Chris and Beth Bruno host conversations at the intersection of psychology and theology. This podcast is powered by ReStory Counseling.
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Want to know what it takes to Restore Your Life? We are Chris and Beth Bruno and we lead a team of brilliant story work counselors around the country all committed to helping you come alive. We call it the Restorey Approach. So if you're a story explorer, kingdom seeker, or just a day-to-dayer, you've come to the right place. Welcome to the Restorey Podcast.
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So the challenge to find the perfect soundproof space continues. It's almost every time we record. And so here we are in a different space and we just argued about the clock ticking, but we're here because we left another space where we had a loud
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co-worker and we had to next door and so here we are just we're joking about even jumping into recording today and dealing with You know little ticks of a clock versus large baritone voice of a colleague This big noise small noise and today we're talking about
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big T traumas and small T traumas. And it's just this fun parallel as we dive into this topic today. Yes. Yeah, I mean, for me, the ticking of the clock doesn't matter as much. It doesn't bother me. I didn't even notice it was happening until you pointed to the clock and said, the clock needs to go.
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And the reality is all of us, all of our lives are full of big things and little things and some big things are big things for certain people and little things are little things for certain people or not. And so as we talk about trauma and the restorying of trauma, it's not a matter of what it is to me. It's a matter of what it is to you and what it means to you in the context of your life and your story. Because what's a little, you know, what's a little tick?
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in the background to you, I'm sorry, what's a little tick in the background to me might be a real big thing to you because of the level of impact that it's had. So let's talk about big T trauma and little T trauma. Yeah, well, so here's the thing, I hear this a lot and I myself have spoken these words. I had a great childhood. I came from a great loving family. My parents are functional and caring
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functioning in life, like I don't have a story. I've heard that. Or I didn't experience trauma. Or no connection to the word trauma at all. Like just no place in our lives and the way we tell our story where trauma fits in. I've heard all of that. And you would say, you would argue that that is.
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untrue. Yeah, well, I mean, think about it in a in Christian settings where people also talk about their quote-unquote testimony.
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that you only have a testimony if it's a dramatic conversion experience or something like that. The fact is that everyone who has become a Christian has a story of what that journey was like for them. Whether that was when they were young or older or dramatic or not dramatic, everybody has a story of coming to faith. And so in the same way, every one of us has a story that is somehow written into our lives.
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Jan Proett, she says it this way. She says the measuring stick is not someone else's story. The measuring stick is Eden and the fact that we are not currently living in in the Edenic experience that God designed for all of us, that we're somehow outside, all of us are outside of Eden, is an indicator that something is amiss.
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for all of us. Something is wrong. And I don't want to just be like always looking for the thing that's wrong, but something is not equal to what God designed us to be and where he designed us to live and how he designed us to live in connection and relationship with one another. So something, we're not an Eden and that is the measuring stick. So you have good parents and I have good parents and many people have good parents. But the fact that those parents are not fully living in the
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the kingdom that God designed means that to some degree there is a miss, there is a deficit, there is something that they could not or would not provide in the upbringing and childhood experience that we had, however good it might be. And so when we talk about trauma, that is the definition of trauma, where something is either kind of some wounding against or something withheld.
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It's not only the thing, the big T trauma is usually the kind of thing that's, you know, the car crash or the death of a parent or the...
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the infidelity in your home that broke the home or something like that, those are big T traumas. And those are usually something that's come against you. The little T traumas are the ones that don't register on that Richter scale. They wouldn't necessarily make you feel like, oh, I have a story because I went through this big thing, but it's more of what's been absent. It's more of what's been withheld. It's more of what might not have been named in your life as hard
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because you just kind of made it through, but you still had to make it through something. You still had to face something. And those are the little T traumas. And the challenge is the little T traumas, they are subtle, they are covert. They're often not named or noticed because we can make it through them. And what happens to our souls often is that the little T traumas have just as much of an impact.
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on our lives and our stories as the Big T1s, though they remain unnamed, though they remain unseen, and though often we feel like we just need to brush them off our shoulder because we should be able to make it through, and therefore they live and they grow and they fester and they become something in our lives that maybe if in the moment back then...
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when those things happened to us, if we'd addressed them then, or we had a parent or some adult address them with us, they might not have become traumas, but because they live within us, over time they're there still. So big T and little t traumas, really at the end of the day have the same effect.
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Well, let's talk a little bit about where we might start to see the, the presence, the evidence of a little T trauma. And let's, let's just focus on little T traumas because that's the majority. Um, and that's, I think more easy to connect to for our listeners. Where might we start to, to name, oh, that like this, there's something here. Right. Well, I think I just mentioned it a moment ago. It's what's been withheld.
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And so the questions of who was not there, what was not offered, what was not given in the moment where you may have needed something more than you received.
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where was there not comfort offered in the moment that you needed comfort? Where was care not offered? Where was attunement or presence or words not offered in the moment where we needed them as kids? And the results of that not being offered ends up where now I have to find my own way to contain my feelings, my experience, my emotions, I have to make sense of what I'm feeling and just think about it.
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offered in the moment of something happening at school, right? It's not a big T-trauma like we talked about, but if there's not a parent to kind of process through that with us, then we're left trying to make meaning of that experience by ourselves, which as kids we don't have a lot of resources to make those meanings, and so we come to an understanding of, well, I guess it's not that important. I guess being called a racial slur or
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derogatory term or some, I guess that's not important because I guess I'm not that important because mom or dad, I told them about it and they didn't seem to make a big deal of it or they didn't even notice that I told them.
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that just begins to lodge into our lives and in our souls that that little t trauma, traumatic as it was, wasn't addressed. It just becomes something that we just absorb. Well, I think what's easier if people are like me, it's easier to go backward. It's, it's more difficult for me to remember all of those situations in school and try and find all of those places where something was absent. It's easier for me to start with today.
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I experienced today that that can lead me backward to maybe finding and identifying the source and then starting to heal or do some restoring backward. And so talk to me a little bit about what are those things today that we could become more curious about what what might happen in our body or what might happen where we get you know just activated.
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signs. Well, I mean those are what I would call cues, okay, and I call them cues because they're indicators that something has been activated with you, some story has been activated within you, and they can be anything really that where you feel your body either tensing or disappearing.
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So I, you know...
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All kinds of examples come to mind, right? The tensing of your body, of you feel the pit in your stomach, or your throat starts to close up, and you feel the knot in your throat, or your hands start to sweat, or there's something that you start to be a little bit more aware of your surroundings, and you're noticing, oh, where's the exit? Where's the door, right? There's something there that gets activated in you where you're starting to go up. There's starting to be some ramp
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happens or there's starting to be some departure where somebody says something or a person engages with you and all of a sudden there's this strong strong impulse to pull out your phone and play a game or to scroll on Facebook or to do something you know to start talking about something else to avoid the topic or you know you're at the dinner table and you have to in that moment get up and go to the bathroom
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Okay, so those are some indicators that maybe there's something happening that's been triggering a story that's been dormant or unaddressed or unattended to in your life that you might want to start attending to and be aware of. And it's in those moments that I would say, like, when did you first start? When do you have a memory of when you felt this way, where you needed to start noticing the door?
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where you started to recognize that if I stay present right now, if I don't dissociate, if I don't pull out my phone, what am I going to have to face? Those are indicators of some of those. They can be indicators of big T traumas as well. And I think more of us have more big T traumas in our lives than we are willing to admit.
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because we've minimized our experience in order to survive. But for sure we have thousands and thousands of little T traumas. Well, I think a lot of times we compare and we say, oh, but what I experienced, what I suffered, what I went through doesn't compare at all to what she did or he suffered. I think we diminish our traumas because there's always something bigger and worse.
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been living with a big T trauma, but have never really accepted it as such. Yeah. And I'll go back to Jan Proett's words, like the measuring stick is not my trauma versus your trauma and yours is worth so therefore mine is not worth attending to. The measuring stick is Eden. And in the same way for Christians, it's like, do you need Jesus more than I need Jesus? Are the things that the brokenness that you're experiencing, do you need more of him than I do?
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And if there's that level of comparison, then, you know, I must, there must be something about me because I didn't experience it to that degree that you did. There must be something about me that is better than you or not in need of him to the degree that you need him or not as broken. And that just shuts down all the possibility of me actually knowing the goodness and kindness of God in my life, because apparently I don't need him that much.
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of the restoring process. And so we're gonna keep talking about this this season. We're gonna talk about kind of what your body is doing and how to become more in tune to that fight and flight and all sorts of related things. So see you next time.
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Alright friends, thanks for listening. If you haven't left a rating on iTunes, we'd love for you to do that real quick. And here's the thing with our name change. We're trying to offer more cohesion to all the things we do with restoration. We've got counseling and stuff for marriages and dads and moms and the list goes on and on. One of the ways we started talking about it recently is to rather humorously and affectionately refer to it all as the ReStory universe. Doesn't that sound interesting?
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Well if you want to learn more, just head over to RestoreUniverse.com to see what we're up to. And we'll see you same time, same place, next week.