Managing Stress and Trauma With Dr. Karol Darsa

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Welcome to episode 296 of Live Happy Now. This is your host, Paula Phelps. And there's no question that the last year was stressful for everyone in one way or another. And as the new year has begun, much of the uncertainty and unrest has only increased. For many, that can move us beyond feeling stressed and create trauma in our lives. Today's guest, Dr. Carol Darca, is, is a licensed psychologist and founder and executive director of Reconnective Integrative Trauma Treatment center in Los Angeles. She has worked extensively with trauma survivors and is author of the book the Trauma Five Steps to Reconnect with Yourself. She's here today to talk about how stress and trauma affect us and what strategies we can use to manage our feelings in a time of uncertainty. Carol, welcome to Live Happy Now.

Hi.

Thank you. Thank you for inviting me here.

Well, we had this call set up and then a lot of things changed. I thought we were going to talk about simply how rough last year was on us and you know, most of us entered this year with a lot of hope for a better year. And already we're off to a rough start. So I guess to start, can you explain how do we start to create a mentally and emotionally healthy new year?

Okay, that's a good question for difficult times, right?

It's a big one too.

It's a big one. So what's important is I think the first step is really just accepting everything as they are coming, including feelings and events, things that are out of our control. This is what actually in mindfulness, you'll hear it as radical acceptance. Things that we can't change. Right. Instead of fighting against it. It's really important just to start with, okay, this is what it is. So that is actually the mantra of the year should be, it is what it is. That doesn't mean we can't take care of ourselves. But fighting against what reality is would be only a battle that we can't win.

Well, sometimes people feel like acceptance is resignation by saying it is what it is, they feel like they're accepting their. The circumstances in a way that saying it's okay. Can you kind of clarify that?

Sure. It doesn't mean you don't do anything about it, but you don't try to change something that you can't change. Like in Covid.

So when Covid happened, you could.

We will have to stay at home. And that's very frustrating. But it is. We had to accept that. But it depends now on what you do with your time. Do you want to just sit in bed all day and watch TV for a whole year and basically get nothing out of it? Or do you want to use that time more effectively and maybe learn some new skills or take care of yourself or exercise more than before now that you have time? That is the difference between radical acceptance and resignation.

What about people who are paralyzed by the current situation? Because I have friends who have gone on both ends of it, some who have used this to get in the best shape of their lives, and others who literally cannot get off the couch. Yeah.

I think in that time it might be that it's triggering something from the past. And that's when would be the most helpful is actually to reach a professional help probably because including what's happening this week with the violence.

Right.

So if you have grown up in a violent home, for instance, or you grew up in a violent country, because a lot of us in this country come from different countries. Right. And this is familiar to you what's happening in the Washington D.C. it could trigger those memories and those times. So that time, it's important to separate that. And if you can't do separation on your own, then you might want to reach out to a professional who can help you that because it really colors your view of current situation.

Yeah.

And even if you're not. If you're not ready to take a step to reach out to a professional, even reaching out to friends and being able to talk about it can help give you some perspective. Is that correct?

Yes, it can. In fact, with that what's important is to really also welcoming all feelings. But welcoming all feelings again doesn't mean that you stay in bed. But if you welcome the feelings rather than hating them, you might become more active. Because if you allow yourself, for instance, one of my tools I always do is journaling every day. So if you're waking up and you're feeling miserable about something, you have some anger or some sadness coming up, spend the time to write it out. At least a half hour freeform writing where you're just really without censoring writing and expressing yourself and letting it out. So that's actually a safe way to let out feelings.

And why is that effective? Because I love journaling. I've used that as a tool throughout my life. Why is it so effective?

That's a good question. When we talk, first of all, we are accessing more. Our cognitive brain is just sort of thinking, but in the writing, we actually access more our emotional brain, which is on the right side of our brain. And so that allows more expressive things to come forward rather than just the thoughts of it. And it also helps you slowing down. See, when you're talking, I can talk fast. I can't write that fast. So it helps me to slow down and become in a way more mindful and more in the here and now and maybe even more in my body. And it's more private. I'm not sharing it with someone, so I don't have to sugarcoat it. I can just really be free in what I write.

Yeah, that unfiltered writing is really important. It's also important to hide that so your family doesn't find it. Now you have a book, the Trauma Map. Wonderful timing on the release of this book. And can you explain to us the difference between trauma and stress? Because this is super interesting in the way that you show what we oftentimes think of as just stress is actually trauma. So can you talk about those two components?

Sure. It's not so much the incident that really defines stress versus trauma, it's more the person's reaction to it. So if you're feeling overwhelmed, your coping mechanisms don't work anymore, and you are maybe even feeling threatened completely, your well being is under threat, you are more likely experiencing trauma. So in fact, you can have two soldiers going to a war and one of them will develop ptsd, Post Traumatic Stress disorder. Right. And the other one may not. That doesn't make the person stronger or weaker. It could have a lot of different factors. First of all, our childhood, how we are raised, what kind of childhood we had, whether there was emotional stability or not, was it a healthy home or not, tells us a lot about how we're going to be as adults. If you had loving present parents, and then as an adult you have traumatic incidents, one could call them, you might be able to handle them much better. On the same token, if all your life you've been abused and neglected and abandoned, or been through really hardship in every level, and then something like this happening, you could just find yourself completely get stuck back in the past and you might Consider that as a traumatic reaction. It also depends sometimes on our temperament.

The way we are born. And see, that's where I go back into the acceptance and welcoming all the feelings. So that's how you are. It's not bad. It's not good. It's just a fact. You see, if you stay dispassionate about how you are or how you react to things, you actually could have an easier time.

But most of the time, people get.

Really angry at themselves for being angry or angry at themselves for being sad.

Yeah. And that doesn't do us any good to beat ourselves up for having a certain set of emotions.

No.

So in your practice, what is the biggest misconception you think that people have when it comes to trauma?

Thank you for asking this.

That's my favorite question.

Unless they have been sexually abused or been to a war, that what they have lived is not traumatic. Especially people minimize the attachment trauma. Attachment trauma refers to a trauma experienced in a relationship concept, like with mostly your first caregivers, like your parents, or.

If you grew up with your grandparents.

So if your parents were physically not abusive and they were able to provide you, you don't have a war experience or anything. Doesn't mean that you did not experience trauma. So you could experience trauma if you were bullied at school. You could experience trauma if your parents were physically there, but emotionally not there. I had a client a couple of years ago that came to me and said, oh, I know you work with usually sexual abuse, and I'm not abused, but I have depression and I don't know why. I said, okay, tell me a little bit about your childhood. Well, my mom died when I was 15 years old, and then my dad was an alcoholic, but they didn't hit me or anything. Okay.

At that point, you're like, we have some talking to Dr.

This is trauma. If you had an alcoholic parent, regardless how they were, that means they were really absent and they were unstable. That's a traumatic incident for a child. Regardless how, who you are, what your temperament is.

Yeah. And so as we come to terms with the fact that something we're experiencing is trauma, how do we even identify that? If we've kind of denied the fact that trauma is trauma, we think it's just stress. How do we start to identify that something is traumatizing us?

I think by the way that you react to current life. So if you're struggling with certain things in relationships or you're struggling in your work, you're struggling with the way that you react to people and you don't understand why you react that way. You might want to look in to see if you have any history of trauma that's impacting you. I mean, we are really highly impacted.

By what happens in our childhood.

Highly. And I think that's where people really minimize it. So basically by looking at your current symptoms, you can deduct some information from.

Your past and then once you identify that, as you said, you can get professional help. And what are some of the other things that you can do to kind of start addressing that?

I'm a big fan of mindfulness, focusing on the here and now, because what happens is trauma is like a hijack to your brain. So if you have trauma, you either find yourself often caught up in the past or caught up in the worry of the future. Anything but present is what the sign.

Of a trauma is.

The opposite of trauma, I want to say, is when you can actually stay in the here and now. So mindfulness, or if you think of the Eckhart Tolle's work of the power of now there, there's a lot of similarities between the of them. You could really at least reduce the symptoms of the trauma. You can't change what happened in the past. You can't really go into the memory.

Work that way much.

But at least you reduce the symptoms. It helps with anxiety, it helps with depression by just really focusing more on here, what's going on right now, like right this moment, 4:13pm Thursday afternoon, I'm sitting in my office and talking to you.

That's it.

But if I go into the future of what's going to happen with my kids tomorrow with the school, it's November.

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I'm going to stress myself yeah.

And I think right now, especially because there is so much uncertainty that we do tend to start trying to project, like what is going to happen. We're trying to figure things out. And that's where I see a lot of people almost getting into a panic mode right now.

Right, exactly. And so also focusing on the here and now can be used with the body.

So you're focusing on the here and.

Now like I'm in the room as I was giving you the example, but also feeling my body. So what happens is trauma takes you out of your body because that's how you can deal with it in a moment of high stress. Because we have a capacity when we can't escape a physical situation. Guess what? We have a special talent. We can escape with our thoughts. I can go to Spain right now, my favorite country to have a vacation in.

Okay.

But when I do that very frequently, then you can imagine what kind of consequences it's going to have on me if I'm constantly absent minded and really out of this moment.

Right.

So as you focus on being here and now, if you can also feel your body, like your feet on the ground or as you're walking, really feeling your legs move, it starts helping you to connect back to yourself and back to your body. So the body helps to regulate your emotions. These are very basic but very important tools to deal with trauma symptoms.

Yeah. And that's one. I'm glad you brought that up because that's something I'm really fond of is just going outside in my yard, just taking a walk around the yard. And it is amazing how it can reset you mentally and emotionally.

And when you walk, it's very easy though to get caught up in the thoughts.

Right.

Because you could just back again, travel into somewhere else. You could think. In fact, that's what a lot of people do. But there's the difference between that kind of a walk and a mindful walk. Right. Just really feeling your body and feeling the environment as you're walking. It's actually a discipline to be able to do that if you do it regularly and not just when you're in a crisis. I think that's an important thing. In fact, as I'm saying it out loud, what happens is people want tools to deal with their emotions only when they're in crisis. And then when life gets a little bit back to normal, they let go of everything. But this is not different than physically exercising. If you want to be fit. You can't only exercise once a month and say, well, today I feel fat. And I exercise and I should feel shape. Emotional well being is the same way. You have to regularly have a practice of mindfulness or yoga or journaling or.

All of the above at the same.

Time so that when a rainy day comes, you know what to do so that you're not overwhelmed.

That's excellent. And we learn to identify it in ourselves and we learn our own coping tools. But how do we identify it in others and help them get through trauma?

Asking them, letting them know that first of all, you are there without any judgment. I can't tell you the importance of the non judgmental attitude because trauma survivors feel often very self judgmental and they blame themselves for almost everything and anything that happened. So if you question in any shape or form that creates the self blame, they're going to shut down. So you have to have a very open heart and a non judgmental attitude about, hey, what's happening, how can I help you? And just sometimes just listening. And maybe you don't know what to do either. But just the listening ear is a huge step for someone's healing. We're not meant to be alone. We're supposed to be sharing our pain with others. That's what makes it less painful.

And I think we do run into. You brought up a really good point. We do enter into that situation where we don't know what to say, so we don't say anything or we're afraid we're going to say the wrong thing. But when someone's in trauma, what is it we should say?

How can I help you? You can trust me. I can be an ear, I can listen to you, I can handle your feelings. Because that's their fear too. They think you won't be able to hear the pain or you won't be able to tolerate their pain. And then maybe explaining to them a little bit of what we talked about right now, like the mindfulness and maybe doing a walk together and reaching out to them rather than waiting for them to reach out to you. I think what I'm noticing a lot with people is people say, well, if I don't mention it, I'll just distract the person in a positive way and they'll forget it. There's no such a thing as forgetting, okay? There's no such a thing as putting it aside. There's only a thing as pushing it down. And if you push down, guess what? It's gonna come up eventually. So don't be afraid, don't be afraid of asking and say, hey, what's happening? You seem this way or that way. And would you like to talk about it?

How important is it for us to realize that pretty much everyone around us is in some form of suffering right now?

I think it's actually good and bad at the same time. It normalizes our feelings and we don't feel alone. But that's the positive side of it.

The other side of it is it.

Could be scary because. And that's been happening with COVID in a way.

Before COVID you may had a person.

Who was your refuge and felt a bit stronger. But when we went into a crisis as a.

Not only as a country, but as.

A world, people started wondering, where am I going to go? Everyone is suffering from the same thing. Who's going to hold for me? And that's the flip side of it, unfortunately.

What have you seen that bring out in us as we get all the uncertainty continues and we have this ongoing stress and concerns? What are you seeing?

You know, it's very interesting. I'm looking at clients that I work with and I look at also friends and family members and it was almost like a graph, if I could describe it to you. In the beginning there was sort of a spike of like shock, anger, I think, mostly shock. Right. And then gradually people moved into a little bit of sort of acceptance and plateaued a little bit like, yeah, okay.

This is the new norm.

And you kind of started a little bit of like maybe hopefulness and still thinking that it's about to end. And then when people realize that it's not ending that soon and it's actually like really a long term change and crisis, I felt, I saw that people's mental health declined again, unfortunately.

What are the strategies for healing that we can, you know, as we start this new year instead of getting frustrated and saying, oh my God, this is going to be worse than last year. Because I've actually already heard that. How can we use this new year to start over?

I would say don't spend too much time in your thoughts. I know this sounds a bit counterintuitive for a lot of people because we somehow, especially in the western world, we tend to think that if we think and we analyze and analyze that we can solve a problem.

We can't.

We just end up ruminating and going around and around, you know, on a loop. So I would say actually practice really letting go of the. The idea of the control and the over analysis. Second thing is maybe don't numb yourself with drugs or alcohol or food and just see this as an opportunity to increase your tolerance for negative Emotions, because.

That'S how life is.

And continuously take care of your emotions. Like all the tools that I mentioned with the mindfulness, yoga, journaling, expressing feelings on an ongoing basis, and even after Covid is done, like, we should continue to take care of ourselves in that way and connect with others.

Reach out.

Continue to reach out. Don't be embarrassed to ask for help emotionally or any other way.

I do have. I just thought of another idea that I'd like to share is I think the importance of play. Especially the more stress we have, I think the more play opportunities we should seek out. You know, if you notice, children are often very easily distracted or they're resilient, I should say when they're stressed, what they do is they play with toys.

And they sort of work out their.

Their stress that way. Through play, we all have an inner child.

For instance, what I've done in the.

Last couple of months is I found some of my early. The novels I used to read as a teenager that I found really fun to read them. I said, oh, I'm going to reread those instead of psychology books that I always read. Kind of creating some like a sense of play, you know, for other people. It could be really games or taking a dance class or dancing, even if it's via zoom. But finding an opportunity to just be silly with the silliness. There's just much more lightness that can happen organically.

Oh, that's a wonderful idea. Because we do know that play is so good for us emotionally and just to be able to recenter our thoughts, that's a huge gift to be able to give ourselves.

Yeah. For instance, my kids now are teenagers, so they don't buy toys that much anymore. I'm actually sad.

When they were young, I think I.

Bought all the toys not for them, but for me.

Yeah, I understand that because I know I've. I've rediscovered coloring books this winter, you know, and that's just a really great way to have to focus on something and. And it's. It's a wonderful reconnection.

Exactly.

You see, you use the word reconnection.

That's exactly what we have to focus all the time, seeing in what areas you feel disconnected. Is it from yourself, is it from others, is it from spirituality? And then finding ways to really reconnect to yourself.

There comes a point as we're doing that, as Robert Frost wrote right now, the only way out is through. This is a journey we just have to keep going on. But there does come a point where you get tired of being mindful of journaling, of all these things. What is it we do at that point to continue that practice?

That's interesting that you said being tired of it. See, if you see it as almost like a diet, you know, when people try to lose weight, they talk about diet versus lifestyle.

Oh, yeah.

The mental health in that way too. If you see it as a temporary diet, oh, I just have to do it so I can feel better. And then I'll let go. Then you will let go. I really see this as a lifestyle because it's an investment into my life. And like I said, this time we have this stress. But there's no guarantee that in two years when Covid is done or the government is functioning better, that I'm not going to have other stresses in life. I might not have it in the country, but I might have it at home. Something could happen to my kids. It's possibility of all those things.

Right.

So I think we should be always prepared to be disciplined about self care. Because to me, self discipline is actually a sign of self love. Like who is more important than me? I don't mean that in a narcissistic. Whenever I say that, clients look at me not like, I don't care about other people, but really, like, you know, if I don't give the oxygen to myself. Right, right. In the airplane, it's the same thing. So I have to spend time taking care of myself emotionally on a regular basis. Because as I grew older, unfortunately, life got more stressful.

It does that, doesn't it?

I have a habit, a routine of doing grounding exercises in the mornings.

And so what I used to do.

I noticed one day is when I would go on a vacation and I travel. I used to travel three, four times a year out of the country. I would let go of it and I'd be like, yay, I'm on a vacation. I realized, wait a minute. Vacation means you care of yourself. So that means I was seeing grounding as a chore, not as something that's like, good for me. And so I changed my mind or frame to change it into, wait a minute, that means vacation. Still take care of yourself no matter where you are. So this is what I mean by lifestyle we have to make as a habit.

I love that. I love that perspective. And that's something we can all do. We can choose how it is we care for ourselves and make that that gift we give ourselves every day to start our day out.

Yes.

And it becomes a habit. Do you ever think in the morning, shall I brush my teeth. I automatically brush my teeth. Imagine doing that on a regular basis when you start practicing grounding or mindfulness or just taking care of yourself emotionally. So what you can do throughout the day is you can check in with yourself constantly and say, wait a minute, how am I feeling now? Because I know, for instance, for me after 6, 7pm is when sort of my energy starts going down, I'm tired. That's when I have to really pay more attention to my mood and do something that. So I'm not depleted.

Right.

But I have to check in with myself in order to even notice that.

And you can make small changes that start making a big difference in how you're dealing with the trauma.

For sure. For sure. But again, if you are bombarded, I should say this actually, really with the past, you're having like flashbacks and nightmares or really fearful situations where you can't even distinguish between the past and the present anymore. I'm afraid to say that this is the time where you will have to reach to a professional. This is too hard to deal with it on your own.

Absolutely. And I think anytime, if you're feeling completely overwhelmed by it, that's the time you reach out for professional help.

Yes.

All right. Well, Carol, you've given us such great things to think about. I'm going to tell everyone how they can learn more about you and learn more about your book. Thank you for coming on the show.

Thank you again for inviting me, Paula.

That was Dr. Carol Darca talking to us about managing stress and trauma. To learn more about Carol, her book, the Trauma Map, or to watch episodes from her trauma map YouTube channel, visit us@livehappynow.com and follow the links. That is all we have time for today. We'll meet you back here again next week for an all new episode. And until then, this is Paula Phelps reminding you to make every day a happy one.

Time is precious and so are our pets. So time with our pets is extra precious. That's why we started Dutch. Dutch provides 25 access to licensed vets with unlimited virtual visits and follow ups for up to five pets. You can message a vet at any time and schedule a video visit the same day. Our vets can even prescribe medication for many ailments and shipping is always free. With Dutch, you'll get more time with your pets and year round peace of mind when it comes to their vet care.