There are a few things that have been pivotal in my personal journey. Therapy is one. Mediation is another. 10% Happier wasn’t around when I first found meditation, but I wish it had been. Dan Harris’ funny, accessible and relatable account of his own personal journey with panic and meditation is something I would love to gift my younger self.
Another one of my favourite books discussing how trauma and difficult experiences can, when left untreated, have life long impacts. Donna Jackson Nakazawa does a wonderful job of explaining how the things that we experience, particularly in childhood, can create physiological changes that stretch through time and continue to affect us even decades later.
The first conversation I have with every single client. Why? Because trauma isn’t what a lot of people think it is. And that can lead to invisible traumas - traumas that are left unseen, unacknowledged and untreated.
Imagine our brain as a room with one giant filing cabinet in the centre of it. The filing cabinet is made up of many drawers (representing memory networks), which are filled with many files (representing brain cells). At birth, most of these files are strewn about the room haphazardly, with relatively few being stored in the filing cabinet. During the course of our life, the files in the room are gradually organized into drawers of the filing cabinet.
Our body has two basic operating systems; the “fight or flight” system and the “rest and digest” system. Both of these systems are vital and we need them both, but we need them in the right balance. And unfortunately, as a society, we are drastically out of balance. Our bodies were never meant to be exposed to a sustained stress response, which is why chronic stress is implicated in obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, autoimmune disease and countless others.
Implicit memory governs much of our behaviour. Such memories are like unconscious mental software packages - they quickly compare present events to past experiences, make assessments and predictions about the current situation, and initiate the appropriate reaction. And while for the most part, this is very adaptive, it comes at a cost.
What makes something traumatic for one person and mildly disturbing for another? Why does the idea of public speaking leave one person exhilarated and another paralyzed with panic? Our nervous system has an ideal climate; a Goldilocks zone in which it operates best. This zone is called the Window of Tolerance, and where we are in relation to it has tremendous impacts on our mood, emotional state, and mental capacity.
In the realm of mental health, the word “trauma” can invoke a lot of different ideas and associations. There tends to be a general consensus around what is sometime referred to as “Big T” trauma, while there is somewhat less agreement in the realm of “small t” trauma. The difficulty with categorization provides a clue as to how the premise of the question might be flawed.
