Episode: 92
Something Scary Happened the Other Day, and I Wanted to Talk to You (and a PhD Trauma Researcher) About It
with Dr. Mary Catherine McDonald, PhD
Learn how to overcome trauma and create the fresh start you deserve.
Dr. MaryCatherine McDonald, PhD, a best-selling author and professor, who, with compassion and clarity, explains what trauma really is and how to heal from it.
You will learn and benefit from her decades of research and clinical experience.
Dr. McDonald gives you the 5 essential things you need to know about trauma so you can finally move forward with your life.
Listen on:
If you’re having a trauma response, just know that you are not broken. The trauma response is an evolutionary adaptation and it is there to keep us alive.
Dr. Mary Catherine McDonald, PhD
Featured Clips
Transcript
Mel Robbins (00:03):
Today's show is going to be a little bit different. It's going to be a tough one. I was a witness to a horrible tragedy. Even if it's hard or it feels very uncomfortable to listen to parts of what we're going to talk about, this is important. I'm going to take you back a few weeks ago to a moment as these events were unfolding where I was sitting in a chair in a bedroom and I decided to hit record and just start talking to you. Hey, it's your friend Bell, and welcome to the Mel Robbins podcast. I want to start the conversation today by just thanking you for being here. Today's show is going to be a little bit different, and the reason why is it's going to be a tough one. So I wanted to give you a little context before we get started. When I launched the Mel Robbins podcast less than a year ago, my promise to you was we would share life together and I would use this show as a way for us to support one another through the good and unfortunately sometimes the bad.
(01:14):
And that brings me to what I want to talk to you about today, and that is how do you support yourself when something bad happens? See, a few weeks ago, I was a witness to a horrible tragedy. And while it did not directly impact me or my family or anyone that I knew personally, it still affected me profoundly. It affected my family and it affected the community that we're in. And I recorded my feelings in real time as I was processing the events that were unfolding because that's how I processed my emotions by talking about them. And when I shared what had happened with my teammates and with my extended family, what was really interesting is that almost every single person had their own story about having been a witness to another person or family's tragedy. And the truth is, when you find yourself in that kind of situation, none of us had the tools to really process how it affects you or how to deal with your complicated feelings of guilt and fear and sadness and grief, and these conversations with my friends and family, it just reinforced the fact that this is a really important topic to discuss.
Mel Robbins (02:38):
How do you support yourself when you witness something horrible? And it's so important that that's what we're going to talk about today. Even if it's hard or it feels very uncomfortable to listen to parts of what we're going to talk about, this is important. Now, when all of this was happening, I had the benefit of speaking with Dr. Mary Catherine McDonald, who is a renowned researcher and expert in trauma. And what I learned from Dr. McDonald a couple of weeks ago, it helped me process the traumatic experience and events that were unfolding here. And I hope, and I know it's going to help you or someone that you love, do the same. So before we get started, I really want you to decide if this may or may not be the right episode for you to listen to today. If it's not, I completely understand this will be here for a resource for you when you're ready.
(03:38):
And I do hope you'll join me again when our next episode releases in a few days. And if this is the right episode for you, let's get started. I'm going to take you back a few weeks ago to a moment as these events were unfolding where I was sitting in a chair in a bedroom and I decided to hit record and just start talking to you. A couple nights ago, we were cooking dinner. It was about six 30 at night, and all of a sudden I heard all of these horns honking and not like Hong Kong honk honk, but like, huh. And somebody lays on a horn and I'm thinking, what the hell is that? And it had been a really windy, stormy day. It hadn't really rained, but it was supposed to rain. But the waves that day on the ocean here where we rent this awesome little house, they were enormous.
(04:36):
I mean, enormous. We had been out at the beach and it's a very shallow beach, and there were lifeguards there, but the flags were yellow and then they turned to red, and I was only in up to my knees. These waves were crashing way over my head and I'm like five eight. And so they were big monstrous waves. There was a riptide warning, and when it comes to the ocean, I don't screw around. The second that red flag is up, we're out. The second they say those words, riptide, we're not screwing around. So we had fun in the waves. We then came home, we're cooking dinner, and now all of a sudden these horns are honking. It's like, and so I put the spoon down, I'm stirring the pasta, and I go out to the front porch and I look down to the right and there are four cars.
(05:26):
There was a tan suburban that is going to be seared into my memory. There's a tan suburban, and I think that's the car where the horn was like, and then all these other cars and more cars coming up. And there were people on the road because the road is right on the ocean, it goes road, and then all of this kind of brush and then tons of rocks, and then the waves were crashing. Everybody had their hands up in the air and they were trying to wave and flag down this police boat that was out in the ocean in these huge waves. And I'm thinking, is there a boat in distress?
Mel Robbins (06:07):
Because that happened two summers ago. There was a boat that kind of ran out of gas and kind of crashed up on these rocks. Everybody was okay. So I'm looking around for a distressed boat and they keep flagging these boats and flagging these boats and flagging these boats and flagging these boats.
(06:23):
And I'm like, what the heck is going on? And we had guests staying with us and the dad of the couple staying with us quickly checked Twitter and was like, it looks like there's a missing swimmer. And I'm like, oh my God, I wonder if they have eyes on 'em. And the boats start turning around and heading away from the people that are honking the horns and trying to get their attention. And I don't know what hit me, but I have this first responder instinct. I immediately picked up the phone. I called nine one one and the first attempt I didn't get through. And that's a scary thing when you don't get through on 9 1 1, I hang up, I call again and it sort of clicks through, but no human being picks up. So I hang up again, and now I'm starting to get panicked that there is a swimmer out there that these people have eyes on 'em, that the waves are so big, the wind is so loud, the rocks are so big between them and the police boats.
(07:21):
The police boats are now way off in the distance. They've gone in a completely different direction. Holy smokes. Holy smokes. I call a third time, I get the dispatcher. What's the reason you're calling, ma'am? I'm calling about the swimmer. There's somebody in the water. Do you have eyes on 'em? No. However, there's a huge group of people on the shore. They're a hundred feet from me, and I say, you have to get through to the police boat. You have to tell them to turn around. They're driving away from the accident. Turn around, turn around. I hear her say, hold on. And then she clicks through. It must've been the police push. She said, this is the third caller we've had about a swimmer. You're going in the wrong direction. Turn the boats around, turn the boats around. I climb up on the railing on the porch.
(08:04):
I'm now, I don't know how I balanced. I'm standing on this railing. I've got this huge red and white towel, and I am waving it back and forth and it's whipping all over the place because of the wind. And I'm saying to the dispatcher, look for the red and white towel. Look for the red and white towel. And then look before it to the left, the people on the shore go there, go there, keep the surfers on your left. Turn around, turn around. And I hear her saying, you're going in the wrong direction. Turn around, turn around, look for the red tail. So she's talking directly to the police boat. The police boat turns around and starts heading back in our direction. And then I start telling her after the surfers look for the people on the road, look for the people on the road.
(08:42):
They've got eyes on something, the boats pull up in front of where the people are. I'm like, oh my God. I give the phone to my daughter and I'm like, Ken, run down to those people. Keep the nine one one operator on the phone. She's like, but we're going to lose her. I said, just get down, get down there, get them on the phone with her so she can communicate with the people on the shore to the boat. So she goes running down. Now the helicopter show up, search helicopters flying all over the place and more information is coming in. And now my heart is sinking and my daughter races down. There's more people down there. The police boats have gathered kind of offshore because there's so many rocks you can't come in. But here's the problem. It's so windy and the waves are so huge, nobody can communicate with one another.
(09:27):
The call drops, the reception's terrible down here for three and a half hours, this search and rescue mission played out in front of the beach house. We rent, oh my God, there's a helicopter often in the distance right now. And I feel myself getting emotional. And the helicopters were going back and forth and the search spotlights and the dive teams and the sheriff's boats and people on the road, and it was just horrible. And the weather got so bad that the dive teams couldn't do their job. And at nine 30 at night, they called off the search and declared it a recovery mission, not a search and rescue.
(10:28):
And the next morning when we woke up, there were people pacing on the beach and there were helicopters and dive teams. And Chris and I were leaving to go out of town for a wedding. And I felt terrible that we were leaving. And I climbed into bed with our son and just held him really tight. And I felt so much heartache for this family. I just, and all weekend long while we were gone, the search and recovery was happening and they were trying to find him. And I just think, what could I have done? What could I have done? I should have run down there sooner. I should have done something. And I keep thinking about it over and over and over again. And part of me feels like, why do you feel so bad? You don't have a right to feel bad, Mel. I mean, it's not like this is your son.
(11:27):
This is not somebody in your family or somebody that you even knew. And yet I do. And so one of the things that I did is I've reached out to my therapist, I've reached out to a trauma specialist, and one of the things that trauma researchers say is that it is incredibly important to process what happened, not by just thinking about it, but by talking about it. And that by talking about it and making sense of the story and putting it in context, you also allow yourself the ability to start to process all the feelings because it's not just the watching or
Mel Robbins (12:09):
Witnessing or experiencing something that can be traumatizing. What I think has been really challenging for me is processing all of the conflicting feelings that have come up over and over and over again. And also stopping my brain from just thinking about the family or reliving it over in my mind or thinking about how I might've been more effective or more helpful, feeling terrible and honestly torturing myself over it and then feeling bad that I am because I don't even know this person personally.
(12:45):
And I wanted to talk about it because there is so much research about how your brain and nervous system process traumatic experiences, and there's a lot of misconceptions about this. And so in case you're somebody that is trying to process something traumatic that you've either been a part of or that you've recently witnessed, I knew that this would be helpful to you. And if you've experienced any kind of trauma in your life and you find that it comes up and you get re-triggered by the sound of a car pulling in the driveway or a beer can cracking open or a certain song for me, I hear a helicopter and I'm right back there like, boom, I hear the words riptide rip current. I'm right back there. I will always think about this when I step out on my deck and I look down to the right, I still envision that tan suburban there.
(13:47):
And there's a reason neurologically why this keeps happening. And there are things that you can do to take all of this experience and the feelings that have come up, whether it's happening right now or it's something from your past that you wish wouldn't keep coming up. There are things that you can proactively do to help take this experience present or past and process it in a healthy way backed by research so that it finds its home in your brain and in the story of your life.
Mel Robbins (14:25):
And so that's what we're going to do today. As you put your arm around me, we're going to walk and talk, and we're going to bring in Dr. Mary Catherine McDonald to help us understand what's happening when something traumatic happens, and more importantly, what do we do about it. And we're going to welcome her to the walk and to this conversation when we come back.
(14:53):
Don't go anywhere. Welcome back. I'm Mel Robbins, and today I am so grateful that you're here. I just appreciate you being here with me. I can feel energetically you got your arm around me as we talk about this very traumatic experience that I had just a few days ago. So Dr. Mary Catherine McDonald, thank you so much for being here with us. I was just telling everybody, listening about this experience of watching a search and rescue mission for a missing swimmer turn into a recovery mission that took place in front of the house we're renting for literally the last four to five days.
Dr. Mary Catherine McDonald (15:38):
In fact, I've had actually more than one client have that exact same situation witnessing a rescue at sea gone that didn't ultimately result in a rescue. And so that is indeed very traumatic. And I think we don't talk often enough about the fact that witnessing a trauma is traumatic. It's not just going through it firsthand, but vicarious traumatization is a thing. It's real. And being a witness to something or hearing details, graphic details over and over, even if you weren't a witness to that, can be traumatic for sure.
Mel Robbins (16:16):
Can you explain what happens in your brain when you witness something like that?
Dr. Mary Catherine McDonald (16:20):
Okay, so really quickly, for those who may not be well-versed in what's going on in the brain, let's talk about what happens in a regular event, a normal event, how that gets filed away, and then we can talk about what happens when you've got something sufficiently overwhelming.
Mel Robbins (16:36):
That sounds great.
Dr. Mary Catherine McDonald (16:37):
So if your brain was a video game, its goal would be homeostasis. And what that means is just equal blood flow, equal electrical activity across the whole cortex. Now that rarely happens because your brain is constantly taking in information and filing it away both from inside the system, inside your body, and also from outside in the world. So when you've got a normal event, let's say you go to the grocery store and something mildly funny happens between anywhere between four and 24 hours after that event, your brain gets filed away into a file room. This is primarily in an area of the brain called the hippocampus.
Dr. Mary Catherine McDonald (17:15):
This is what I would love to film a Pixar movie about where if you have this file room with all these multicolored file cabinets, and then there's these little file room workers who are running around trying to put your memories away in an order that enables your brain to pull them out when it needs it and make sense of it because your whole system is wired for safety, and the better we remember things, the more likely it is that we are to survive. So when you have a normal event going on, you've got relative homeostasis in your brain, meaning you have access to all of the parts of your brain that are needed in order to complete that filing system.
Mel Robbins (17:54):
Well, what happens when you are in a situation where the memory gets properly filed away?
Dr. Mary Catherine McDonald (18:02):
So between four and 24 hours after an event, it gets filed away, and then when it gets filed away properly and in an organized fashion, that means that you can reach for that file later when you need it, pull it out, talk about it, and then put it away and continue on with your day. So let's say I'm like, oh, I want to tell you about this funny thing that happened at the grocery store. I can really easily reach for that file, tell you the narrative content, feel some of the feelings, maybe I laugh again as if it's happening again and then I can put it away and we can continue on doing whatever we were doing. So that's a normal event. That's what your brain wants and needs to happen.
Mel Robbins (18:38):
That makes a lot of sense. Can you now explain what happens in a traumatic situation or even just a situation where the alarm or anxiety in your body just starts to go off
Dr. Mary Catherine McDonald (18:53):
When you've got something sufficiently overwhelming going on, the homeostasis in your brain goes totally out of whack on purpose. This is an evolutionary adaptation that happens so that you can handle the threat or the danger that is in front of you. And so your brain, when the alarm system goes off, this is in your limbic system, your amygdala, it reprioritizes 47 different functions in your brain and body to prepare you for what it is. Sensing is a danger. One of the things. So that's adaptive and it's really cool, and I'll tell you why I'm emphasizing that in a second. One of the things that kind of goes offline, however, is the file room. So if you can imagine all those file workers, they run out of the hippocampus because they are needed elsewhere to handle the threat. So instead of this neatly organized file folder that you get between four and 24 hours after the event, you get instead a fragmented file folder.
(19:48):
And each file folder needs that narrative content. So I can tell you the story, the emotional content, so I can feel a little bit of how it feels, and then a tag that tells me in my brain what it means, how do I find it, how do the file room people go and find it. So when you have an overwhelming event, this adaptation happens in the brain and in the system. And what that then means is that the file room workers aren't there. So you get this fragmented file, the file room workers come back into the room and they're like, oh no, we have a fragmented file. We don't like a fragmented file. We like everything to be in order. We don't know where to put this, we don't know where it goes. So they kind of keep it sort of in a queue so that it can go to the front of your mind whenever you experience anything that is similar to something in that fragmented file, which will give you the opportunity to organize it all over again.
(20:39):
So this is the origin of the trauma trigger. Again, this is your brain trying to help you by telling you, oh, okay, so let's say you have this fragmented file, it has post-it notes in it, your brain doesn't know what it means. It's just sitting there in the file room on top of one of the drawers, and let's say the color red is in that file. And then you come across that same exact shade of red in the universe. Someone walks across your periphery and they're wearing that same color. The file room dudes say, oh my God, here's the chance you need to organize the file. And so they throw that to the front of your mind to give your brain the opportunity to organize it. Hey, we have a fragmented file. We don't like that. Let's throw it to the front of mind, give you this opportunity. And then the problem is your amygdala. That limbic system also recognizes that color red and it has coded that red as mortal danger. So it goes and sets off the alarm system all over again, and then you're off and running even though you're sitting at your desk at your office. So that's essentially what happens between when you have a regular event and then when you have a traumatic event.
Mel Robbins (21:47):
That makes total sense. I love the explanation of a fragmented file because that's how I feel. I feel like I've got these little snippets of the whole experience, like the red and white towel that I was waving, the super windy breeze blowing the towel, and how heavy it was, the sound of the helicopters, the sound and the spotlights of them once it got darker, the police boats, the horns, there were all these snippets. And then 24 hours later when I heard that they had not found him yet, all of these little fragments feel like they're floating around in my brain. You said that this is how we're designed and that it's adaptive. How is that adaptive? I mean, that sounds like maladaptive. I just kind of want this traumatic thing to go back in my brain in the filing cabinet and I don't want to think about it again.
Dr. Mary Catherine McDonald (22:40):
That's a great question. I think there's a fine line between adaptation and maladaptation, and I think it's really important that we understand. So what I've just described is essentially the origin of the trauma response, and I think it's critical that we understand that the trauma response is adaptive and it's designed to help keep you alive. It is sort of born of a will to survive. And the reason that's important is because when we try to heal from trauma, we often go immediately to a shame place. If I have trauma and I'm dealing with these symptoms, this means there's something wrong with me. I am broken. And so when we start by understanding that it is an adaptive move that gives you the symptom that is eventually maladaptive, then I think it can help us heal. We can peel away that layer of shame. But you're right, it is something that started out as adaptation that becomes over time maladaptive. And what you're describing is kind of like the trick when it comes to treating trauma, which is integration. How do we take that file folder and figure out how to organize it and put it away so that it looks more or less like the rest of your files without continuing to get triggered over and over and over again?
Mel Robbins (23:51):
Exactly. I mean, for me, that's the a hundred million question. How do you integrate as you say, these experiences so that you're not re-traumatized? Because that's exactly what I've been doing to myself. I mean, this is also just a few days old in terms of my experience, but I continue to go over and over and over in my mind, how are these poor parents feeling and the family members and oh my God, the anguish of them going back and forth on the beach. And I saw that there was a GoFundMe page and I donated to it, and I just keep feeling this heartbreak over and over and over again. And then of course I feel bad because I go, why am I torturing myself and why do I feel so gripped and devastated by this? I'm not even a member of their family. I didn't know who died.
(24:44):
And so I would love to talk about both why you feel conflicted when you have these sort of traumatic experiences. Why are your emotions kind of unsettling? And I also think for the sake of everybody listening, this is so fresh for me, but every one of us has had a traumatic experience in our life, whether it is a death when you were in high school of a classmate or maybe somebody in your family or something that happened in your community, every single one of us has either had an experience like this or will have one. And I would love to learn the specific steps, Dr. Mary Catherine, that we all can take so that even after the fact, we can properly file these memory files of what we saw, how we feel the emotions inside of us into the right file cabinets so that we can move on with our lives.
(25:51):
We can stop being retraumatized by it. And that's exactly where I want to go with you when we return. So stay with us. Welcome back. I'm Mel Robbins and I'm here with Dr. Mary Catherine McDonald, who's a trauma specialist who has been researching trauma and working with people for decades. And we're talking about a very traumatic incident where a swimmer went missing and the search and recovery mission took place right in front of the house that we went for days. So Dr. Mary Catherine, let's talk about integration. How exactly do we integrate a traumatic incident into our life moving forward?
Dr. Mary Catherine McDonald (26:33):
This has been the thing that sort of the field of neuroscience and psychology and psychiatry have been trying to figure out since the 18 hundreds, how do we circumvent the alarm system and organize the memory file? There are a lot of different modalities that can accomplish this, but basically at a base level, what you're looking for when you're aiming at integration is a narrative of the event that doesn't have any holes. So it has a coherence, a beginning, middle, and an end, and some amount of emotional content. So if I tell you a funny story, I'm going to maybe laugh. I feel some of those emotions. If I tell you a sad story, I'm going to maybe tear up and feel a little bit sad. That's okay. Our memory files are supposed to have emotion and then a set of meaning tags. What does this event mean in the larger story arc of your life?
(27:17):
So typically I think I am a huge advocate for multiple modalities when it comes to integration because we're always in it for a quick fix and we want to say, okay, I want to do five sessions of something and then get this integrated, but typically we need more things because your entire system is along for the ride. It's not just a file problem. Your body is involved as well. So just to give you a quick rundown, EMDR eye movement desensitization and reprioritizing is a modality that's designed to sort of short circuit the fear center from setting the alarm off. So what happens is the clinician will occupy your vision usually, I mean,
Dr. Mary Catherine McDonald (28:00):
The first ways that they used to do this was just to wave a finger back and forth in front of your face. So think like old school hypnosis was a little pocket watch. And when your visual cortex is occupied, when you're talking about the memory, what you're essentially doing is manually creating homeostasis in your brain. You're manually pushing blood flow and electrical activity to the parts of your brain that are trying to get disconnected by the alarm system. So EMDR is one modality. Narrative therapy is a great modality. Sometimes people use alternative medicines like psilocybin or MDMA, both of which are thought to turn off the fear center and enable you to talk through the memory and integrate it without having that overactive alarm.
Mel Robbins (28:44):
One thing that I keep thinking about is the fact that other people in my family and some friends of ours all witness this exact same thing, and our two friends were just as shaken up as I was, but some of our family members were not, at least on the surface as triggered as I have been by this. Can you talk a little bit about why that is? Why you can witness the exact same event or have the exact same traumatic experience, but two people side by side have a very different trauma response to it?
Dr. Mary Catherine McDonald (29:20):
So one of the things that's really interesting about these file folders, and this is something that has been interesting to track through the history of the study of trauma, is that since a file folder can be fragmented in one of a billion different ways, this means that the symptoms that come after the event can also look very different even for two people who went through the exact same event. And the reason that's important historically is because we used to use that fact to shame people and say, okay, let's use a combat veteran. For example, you have two soldiers that fought in the same war, in the same battalion having the same job, they witness the same thing, one of them comes out and they have all of these overactive emotions. The other person is totally shut down. So the person who's having the overactive emotions, there must be something wrong with them aside from combat because this person next to him seems to be doing quite fine.
(30:07):
And in reality what's happening is that the fragmented files can be creating different emotions. For some people, that creates a whole lot of upset distress, crying outward feelings of anxiety. For other people, it causes total shutdown. And so they seem to be talking about an event and not having any emotional response to it, or they just don't feel anything at all. And in the media we use when we talk about somebody who has P ts D or someone who's dealing with trauma, we usually use an example of someone who's having an overly charged response, they're crying too much, they're having this sort of hysterical response. But from a clinician standpoint, if someone comes in and they're telling you this story that is the most horrible thing they've ever seen and there's no emotional content, then we can see really clearly that part of the file folder isn't there. So they have the story, they don't have the emotional content that still requires integration. Right.
Mel Robbins (31:04):
So are you saying that everyone who sees a traumatic event has some kind of trauma or fragmented file?
Dr. Mary Catherine McDonald (31:12):
Good question. No, because it depends on whether or not the file gets consolidated between four and 24 hours after the event. For some people, they have the opportunity to consolidate that memory, even if it was really overwhelming in the moment. Let's say they get home and they're able to talk to their partner or their family about it, assign some meaning to it and put it away, then that file is going to start looking really quickly like the other files in their file cabinet. So there was a study, I think it was in Israel, and they took folks who had just been through a terrorist attack in the emergency room and they had one group go through a narrative therapy exercise where they had to talk through the event, kind of over and over, assign it meaning feel through some of the content with someone who was able to attune to them.
(32:03):
And then the other people just got sort of the standard of care in the emergency room, the people who went through that event, and they were able to narrate and integrate the memory right away where something like 80% less likely to have PTSD from going through the event than somebody who just went through this standard of care that you get in the emergency room. So it really depends on what goes on immediately after the event. We focus so often on the type of event and whether it's traumatic and not the person who went through it, and then what happens in the aftermath, if someone is there to help you in the right way to integrate the memory, it's a lot less likely to become traumatic. In my work, I've kind of readapted the definition of trauma because this is the thing we've been arguing about in the field of psychology since the 18 hundreds, which events are traumatic, which are not.
(32:52):
And it's like, guys, this is not the point. And the definition that I use is that anytime you have something that gives you an unbearable emotional experience that lacks a relational home, you have a potential for a chronic trauma. So unbearable emotional experience plus a lack of a relational home means you potentially are going to have these symptoms, and that means, I love this term relational home. I got this from a clinician, Robert Sto because it can be a lot of different things. What it means to listen to someone and provide them with a space to help them feel through and organize what was too overwhelming to organize in the moment can look like so many different things and different people are going to require different amounts of a relational home based on the event. So if you're going through a divorce or a breakup, you might need a relational home every day for six months, and what that relational home might look like might be really different depending on the day.
Mel Robbins (33:50):
When I was researching this, I bumped into his work and this concept of a relational home, and so I'm glad you're talking about it because the way that I thought about a relational home is sort of this notion of where can I put this? I mean, I just witnessed something, but I've got all these complicated feelings about what I witnessed and about what just happened, and it's the feelings that I'm trying to make sense of, and I know that wishing it hadn't happened doesn't make it go away. But how do we find a relational home for feelings that keep coming up? I mean, for example, is it normal to feel guilty or conflicted that I'm so affected by this when I wasn't even someone that was part of the family or part of the search team? I was just watching this.
Dr. Mary Catherine McDonald (34:45):
Yes, 100%. I mean, I think the reason that we feel guilt is because we've been defining trauma incorrectly for 150 years, and one of the ways in which we've been defining it incorrectly is that we create a false hierarchy where we say the trauma that I'm going through, the experience that I'm having is not legitimate for X, y or Z reason. The truth is, your nervous system is telling you everything you need to know, which is that you're having a trauma response that requires intervention. If you had appendicitis, you wouldn't feel shame at having appendicitis and you wouldn't go in the emergency room and say, oh, so-and-so is having this experience, and that's a lot worse than mine. They have a broken collarbone and they're sitting right in front of me and I can see that. And so they require care, and we don't do that with physical injury. Why would we do that with psychological injury?
Mel Robbins (35:34):
That's true. That's a good point. How do you stop getting that incident to play out in your mind over and over and over again? That's what's really been haunting me.
Dr. Mary Catherine McDonald (35:44):
Yeah, that's a great question. So one of the primary symptoms of trauma is intrusion. And so this can be intrusive thoughts during the day. You're trying to go about your day and the thing just keeps popping up. It can be kind of this flashback memory where you sort of lose track of the moment and you're thrown back into the past fully. It can happen in memories, and it can also be people can end up repeating behaviors that kind of put them back into traumatic situations. This probably wouldn't be the case in this situation, but this happens a lot when it comes to relationship trauma. So how do you stop the intrusion? Basically, the short answer, which is also the long answer is that you integrate the memory. And so what that looks like depends on the event.
Mel Robbins (36:32):
Well, let me just share what's happened for me. A big part of the process for me is peeling away this shame that I'm having a response that's outsized in some inappropriate way that I don't deserve to be having this response. I don't even know this person.
Dr. Mary Catherine McDonald (36:52):
Right? Let's put that down and now let's look at what's coming up, because I think shame is the biggest barrier for integration, and we never really think about that. The trauma response is happening for a reason. It's something that's going on in your biology that you cannot stop. So let's stop shaming ourselves for it and then turn to it and see what it needs. Then I think if you sit down with someone, you can kind of figure out what fragments are sticking out and what do those fragments mean? How am I going to fit them into this narrative of what happened? And then how am I going to fit this into a larger narrative of my story? And I think you can see really directly where shame gets in the way, because when you're talking about something that happened that you witnessed and you didn't even know the person, it feels like, how am I going to fit this into my story?
(37:38):
But the truth is that something really intense and meaningful happened to you as well. And so how are you going to fit that into your larger story? What kind of meaning can you assign to that? Right? Doing a podcast episode for example, using it to talk about to your listeners about trauma and normalize the response, that's a great way to assign meaning to this event that feels really out of control and meaningless. Once you do that, and you may need to do it kind of a couple of times, typically what happens is that the intrusion starts to recede. You stop having those intense intrusive memories and the memory starts to, it may come up every now and then when you have a reminder, but when it does, it's a lot less intense.
Mel Robbins (38:21):
You know what? I know exactly what you're talking about because I have had an experience in my past that was extraordinarily traumatic. For those of you that listen to the Mel Robbins podcast or have read any of my books, you are very familiar with this past experience where 15 years ago, my husband and I were about to lose everything. We were going bankrupt. I was drinking myself into the ground. We were fighting nonstop. I could barely get out of bed, and when it was happening, it was traumatizing. The anxiety was crushing, the depression was crushing. The just bills and the financial stress were crushing. The amount of stress in my marriage was crushing and I couldn't talk about it. It was like I was frozen. And even as we started to climb out of it, Dr. Mary Catherine, I couldn't talk about it without getting choked up or feeling stressed out.
(39:20):
But here's what I realize in hindsight, I have now told the story of that rock bottom moment nearly losing everything so many times, and I've allowed myself to feel the emotions of that moment so many times that I have integrated the story into my life. I do talk about it all the time, and I don't feel that traumatic trigger at all. I can access kind of authentically what I felt like, but I don't feel the intensity of the emotions. So you're right, telling the story over and over and over again does help us process. And there are a lot of you that have experiences that you have survived, that you have lived beyond, that you have moved through, but that emotional file and the ability to talk about it and tell the story, there's a huge opportunity for you here, and I want you to really seriously consider what Dr. Mary Catherine is telling you. So one of the thing that I loved is that you talked about this relational home and how telling the story and feeling the emotion allow you to file those fractional files in the proper place. What are some things that people could do right now if this is resonant? If they want to lean into the advice that you're offering and the expertise that you're offering, can you name some things that you would recommend that anyone listening could do right now?
Dr. Mary Catherine McDonald (41:01):
Okay, so I think three things. Number one, take your shame and put it like close your eyes, visualize putting it in a box and put it on the highest shelf you can in your house. You can pick it up later. I'm not going to try to take it away from you, but just try to put it down for a couple of days because it is getting in the way. It will continue to get in the way, in a way that will prevent healing. So number one, take your shame. Put it in a box far away. Number two, I think that one of the best things you can do here is try to really make sure that that narrative of the file folder has all of the pieces have you talked about, especially, this is tricky, especially when you go through an event with other people.
(41:42):
You often don't narrate it because it happened and you all know what happened, but could you sit down and write out the events as if you were telling someone who wasn't there and had no idea what happened? Have you done that yet? Continue to do that. If you've done that already, maybe once a day, if you can stand it just to get the narrative straight because you're already having these intrusive thoughts, you might as well tell the story. The second thing is to try to connect the narrative with the feelings. What feelings come up? What feelings came up in the moment, what fragments seem to be sticking out? There will naturally be moments in the story where you feel something really intense, and so what is that feeling? What is it tied to in the rest of your life story? What kind of meaning does it carry?
(42:31):
And try to do that with someone else. So if you can feel through those things with someone who can be attuned to you and say things like, oh, I can imagine, or You must have felt so helpless and I've felt helpless before, and that's terrible, then those things can kind of help put the emotional fragments in the right place. And then again, that last thing is just to what meaning are you going to assign this thing? What importance does this have in your life? Did it give you some kind of message? What can you do with it as you go on? How are you going to carry that forward? If you're having a trauma response, just know that you are not broken. The trauma response is an evolutionary adaptation, and it is there to keep us alive. Of course, it causes distress and can become maladaptive over time, but its source is survival. And so I think that's really critical. The second thing is that the trauma response is something we can work with. We have a lot more say over our nervous system than we think. So we assume because we don't have control over that initial trauma response that we don't have control at all, but that's not true. We can walk back some of these responses when they're getting in the way.
(43:48):
And then the other three things that I have to say I think are about triggers. One, I think we get the mistake that we are always conscious of our triggers. We are not, sometimes triggers are really kind of subterranean and in the back of the brain and are not consciously connected. So it's really critical that we start, I think anyone, but especially if you're doing trauma healing, treating your body as a barometer, it's giving you data all the time. If you're feeling upset around a certain person, that's something you should listen to because it's possible that there's kind of a buried trigger there. The second thing is that triggers are not assigned to avoid the thing for the rest of time. As we talked about, triggers are maybe a painful way, but a way that your brain is trying to get you to organize a memory that is not organized.
(44:37):
So we need to kind of look at them as opportunities rather than reasons to avoid something forever. And then the last thing is that not feeling is not a realistic goal. Our memory folders have emotional content in them for a reason. If I want to tell you about the most joyful day of my life, I would like to feel some of the joy. We don't question that when it comes to happy memories. If I tell you about the morning that my father died, I'm going to feel some sadness because I pulled out a folder that has sad in it. Our memory files are supposed to have emotion, and when we set as the goal, not feeling like we say, oh, I know that this is integrated. When I don't feel anything, we've got that totally wrong, and we are asking our brain to do something that it is not equipped to do, nor would we want it to.
Guests Appearing in this Episode
Dr. Mary Catherine McDonald, PhD
Dr. Mary Catherine McDonald is a trauma researcher, author, and professor dedicated to understanding and healing the effects of trauma.
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Podcast: The Trauma Tapes
A podcast about overwhelming experiences and how to cope with the traces those experiences leave.
Resources
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- Harvard Medical School: Study on the various faces of trauma.
- National Institute for the Clinical Application of Behavioral Medicine Integration: Integrate the brain and prevent dissociation after trauma.
- American Psychological Association: Unpacking narrative exposure therapy..
- University of Maryland Medical: Trauma affects everyone differently.
- Relational home: Robert Stolorow’s book on trauma and human existence.
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