Why Trauma Beliefs Are So Hard to Change

Hey there, everybody, and welcome back to this video. Today we're talking about why trauma beliefs are so hard to change. I'm your host, Dr. Donnelly Snipes. Remember, trauma is a situation that causes you to feel unsafe and powerless. That's the core feature of trauma. Trauma beliefs are those beliefs that are formed as a result of that experience to help you predict and. And prevent future unsafe situations. So if you are driving along and it's pouring down rain and you get into an accident, then you may form the trauma belief that it is unsafe to drive in the rain. Okay, well, to a certain extent, that's kind of true, but a lot of it is a matter of degrees. But it's important to recognize you formed that belief based on your experience, and now you hold it, and your brain says you don't want to get into another accident because it could be worse next time. So your brain's actually trying to protect you by holding on to that belief. When we have a trauma experience, it is emotionally powerful. And so what we call emotional salience, or the power of the emotion, makes it more or less difficult to get rid of things that don't have a lot of emotional power to them. They're easy to forget. Things that have a lot of emotional power, on the other hand, tend to stick around. So think of boulders versus pebbles. You can sweep pebbles out of the way or move, step over them or something, and you don't even notice. But a boulder, you know, that's kind of in your way, and it's harder to move. Unresolved anger is also a reason that we may have difficulty getting rid of trauma beliefs or changing trauma beliefs, because anger, remember, is a response to a threat, and trauma was a threat. It left us feeling unsafe and powerless. So we may have some anger that is unresolved, and we're afraid on a subconscious level, if we let go of those beliefs, we may be vulnerable. Now, anger has a lot of buddies. Anger is a kind of a umbrella term. Guilt is anger at yourself. You may have difficulty letting go of certain trauma beliefs because they are. You're angry at yourself for what happened. And right now, for whatever reason, you're afraid to let that go. You're afraid to let go of that guilt because. And I don't know what follows your because. But if you're afraid that if you let go of that guilt, fill in the blank. It can revolve around shame. And shame and guilt are very closely connected. Shame is anger at yourself, but shame has to do more with whom, who you are not what you did, guilt is about something you did. Shame is feeling bad. As a person. And sometimes we have difficulty letting go of trauma beliefs because we believe that we deserved it. For some reason, that shame tells us you're not a good person. So you deserve that bad thing to happen to you. And it's going to be important to process that and develop a different understanding of yourself as a human being, as a lovable human being. And grief. Now grief has a lot of emotions. Denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. But anger is a part of grief. And when we experience a trauma, sometimes it creates a whole cascade of losses in our life. And until we address those losses, until we feel safe and empowered in each one of those areas, our brain's going to hold on to that memory and go, yeah, but what about this over here? I need to keep you safe so that doesn't happen. Cognitive accommodation to create a sense of control or safety. Accommodation is a concept that Piaget put forth. And basically it means changing your understanding of the world to fit the data. And when you experience a trauma that doesn't compute, you're thinking to yourself, this isn't supposed to happen to me, this wasn't supposed to happen to me. Or I don't understand why this is happening to me. So the experience does not fit with your current understanding of the world. Therefore you change your understanding of the world to fit the experience. And that's your brain's way of kind of bringing that memory in and saying, come on in, join the, join the club. Unfortunately, since that memory is so strong, it tends to be a bully and downplay some of the non threatening memories and experiences. Changing or letting go of these trauma beliefs may threaten your perceived safety and stability. So if you tend to over generalize, it is never safe to drive in the rain, for example, or every time there's a thunderstorm, there's going to be or tornado. That's over. Generalization. And you may have had multiple experiences where driving in the rain or during a thunderstorm, bad things happened. So part of you started to say, well it seems like every time X happens, Y happens. But that's not actually accurate. That's based on some cognitive biases that we'll talk about and all or nothing thinking I'm either all good or all bad. It's important to acknowledge that not all similar situations will be dangerous. Thinking of exceptions, what are times that you were driving in the rain or riding with somebody who was driving in the rain that there was not a car accident? What are exceptions to the thunderstorm Rule, you know, how many times have you been through thunderstorms that nothing bad happened? And it's important to really start recognizing the facts. The traumatic events are going to seem a lot more frequent because they're bigger. And in your mind they're bigger, they're that bolder. But it's also important to recognize the times when it hasn't happened to get some balance. So consider in every situation when you're starting to have those trauma beliefs triggered, consider the facts in context, in this context, at this time. Does this trauma belief apply cognitive biases? I already brought those up a little bit. The confirmation bias hinders your ability to consider alternate perspectives. Confirmation bias means I am going to look for information that confirms my belief. I am going to, during a thunderstorm, during a rain, while we're driving, I'm going to look for people that got into wrecks and that will confirm my belief. Or during a thunderstorm, I'm going to get online and I'm going to look to see where the tornadoes are. I'm going to confirm my beliefs. And when we do that, we tend to do that to the exclusion of contradictory information. We tend to do that to the exclusion of data that would tell us, hey, you're safe. And that confirmation bias also goes along with what I was talking about on the last slide, that we tend to remember the traumatic events and not remember the non traumatic events. So when I'm thinking about thunderstorms, the thoughts that come to my mind are of all of the times there was something bad that happened, not of all the times that there wasn't. And that, that's that cognitive bias. My brain is confirming my expectation that it's going to be bad. Instead of looking at all of the data and really getting a big picture. We can also experience the confirmation bias by mind reading. When we mind read, we think that we know what somebody's thinking so we can confirm that they're angry with us by look, the look on their face. I just knew you were angry with me because I saw that look on your face. We're looking for something to confirm our expectation someone's going to be mad at us or somebody's going to be unsafe. Jumping to conclusions, same sort of thing. If you're anxious, worried that your significant other is cheating on you, you're probably going to look for information to support that. Maybe they are being withdrawn, maybe they are late coming home from work, maybe, you know, there's a lot of maybes, but each one of those things has a variety of different possible explanations. But when you're using the confirmation bias, the only explanation you're willing to accept is they're cheating on me. And personalization is another confirmation bias where that happened because I'm a bad person, that happened because of me. And looking at and, and a lot of times you do have a part in things. If you're driving in the rain and you get into a wreck, well, yeah, you played a part in it, you were driving, but it wasn't necessarily your friend fault. And it doesn't mean necessarily that every time you drive in the rain you're going to get into a car accident. The availability heuristic is the Boulder pebble I was talking about earlier. A lot of people, for example, think that flying is dangerous because when we hear about airplanes and flights on the television, on the news, we, we're only hearing about the crashes. We're not hearing about the 20, 30,000 flights a day that go off without a hitch. So the information about safe flights, we don't have it. The only information we have available to us is about the things that were newsworthy. And the hindsight bias can also cause us to want to hold on to some of those trauma memories. And that's very self explanatory. When you look back and you go I should have known or I shouldn't have done that and then that should starts to inform or that shouldn't starts to inform what you do in the future. So I shouldn't have driven in the rain. Therefore in the future I'm must not ever drive in the rain. And you're holding on to that belief that you formed. Now there is a kernel of truth sometimes in trauma beliefs, not always, but sometimes. And it's important to recognize that trauma beliefs tend to be extreme and use those all or nothing words or have extreme consequences to them. So I'm not saying that you're necessarily going to get rid of those trauma beliefs, but reframing them can be helpful. For example, if I drove in the rain and I got into an accident that was traumatic, that was scary, therefore, yes, it is more dangerous to drive in the rain than it is when it's not raining. And there are steps I can take in order to keep myself safer. So I'm learning from that experience that yeah, okay, maybe I didn't give enough credit to slippery roads. However, I'm not saying that when it rains it is never safe to drive and I can never go out when it's raining. So it's taking it and putting a practical perspective on it. If you will. Relationships can also cause us to have difficulty letting go of trauma bonds or trauma beliefs. I'm sorry. Identity and self concept may be altered by trauma, and changing these beliefs may feel inauthentic or scary. So if somebody says, I am a survivor, I am safe now, then there's a little voice inside them that may say, well, if I'm able to keep myself safe now, what does that mean about the past? Did I bring that on myself somehow? And so it's important to kind of silence that critic and consider things in context. When you were 4, you had much different skills than when you're 24. And in certain situations that are traumatic, what you're doing now is fine. And what you did back then didn't cause the trauma. You just happened to unfortunately experience it. If I'm worthwhile, why did they do this to me? Why did they abuse me? Why did they abandon me? Why did they. Whatever that can. People who have experienced trauma, especially abandonment, rejection, abuse, may really start to think of themselves as unlovable. And if they let go of that, then they totally shakes everything up because this person that did whatever it was to them, they've got to try to start understanding, well, how could you do that to a good person? You know, the only way your behavior makes sense is if I was a bad person. And if I'm not broken as a result of my trauma, why do people keep rejecting me? This is another one of those that people sometimes have a hard time letting go of because in their present, they are still adopting that victim stance. They're seeing themselves as broken, and they're assuming that other people are rejecting them because of their brokenness, because of whatever the trauma did to them. Instead of, it might just be you're not a good match. Or it could be that because you feel powerless, because you feel hopeless and helpless, you may be engaging in, for example, what we call codependent behaviors, and that can be off putting to other people. But it's not because you're a bad person. You want to focus on the behaviors, not the person. Additionally, people who've experienced trauma may surround themselves with people who share similar beliefs, which can create an echo chamber. I'm all for support groups, don't get me wrong. But being around people that share your belief of unsafeness and who support and reinforce that belief that you are unsafe, that you are powerless, that there's no hope, can be really exhausting. And the more that behavior is rein that belief is reinforced, the bigger that boulder grows. And because of your trauma, beliefs you may avoid situations that challenge those beliefs and can prevent what some call traumatic growth. Going back to driving in the rain again, you experienced a, an accident when you were driving in the rain. It was traumatic, it was terrifying. You've recovered. And until you're able to go out and at least ride with somebody who's driving in the rain again, it's going to be difficult to start changing that belief and restructuring it to be less extreme. Trauma related beliefs will be harder to change if you're not feeling safe and empowered. And so if you find that those trauma related beliefs are sticky, it's important to step back and go, how is this behavior still somehow protecting me? And is it accurate given the facts in the current context? Have compassion for yourself. When beliefs do not change quickly, recognizing their purpose, you can move a pebble out of the way really fast, but moving that boulder, you're only going to move it, you know, a centimeter at a time maybe. But recognizing every little bit of progress when you notice you're having trauma related beliefs, evaluate them based on the facts in the current context to decide their accuracy. And consider keeping a log of your trauma related beliefs to evaluate if they're decreasing in frequency or intensity. So those beliefs that you have that you recognize are related to trauma, whether it's about abandonment or rejection or whatever it is, keep a log of how frequently you have beliefs about that. And obviously each time you have that belief, you want to try to evaluate it, restructure it, and then eventually, hopefully, you stop having those beliefs so often, or when you do have them, they're not as sticky, you're like, no, that's not accurate in this context and it goes away. Hopefully. That has given you a few tools to understand trauma related beliefs and start coping with them.