26 - SHOULD YOU FACE OR AVOID YOUR TRAUMA? - NOT ALL ADVICES ARE GOOD - SO, WHAT CAN YOU DO?

Hi, I'm Dr. Carol D', ARSA, Author, Trauma psychologist and founder of Reconnect Trauma Treatment center in Los Angeles. Today we're going to talk about avoiding trauma versus facing trauma. Should you avoid facing your history of trauma and basically never really looking back to what happened? Or should you face and deal with everything that happened to you? It's actually a complicated topic, believe it or not, because of what people think facing or avoiding means. So what happens if you avoid. Well, let's say you had a severe trauma in your childhood and you never want to remember it, which makes sense. We call this a defense mechanism. And then you just go on with your life and then you just find yourself in situations as an adult that starts sort of triggering you, right? Meaning you start having reactions to things, you get angry at people, you don't understand why, or you avoid certain people in your life, you avoid certain relationships, or you find yourself really depressed or anxious, but you can't really pinpoint to the reasons. So that's what happens when you avoid facing your past because you put things aside, you did not want to feel those again, which has a good reason. And then now you are actually facing other reactions and other emotions that kind of forces you to look back. But so here's where the trick comes, because a lot of people think facing your trauma means you have to actually talk about exactly what happened. Tell in detail to somebody that you know or therapist, you know, a friend, and then you have to be able to say it more than once until you have absolutely no negative reaction about it or that you're not breaking down. So you might have heard of a therapy method called exposure therapy. For instance, let's say you are a sexual abuse survivor. They ask you to tell your story over and over again. And not only that, but you actually record yourself telling the story, go home, listen to it over and over again until you don't react to it. I absolutely do not recommend that. Please listen to this once again. I do not recommend for you to face head on your trauma where you have to talk about every detail. Not only that's not helpful, but that actually can be very much re traumatization. So facing your trauma does not mean that you have to say what happened over and over again or remember the details. So facing trauma from a psychological point of view, especially if you are more somatic, psychologist oriented, means something completely different. It means something actually much more encouraging, much more containing, and much less upsetting. So it's about dealing with the emotions or dealing with the impact of the trauma. Rather than facing the memory of it. So that's the key thing. Facing does not mean face the memory, but face the feelings or face the impact of it. So if you felt very much violated in your childhood or even as an adult and you find yourself having anger or sadness or other, you know, fear kind of feelings, deal with those feelings. Do not pretend like nothing happened. Do not pretend like it's not important. Do not minimize it. Do not compare yourself to others who may have had worse traumas. Do not say, mine is not that big of a deal. You know, poor people, they are really suffering. That's what I would call avoiding. So if you can accept that something happened and something meaningful happened for you without comparing to other people, then in my view, you are already facing your trauma. So just to recognize when something happens, oh, that's a reminder of my trauma, because I have had trauma is already a great step in actually facing your trauma rather than again avoiding it, pretending like it didn't happen. So you can start there. And in fact, every time you have big reactions and big emotions in your adulthood life right now, pay attention to see if this is triggering something from the past. Often it is. We are very quick to judge the others, to think it's they, they did something wrong and that's why we reacting that way. But often it goes back. You can trace it back to your childhood. So sometimes you may not trace it back to a specific incident, which is still fine. But if you can just trace the feeling back, then you can again see the connection to your past trauma. Let me give you an example. So let's say your boss says something to you, very mean, and your feelings are hurt. And even though they didn't fire you, you find yourself in tremendous amount of fear, I'm going to get fired. I knew I wasn't good enough. And you know, that kind of a fear and you like almost having nightmares about it. Go with the feeling of what, what is that bringing up? Oh, it brings me up. Sense of inadequacy, sense of I'm not worthy enough. And then if you can face that feeling and even sit with it for a minute, in fact, you can trace even your body. See where you feel this in your body. Okay, I feel inadequate. I have a stomach pain, I'm kind of getting like anxious and my hands are sweating. Then ask if you felt this feeling before, could have been coming from your childhood, from adolescence, like what other times you felt this feeling. And even if, again, if you don't have a memory connected to, but you have a Sense of like throughout my childhood I often felt that way. Then it might be a connection to your childhood and this is how you know that it's actually triggering your trauma. So just there acknowledge the trauma. Okay? It's the past. I'm reacting to it. It's not my fault, it's not good or bad, it's just a reality. And then what did I learn based on that? Oh, I learned that I'm actually not good enough. And then really challenge that negative belief system for yourself and see how you are able to manage your reaction this way. Let's talk about some examples of what happens if you actually avoid all your feelings and all your history and all your traumatic experiences. Well, it shows up in quite a lot of different ways. Obviously it shows up emotionally like I was talking about. But do you know that you can also get sick? If you actually avoid a lot of your trauma, you can find yourself with chronic illness such as stomach pain, chronic physical pain, back pain, neck pain. Sometimes even people talk about these diseases really creating cancer or more autoimmune diseases and, and fatigue oriented symptoms and reactions. So especially if you go to a doctor and they do not find anything biologically wrong with your body for your symptoms, you might really want to look into, see if this is connected to your past and it's connected to the unprocessed, undigested feelings. Yes, I actually said the right word. Digestion and processing. This also applies not only for food, but it really applies for feelings. So when we eat food, we chew first, right? It's slow, we swallow, it goes to our stomach and then we eliminate. So there's a natural process of digesting. The same thing happens with feelings. When we feel something, it's almost like we have the taste in our mouth. We kind of have to chew it. Often we swallow without chewing, but we do have to chew it, then we swallow it and then we have to look into how to eliminate it. And one of the ways to eliminate means. Again, I'm back to my original question. Do you avoid your trauma or do you face your trauma? Another side effect of avoiding your trauma shows up in ways that you may not have thought of it, but it's a very common one. It's addiction. Addiction to substance, drug, alcohol, food, love, gambling, sometimes technology. These are very common addictions are actually there because you are really trying to numb certain feelings. You're really trying to forget what happened and what other ways. That's the best way to forget something, right? Is by making yourself high. So if you want to really know what you are trying to avoid in your life. Stop using all the substances that you use to medicate yourself, to numb yourself. And then you'll find whatever that you are trying to avoid because all the feelings, all the memories from the past will all of a sudden show up. I do not recommend that you do this so much on your own. I really think you should get support, therapeutic support, professional help, such as at Reconnect, even though we're trauma treatment center, but we help with addictive disorders as well. So we can help you to get into the origin of why you are behaving a certain way. Also chronic anger, chronic depression. These are really signs that you have avoided really facing your past. I want to encourage you, but at the same time I want you to know that being gentle in this process is very, very, very, very important. You can't do this very fast or else you could actually find yourself very much overwhelmed. So please be gentle with yourself, be gentle with others. Do not judge the process. Know that it takes courage to be able to face your trauma because trauma creates disconnect, as you've been hearing me say that. And that's why our goal is to help you to reconnect to yourself. If you want to know more about Disconnect that I'm talking about and read about other clients stories, you can read it in my book, the Trauma Map. There's also the audiobook version. And then you can really learn how to find ways to connect to yourself. And thank you for watching. See you next time.