And, I mean, that inner child came up, I started feeling, like, lightheaded. I hadn't desensitized to that particular trigger. So recognizing that some things are still going to be triggering, but you can reduce your reaction to them. Just like if you're afraid of spiders, you can go through what we call systematic desensitization and get to the point where you're not terrified of spiders all the time. You may not want to pick one up and make it your best friend, but you can get to the point where when you see one, you don't feel like you're going to faint. So, no, we can't get rid of our triggers, but we can become aware of them, and we can develop skills to cope with them. And we can take some of their power away as we start to recognize how they are not threatening in the present. Can we free ourselves fully from trauma, or is it for life? You're always going to have the memory. You can heal your stress response. You can heal your nervous system. You can heal a lot of the effects of trauma. You can process the trauma. So you move to A stage of acceptance. But it's always going to. There's always going to be a memory of it there. And. And again, just like the triggers in my environment, I've desensitized to most of them. But that one, oh, boy, that, that was a doozy. But I'd never tried to desensitize to it. It wasn't anything that crossed my mind. So being compassionate with yourself and understanding where your reactions are coming from and then looking at the facts in context can be very helpful. When parents tell you they love you and care for you, but they treat you badly, that creates what we call cognitive dissonance. You're saying one thing, but you're doing another thing. And a lot of times when caregivers or anybody is doing that, they're saying they love you and they're treating you badly. A lot of times they don't realize they're treating you badly. Either that's the way they've treated everybody, that's the way they've been treated. Or they don't realize they. That you perceive what they're doing as bad as. As harmful. So that can be part of it. Communicating what is problematic can be, if it's. If it's safe to do so, can be one step to addressing that. If you believe they don't know what they're doing, sometimes it's just the way they are. I have one relative who. She's just blunt, direct, sometimes, well, very critical. And that's just the way she's always been. And she's always going to be that way and just accepting that as who she is and having compassion for how dark it must be in her head to feel like she needs to behave that way. Now, the other, the third option, and I hate bringing it up, but I'm going to. Is the narcissistic parents who smile and tell you they love you and they will use you to whatever ends necessary to get what they want. And that is. That's psychological abuse. That's parent. Parentification. So there are a lot of different reasons that are. Yeah. Reasons why that dynamic might appear. And it's important to evaluate that situation. And it also creates dissonance in your own head because you're like, well, you're saying you love me, but then you're doing these things. So I'm confused. And for a child that just really messes with their brain, for an adult, we can step back and we can go, you say you love me, but you're doing these things. What do I need to do to stay safe in this relationship. If you're not willing to change your behaviors. It. Yes, schism in the family can cause intergenerational trauma. If you have, for example, grandparents that cut off parents and they say, no, we're not going to talk to you anymore, not only do parents feel rejected, but then grandparents or then the grandchildren or the children may feel rejected. They're like, well, why don't Grandma and Grandpa want to spend time with me? So yes, it can cause trauma. It definitely causes grief, and it can have a lot of. A lot of dynamics that are unanticipated when, when the schism is created. Alrighty, everybody. Have a wonderful day. Thank you for being here. I hope it was helpful to understand that, you know, your caregivers may not have been starting out healthy in the first place, and their caregivers may not have started out healthy. There was a trauma. There was something that happened somewhere along the way that may have started the snowball in motion. However, you can stop the avalanche. For cptsd, I really recommend a multimodal approach that involves physiologically healing the nervous system as well as addressing the cognitions that are created and developing skills like communication skills and emotional intelligence that may not have been learned or may have been gotten rusty in an unhealthy relationship. Have a great rest of your weekend.