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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 another episode. Today we thought we would go back to some of our beginnings, if you will. We haven't recorded an episode. That is just a basic what is trauma? For a couple of years, and we thought it would be really good to revisit it, especially since there's been a lot of new books and literature that have come out about trauma. So let's start with a basic definition, lena. How do we define trauma? What is trauma?
0:02:41 - Speaker 2
Well, we define trauma in our program as either a relational pattern or an event or a lack of attention that leads to a shift in your belief about yourself and your belief about the world, and that is the way that we conceptualize it in our program. But there are lots of other definitions, and do you have some that you have been looking at lately?
0:03:11 - Speaker 1
Yeah, you know, I'm always interested when a new book comes out, to see how the author defines trauma and how they think about trauma, and all of these are just adding to the conversation to help us understand trauma at a deeper level. One of the, of course, bessel van der Kolk and Judith Herman are the two really godfathers and godmothers of trauma, and Bessel van der Kolk takes a more biological view of trauma, where Dr Herman takes a more social view of trauma, and both are really important. But the definition that really captures me is that it's something that's unbearable and intolerable, and that comes from van der Kolk. Another definition that I really like comes from Deb Dana's book. She has a book polyvagal exercises for safety and connection and she works really closely with Stephen Porges and she talks about how trauma is what happens to a person, where there is either too much too soon, too much for too long or not enough for too long, and I really like that.
It reminds me of Gabor Maté and his definition of trauma, which he talks about. It's also the good things that didn't happen to us. So we have bad things that happen to us and we have good things that we didn't get, and those can both be trauma. So let's talk about what types of trauma there are. I get a lot of questions about this. I'm sure you do as well. We know about trauma and then people see words like complex trauma or CPTSD or PTSD. Let's kind of break it down and talk about the different types of trauma. Sure.
0:05:13 - Speaker 2
I think that when I'm talking about trauma in this arena, I'm not talking necessarily about a diagnosis of PTSD or complex PTSD. I'm talking about how, throughout our lives, and particularly in our childhood, we can have experiences or lack of experiences, and oftentimes these are within relational patterns, and what those experiences do is they do not provide us with a way of being seen and heard, and they also can include parents who are doing the best they can, but maybe suffer from their own addictions, or adult children are alcoholic, who are raising you. The idea is that the trauma can be any incident that is overwhelming to your nervous system, so we can have single incident trauma, we can have relational trauma, we can have trauma that is medical.
0:06:23 - Speaker 1
There's tons of different types of trauma, yeah, and I think what we see a lot with our clients are people who are dealing with both childhood trauma and complex trauma and, to kind of let our listeners know, a lot of people who have complex trauma receive complex trauma in childhood. However, you can also have complex trauma in a sustained abusive relationship as an adult, correct Whether that relationship is interpersonal, at home or whether it's at work. So complex trauma is a sustained pattern that lasts for a length of time. Kind of going back to Deb Dana's definition, it's too much for too long or not enough for too long, and so we see a lot of complex trauma. And to kind of clarify, complex trauma is also called CPTSD. So those are synonymous and I think that can get confusing if you're on social media and you're seeing things about CPTSD and complex trauma and childhood trauma.
I think a lot of people are trying to figure out these definitions. So we've got all different types of trauma. Like you said, we've got single event. We do have PTSD, which is kind of where the field of trauma started, the modern field of trauma, of course, mainly looking at people who had served in war. We have complex trauma. We have medical trauma. We have lots of different types of trauma, but at the core, they all are overwhelming our nervous system and really changing for the for the worst, if you will, in a negative way the way we perceive ourselves and the world around us. So that's really the commonality.
0:08:16 - Speaker 2
Teenage clients that I'm seeing now are having a lot of trauma in their friendships, maybe even particularly after the pandemic, because it was so disruptive and dysregulating to social relationships, particularly amongst teens, and what they are dealing with is this perception that they don't have the right to have healthy boundaries, that they don't, that they're not worthy of healthy friendships. And a lot of this happens in my clientele in junior high, and junior high is such a pivotal time for both girls and boys. But you also can have this trauma that occurs in your friendship relationships and that can be very devastating and it leads us to make all kinds of choices in our lives that are based on fear instead of being based on clarity and transparency and that sort of thing.
0:09:26 - Speaker 1
Can you give us an example of how trauma might show up in a teenage friendship? What does that look like?
0:09:33 - Speaker 2
Sure. So I have a couple of teenage clients. One in particular, in junior high, had a couple of friends and as the seventh year turned into seventh grade, turned into eighth grade, the shift in these friends. So it was three girls, three kids together, and what ended up happening is two of the kids aligned with each other and they formed a type of a I don't know cohort isn't quite the right word, but an alliance.
And the result was that my friend not my friend, my kid that I worked with consistently not only left out but when invited to things, was ignored or was put down, made fun of that sort of thing.
And I can remember her at 13, saying to me I think I've realized that, even though these girls have been my friends since I was eight years old, I need to have some distance from them. And so she, on her own, came up with this idea of how to like limit her exposure to these two friends. And then I have another kid who, in eighth grade, had a very good friend who started showing severe signs of mental illness at that time, and my client ended up feeling really responsible for her best friend. And no, 13 year old is equipped to deal with significant mental health issues in a friend and, as a result of the mental health issues, my client ended up rejected and blamed and accused and it created a very uneven relationship that wasn't necessarily based on accuracy, so the mentally ill teen would accuse my client of certain things that didn't happen and so it became very disruptive to my teen client and really impacted her ability to trust future friendships.
0:11:55 - Speaker 1
I think these are great examples, very clear, and as you're speaking, I realize that I also see these same patterns in adult friendships, and so what we're talking about is probably trauma in one or more of the lives of the people involved in these relationships. That then gets brought into the friendship and those coping mechanisms you know of trying to protect yourself and feel safe when you're hyper vigilant, are showing up as making alliances, and you know obviously mental health issues where you're not necessarily tethered to facts and what's actually happening. Those are great examples and I think that's really helpful for listeners to understand that we can have trauma that's easily identifiable and then sometimes those trauma patterns get brought into other relationships and that gets really tricky.
0:12:59 - Speaker 2
And even if the trauma isn't obvious. So as I worked with with both of these clients over the years, it became apparent, as they maintain some kind of contact with these friends of theirs, that there was a lot of trauma coming from these friends of theirs and the trauma within the home and the relationship environment and that kind of thing. So it was very fascinating to see, very tragic. But working with my clients and seeing them heal and learn how to trust again has been very rewarding, I'm sure.
0:13:38 - Speaker 1
So we've talked about how trauma can show up. What are some other clues for someone who's listening about their own trauma? So signs of trauma and clues to know if they've had trauma.
0:13:58 - Speaker 2
We talk a lot in our program about these categories and one of them is physical or somatic clues, and when you are taking a look at things and reflecting back, it's important that you know that trauma is one possible explanation for some of these things. Sometimes it can show up in migraines, Sometimes it can show up in gastrointestinal issues. So a lot of kids that I've worked with in the last few years have a lot of oh shoot. I can't remember what it's called IBS. Yes, thank you.
0:14:37 - Speaker 1
Yeah, they have a lot of IBS. Yeah, it's very common with people with trauma to have IBS, because the nervous system is constantly dysregulated and that that impairs digestion.
0:14:49 - Speaker 2
Yes, Yep, and so you can have these real physiological symptoms and these real physiological issues, and some of them may be coming from trauma that's been stored in the body and hasn't been resolved. So those are some things you can look for.
0:15:09 - Speaker 1
I think that's a great point, that we cannot drive this home enough that trauma is not just an issue of our mind and our brain, but it gets stored in our body. And because the nervous system is affected by our limbic brain through the polyvagal nerve, we know that trauma gets stored in the body and that shows very real physical symptoms. The landmark ACEs study that was reproduced by the NIH in conjunction with Kaiser Permanente in 1996 and 1997, out of 17,000 people they were able to discover that childhood trauma, adverse childhood events, directly led to an increase in heart attacks, stroke and other very real physical ailments. So this is not, these are not psychosomatic. These are very real physical ailments. So when you do have those, as you talked about, that's a clue that it could be related to trauma.
We also know that there are other mood and cognition symptoms of trauma. So we see a lot of anxiety related to past trauma. We see mood disorders such as depression related to past trauma. There is a growing body of doctors and therapists who believe that really at the heart of almost all mental illness is unresolved trauma. Now that hasn't been borne out in research yet, but it is a growing movement and it's something I think that's interesting to watch and see where the field goes. Is our depression actually because of unresolved trauma or is it genetic? So it'll be really interesting to kind of see how that plays out. We also see arousal and reactivity signs, and can you talk to us about some of those symptoms? What does that look like in a person?
0:17:13 - Speaker 2
Sure, when, when we're looking at arousal and reactivity, what we're looking at is when people have a very large response to something that doesn't warrant the response. So the brain is perceiving a more situation than is actually occurring. So it can look like when somebody doesn't take off from the green light as fast as you'd like to and you blow your top, or it can look like somebody cutting you off and you freak out. It can look like you making a mistake and the response internally is so large that it triggers a shame cycle. And so the reactivity is about having these outside outsized responses, and the arousal signs can be anything from problems with managing regular even breathing, increased heart rate, increased blood pressure these kinds of things can also show up in arousal.
0:18:25 - Speaker 1
And again, what we're doing here is we're alerting listeners to lots of symptoms that you will get curious about. Does you know one symptom mean you have trauma? No, it means that it's something to get curious about and start to work with a professional to determine if it is due to trauma. We also have avoidance symptoms, and avoidance can look like any sort of numbing behavior, addiction to really anything it can be, you know alcohol, drugs, porn, shopping, food, anything to avoid those sensations that come up, because remember, trauma shows up in our everyday life as sensations and reactions, not necessarily cognitive, clear memories. So avoidance is, I think, one of the most common set of symptoms. Are there other avoidance symptoms that you can think of besides addiction?
0:19:27 - Speaker 2
Well, I think a lot about perfectionism and perfectionism. One of the symptoms of perfectionism is avoidance, and perfectionism often times comes from an overwhelming experience in your earlier life, where your brain subconsciously makes a decision that if only you were perfect, then this bad thing would not have happened to you. And that's particularly common when we have really dysfunctional family relationships. So perfectionism is another thing that I see and great point, yes. And then avoidance in general is something that kind of cycles in a lot of the clients that I see. So there's an intense amount of anxiety, there's the avoidance because of the anxiety, then the anxiety rises. It can be a very exhausting cycle.
0:20:25 - Speaker 1
And then our last set of symptoms are called intrusion symptoms, and these can come back as nightmares or as intrusive and ruminating thoughts and memories that are very hard to quiet. And intrusive symptoms are very I think they are the most difficult At least they have been in my life. Are there other intrusive symptoms that you can think of?
0:20:58 - Speaker 2
The intrusion is typically what I have noticed is typically in the thought process, and having intrusive thoughts, including memories, keeps us trapped back in the trauma, and so the intrusive symptoms are very, very disturbing for most people, and that is a very difficult thing to deal with.
0:21:28 - Speaker 1
Now I would say, out of all the symptoms, for me personally the intrusions were the clearest sign that I had unresolved trauma, because it was so clear. The nightmares and the flashbacks, they were crystal clear to the point where it felt like I was back at that age. And so I would say, with all of the other symptoms it's like okay, take a clue, see if you have trauma with intrusion. To me it was super obvious and I know that not everyone will have that experience, but there was no doubt whatsoever that something had happened to me, because I was transported back to that moment in time, which was horrible and also necessary for my brain to help me start to put the pieces back together and start healing.
So we've talked already about some examples of how trauma shows up in our everyday life. But let's move on to talk about how do we recover from this. Let's say we've got some symptoms. We're listening to this, we're like, oh my goodness, a lot of this is making sense. How do we recover from this? What does the research say? What's the most effective way to move into healing and recovery?
0:22:40 - Speaker 2
Well, what the research supports is that unless we use the body in our healing journey, we will not fully resolve trauma, and that's why sometimes you'll hear things like you can't fully heal from trauma, you can just manage symptoms, and that is not accurate. You absolutely can heal from trauma, but not if your method of addressing it is talking about it over and over and over again, and if we do not include the body, then we will be trapped and our nervous system will not be able to release the body memory, and there are some really specific things that can be helpful for that. So EMDR, which is eye movement, desensitization and reprocessing, uses a myriad of approaches sama Yoga for that, and справacao, as does internal family systems, and we also have seen a lot of powerful research on neurofeedback or biofeedback, and I love how the research is moving more towards the awareness that we have body memory and cellular memory and that if we don't include that in our recovery, we're not going to have complete recovery.
0:24:05 - Speaker 1
I think that's a really, really great point and we are seeing. In our program. We of course, include EMDR and internal family systems and we are just starting neurofeedback locally. It's in beta still, but we are seeing truly miraculous results through all three of those methods and it gives me so much hope that people can recover, they can heal. Not only are we living testaments that there is hope after trauma, but we're seeing it in the people we work with as well. Yes, and in our own journey.
0:24:47 - Speaker 2
I think that's the most compelling thing for us is that we have used these things in our own journey and found them to be tremendously helpful to heal our trauma. Yeah, absolutely.
0:25:00 - Speaker 1
I never thought I'd be able to sustain a relationship ever, and I don't have a perfect marriage, but I have a very stable, loving marriage of 23 years and that to me, is proof that we can recover, because there's no way I could have sustained a relationship previously without getting help Right. So we just want our listeners to know there is so much hope. I think that's what motivates I know it's what motivates me to get up every morning and do this work is I see people getting better and, as usual, we are just so grateful that you join us each week to listen and learn about trauma and we hope you have a good 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.