Dr. Dawn-Elise Snipes explains how trauma rewires the brain to fixate on threats, creating pessimism and hypervigilance. She recommends grounding checks, a daily 20-minute practice noticing five positives for every negative, and journaling distressing thoughts in a separate 30-minute window to evaluate their accuracy.
Hey there, everybody, and welcome back to this video on trauma related symptoms. Today we're going to be talking about pessimism. Had to check my notes right there. Pessimism or negativity is a very common side effect or consequence of trauma. When people experience trauma, and I know you're going to get tired of hearing me say this in every single video, but it's that important. When people experience trauma, they feel what they feel unsafe and powerless? Well, when you feel unsafe and powerless, your body registers that as a threat. Makes sense. When you feel threatened, that will trigger your fight or flight response. That triggers anger or anxiety in you. When you experience trauma, all of the stimuli, all of the things associated with that trauma, like the place and maybe even the shirt you're wearing, or the people that are there, all of those things can serve as reminders or triggers for that trauma. Our brain is programmed, unfortunately, to remember and assign more weight or what we call more emotional valence to negative, distressful or painful experiences or stimuli. So our body assigns more strength to the trauma memory than it does of the happy memory of going to the park with your friend or going getting an A on a test in school as a result of those memories being stronger. Even if you don't have as many of them as you do happy memories, you may remember them more strongly and it may feel like everything is always threatening. And that's where that some of those cognitive distortions come in. But when you experience this, when your brain is so focused on remembering those threats to keep you prime, to keep you hyper vigilant, to keep you safe in the future, that you can't see the good things that are happening, that you can't really remember the happy times you've had, then it makes sense that you may start becoming more negative and pessimistic because you're viewing the world through glasses that just flash danger constantly. You know, think of wearing some of those new fangled glasses they keep talking about coming out with that have information overlaid on the lenses. And the lens is just telling you constantly you're in danger, there's a threat, there's a threat that could be a threat. It would be exhausting. And it would also again, prevent you from noticing some of the good things. And it could start to feel hopeless and helpless and dark and scary. How do we address it? Ultimately, it's about helping the person get grounded and be mindful in the moment and when they feel anxious, when they feel negative, to evaluate in this context at this time, am I safe? Am I empowered? Is there anything wrong? If they're safe and empowered, then the next step might be at this, in this context, at this time, what positive things can I notice? Yeah, there's going to be negative things. Life is never perfect. But it's important to force your brain to balance out those negatives. Like when you're walking through the, through the forest, if you notice a cottonmouth snake, which for those of you who don't know cottonmouths are poisonous, you notice the cottonmouth snake. Oh, that's scary. But to also notice the chipmunks and the squirrels and the bunny rabbits and the owls or whatever it is that you like to notice. For every stressful event that you experience or you notice, you're going to need to notice on average five happy events. That's how strong those memories are. I encourage people who believe that they are unnecessarily pessimistic to keep a log, keep a journal of those things. I encourage them to spend 20 minutes a day, that's all. The other 23 hours and 40 minutes, they can be as negative as they want. But 20 minutes a day set aside time to focus on the positive. What good happened today? What good did I do today? Anything that's positive, uplifting. Notice that during that 20 minutes and it's kind of like a workout for your mind. Just like you go to the gym, you're not going to lift for 12 hours, but if you go in and you lift for 20 minutes, you can get a really good workout in and it has long lasting effects. And they have found that people who spend that 20 minutes a day focusing on the positive, it really trains their brain to be more aware of the totality of the situation, the good and the bad, instead of just focusing on, on the negative. The other tip that I will give you if you're feeling really negative is to write it down on paper what you feel hopeless about, what you feel helpless about, what you feel angry about, what you feel scared about, whatever it is, write it down on paper as it comes up and put it in a box. And then 30 minutes a day, whenever you want to, not during your happy time, not during your happy 20 minutes, but 30 minutes a day you can set aside to go through those stressful thoughts that you had and process them and examine whether they are actually accurate in, in this context at this time. And if they are, what can you do about them? How can you use your energy to address them in a way that will help you move forward toward your rich and meaningful life?
