Understanding Your Pain: How Childhood Experiences Shape Your Life and Relationships (Episode #111)

Welcome to the Human Intimacy Podcast. Dr. Kevin Skinner with Marianne Michalis, licensed clinical social worker. Marianne, I want to begin this podcast by saying two things. One is, if you are listening, thank you. Number two, the topic today is heavy. And the reason why is we're going to be talking about personal pain points in our lives that are real, that maybe we're stuck with, maybe we feel depressed, maybe we feel like, I don't know where to go with this pain point. And so today we want to introduce How to work through and assess and understand your pain points. Marianne, your key thoughts as we introduce this topic.

I appreciate being here. And I appreciate that you prefaced our conversation today with it being heavy. And one of the primary things that we do as therapists is try to hold pain and try to help our clients access the pain that oftentimes is either raw and it's right there in their face and it's crushing and crippling, or that it's buried so, so deeply that we need a backhoe to really try to even access and excavate it. And so there's kind of two polar opposites, even when we're talking about pain. And then there might be like the numb or throbbing, maybe in the middle. But pain is— this might not be like, hey, today let's talk about pain. This sounds like a good idea and it'll be fun. It's not, but I think when we shine the light on some of these topics that are hard, it helps us recognize our humanity. And so my hope today is that for our viewers and listeners, that you will find maybe something that will be helpful to you to see yourself better and understand yourself a little bit better, maybe with a little more compassion.

And that's a great starting point with that compassion, because As we look, there's in our field, there's something called Adverse Childhood Experiences. And this is a short 10-item assessment. And interestingly, Marianne, a few years ago, I thought, I wonder what our clients that walk into our offices, I wonder what their ACE scores are. And so we started gathering research and data along with the other assessments on betrayal trauma and acting out behaviors. And as we gathered the data and I started looking at it, I think I had 750 who were betrayed partners and over 500 who had betrayed their partners complete this. And then I compared their ACE scores to the general population. And what I found is that betrayer and betrayed on average are scoring higher ACE scores than the general population by a significant number. Women more than men. But the interesting part of this to me was we are dealing with clients who've been betrayed or betraying. And they have higher trauma from their childhood. And I think it's important for us to say, okay, what do we do with that? These pain points of life that have been there, that maybe the coping strategy was my sexually acting out or drinking or doing something. But what do I do with this trauma that I feel internally?

Right. Before we jump into what do I do with it, I want to speak a little bit more about those ACEs because I remember when I first learned about it, I was, I was a little bit flabbergasted because the adverse childhood experience score or scale that we use, it can predict even lifespan. Like if these things have happened to you, it may impact your lifespan by 10 to 20 years. And there's a fascinating TED Talk by Nadine Burke Harris and her book, The Deepest Well. Where she dives into it. She was a doctor in a difficult part of California. And when she started looking at this and understanding the ACEs, she found that they could actually predict health problems that individuals have based on their zip code. So if you grew up in this neighborhood, we know that you probably got poverty, you probably got crime, you probably got gangs, there's probably addiction. There's all of these things. There may be some mental health. There's all these things just based on your zip code. That they could predict based on where you came from. And these are predictions of your heart disease, of your health, chronic health issues. Everything related to your health is actually, they found, related to these adverse childhood experiences. And so when we think, oh man, yeah, this happened to me, it's in the past, it's not a big deal. Actually, as you said, we have a there's a high correlation between what we struggle with based on what we experienced in our childhood. Because oftentimes when it's in our childhood, most of the time it's not always resolved.

And that's deep as well. Nadine Burke Harris, she in there in her book, she talks about how it influences both physical and mental health. So if I have those adverse childhood experiences, I'm more prone to mental health challenges of anxiety and depression. And then substance use disorders, you start to look down the path of what it does to the body. And trauma at any stage of life is usually, as Bessel van der Kolk says, stored in the body. And so I know that we have talked a lot about sexual betrayal, people who are acting out unwanted sexual behaviors, but we have to look at these, what we call key life events in our life, and understand how they influence where we're at today. Without doing that, it's like we didn't get here in a vacuum. I often say to my clients, there's always a story, and it's that story that we're trying to understand. And in a nonjudgmental way, I'm not trying to blame parents. There is no blame. It's just, this is our story. So some of the ACE questions, Marianne, just leading into some of them: Did I witness abuse? Did I experience abuse? Was there yelling, screaming, belittling, put-downs? Did my parents divorce? Was there substance use in our home? And then even more challenging, was there sexual abuse? Did I witness or did I experience sexual abuse?

And it's also incarceration of a family member.

Went to jail or prison. Yeah, that's right. And so we look at those 10 items, we say, okay, If I had those, what do I do? And the answer to that question, I think Nadine Burke Harris does a wonderful job of explaining kind of what's happening inside of the body, but really it's a transformation of finding a safe place again, or a safe place in your life as a starting point.

Yeah. I know from my own personal experience, when I first learned about ACEs, you know, I took the ACE the ACE score and I was like, oh yeah, I, yeah, no problem. You know, I like, my scores are so low. And then as I started doing some of my own work, it was like, oh, I didn't realize that that was actually abuse. Oh, I didn't realize that. And so it's interesting when we go back to like the things that we have to excavate that are maybe deeply buried versus where we actually think we are versus where we may have come from when we have somebody say, You know, this happens for me oftentimes with my clients. I'm assuming it does for you too, but my clients will be sharing something with me and I'll say, you realize that that's abuse. And my clients will say, what are you talking about? And it flips their whole world upside down to realize there's a name for this. And if we look through another lens, oh, that wasn't okay.

That's right.

But that was my normal. And I thought it was normal. I thought it was okay. And that can be really disconcerting. I think that's part of the tenderness of what we're talking about today is the things that as children, we probably couldn't prevent, that we predict that we were in a powerless state and things happen to us outside of our control and they impact our life now and they impact our health and our lifespan outcomes.

Yeah. And the interesting thing, and this will be how we will end at this today's podcast, but The hope of it, and that's what I want to leave here at the end, that there's, even if I had those adverse childhood experiences, there are things that I can do to mitigate those adverse childhood experiences or other life experiences. One of the challenges with the adverse childhood experience, that looks specifically within my family. What it doesn't take into account is things like being bullied, things that happen in friendships. That may have contributed to some of these early life events where I stopped trusting people? Because usually when we have adverse childhood experiences, we begin to hold back from people because we don't feel like they're trustworthy. When we work through our stuff, whether that is adverse childhood experiences that we've talked about or other life events, key life events, being bullied, being made fun of, Being in poverty, having an experience where you're made fun of because of your clothes or because of whatever it is that you did. Maybe I didn't do as well on a test. So one of those formative times, maybe my body developed different than other people. I remember many years ago talking with somebody who hormonally didn't have certain hormones in their body, so they didn't develop like their peers. And this individual felt less than, was always left out of, oh, if we're playing a sporting event or if we're doing something, they were always chosen last because they were this small scrawny person.

So what I'm hearing you say is we have the ACE score that we can look at, but it's not all-encompassing because we have attachment injuries. We have abandonment, we have belittling. And these questions are usually, you know, it talks about sexual abuse and it'll say by somebody 5 years older than you or not. And sometimes like, well, wait, it happened by somebody 2 years older than me. So it's still an injury, but it may not hit that scale that we're looking at. But nonetheless, these experiences that we have, they impact us and they leave a mark and they stay with us.

And what's interesting there, Marianne, when we transition from understanding our story— again, I don't believe that change occurs in our lives unless we have enough awareness and understanding of ourselves and our life experiences. And that's really what we're looking at with these key events of life. But as we begin to make a transition, let's say I have the awareness of these are my key events. And one of the assignments I typically will give my clients is I want you to go look at just key events. Another way to do that is something that we therapists do called a trauma egg. And, and I start to get the story. The transition is always, oh, so what do I do with this? I did have that experience where I was abused, or I had that experience where I was bullied. What do I do with it? And that's the beauty of what we're learning in therapy, of how we can help people work through traumatic experiences and traumatic memories that they may be stuck in.

When a client does that work and it's sitting there, I think one of the most powerful things is to have a witness. And that's where a therapist can sit with you and help you then process that pain. I'm seeing this trauma egg. I'm seeing everything, all of these traumatic events, and I can do the work, but if I don't have anywhere to talk about it, to make sense of it, to process it, I still kind of feel stuck with it. And that is where we need witnesses in our lives. We need safe people. That can say, yeah, that was really painful. That was so hard. And sit and allow the emotions to come out of us because we're unveiling something where there's a lot— it's kind of like when you open the oven and there's a whole bunch of steam that like comes out first before you can even see whatever it is that's in your oven.

And that's where therapy is so essential because sometimes I can have a friend, I can have a family member, but they may not be able to be with me in that experience. And that's That's why a seasoned professional or therapist who can be with us in that experience and hold it in a safe way for us, because there's certain times where I've been with clients and they just need an emotionally stable place to let out whatever that experience is. And here's the interesting thing, Marianne, when they do that, I have seen them, it's almost like their countenance changes when that pain, the hurt, the grief, the loss, all of that It's like, I've worked through it. I don't feel that pain anymore. And when we work through our stuff, and I say that in a very personal way, because when I was trained in doing EMDR and I did some of my own work related to an early memory where I remember being in a car, and I've shared this experience before, and seeing my parents in an intersection, my dad with another woman, that experience wasn't talked about for 35 years in my life. But the experience was stored in my body. There's no other way to describe it. And when I had certain feelings, I didn't know where they were coming from. But when I did the EMDR, I went back to that memory, and as I released the tension associated with that, there was initial— a weight on me, like I felt a gorilla was weighing me down. Why am I doing this? That feeling. And then the transition of I don't feel that weight anymore. What happened? That, Marianne, was a very real experience to me of seeing literally the feeling, the weight just, just come off in that memory.

One of the interesting things about the hippocampus is even though it's in charge of our memory, when we have traumatic events or we have stressful events, we have stress hormones that are released And they impair the hippocampus. So it actually doesn't record. So our body has the emotional memories, the sensory memories, but it does not have the context that it can pull up and say, oh, here's that scenario. When we have an adrenaline burst, which is usually related to fight or flight or freeze, when that shows up, that's where we may have a, like that light bulb moment where we have a smell, a sound, something like that. And so all of this is encoded. As you were talking about, you were carrying that for 35 years. Your body had all of the stress in that moment. You had— I can look back and here's this scene frozen in place. And sometimes we have that and sometimes we don't have that, depending on the neurochemistry that's going on in our body when we're experiencing these traumatic events. And so sometimes I'll have people say, you know, they'll present and I can say, boy, you sure look like you have all of these markers of having experienced something. They'll say, but I don't have any memory of it. So it must not have happened. I don't want to pretend or lie that, you know, that maybe it happened. I don't want to accuse anybody, but their body is screaming, yes, something happened, but they don't have the memory. So I want to really validate that as well.

And that can feel crazy making, like, did it, didn't it? I don't, I don't know whether this happened. And here's the interesting thing about it. Even in our traumatic memories, it still is how we respond to the experience itself that determines whether it's going to be stuck in our mind and body or whether we're going to learn how to release it. And the difference there, usually, at least in my experience, I didn't know what I didn't know until I knew it.

Right.

And then that memory came up and then I started talking about it. And then I did some of my own work around it and it loosened its power and it changed my life. And that's the part of, are we afraid to go into difficult experiences? Are we afraid to look at the past? And that's why you have to have a safe environment, Marianne, that allows you to really explore the past without feeling the fear of being in a safe enough place that I can go metaphorically run into the storms of life.

Can I ask you a couple questions about that, Dr. Skinner? So for 35 years you'd been carrying it, was the— because when you went into your EMDR training, you said, hey, here's something I want to work on. But I'm wondering, had you spoken about it before? Did you have words for it before? So were you like, how conscious were you of it?

The only time that came up was I was in Toronto, Canada, doing a trauma egg. And I'm doing this trauma egg, and they said, identify something from your childhood that was difficult or hard. I'm like, I had a good childhood, but I'll do the divorce. My parents divorced. And then next question was like, what are some of the memories that you have related to your parents' divorce? And the first one came up is the day that my mom and dad told me. And the second one was one that I had not thought about for 35 years. And there it was. It was just sitting right there. I'm like, Is that it? So I went home and fortunately, then a couple of weeks later, my mom and older brother were together and I said, hey, I got a question. I had this experience and I just asked them. I said, did this happen? And they said, yeah, that did happen.

And you even questioned, you questioned, did this even happen?

Yeah.

Here's this memory that showed up, but I don't know, is this even legit? Did this even happen?

I'm not sure. But from my perspective now, my brother's experience of that was a little bit different and my mom's experience was I mean, interestingly enough, we didn't go into town like we were gonna do that day. We went to my grandma and grandpa Skinner's, and my mom went in and she came out. We didn't talk about that for 35 years. It was not talked about. There was nothing that I could have said, okay, we had a conversation here about it. We never did. And so the only time we had that conversation was when I brought it up after the sitting there for 35+ years.

And I hear you talk about that and That is such a huge attachment wound. Attachment wound of seeing dad with somebody else, seeing mom get out of the car and then not being able to talk about it. So you're having this experience of, I don't even know what's happening to my world. My primary main attachment figure, something just exploded and we're pretending like nothing.

And interestingly enough, Marianne, I would not have identified it as you just said it. I would not have called it, I would not have called it an attachment wound. I would not have called it, at that time, there was not a language for that 8-year-old boy.

Does that fit for you now?

No, because I did the trauma work on it. I could not have told that story in any setting, maybe because of my own embarrassment, my own shame, my own feelings, but I would not have talked about that experience. Had I not done my own work.

Right.

Wouldn't have done it. And furthermore, I don't even think it would have been on my mind had I not been doing some of my own work.

Yeah, you'd been carrying all of the emotions around it.

That's right. In the background of my mind, the interpretation, how I interacted with people. If people didn't respond to me in a way that I anticipated, I could feel rejected. I could feel abandoned. I could feel like I didn't matter.

Which that's all attachment wounding, right?

Right. But you wouldn't have known it because I'm like, okay, I'm trying to function out here in this way, but you don't know what you don't know until you know it.

Or you recognize it, or somebody says something and it brings it to your awareness, which is the beauty, I think, and the complexity of our humanity.

We all have our own stuff is my point.

Yeah.

And so these events of life, when we say, hey, You know, this is hard. It's hard to go back into certain memories and explore. And yet, ironically, it has freed me. It literally, physically, emotionally, in so many ways, I feel different talking about the experience. I don't feel pain with that little boy's memory anymore.

Let me ask Dr. Skinner, how has that— how did that change, or how has that impacted your therapeutic approach.

I always say that we always have a story, but when you don't have your awareness of your own story, then you have a space that we might call blindness, a blind spot. I feel things, I experience things. So as an example, my wife may have done something and I could be triggered, and I might not even know why her response triggered me the way it did, but I felt that way. You can't ignore the things for too long without bumping into something. And you just might not know because you didn't know where it came from. But when you do your own work, you're starting to say, oh, I see, I see that feeling of being unimportant or like I don't matter. Oh, that's part of the story that I didn't realize that brought me to this space.

There's a concept that I've been reading about recently where it's talking about when we're betrayed or any of these experiences, these pain points that we're talking about, What it often does is it slices a knife right through to the core of these childhood wounds that we don't recognize. So if I'm betrayed, it hits my attachment and my needing to attach. And, and it can be an ending and also a beginning at that same space where I'm beginning to now have a really clear gift of, hey, there's work that needs to be done here. And when I say that's not the gift I ever wanted or I ever want to receive, But if we can look and say, wow, this is showing me with some really strong clarity that I have some work to do in this area, because I've got really deep wounding that tells me there's something in my past that needs to be resolved.

And as I have done work, similar work that I did on myself with other individuals, I've done work with individuals who also experienced their parents' divorce, or they experienced some childhood memories that were painful and difficult. And as I've done some therapeutic work, whether it's EMDR, eye movement desensitization and reprocessing, those who are trained in ART, accelerated resolution therapy, what I have found in my own work with doing EMDR is the memories associated with core beliefs, when they are worked on, worked through, the body changes, the tension in the body changes. And that's what Nadine Burke Harris, when she's talking about the solutions to adverse childhood experiences, some of those things are not complicated, but they're hard because when your body's stressed, Marianne, you don't sleep as well. Your body is under a regular state of stress because it has felt like it has to protect itself. So when the body can relax, it's going to sleep a little bit better. It's going to digest food more effectively or efficiently. And then you do other things like mild exercise, And you start doing mindful meditations, and what happens is the body begins to rejuvenate, feels stronger. And that's what the message is when we've had life traumas. These basic things— and I say basic— how are you sleeping? Are you getting healthy nutrition? Are you doing light or mild exercise, or regular exercise if you are used to exercise? And if so, can you feel the tension in your body leaving. That's one of my telltales is I'm starting to pay way more attention to my body and understanding what my body needs when I'm feeling overwhelmed. And that's just a self-awareness, not necessarily related to trauma, but just my attunement to my own body.

In her book, In the Deepest Well, I know she talks about that mitochondrial sheet. That is what these traumas, these adverse childhood experiences, they strip away. It's like a protective layering. And so these things that you're talking about, they actually help build up these sheaths. There was some research that they did looking at the impact of mindfulness, and they found when a group of people who had really high stress jobs, who weren't super happy for 8 weeks, when they practiced mindfulness for 8 weeks, they could see changes in their left prefrontal cortex. Like the structure started to change that left side of the prefrontal cortex. When we do mindfulness, it actually brings more happiness, more energy, more enthusiasm. And so as we're talking about, there are very specific things that we can do to even change our brain structure to help us feel better and to help rewire and re— change the circuitry of our brains, of how we're interacting. I think this really leads us to benevolent childhood experiences.

Yeah.

Okay. I think this is the part of hope because when I share this with my clients, it's kind of like, oh man, I'm doomed. I hit 9 or I hit 10 out of 10 of the ACEs. And we say, yes, but there are people who are incredibly resilient that don't match. And so like, well, hold on a second. How does it, how's this person still standing based on this data and what, what they found with the benevolent childhood experiences? It's another scale and it's kind of like the balance. And so even if I had these things happen, we can also look and say, who in your life cared about you? Where did you feel safe? What benevolent experiences did you have that counterbalanced that? And I know I've talked to you a lot about my grandmother. I had a grandmother, but I felt like I could go to my grandmother and find the nurturing, balancing support that I needed through some of my things. And, and so when we look at what we've experienced, also balanced against some of the other positive experiences, that has such a huge impact on how we are processing, how we are functioning, on our physical health of our body.

Yeah. And the, what they call the BCE. So ACEs, adverse childhood experiences, benevolent childhood experiences. The thing about that that I find some, at least from my perspective, is interesting. One person, one relationship can alter our perception of self. And interestingly enough, even a meaningful relationship today can help us heal wounds from the past. When we start looking at solutions, if I've had these difficult experiences and maybe I've been afraid to look at them, finding a safe therapist, finding that safe environment where you can do that kind of work in an environment where you can look at internally, very important part. And then the other part of it is doing the things for self-care that you take care of yourself, learning how to regulate your own mind and your own body, because that's more empowering. I believe in co-regulation, letting other people soothe and comfort us, but learning how to do that internally, like that mindfulness that you described, learning how to do a deep breathing and relax the body, going for a walk and appreciating the snow or the trees or the blossoms or whatever that is. When you start to appreciate the world and this, maybe it's a smell or there's something that you do that just calms your mind and your body, that is therapeutic regardless of life experiences. And I've had a very interesting experience recently as we get ready to close up today. One of the things that I've done is I have been going to a sauna and doing a cold plunge and It is such an interesting thing noticing the sauna for about 15 to 20 minutes and then going into the cold plunge. And when I leave where I go exercise, my entire body feels in a way that I have not felt. It's just like it's a calmness. My muscles relax in ways that I'm not used to feeling that way. It is my self-care. And so what is that to our listeners, to our viewers? What is it that you're doing to take care of your mind and your body? And are there things that are holding you back? And if there are, you don't have to stay there. There are solutions. There's always hope.

I think as we end today, Dr. Skinner, I always come with that compassionate space, but I also want to invite our listeners and viewers to start to look at your stories, start to even challenge your stories. As in your example, start to ask about our stories, because oftentimes the way that I perceive something that experience that I experienced, somebody else can give me a different perspective and either validate it. Or help me to see it in a different way that can help me shift. And I need to do that in a safe place. As we question our stories about our past, you know, you said you'd been carrying that for 35 years, but you hadn't ever really looked at it. All this work that you needed to do, but it has impacted how you see the world and how you interface with the world and other people. And that's incredibly powerful. We all have our work to do. And so can we give ourselves kindness and grace and a lot of space to say, hey, I'm going to step into something that might be a little bit painful that I haven't really thought about for a long time, but let me just check and see, is there anything around that that I need to unpack and do some work around? Because it might be impacting how I'm living my day and how I'm interacting with other people right now.

That's right. And Again, we have to pace ourselves. If it feels overwhelming, don't overwhelm yourself. Talk with a therapist if you find yourself like, I know something's there. Again, these are things that we highly recommend because, you know, this is a podcast. This can't replace mental health. This can't replace the help that you can get from a professional. But if you're gonna do the work, doing the work is actually freeing. It really is. And when I've been carrying a burden or a load sometimes for 35 years, there's things that when you do the work, you feel a difference. And that would be my invitation. Seek help, get yourself into a place where you are aware of those things that are holding you back, because they're going to hold you back, not just physically and emotionally, they're going to influence how you approach relationships. And my deepest desire is that individuals will be able to turn toward healthy relationships and build healthy relationships. And I think when we have unresolved stuff, it holds us back.

Thank you so much, Dr. Skinner. I've loved being part of this conversation. As always, I think there's so many other places we could continue the conversation, but I really appreciate being part of it today. Thank you.

All right. And thank you, Marianne. And to our listeners, you guys have a great week and we'll see you again soon.