In this short monologue, the speaker explains that trauma is not the external event itself but the brain's learned response to that event, echoing Gabor Maté’s perspective. Recognizing this distinction offers hope because the brain’s adaptive mechanisms that created harmful responses can also be harnessed to develop healthier ones through neuroplasticity. The speaker introduces psychiatrist Jeffrey Schwartz’s four techniques—reframing, relabeling, revaluing, and refocusing—as practical ways to engage neuroplasticity. Using a personal story of losing a son named Mitch, the speaker illustrates how revaluing the experience (acknowledging the 19 years of joy and lessons) can shift the emotional narrative, preventing the brain from repeatedly reinforcing the trauma response. The overall message emphasizes that awareness of these processes is the first step toward breaking automatic, maladaptive patterns and shaping a healthier future.
Chapters
It's awareness. And Gabor Mate has written a lot about this where he says that the good news is that trauma is not what happened to us. It's the response that we've developed to what happened to us. That's good news. Because if it was the fact that my son had died or that I had been bombed in Iraq and all that stuff, if that was what actually created what was going on in my brain, then I would be hopeless because I can't go back in time and make that stuff not have happened. Right? But once you understand, once you're aware of what's happening in your brain and how brains work, right? And also to understand it's not a bad thing that your brain works that way. It's actually a good thing. Because the same process that automated all those harmful responses is the process you're going to use to automate better responses, that neuroplasticity process. And that neuroplasticity process works on repeated attention to something over something else. So once you decide that you can think about something different or in a different way, or you can revalue. My friend Jeffrey Schwartz, the psychiatrist who's done a lot of really amazing work on obsessive compulsive disorder, gives us these ideas of reframing and relabeling and revaluing and refocusing the things we've been through. Like. Like, okay, that. That event where I lost my son, that's the most devastating thing I've ever been through. And it will hopefully be the worst thing I've ever gone, I will ever go through. But it's not the only thing I've ever been through. And so I can take that loss of Mitch and I can say, you know what? I had him for 19 years. And during that 19 years, there were a lot of incredible, beautiful moments. There were things I learned from him. There were laughter, there was joy, there was happiness. There's this stuff that I learned from him that I can now use to help other people in my life, I can revalue some of the things that I feel and think about when I think about Mitch. And one of the things that a lot of us do is when we think about that person that we lost, or we think about that assault we went through, or we think about the thing that happened to us, the only thing we allow ourselves to think about is that particular event and what we felt around it and the way that it affected us. And because of that, what we're doing is engaging neuroplasticity to continue to automate that abnormal response that we have habituated. And we're basically making that response more robust in our brain. And so then the physiology that happens out of it is going to become more robust. And so being aware of that is the first step to say, you know what? If that response isn't helping me, it's not the trauma that's writing the story of my future.
