Dr. Karol (Karol) Darsa, a trauma psychologist with 22 years' clinical experience, introduces her YouTube channel and her new book (The Trauma Map). She defines trauma as overwhelming events that create disconnection (from body, emotions, thoughts, others) and then debunks five common myths: 1) trauma must be a major, obvious event; 2) you must repeatedly talk about the event to heal; 3) cathartic purging (heavy crying/venting) is necessary; 4) time alone heals trauma; 5) positive thinking/‘just put your mind to it’ is sufficient. Her therapeutic stance emphasizes gentle nervous-system–based reconnection rather than repetitive exposure or forceful catharsis.
Chapters
Hi, I'm Dr. Carol Darza, author, trauma psychologist and founder of Reconnect Integrative Trauma Treatment center in Los Angeles. Welcome to my YouTube channel. This is my first day today, actually. I'm very excited about it and I wanted to really share also that I just published a book. It came out three days ago, the Trauma Map. Five Steps to Reconnect with Yourself. So this channel obviously got inspired by my book. I wanted to be able to talk to you guys about a lot of things. So I'm going to start a little bit by first telling you that I've been a psychologist for 22 years and, and I work with clients intensively working with trauma. And occasionally when I try to make a point and I wanna teach something, I will be talking about my clients with, of course, pseudo names and some examples that are not recognizable for anyone. So please bear in mind, keep that in your mind that I'll be giving examples because I wanna make sure that you relate to what I'm sharing. A lot of the things that you guys are feeling are. Are things that I have experienced with other clients. Working for 22 years. I'm very, very passionate about trauma field in general, by the way. That's been my only passion ever since I know myself and I've been in this field, like I said, again, for 22 years. And I wanted to be able to give you some information about certain ways that I look at trauma. First of all, what is trauma? Trauma is a very stressful event that leaves a person feeling powerless and really overwhelmed. It's a little bit different than stress because stress can be sort of daily things that can happen that can create stress. But trauma is a really much more overwhelming event. And trauma creates a disconnect within the person. So you may find yourself disconnected from your body, from your mind, from your thoughts, from your emotions, and even from the people around you. So in the way that I help people is to really help you to find some way to reconnect to yourself. And that's what the healing is all about. So I'm a strong believer that healing is possible. It does take time, but with the right attitude and the right support system, you can definitely achieve healing of trauma symptoms. So let's talk a little bit about trauma myths, as I call it, because there are a lot of beliefs about what trauma is, a lot of beliefs about what one person has to do in order to heal from trauma. And I have some strong opinions about some of them. And I wanted to share with you what I believe and what I have Found helpful over the 22 years. I made a list. First one, you might believe that you have trauma only if you've experienced something like a war or a severe sexual abuse attack kind of thing. I can't tell you how many times clients come through my door knowing that I'm specialized in trauma. They tell me I don't have trauma. Okay. I ask them questions like, tell me a little bit about your childhood. Well, my mom died of cancer when I was young, but my dad was loving. No one hit me. No one did anything like that. So I don't have trauma. Well, here's the wrong thing. It doesn't have to be something so big for trauma to be considered trauma. In fact, relational trauma, something like the example that I gave you or your parents neglecting you or not being there for you or having even an ill parent that you have to take care of growing up can be really considered trauma. Growing up with a narcissistic parent is a trauma. Being bullied at school is a trauma. So there are a lot of examples like that that actually would be really considered trauma. So don't think just because you're not coming out of a war or you didn't experience a huge earthquake that you're not traumatized. And why is that important to know? Because if you know that you have trauma, then you can heal according to that. Let's talk about myth number two. You might believe you need to talk about trauma over and over again in order to get it out of the system. Almost. People talk about, I need it. It's like, if I can just throw up, purge out of it, I can just let go of this trauma. So I need to be able to talk. In fact, I did a Google search the other day. I went and I said, I'm going to pretend like I don't know anything about trauma. So I said, how do I heal trauma? And this thing came up where it said I have to talk about it over and over again, and I would have to record my voice and listen to it and so that I can get really desensitized. Please do not do that. Don't believe that you have to talk about it so much. It can actually really be upsetting and not really helpful. There are ways, believe it or not, to heal trauma without ever mentioning what the incident was about and therefore not stressing yourself again. So, again, my goal is to be able to give you sort of gentle ways and helpful ways so that you can be well informed about what trauma is and what it's not. Myth number Three, you may believe that you need to purge your feelings and have the strong cathartic reaction like crying or, I don't know, sometimes people do this in the group settings, like heavy crying as a group or breathing and all sorts of exercises that, okay, if I felt so much, that means I healed my trauma. Well, that's a very old way of healing the trauma. In fact, they used to do what's called a bataka work where you would like, hit a pillow and to take all the anger and all the trauma out of your system. That is not necessary either. That is a huge myth. You need to be very gentle, very slow when you work on trauma. And there are times where you don't even have to cry. Believe it or not, I had a client who was unfortunately abused as a child. And when I said, we have to work on that because she was experiencing depression, she said, oh, no, I'm not touching that topic. Because whenever I talked about it, I was in bed for days. There's no way I'm touching that topic. I said, no problem. What if I guarantee you that when we talk about this, you are going to be able to function daily and you will not be in bed for like you have been in the past. She didn't believe me at first, but I was able to gain trust. And in couple of days we were first able to really focus on making her feel relaxed and her nervous system to calm down because she was just so activated and triggered on an ongoing basis. So we found ways to really first calm her nervous system down and she was able to talk about it without actually feeling so much more depressed like she did in the past. So, no, you don't have to cry about it if you don't want to. Myth number four, time heals everything. Ah, yeah. This is a very common one. We say that for everything. I think this is because as human beings, we want to believe that it's a possibility that time heals everyone. Because, hey, if time heals everyone, I don't have to do anything. You know, unfortunately, that's not true because when you just leave the time on its own and you have like an injury and you never treat it, it just stays there. Yes, the triggers might be a little bit less upsetting, but in some cases it could be even more upsetting. So I have had clients that I work with that had trauma 20, 30, 40 years ago. They were very upset with themselves, saying, how come I'm still. I'm a grown up now. This was, you know, when I was a child and I should be able to move on. And, well, it doesn't work like that. In fact, when we are children, it's easier to heal from certain things because we have some sort of a resilience. You know, we just, like, go out to play and we forget about it. And we can heal. At least we forget temporarily, but later on, it starts building. And so time alone, it's not sufficient to heal that. Right. Support therapy, a lot of other techniques that eventually I'll be talking about will be much more helpful than just leaving it up to the time. Okay? Myth five. Okay, this is a very interesting one. Cause the belief might be I can overcome my trauma if I really put my mind to it. Have you heard the secret? Okay, this is this new belief. It's been going on for many years, actually, but it's gotten stronger that I can do anything if I just put my mind to it. Well, this is a really huge myth. Actually. It's a very damaging myth because it makes people feel very guilty of the fact that they can't move on from trauma. A lot of my clients, the first meeting, when we meet, they tell me I must be a weak person because, look, I couldn't overcome my trauma. Well, it doesn't work like that. So please do yourself a favor and let me actually explain to you why I say just your mind is not enough to overcome trauma. So when trauma happens, it actually gets stuck on your body and on the right side of your brain, where a lot of the emotions are stored. So when you just use your mind or you're just talking about it, you're accessing your left side of the brain, which is where your cognitive part is. Well, you never really access your body, and you never really access your emotion. So when you just put your mind and you're doing behavioral things or thoughts about two just a positive thinking, I'm gonna, you know, move on. I've passed this thing, it just doesn't move on. It just doesn't heal because you are not able to access it from a true point of view. So there will be many more of these topics in the next videos. And again, I want to remind you guys of my new baby that came out three days ago, the trauma map. Uh, you're gonna see much more of this information in there. So. So remember, trauma equals disconnect. Healing equals reconnect. Stay connected.
