The Scent of Trauma with Erin Dunn | Others Over Self Leadership Conference

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Dunn is a 10 year Air Force veteran and a 30 year PTSD survivor. In the Air Force, she served first as a journalist and then as a special agent with the Air Force Office of Special Investigations. She's a former Dale Carnegie instructor and geopolitical planner for the Joint Staff. Having lived and worked in seven countries while deployed to combat zones in Iraq, Erin maintained grueling law school studies and graduated in 2014 with a Juris Doctor from Concord Law School. She also earned a Master's of Science and Communication Management from Syracuse University. Erin educates others on veterans benefits, understanding trauma and moral injury, and crisis management. She raised a son who's now in the Honors College at Grand Valley State University. Her son is a paralegal in the Michigan Air National Guard. Ladies and gentlemen, I am deeply honored to introduce my friend to you, Ms. Erin Dunn.

You know, it was pretty ironic. Shelley was talking about what was going on upstairs and the speaker upstairs is also talking about resiliency. And so part of, part of my topic, relentless resilience, I don't refer to it much, but I am giving you some tools to help you become more resilient if you have ptsd, if you have some other associated mental health condition, or if you know someone who does. My name is Erin Dunn, 10 year Air Force veteran. I currently work for the Army. I've been associated with the government for, I don't know, close to 20 years after active duty. I have lived with PTSD for more than 30 years, since my active duty days, and it has impacted every part of my life. It's not been easy, but I have learned some ways to cope. What I'm sharing with you today are ways to cope that typically PTSD experts, so called experts and websites don't normally address. You have to kind of search a little bit further outside of a PTSD realm to reach these things here. Okay. Okay. So what is ptsd? According to the Mayo Clinic, it is witnessing or being involved in a terrifying event that subsequently causes problems having to do with flashbacks, nightmares, uncontrollable thoughts, and severe anxiety. This is your brain. This is your brain on ptsd. What I'm just trying to show here is that for people who have experienced trauma and subsequently develop ptsd, their brain is different. I want to talk about a little bit about what Laverne was talking about yesterday because she hit on two very important points. She said the first thing that really keyed in with me is there is no trauma without grief. And the other one was she was talking about trying to recover from grief and how you have to let your brain reset. Outside of the official definition of Post Traumatic stress disorder contained in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Health Professionals. Professionals number five, whatever. However the VA describes it, some people call it a mental illness, some people call it a mental problem, some people call it a mental condition. This is. It's just mental. Okay. But in going off of what Laverne was talking about, there is no trauma without grief. It's almost as if the PTSD brain goes into a grief mode, but never heals. Like, you spend your whole life grieving, living that grief, reliving. It doesn't matter if you've dealt with the grief. Your brain is like this now. And so you're just reliving it over and over again. You're reliving the grief. You're not always reliving the trauma. Right. Thank you. Because I'm seeing some heads there. Yeah. And Shelly did talk a little bit earlier about gaps, and Amy talked about gaps. I found a gap. I found a gap. And it was a six year old boy. Let's go. So this is a really busy slide, but I want to focus on the center gray portion, sensory issues. That one at the very top. Shelley mentioned that, that I have a law degree from Concord Law School. Hopefully some of you have found your Concord Law School pen and your pens in your bags. In 2014, I lived in Virginia. I worked for the joint staff and a bunch of family members from Michigan. We all met up out in Los Angeles for my law school graduation, summer of 2014. I was sitting in a hotel room with my niece and we were just catching up. Now, my niece had a six year old son who had just recently been diagnosed with adhd. I asked her how it was going with his recent diagnosis and she started tapping me on the hand. I want everybody to do this, just tap on the hand. And she said, this is what he has been experiencing for six years. Constant sensory overload. Everything is louder, everything is larger, everything is brighter. And she was doing this to me and I started crying right then and there. I cried for him and I cried for me. Because in a very short few minutes, my niece, in describing her son's adhd, had described a good portion of my life with ptsd. We had no idea there was an overlap, but that's when I first began to discover this overlap. ADHD and ptsd, they can both suffer from sensory issues, sensory overload. In some of my research, I also found that some of these common symptoms with ADHD and PTSD are also relevant or they can be relevant in autism and a few other situations as well. Or a few other mental conditions as well. So what happens when we're doing this? They're called triggers. Everybody know what a trigger is? Sometimes triggers can be good, and sometimes they can be bad. With a trigger, the body remembers. The inspiration for the title of my talk, the Scent of trauma, came in 2022. We were at a women veterans conference in Lansing. I believe it was Erica. Where was it? Was it Lansing? Okay. And there was a speaker up, and she was telling. Her name was Rhoda, and she was telling a very compelling story called Steak, Lobster, and a Gunfight. And I was sitting in the back of the room, and she said four words. She said, the smell of death. Ursula remembers what that did to me, just hearing the words, the smell of death, because I immediately went into some sort of trigger. I had to leave the room. And Ursula was the only one in the lobby. And she came over and she comforted me, and I cried for a good 30 minutes because of those four words. The smell of death reminded me of something really terrible in my past. Thus, I came up with the Scent of Trauma. I want to talk about the different types of triggers because some can be really severe. Triggers can be triggered. PTSD triggers can be brought on by any number of things. Okay? They can be disabling, non disabling. They can be really irritating. They can have me in bed for three days or afraid to leave the house for three weeks. They can be obvious, and they can be not so obvious. That is one of the reasons why I have a difficult time with the definition, the official definitions of ptsd, because it sounds as if people with PTSD are having those things and they actually know they're having those things, and it's really obvious. But for those of us who have had it, it's really not. It's not that clear cut. It's not that obvious, especially when it comes to sensory overload. So when I talk about the triggers, the acute and the chronic, I want to tell a little story about a furry little animal in Memorial Day 2019. I'm driving down the road and I'm stopped at a stoplight and I see a squirrel. I see a squirrel in the road. I see a squirrel in the road that has been hit by a car. And if anybody can sense what's going on, I'm triggering myself as I'm talking about, about this, okay? I looked at that squirrel in the road that had been hit by a car, and my brain remembered. Now, mind You. I've never forgotten my trauma. I've never forgotten the senses. But my brain decided it was time to remind me again. So I'm sitting there in traffic and I'm looking at this squirrel and I know immediately what is going on. I am being triggered. It was like one of the most obvious flashbacks I've ever had. And I was sent back in time to 1988 to the Ramstein Air Show Crash. And if anybody, many of you are too young to even understand what that is, but you can Google it. The Ramstein Air Show Crash. So I knew immediately what was happening to me. But the thing is, squirrels have nothing to do with my trauma. Squirrels in the road, nothing to do with anything that I personally ever experienced. Yet my PTSD brain decided I wasn't finished grieving enough. And by golly, we've got to give you this other reminder that acute and pretty severe trauma. I got to my friend's house where I was on my way that day on Memorial Day, and I walked into her house and I sat down on the floor and I cried for over an hour uncontrollably. She had no idea what was going on. And I had a really difficult time explaining it. So it was really severe and it took me weeks to move past it. But that acute trigger has now turned into a chronic trigger. So part of this PTSD is I have an acute trigger that was so obvious and so scary. But now, turtles in the road, beavers in the road, deer in the road, dogs in the road, they trigger me too, in a chronic, lower level kind of way. And it's all because of what I saw that particular day. But those triggers, those chronic triggers now don't send me back to that day in 1988 at the Ramstein Air show crash. They send me back to that stupid day in 2009 or 2019 when I'm driving towards my friend's house. So they send me back to the squirrel. So sometimes if I am having a bad day, I just say it's the frickin squirrels. And some people who know me know exactly what that's about. But the squirrel plays, for some reason now, a significant portion or a significant role in my ptsd, which has gotten much worse over time. Going to talk about the senses, and eventually the slide is going to catch up. So there are a number of senses that we use, that we absorb and that we use every day to help us navigate through life. So we have the five. What are the five? Sight, touch, smell, taste, sounds. This slide has eight of them. On there. Movement, balance, interoception. Interoception, I believe, is like your internal body sense for whether you're hungry or thirsty. I kind of feel like I'm a little bit thirsty. But for our purposes today, we're going to focus on the five senses. And the reason we're going to do that is because the five senses up top are generally the ones that are externally influenced. Okay, now, I do want to point out I'm not a medical professional, I'm not a mental health professional, and I'm about to show some slides here that may trigger people with PTSD, but this goes into our sensory overload. So, Ms. Kelly, so this is the IMAX theater at the Henry Ford. This is the Chicago o' Hare Airport. Airport, which, I mean, if I just hear those words, it's like an overload of your senses. Few years ago, I was at an IMAX movie theater with my niece and my sister. IMAX surround sound, big screen. It wasn't a dinosaur. We were watching Beauty and the Beast. Anybody seen that? The live action, you know, non cartoon thing of Beauty and the Beast, which is actually really good. And I had a big sensory overload at this IMAX theater and was just in tears at the end of the movie. And they weren't happy tears because of the happy outcome. I have had meltdowns in airports, but let's take a look at the one in the center where that's supposed to depict fireworks. Now, if you're in any of these situations, what are some of the senses that you're going to experience? Sounds. What? Touch. So we've got sound, touch, sight. What are we seeing? Mm. What about the people? We're seeing boatloads of people. Okay. Smells. Okay. Sense of taste. How eating popcorn, eating hot dogs, eating elephant ears that are being sold on the side. Okay. What about the parade? I've had a major meltdown at parades. We've got the crowds, we've got the cotton candy, we've got all kinds of smells going on. You've got people touching. You're trying to maneuver through, and then starts the sirens, the fire department going through, and then the next fire department goes through and then the next one. Okay, so, oh, the supermarket, the grocery store. Has anybody actually ever left a cart full of groceries and had to leave because of. But do you recognize that it's sensory overload? Because until 2014, when I learned about my nephew and what he had been suffering, I didn't recognize this as sensory overload. But at the same time, it didn't fit into my PTSD either, because I wasn't having a flashback. I wasn't having intrusive thoughts. I wasn't having really bad memories. All I knew is I wanted to kill somebody. I wanted to scratch somebody's eyes out. And I didn't know why. So let's go to the next slide. Opening day, Comerica Park. So think about the senses. When you're walking into Comerica park, what do you see? Lots of people. So we've got sight. What are you hearing? Okay, announcers. Okay. Touch maybe. Yeah. You're smelling all kinds of marijuana. Amen. Yes, you are. All right, so you're walking into Comerica park and you're doing okay because you've only got a few senses going on here. But then. Then you get here. Yeah. A picture like this, just knowing you're going to be involved in that can actually be pretty scary. The point I'm trying to make here is that sensory overload can be progressive. All right, let's go. There we go. So this is my family, my crazy, wild, lovely family. This is me. And this little guy right here that I've got my arm on is my nephew with adhd. And I'm proud to say that because he got on the right medication and the right therapy at the right time, he is a thriving 15 year old. He's not had problems in school or anything like that, so I'm very proud. But he, at six years old, has no idea what a huge impact he had on my life. But let's talk about family gatherings. Who's got a big family? Yeah. What kind of senses do you experience when you're in a family gathering? Nope, that's. That's when your overload kicks in. Noise. Yeah. So, I mean, I love my family. This is in my basement at my house. But, you know, we've got. We've got my little brown dog who's just a little brown, who run, you know, running all over the place. We've got back here somewhere as a newborn baby. Oh, right there. Newborn baby. So the baby's crying. We've got the older boys bullying the little kids. We've got two little kids fighting over some little toy. We've got the niece over here who's running, who shouldn't be, and trips over somebody's foot. Now she's crying. We've got food all over the place. We've got people drinking. We got people laughing, and we've got family trauma. I've had to leave family situations because of sensory overload. In this case, Like I said, this was in my basement. I couldn't leave. But the beauty of that is I can control my environment and I can go to my bedroom and shut the door if it gets to be overload. And this last one, who likes to tube down Michigan's Michigan rivers. Anybody ever done that before? Okay, so this is a landing zone and a tubing area. And I don't. I don't even know if that's a lake in Michigan. But think about the senses involved in that. You've got people dragging tubes. You've got your feet in the water that's a little cold running through. You've got pebbles in your shoes. You're smelling marijuana and beer big time. You've got people yelling. You've got babies crying. You got sensory overload there. Yeah, I personally have experienced that, actually. I've personally experienced all of those, you know, sensory overload. But it's not always easy to recognize. I know that. I feel like I want to crawl out of my skin. I'm not having a flashback. I'm not reliving some painful memory. I just want to scratch somebody's eyes out. Puts me into fight or flight mode. We're going to talk about fight or flight mode a little bit later. Can anybody understand? Can anybody see what sensory overload or how it happens in common every day. Supposed to be fun situations. Except for grocery shopping, that's not supposed to be fun. What does sensory overload look like? Anybody here can identify with that, with those feelings? Uh huh. So this is what it looks like. Is there anybody who can really describe it, what it feels like? So this is where I recognize the gap. Now, some of these may or may not be healthy. Laverne, I might need your help in determining on screen what is healthy and what is like a healthy coping mechanism versus an unhealthy aggression, agitation, maybe not. Not listening. Well, it might be healthy for me, you know, maybe not. The person who's trying to talk to meltdown, shutdown. That's happened to me so many times. Unable to sit still. So this is one of these things where my nephew me, my PTSD brain and his ADHD brain, we're having a real hard time with this sensory overload. But we don't always know why. There are some common elements. But I do want to make the point that in those pictures we had lots of crowds. Crowds don't always trigger, at least for me, crowds don't always trigger. My PTSD or what triggers it is the senses, the sensory overload. So just last week I was at an industry show and there were probably 800 people around me and I wasn't triggered. Sight and sound. There were no other stimulants going on with my senses, my other three senses. And subsequently you could also have sensory overload when there is no crowd. And so about a year and a half ago, I was at a community breakfast at my local American Legion. I was commander of the American Legion at the time. And we were doing fine. And we were prepping breakfast. There weren't a whole lot of people there. There were about six or seven of us. But after about an hour, the cook started cooking the sausage and I could smell it and I could hear it. And at that point I had progressed into sensory overload. I didn't know it, but I went from being happy and enjoying myself in an instant, being sad and feeling like I just wanted to die. And I had no idea why, but I left the room within five minutes. I was in a full blown meltdown. And then I pulled myself together and then I went back to helping with breakfast. So it's not always crowds, and crowds don't always mean sensory overload. Okay, so now we're going to get into some strategies. Ms. Kelly, you can know before you. Well, actually this. So this is actually supposed to be way up here so you can hit it again and see what happens. Okay, well, it is. No, no, go back on the original. I had like big red crosses going through there. But this is our first strategy. So what you're going to do is you're going to know before you go if someone comes to you and say, hey, let's go tubing down the river. Or hey, let's go to. Let's go to the IMAX theater or hey, let's go to the parade downtown. Or maybe you just have to go to the parade because your kids in the parade. That's happened to me too. So knowing before you go is you evaluate the senses that are likely to be stimulated in that particular environment. Now, I didn't evaluate prior to me going to that industrial show last week, but I just happened to luck out. There weren't a whole lot of smells. It wasn't so tight that people were running into me. All right, so assume pretend there's big red X's on two of those. And what you're trying to do here in this strategy is minimize the sensory input that you might experience when you're going there. Okay, so Ms. Kelly, can we go to the next one? Okay, gracias. Thank you, brain. Has anybody had a Therapist or somebody else talk to you about thanking your brain. Somebody mentioned it here yesterday, something about empowerment. Your brain in these sensory overloads is getting confused between what is danger and what is not. It's not necessarily sending you back in time to some traumatic event. You just know you want to crawl out of your skin or you're going to. You're in fight or flight mode. You are in fight or flight mode. This is a very important function of your brain. But PTSD brain gets confused because it didn't reset after your trauma. So what you're trying to do here is thank your brain for keeping you safe. And literally, I have sat in a a show with sensory overload and I'm grabbing the handles. Thank you, brain. Thank you for keeping me safe. I am safe. I am here. I have the power here. So you want to thank your brain, but one of the things you're also doing and doing that is you're level setting your expectations. You know, that going to the movie theater in that particular scenario or going to your kid's parade and can trigger sensory overload. You're level setting your expectations. You know what sensories, what senses are likely to be triggered there. Now I want to talk a little bit about level setting expectations. So Shelly mentioned with my bio that I was working on my law degree. It was an online law degree, and I was working on it while I was deployed as a government civilian over to Baghdad. Now, we had explosions all the time. We had indirect fire coming in a lot, and if it wasn't coming to us, we could hear it in other places. I was in the green zone, but you could easily hear it right outside the green zone. Probably not the best place to be for a person with ptsd. But I pursued it. However I expected it, there was nothing that happened regarding explosions in Baghdad that triggered my PTSD because my brain expected it. And that's what we're trying to do here. Level set the expectations and empower your brain. Now, I'm not saying that I didn't have any triggers in Baghdad, because I did, but none of them had to do with explosions, as ironic as that was. So, yep, we're going to say, oh, yeah, the normal versus the danger. And this is where your brain is going to get confused. So. So you're going into this next scenario. Okay, Ms. Kelly. All right, toolkit. So our strategy number three, you're going to have a toolkit at the ready. Now, what is this? Well, first of all, this is a female soldier that Shelly gave me, and we have Some on the tables. I'm sure we can get you some. A military member, a military woman is not never going to go out and patrol without her tools to keep her safe. These. This is actually a picture of my personal toolkit. So these are Greek worry beads. These are the ones I keep in my purse. Those are the ones I keep at home. Now, I have carried Greek worry beads with me for 20 something years, since I was stationed in Greece. I had no idea how valuable they would help me with my sensory overload. So we've got a fidget spinner. You know what, come to think of it, I have my own personal toolkit here. Lavender oil. Now, I personally, I mean, I'm a big believer in essential oils. I personally don't really like the scent of lavender oil, but it is very soothing. It is very soothing. So all of these things, you've got rubber bubble, Rubber bubble popper thingy in the center. I don't know what you call it, but I call it a rubber bubble poppy thing. Popper thingy. You've got your earplugs here. Let's see what else, what else do we have in this toolkit? Oh, yes, we've got our noise canceling headphones. There we go. You can take these with you. But, but to be honest, the. That, the. Just kidding. The earplugs will work just as well. So your idea here is to try to minimize or distract your senses. Minimize or distract with your toolkit. Now let's. Let's see, I've got. I've got my little woman. Woman veterans talk back. It's very exciting. What else? Oh, oh. So Laverne's company, or Laverne's CNS Healthcare, the one that Laverne is affiliated with, gives these out freely. And by the way, there is a basket of little stress balls. If anybody wants them. We can pass them around. So what else do we have? Oh, it's in the photo. We've got the Little iPods or AirPods or Earbuds, whatever you want to call them. We've got earplugs. We've got more earplugs. I never leave home without me earplugs. And then we also have a fidget spinner. So the fidgets, this particular fidget spinner, and the rubber bubble popper thingy, and the Greek worry reads, those always stay close, within reach at home. But what we're trying to do is to take our overloaded senses and focus on one or minimize one or two. Distract our brain, our PTSD brain and Help our PTSD brain recover to the point that it's not thinking it's in danger anymore. Let's make sure I covered all of that. Yeah. Refocus, redirect, minimize. Let's go to the next one. Okay. Tina talked about the 4, 7, 8, and there were. I think there was somebody yesterday who also mentioned the 4, 7, 8 breathing process. But I talked earlier about the fight or flight mode. Now, the fight or flight mode is actually like fight, flight, freeze, faint, or fawn or something. There's a number of Fs in there. It's the fight or flight mode for a lot of people with ptsd. When you're in sensory overload, this is what's going on. You're in that fight or flight mode because your PTSD brain doesn't know the difference. Your PTSD brain has engaged the sympathetic nervous system. But what we really want is we want to engage the parasympathetic nervous system. Fight or flight is sympathetic nervous system. Calm is your parasympathetic nervous system. So one of the ways that you can engage your parasympathetic nervous system is through that four, seven, eight breathing techniques or repeated deep breaths that don't send you into any sort of hyperventilation, but repeated deep breaths. So there are other ways on site where you're standing in the moment that you can activate or help engage your parasympathetic nervous system, one of which is rubbing your lips. Believe it or not, your lips have connections to the. I don't know if you want to call them, you know, nerve connections. But your lips are a pathway to the parasympathetic nervous system. So you can do this, you can sing, you can dance, and I've got no problem dancing in public. So, I mean, I have done that before. You can hum, you can listen to music. So all of the. You want to engage, minimize, refocus, or redirect some of your senses. So our fourth strategy, Breathe and soothe. So do something soothing to engage your parasympathetic nervous system and to overpower your sympathetic nervous system to get you out of fight or flight mode. Intentional grounding. Now, I'm a huge football fan. Anybody here? Football fan? Yeah. Everybody's like, yeah, whatever, whatever. Okay, so there's a penalty in football called intentional grounding, where the quarterback is throwing the ball. He realizes he's about ready to get tackled, so he intentionally throws the ball to the ground. That's a penalty. Now, when we're talking about therapy and mental health strategies, there is a grounding Technique that mental health professionals can use in severe anxiety situations. However, that grounding technique involves all of your senses. If you're in sensory overload, I don't recommend that you do these things to stop yourself from being in sensory overload. What I mean by intentional grounding is literally sit on the floor. When I talked earlier about the different senses. So we've got the five senses that are stimulated externally, but we've also got the gut brain connection, the hot and cold connection, the sense of balance, your sense of movement. So here you want to refocus your senses on one of the others that you can stimulate internally all by yourself. You can feel the coolness of the floor if you're on the floor. Anybody a fan of the Die Hard series of movies? Yeah. Okay. You know, one of the other things you could do is wear crazy socks and focus on your socks. In the Die Hard movie, the very first one, there's the scene at the beginning where John McLean is getting off a plane, and he's clearly a bit agitated, and this dude says to him, make this with your toes. It works. It really works. What I tend to do is if I'm in a situation where I can take my shoes off is I'll take my shoes off and just kind of stimulate my feet that way. But doing that, making fists with your toes, it actually kind of works. Well, now I got to put my shoes back on. Okay, so intentional grounding. So let's bring it all together, Ms. Kelly. You're going to know before you go, you're going to analyze the situation not in terms of crowds, but in terms of what senses are likely to be stimulated. Empower your brain. Thank your brain, because your brain is going to keep you safe. And one day there may actually be a dangerous situation where your brain has to discern between danger and normal. And you're going to know. You're going to keep your toolkit at the ready. You know, you can. You can put it all together. You get your crazy socks on. You got your Greek worry beads. We're going to sit on the floor. Intentional grounding. Stare at our very colorful socks, because we're going to redirect our senses, and we're just going to have a grand old time. We're either going to listen to music or we're just going to cut out anybody who can't. You know, we just want to cut out the sound so we can't hear anything. So you're going to put it all together with your intentional grounding. You are rocking it, girlfriend. This is a safe place. Kelly, let's go to the next one because we're talking about safe place. So when you get home now, there are any number of things, and I think yoga might even. Is yoga on here. Yoga is a huge help for engaging your parasympathetic nervous system and calming your fight or flight mode. But some of these things you can do out and about. My goal here today was to get you focused on what can you do in the moment when. When you're in that sensory overload so you don't scratch somebody's eyes out. But when you get home, that's when you pat yourself on the brain on the back. You're going to high five yourself, you're going to thank your brain once again, and then the next time it's going to a little bit going to get a little bit easier and a little bit easier. So the only thing that I want to close with is something deadly serious based on my story and at the same time, a little bit funny, too. So, Ms. Kelly, grand finale here. There we go. Thank you all for coming.