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Join certified trauma professional Dr. Amy Hoyt and licensed therapist Leina Hoyt, MFT at https://www.mendingtrauma.com as they teach you how to recover from trauma and cPTSD. Trauma shows up in our everyday reactions and sensations and recovering requires a multi-prong approach that considers the mind, body and spirit. Dr. Amy and Leina will teach you the most emerging research and skills to empower you to overcome your past traumas. They address nervous system health, somatic therapy, trauma, cPTSD, EMDR, Neurofeedback, IFS (Internal Family Systems therapy), and many other modes of recovering from trauma. As mental health experts, sisters and trauma survivors, they teach you the tools that actually helped them recover, are backed by research and have helped thousands of their clients. Each episode is packed with clinically effective methods as well as scientific findings to guide you through your own trauma healing journey. Whether discussing cPTSD, PTSD, medical trauma, somatic therapy, nervous system regulation, EMDR or neurofeedback, Amy and Leina will help you recover from trauma so that you can reconnect to yourself and others.
0:00:02 - Speaker 1
Welcome to the Mending Trauma podcast. I'm your host, dr Amy Hoyt, and, along with my sister, laina Hoyt, a licensed marriage and family therapist, we want to help you recover from trauma, whether it's childhood trauma, complex trauma, ptsd or any other trauma sustained from abuse or narcissistic relationships. We want to help you develop skills and ways that can help you to recover from the symptoms and the effects of trauma. We are so glad you're here. Let's dive in. Hi Amy here. Are you feeling stuck or overwhelmed by things that pop up in your daily life and perhaps these are because of past traumas or toxic stress? Have you tried traditional therapy and found that it wasn't enough? I know that was the case for me. That's why we developed the whole health lab.
Mending Trauma has put together a program that combines the latest research with proven methods to help you recover from trauma and move forward from these daily stressors and triggers. We use somatic therapy, emdr, cognitive behavioral therapy and internal family systems therapy. We use nervous system regulation and many other tools so that we can combine the best methods that are identified in the research to help you recover without being completely overwhelmed, so you can work on trauma on your own pace, your own time and still with the mentorship and support of a highly trained, certified staff. That's us no more waiting for appointments or sitting in traffic driving to see a therapist. With our online program, the whole health lab, you can access it from anywhere, anytime, even on an app.
Visit mendingtraumacom backslash whole health lab and learn more, get your questions answered We've got a frequently asked questions section and sign up so that you can have this life changing program in your world today. Don't let your past hold you back any longer. Take control of your future and we can't wait to see you in the whole health lab. Hi everyone, welcome back to the Mending Trauma podcast. We are excited to dive into our topic this week. It's something we see a lot in our private coaching and therapy sessions, and that is when trauma distorts our perception. Let's talk about that. Laina, tell us what you mean by that, what we're seeing and kind of what examples we have of that.
0:02:38 - Speaker 2
Sure the best example I have of this from my own experience working with a significantly traumatized client. This is about eight years ago, before I had more specific trauma, informed training in, especially in terms of the nervous system and how, when your nervous system is really activated, you actually can't perceive safety. And I can remember being in a session with her and I really wanted to help her, like reduce her distress about things. And what we know is that when we've had traumatic experiences or dynamics, it alters the way we perceive the world as a dangerous or a safe place. And so she would come in and she'd be very distressed about something and I'd say to her well, that's your perception, and for some reason she was hearing me say it's not real and you shouldn't be upset. And that was not what I was saying.
But I didn't have as much experience or true education about the nervous system and how it affects our ability to perceive and think and form opinions, and I remember I will never. That was a seminal moment for me in my career because I didn't know how to best approach it and I felt stuck in trying to help her, and so that has stuck with me for the last eight years and it's really informed some of the learning and research that we've done for our amending trauma, the whole health lab. So I'm really grateful that that happened and I regret that I didn't have more, more specific skills at that time. But that's what trauma does it hijacks the nervous system and it does not allow us to see things from a neutral standpoint and so things that other people would not be concerned about or wouldn't be offended by, somebody who's had a lot of trauma in their history doesn't have a different way of looking at it.
0:05:05 - Speaker 1
Yeah, I think that's a perfect example and it's a perfect entry to talk about specifically complex trauma. And what we know from complex trauma is that it often happens in childhood, although it can happen in adult relationships, but it is a sustained pattern where our winering for safety or survival is also aligned with our wiring for connection. And so when we are in an environment where we're not getting the attention or the love or the resources that we need in childhood whether it's through, you know, because of abuse or neglect we are with people that are supposed to be protecting us and yet our survival, trauma responses are engaged constantly. Right, we're trying to protect ourselves. Well, that gets wired in early childhood with our wiring for connection, because we love our caretakers and our parents and we want so desperately for them to see us and love us and take care of us, so that dual wiring survival and connection actually can set us up later in life for these interactions in relationships, whether they're casual relationships or more intimate relationships or familial relationships, where we constantly, when we're getting close to people or close to people, are seeing danger and threat.
And you know I, before I became certified in trauma, I this would happen to me constantly as an adult where I would have a close friend and all of a sudden there would be this point in the friendship where it went from kind of the honeymoon phase to more of the phase where I was starting to feel in danger.
I didn't identify it like that because I didn't have the language, but I would feel like they, they don't seem to like me, they don't, they might, maybe they're out, maybe they really don't like me and they want. You know there's malice behind some of their intentions. So one benign example is, you know, going out with a group of friends and having one of my close friends sit next to someone else at dinner and engage in conversation with them and not engaging as much with me. And so, although I love this person and they were one of my closest friends, I felt so distressed because I felt somehow left out or unsafe and that wiring from my own childhood, growing up in an abusive home, having had, you know, sexual abuse and emotional abuse and physical abuse, was so strong that my adult friendships, my perception, was distorted in those friendships.
0:08:11 - Speaker 2
Yes, and it was beyond your will, it was beyond your ability to, it was beyond your consciousness.
0:08:19 - Speaker 1
Correct and I had no framework to understand what was happening, and so it felt, it felt real. It was real to me. Oh yes, exactly. But their intention, by sitting next to another person at dinner, was not to upset me or to leave me out. It was to get to know another person, which is a wonderful, beautiful behavior.
0:08:43 - Speaker 2
Right, that's a great example. I think about the example of moving into a neighborhood in your 20s and seeing a neighbor pass you by in the car and you waving and they didn't wave back and how that was so distressing for you. You were so disturbed about it because you didn't have a way of interpreting that any other way, except for that it was personal and that is how many of our listeners live inside a lot of their relationships and it's a terrible, horrible, it's just awful and we don't do it to ourselves. I know that people really like to say that we do Like you're thinking it's all about you.
0:09:26 - Speaker 1
That's not what this is about, right? It's a nervous system reaction.
0:09:30 - Speaker 2
Yes, exactly, and the workshop I'm doing today ties perfectly into what we're talking about. I'm talking about emotional trauma and how the wiring for safety and the wiring for connection get entangled and we start to protect our selves from these perceived slights or perceived pulling away of others.
0:09:54 - Speaker 1
Yes, and one of the things you just said, lena, is that you talked about how, during this distortion where we're misperceiving other people's behavior and feeling like it's directed at us, we are taking things personally. And this is not narcissism, this is not. This is a nervous system reaction where our limbic brain has hijacked the situation. It's transported us back in time to other situations we have had that felt painful and, as our listeners may remember, trauma shows up as sensations and feelings, not necessarily as concrete memories. So if you have a bodily sensation of feeling left out or feeling slighted by someone and something similar happens, whether or not that person intended it, we can get transported back to that same sensation, and that's where some of the misperception comes in.
0:11:00 - Speaker 2
Yes, it's such a painful way to live and when we're in that way of experiencing the world, we don't have any awareness that that's what's happening for us. We just can't figure out why everybody is eventually leaving us, or we can't figure out why somebody I can't rely on one person to just be my person, and it's really disheartening and discouraging.
0:11:28 - Speaker 1
I think that one of the the most helpful pieces of information that we can teach our listeners is to really pay attention to what's happening in their body during these moments. We know that when we are transported back with those bodily sensations, we're going to feel probably a clenching of the chest, maybe a sick feeling in our stomach. Sometimes it'll be a flush feeling in our face, and that is the time to get curious. Okay, what's going on here? Why do I feel sick to my stomach? I understand that this is upsetting me and we start to become the observer of the situation, and one of the most important things when we do become the observer is to note that we want to be really kind to ourselves while we're observing. One of the things that happens in our brain when we start observing is it really calms down the amygdala and it puts us back in our prefrontal cortex.
0:12:41 - Speaker 2
Right and our prefrontal cortex is the home of our executive functioning. It's where all of our logic, our wisdom, our higher emotions, our spirituality all of that is accessed in the prefrontal cortex. So being able to use non-judgmental observation to calm down the amygdala, so we have increased blood flow to the prefrontal cortex, is so essential.
0:13:09 - Speaker 1
Yes, and then one of the other tricks. While we're talking about being the observer, one of the best things that you've taught me is to get out a piece of paper and write down the facts of the situation. So, for instance, my example of going to dinner with a group of friends, my facts would look like I went to dinner with blah blah, blah, blah, blah blah, I sat here, so and so sat there, I talked yeah well, I talked to so and so they talked to so and so and so and so, and those are the true facts of the evening. And what happens when we look at the facts in black and white?
0:13:52 - Speaker 2
Oh my gosh, it's really. It can be almost magical. I can remember discovering this in a in a I was supervising a high conflict co-parenting case. One of my student trainees was working with this family and I can remember being in the session and saying to one of the parents you're describing motivation, not behavior, and it something clicked in my mind from that and this I use three by five cards. This tool of using a three by five card and writing down only what you can see in here. Nothing else, no conjecture, no assumptions, no meaning making, nothing else takes so much of what I call dirty pain out of the interaction, because the clean pain is maybe that you wanted to sit by Susie Q and Susie Q sat next to you, know, anne. But the dirty pain is all the meaning making we have in our head, all the narrative that we explain to ourselves for the reason for this person sitting next to Anne and wrote us.
0:15:06 - Speaker 1
And it's the dirty pain is what we call the suffering. Truly, because life with humans, other humans, can be difficult. There's going to be some bumps and we're going to accidentally hurt each other. The suffering is when we do assign meaning to those behaviors and when we continue to ruminate on those perceived meanings.
0:15:33 - Speaker 2
Yes, yeah, I was talking to one of my clients last week and I've worked off and on with him probably since he was about 12 and he's 22 now and he had a really upsetting experience and I was packed. He reached out to see if I had any time. I said I have 25 minutes. So we got on the zoom call and I said, tim, what's going on? And he started telling me and it's like his words are tumbling after each other because he's so distressed and I said to him I'm going to have you stop for a minute and I want you to tell me only the facts of this situation.
He said Well, I was really angry and I wanted to hurt somebody. I said that's not a fact. He said I was really angry and I had a thought that I wanted to hurt someone, and I said yes. And he said but I shouldn't have had that thought. And I said your brain is doing this thing. Where you had this experience, emotionally and with your cognitions, that was so disturbing that the rest of your brain forgot you didn't do it, like it didn't happen. So you can stop being quite as distressed and quit being yourself up, because the win is that, despite having these thoughts and feelings. You actually did not do it and he couldn't get there without the facts, right, exactly.
0:17:08 - Speaker 1
And when you put the facts in black and white and you only deal with the facts, that example is perfect. On how trauma can distort our perception of ourselves, yes, so trauma distorts perception of others and assigns motivation and meaning to other people without any sort of fact, and it also distorts our perception of ourselves, which we know. That's actually literally one of the parts of the definition of trauma that it does distort the way we view the way we view ourselves, and it's a much more negative view, right. But I love your example that you were able to bring this client back to the facts, that he had a thought and he did not act on that thought, and that's powerful.
0:17:54 - Speaker 2
It is and it was like it's. What I learned in EMDR is that when you have trauma, it comes in these clusters and so certain things get associated with it, and so he grew up in a family where there's a lot of raging from his dad, so anger was exceptionally dangerous, and so he had this neurocluster in his mind about what he had wanted to do that was completely disconnected from the reality that he didn't do it. It was so interesting.
0:18:30 - Speaker 1
Yeah, that's a great example for our listeners because, quite frankly, I think that's just as painful and leads to just as much suffering as our misperceptions of ourselves from trauma. Well, anything else you would like to leave the listeners with in terms of how trauma distorts perception and how to kind of correct that.
0:18:52 - Speaker 2
Sure, hang in there. This is hard. This is hard stuff. You mentioned suffering. I love the Buddha saying if you're human, this is a loose quote, but if you're human, pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional, and we don't cause ourselves to suffer on purpose. I don't care what anyone has told you about that. No one would pick that. And so if you're noticing that this is something that happens for you, then understand that it came from a protective drive from very young in your life and that you're not doing it to yourself.
0:19:34 - Speaker 1
That's great. Well, thank you so much for joining us again this week and we look forward to being with you next week. Thanks for listening to this week's episode of the Mending Trauma podcast. Lane and I are really grateful that you spend time with us each week. We know you have a choice and that time is currency. We would love if you would share this episode on social media and tag us so we can reshare, if you feel so inclined. Go and give us a five-star review wherever you listen to pods, so that we can get the word out and help more people. We know that we are all working hard on our mental health and we wish you great success this week in implementing these new skills. We'll check in next week.